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
The title reflects the general tone of this study of the pandemic that killed half a million Americans in six months, and 20 to 40 million worldwide. After describing the disease’s symptoms (“Delirious from lack of oxygen, these young men rolled and thrashed about on their beds and cots, moaning, mumbling, and spitting up blood”), the spread, and the frantic but ineffective efforts to control it, Getz (Life on Mars, 1997, etc.) chronicles scientists’ long search for the specific cause—which involved much digging up of corpses and experiments with diseased tissue. Despite some recent breakthroughs, that search still continues for, as the author points out, though the 1976 scare turned out to be a false alarm and we are better prepared now than in 1918, new flu strains appear frequently, and we are all still potential sitting ducks for a deadly one. Period photos are interspersed with solemn, impressionistic art from McCarthy; an accessible bibliography will give a leg up to readers who want to know more. Combining cogent accounts both of a worldwide tragedy and some classic medical detective work, this is certain to please and to sober a wide audience. (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-5751-X
Page Count: 86
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
Marrin’s biography of our first president is packed with information, but is problematic in its presentation. In his characteristically epic style, he portrays an intriguing George Washington: militarily inexperienced, socially retreating, but with a hard edge that helped him to gain wisdom through his mistakes and earn respect as a commander. Copiously documented, the narrative should inspire readers to learn more about Washington. But Marrin undercuts his own authority with several stylistic problems. He regularly uses sweeping statements that, without clarification or context, are debatable (“Great Britain ruled the mightiest empire in all of human history”), or illogical, e.g., “Had it not been for Charles Lee, Washington might have won the war that day. Because of Lee, it would drag on for another five years.” (Lee may well have kept the war from ending that day, but he himself did not have anything to do with its ultimate length.) In an unusual comparison he suggests that “a war dance was like a ‘pep rally’ before a college football game.” He relies on the present tense to lend drama to his scenes, in a way that can only be considered fiction (“At once, a plan formed in the British General’s mind”), or that makes an interpretation but presents it as fact (“Someone, undoubtedly without his [Washington’s] permission, had driven a pole into the ground amid the corpses”). Marrin’s style makes for dramatic reading here and there, but his narrative is long and often bogged down in details, and he eventually undermines any dramatic tension by overusing his tricks. The book is well illustrated on nearly every page with black-and-white reproductions of etchings, drawings, and maps; notes, a bibliography, and index (not seen) complete it. Marrin’s book may be useful to young readers for its extent of documented information, but they may find better reading elsewhere. (Nonfiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-46268-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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