Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

The Los Angeles Times recently announced its 30th Annual Book Prizes and its April Book Festival held at UCLA April 24th & 25th. This year they have two new prizes, The Innovator's Award, awarded to Dave Eggers, and the Graphic Novel Prize (the first specifically designated prize in the United States according to the LA Times).

2009 Robert Kirsch Award goes to Evan S. Connell

The rest of the awards (including the Graphic Novel Prize) will be announced at the book festival in April.

Here are the finalists:

Biography Finalists

• Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
• Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (W.W. Norton & Co.)
• Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic (Random House)
• Melvin Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (Pantheon)
• Kenneth Whyte, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (Counterpoint Press)

Current Interest Finalists

• Dave Cullen, Columbine (TWELVE/Hachette Book Group)
• Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (McSweeney’s Press)
• Tracy Kidder, The Strength in What Remains (Random House)
• Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Knopf)
• T.R. Reid, The Healing of America: The Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Healthcare (The Penguin Press)

Fiction Finalists

• Jill Ciment, Heroic Measures (Pantheon)
• Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat (Europa Editions)
• Michelle Huneven, Blame (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women (Scribner)
• Rafael Yglesias, A Happy Marriage (Scribner)

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Finalists

• Petina Gappah, An Elegy for Easterly (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Paul Harding, Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press)
• Philipp Meyer, American Rust (Spiegel & Grau)
• Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton & Co.)
• Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Graphic Novel Finalists

• Gilbert Hernandez, Luba (A Love and Rockets Book) (Fantagraphics Books)
• Taiyo Matsumoto, GoGo Monster (VIZ Media)
• David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon)
• Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe (Oni Press)
• Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., LLC)

History Finalists

• Richard Holmes, Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)
• Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (The Penguin Press)
• Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance 1950 – 1963 (Oxford University Press)
• Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press)
• Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789 – 1815 (Oxford University Press)

Mystery / Thriller Finalists

• Megan Abbott, Bury Me Deep (Simon & Schuster)
• David Ellis, The Hidden Man (Putnam)
• Attica Locke, Black Water Rising (HarperCollins)
• Val McDermid, A Darker Domain (HarperCollins)
• Stuart Neville, The Ghosts of Belfast (SOHO Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books)
• Amy Gerstler, Dearest Creature (Penguin Poets)
• Tom Healy, What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books)
• Brenda Hillman, Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press)
• Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, }Open Interval{, (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Science & Technology Finalists

• Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe (Pantheon)
• Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (Basic Books/Perseus Book Group)
• Bill Streever, Cold: Adventures in the Worlds’ Frozen Places (Little, Brown & Company)
• Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books/Perseus Book Group)
• Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (W.W. Norton & Co)

Young Adult Literature Finalists

• James Cross Giblin, The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy (Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Frances Hardinge, The Lost Conspiracy (HarperCollins)
• Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwin’s Leap of Faith (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers)
• Elizabeth Partridge, Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don’t You Grow Weary (Viking Children’s Books/Penguin Group)
• Shaun Tan, Tales from Outer Suburbia (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)

More on the Tournament of Books 2010

In early February, I noted Mark Movic's lead on the Tournament of Books for 2010. I actually discovered this (also on Mark's lead) a year ago and thought that we had a blog entry for it--but I haven't been able to find it ... so that was a blog entry I apparently dreamed. This time I am going to go ahead and list the short list for 2010. If you are interested in the long list, you can also find that at the Tournament of Books site. To all readers, I recomment that you take at least a few minutes to browse through the long list as well as the short list below.

The 2010 Tournament of Books Shortlist

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood (available at Burling Library)
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker
Fever Chart, by Bill Cotter
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis
The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver (3rd floor Burling, PS3561.I496 L33 2009)
Big Machine, by Victor Lavalle
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann (Smith Memorial PR6063.C335 L47 2009)
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (soon to be available, Smith Memorial, Burling)
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore (Smith Memorial, PS3563.O6225 G37 2009)
Miles from Nowhere, by Nami Mun
That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo
Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie (Burling, 3rd Floor PR9540.9.S485 B87x 2009)
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett (Burling, 3rd Floor PS3619.T636 H45 2009)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower (Smith Memorial, PS3620.O927 E93 2009)
Lowboy, by John Wray (Smith Memorial, PS3573.R365 L69 2009)

Have you read any of these? If so, please let the Book Review know what you think. We always welcome reviews as long as one sentence or a full page ... or more.

All books are at Grinnell College Libraries or on order.

R. Stuhr

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1935

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Doremus Jessup was an aging newspaper editor in bucolic Fort Beulah Vermont in 1935. Leading a thoroughly prosaic middle-aged existence, as the novel's central character, he witnesses the contentious presidential election of 1936. The result of the election is that Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, an anti-intellectual populist, becomes president and conducts a gleichschaltung of his own, transforming the country into a corporate/fascist state complete with concentration camps. Jessup rides successive waves of totalitarian change and is thrown into working with the political underground, a faux collaboration with the “Corpos,” imprisonment, escape, exile, and finally a return to the underground.

