A how-to guide disguised in a disposable novelistic dressing.
A novice book collector gets a quick and expensive education in the rare-book world in this epistolary tale.
In his 2011 novel, Correspondence, Hall introduced Larry, a rough-around-the-edges New Yorker who lucked into a cache of letters written by Victorian luminaries. In this sequel, Larry is flush with $400,000 from the sale of those letters and now wants to collect fine books. Perhaps a complete run of Trollope first editions would be a good way to start? One of his email interlocutors gently steers him from this folly—that’s an extremely expensive enterprise, and he’s on a $25,000 budget. So after a brief flirtation with more modest Victoriana, he begins to seek out affordable works from New Yorker writers such as James Thurber, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and Dorothy Parker. Larry’s indulgent correspondents deliver pocket biographies of the authors he’s chasing down, along with brief clinics on book-collecting arcana, from foxing to association copies to explanations of wild price differences in different editions and the fine points of marrying dust jackets. Between that and Larry’s jeezum-crow exclamations at just about every step (“I have a question for you on dust jackets: What the hell is this all about?”), the novel is often ploddingly pedagogical, and Hall’s feints toward deepening Larry’s character with mentions of an impatient girlfriend and a shady-seeming book dealer feel half-hearted. But while the book is weak as a story, it’s a reasonably engaging and informed introduction to serious book collecting, and Hall's detours on Trollope and Max Beerbohm are informed by his scholarship on those authors. (He’s written books on both.) “I can’t help but admire a person so unashamedly frank and humbly inquisitive,” a scholar says of Larry, which is true enough. Alas the tension here largely involves Larry’s pocketbook.
A how-to guide disguised in a disposable novelistic dressing.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56792-56-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Preaching to the choir, perhaps, but an invigorating sermon all the same.
Zinn-ian conspiracy theories, propounded engagingly and energetically by filmmaker and gadfly Stone and Cold War scholar Kuznick (History/American Univ.).
If you’ve read Howard Zinn—or if, like Jeff Lebowski, the Port Huron Statement is still current news for you—then you’ll have at least some of the outlines of this overstuffed argument. Premise 1: Though the United States may pretend to be a nice, cuddly sort of democracy, it’s the font of much trouble in the world. Premise 2: When, post-9/11, neocons began pondering why it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for the U.S. to become an imperial power, they were missing a train (or Great White Fleet) that had pulled out of the station long ago. Premise 3: We like European fascists better than Asian fascists, as evidenced by propaganda posters depicting our erstwhile Japanese foes as rats and vermin. Premise 4: War is a racket that benefits only the ruling class. Premise 5: JFK knew more than he had a chance to make public, and he was gunned down for his troubles. And so forth. Layered in with these richly provocative (and eminently arguable) theses are historical aperçus and data that don’t figure in most standard texts—e.g., the showdown between Bernard Baruch and Harry Truman (“in a colossal failure of presidential leadership”) that could only lead to a protracted struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for post–World War II dominance. Some familiar villains figure in as well, notably the eminently hissable Henry Kissinger and his pal Augusto Pinochet; the luster of others whom we might want to think of as good guys dims (George H.W. Bush in regard to Gorbachev), while other bad guys (George W. Bush in regard to Saddam Hussein) get worse.
Preaching to the choir, perhaps, but an invigorating sermon all the same.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1351-3
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)
In 1943, motherless 12-year-old Eva, her sickly older sister Rachel, and their Papa are forced by the Germans, who have
occupied their Polish town, Bezdin, to live in the Jewish ghetto. Papa knows their lives are in danger and worries what will happen to his girls if he is killed or sent to a death camp. Then one day, as Rachel is walking to their aunt’s apartment for a visit, the soldiers raid the ghetto and carry her off. Weeks pass, and Papa finally hears that she is alive in a labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Since conditions in the ghetto worsen daily and the raids increase in frequency, Papa begs the Nazi official for whom he works to send Eva to join Rachel in Parschnitz; miraculously, his request is granted. At the camp, conditions are terrible—there is little water and practically no food, and the inmates are forced to work 18 hours a day at jobs that are not only difficult but extremely dangerous. Eva, for example, works on spinning machines, where she must keep lint from clogging the machinery by reaching into the moving mechanism. The girls grow weaker by the day, and their worries are compounded by two things: their uncertainty about the fate of Papa the ever-present chance that they will be chosen to board the trains that leave each day for the death camps. While the book is fiction, the author has based it on the life of her own mother-in-law, who survived in the camps even as her sister did. Every word of this radical change for Isaacs (Swamp Angel, 1994, etc.) rings as true as any first-person story told by an actual survivor, giving young readers another powerful testament to the horrors of the
Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-590-60363-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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