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BY THE BOOK

Name: BY THE BOOK
Author: Pamela Paul
ISBN: 978-1-62779-145-8

WRITERS ON LITERATURE AND THE LITERARY LIFE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

edited by Pamela Paul ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 2014

Better scanned on the website.

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A hit-or-miss collection of Q-and-As, posed mostly to writers in the New York Times Book Review’s “By the Book” page.

Current Book Review editor Paul’s introduction is somewhat pretentious: “The idea was to simulate a conversation over books, but one that took place at a more exalted level than the average water cooler chat.” Well, Q-and-A sessions are hardly “conversations,” and some of the questions—e.g., “What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes? Do you snack?”—aren’t even worthy of the snack machine, let alone the water cooler. Inevitably, there is a good amount of solipsism: When asked, “What was the last book that made you cry?” Richard Ford replies, “My own book Canada.” Some answers are wacky. “What book is on your night stand now?” John Irving: “I don’t read in bed, ever. As for the main character in my novel In One Person, Billy Abbott is a bisexual man; Billy would prefer having sex with a man or a woman to reading in bed.” Some are stuck in a rut. “What book is on your night stand?” Sylvia Nasar: “Two biographies of Frances Trollope.” “Last truly great book you read?” “The Widow Barnaby, by Frances Trollope.” “Book you wish you could write?” “I’d love to write biographies of Frances Trollope.” However, there are some choice tidbits, too. “Being a native German-speaker, Hayek strings together railroad sentences ending in train wreck verbs,” deadpans P.J. O’Rourke. Donna Tartt wants to have a dinner date with Albert Camus: “That trench coat! That cigarette! I think my French is good enough. We’d have a great time.” Still, for the most part, clinkers outweigh the gems. Lee Child and Arnold Schwarzenegger want Barack Obama to read Churchill; Colin Powell wrote for money; and Rachel Kushner avoids “books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas.” There’s a tip to remember. Other contributors include Jhumpa Lahiri, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jonathan Lethem and E.L. Doctorow, among many other luminaries.

Better scanned on the website.

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-62779-145-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: July 31, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
100 THINGS WE'VE LOST TO THE INTERNET
by Pamela Paul

- BOOK REVIEW
RECTANGLE TIME
by Pamela Paul ; illustrated by Becky Cameron

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW TO RAISE A READER
by Pamela Paul & Maria Russo ; illustrated by Dan Yaccarino & Lisk Feng & Vera Brosgol & Monica Garwood

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)