The truly stunning aspect of this book is the absolute continuity of right-wing politics in this country over the last seventy-five years. President Windrip's administration is openly dominated by big business and is not loath to openly display this allegiance (in the same plutocratic spirit of the recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizen's United v. Federal Elections Commission case). Windrip was pro-Christian, anti-feminist, and opposed the teaching of evolution; his administration totally favored what we now call a unitary executive doctrine. Beside issuing false and misleading statements the Windrip White House did its best to suppress independent reporting in an attempt to completely control the flow of all information.

Throughout the reading of Lewis' novel, several works on political history and theory kept springing to mind, namely, the late great Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism In American History (1963). as well as his The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965). More recently Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008) very much deals with this subject matter. A work of fiction that examines the same subject and the same political era is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004). Lewis was projecting forward to the 1936 election and Roth was glancing backwards in a counterfactual way at the Nazi fellow traveler Charles Lindberg wresting the 1940 presidential election away from Franklin Roosevelt. The two books written seventy years apart provide an interesting contrast on fascism wrapped in an American flag.

Lewis, Sinclair. It Can't Happen Here
Burling Library 3rd Floor PS3523.E94 I8 1935

Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Knopf, 1963.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, And Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1965.
2nd Floor E743 .H632

Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
Burling Library 2nd Floor JK1726 .W66 2008

Roth, Philip. The Plot against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2004.
Burling Library 3rd Floor PS3568.O855 P58 2004

Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

Tyler, Anne. Noah's Compass. New York: Knopf, 2009.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

I was excited to see this in the South Bay train station in Boston and bought it to read on my six hour train trip. (See the previous post to learn that Anne Tyler is a favorite author of mine.) I didn't read it for the whole six hours, I needed to spend a fair amount of time looking out the window too. If you are familiar with Anne Tyler, this new novel will not disappoint and despite the familiar tone, it is a new story with fresh insight and new characters. A divorced and solitary father of two grown daughters and one teenage daughter finds himself unemployed. Thinking that he can pare his life down to the very minimum he leaves his elegant apartment in the middle of Baltimore and moves into a new characterless apartment in the county. He is attacked his first night in his new spartan apartment and winds up in the hospital with no memory of the attack. He becomes obsessed with trying to regain this lost piece of his life and in the meantime finds his life suddenly less solitary as his daughters and ex-wife step in to keep an eye on him as he recovers. Relationships are reinforced, as well as newly formed and broken; insights are gained, and modest improvements are made. The concluding pages are filled with phrases such as "good enough job," "solvent, if not rich," "okay place to live." But a man with his Socrates, his rotisserie chicken, his solitude and his family relationships in place, can live without the fireplace.

Slowly making its way to the Grinnell College Libraries.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Nocturnes. New York: Knopf, 2009.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Ishiguro is a favorite author of mine and so I read everything that he publishes. The great thing about liking the works of living authors is that you get to look forward to new books. This year has been good to me so far with Ishiguro, Anne Tyler (coming up next), and soon, Chang-Rae Lee. There is more, but this winter is clouding my brain and these three are foremost in my mind. The first two I have actually already read and enjoyed. My favorite Ishiguro novel is The Unconsoled, a Kafkaesque, anxiety dream that never ends. The main character is a pianist, who among other things, is finding it hard to find a room to practice in. It is dark and hilarious at the same time. Nocturne is a collection of short stories all of which have something to do with music and maybe self-confidence: lovers of music, musicians trying to make it, musicians trying to make come backs. Every single story was excellent and a perfect snapshot. Even Ishiguro's first person narratives seem to keep their distance from the reader, but I find the style appealing and somewhat mysterious. The characters don't reveal everything, and they are often confused and trying to figure out what is going on as well as the reader. Please read! I love Kazuo Ishiguro. If you have only read The Remains of the Day, you don't have a complete picture of everything he has to offer.

The Unconsoled
Burling 3rd Floor PR6059.S5 U53 1995

The Remains of the Day
Burling 3rd Floor PR6059.S5 R46 1989

Nocturnes
(on order)

More recommendations for whiling away the dark and cold

Mark Movic also tipped the Book Review off about the Morning News Tournament of Books. Somehow there is a Rooster involved, and if you are a fan of independent book stores, the great Powells Book Store has a hand in this too. Follow the link and scroll down to find the tournament's short list of books. If you keep looking, you'll find the long list too. Even the most innovative of book tournaments has to make some money, so you can buy t-shirts, and support it's sponsor as well. The nice thing about this list, is that you won't have heard of all of these authors or these books. Some, yes, of course, but others will be new discoveries. Check it out!

Mark Movic reads during the long winter months

And they are so long! Mark Movic, guitarist, Drake Alumnus, Des Moines resident, and friend of the Grinnell College Libraries read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest during the summer of 2009. He read it along with others through Matthew Baldwin's Infinite Summer blog. As Baldwin said, "June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages¹ ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat."

Mark recently let me know about another online book group who began reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666 during the last week in January. They are currently in their third week--it might not be too late to catch up. This reader/reviewer would like to read 2666 but didn't get going with the group in time and will have to wait until she is ready to read on her own. Bolaño, a Chilean poet and novelist, who died at the age of 50 in 2003, has become much talked about and translated in recent years. The book review is also aware of another Grinnellian who read Moby Dick through with an online reading group. If you are reading this and have participated in an online reading group, tell us what you read and what the experience was like (bookreview@grinnell.edu). We'll share the information with our reading community.

Finally, this winter, Mark read Chronic City, versatile writer, Jonathan Lethem's latest novel. Mark writes that he liked the novel, but wasn't prepared to say what it was about. So, although it wouldn't have made the list of 1001 books to read before you die (having been written three years after that book, which became immediately out of date upon publication!), but it might be a good one to read before the winter ends. You have a couple of months to fit it in.

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1996.
Burling Library 3rd Floor PS3573.A425635 I54 1996.

Bolaño, Roberto. 2666. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Burling 3rd Floor PQ8098.12.O38 A12213 2008

Lethem, Jonathan. Chronic City. New York: Doubleday, 2009.
Burling 3rd Floor PS3562.E8544 C47 2009

Sharon Clayton recommends

Sharon Clayton of the Grinnell College Libraries and avid reader recommends two books she has read recently:

Boxall, Peter, editor. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. New York: Universe, 2006.
101 academics, critics, and editors submitted lists of great novels from which Boxall compiled the 1001 and one books alluded to in the title. The list includes short stories and other genres of fiction as well as novels. When asked about the idiosyncratic nature of the list, Boxall told New York Times reviewer William Grimes, “I wanted this book to make people furious about the books that were included and the books that weren’t, figuring this would be the best way to generate a fresh debate about canonicity, etc..” I like the idea--seems optimistic and ambitious. Read the review by William Grimes from the May 23, 2008 NY Times.

Bragg, Melvyn. Adventure of English: The Biography of a Langauge. New York: Arcade, 2006
Based on the television program hosted by British novelist and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, this book traces the long history and evolution of the English Language. For a discussion of this work see Michael Quinion's review in World Wide Words.

Both books are available in Burling Library.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

The publication in 1963 of Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem was greatly resented in Israel. Evidence of this irritation was manifest in that it took over forty years for a Hebrew translation to appear. Arendt is evidence that while a gadfly is never a welcome guest empirically challenged creators of an ideology have all the more reason to resent self-appointed truth tellers in their midst.

Mossad agents captured Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina in May of 1960. Living under the name of Ricardo Clement, working for a local water utility company, Eichmann knew that he was being followed. After his capture/abduction he was spirited to Israel where he stood trial on fifteen criminal counts including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in an outlawed organization. He was eventually convicted on all counts and was hanged on May 31, 1962.

Hannah Arendt who was working as a reporter for the New Yorker magazine at the time was highly critical of what she saw as a show trial. Arendt, who for a short time had worked in the Jewish Agency's Paris office, was alienated from the Israel of David Ben-Gurion because she perceived it to be overly nationalistic, racist, too religious, unwilling to make concessions on the Arab question, not sufficiently liberal in regard to its own Arab minority, arrogant towards Jews living in other countries, and much too quick to ascribe to itself a set of moral virtues. She rejected the Zionist founding of Israel and its failure to separate church and state. Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, argued that the cause of the Holocaust was that Jews did not live in their own country and one of the goals of the Eichmann trial was to remind the world that the Holocaust obliged them to support Israel.

While Arendt characterized Eichmann as a liar and a braggart who was outrageously stupid; he was not inherently evil. What made Eichmann, and all of the future potential Eichmanns, dangerous was the relative ease with which a rather average person is converted into doing immoral acts. This is a profoundly misanthropic doctrine that Arendt puts forth but there is some validity to it. What if you knew George W. Bush as the avuncular fellow behind the counter at the bowling alley instead of his role as the “decider” overseeing a system of secret gulags where torture was practiced?

One of the common themes at the Eichmann trial was Israeli heroism and the weakness of Jews in exile; Arendt was a critic of both groups. In the instance of the Zionists she compared their search for “suitable [human] material” to Nazi racist attitudes “...the Jews from Palestine spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann” (p.55). In the case of the Judenrats (Jewish Councils) she was even tougher. These councils made the work of the Nazis easier. The Jewish authorities in many instances helped in administrative and police work (in Berlin the final round-up was done entirely by Jewish police) and without their assistance there might have been complete chaos or a severe drain on German manpower. “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story” (p.104).

While Arendt is critical of the conspirators of July 1944 who attempted the assassination of Adolf Hitler because they rarely mentioned the slaughter of Jews in the East in their correspondence, the extermination camps and the Einsatzgruppen were largely ignored by Hitler's opponents, the German Republic with its “veritable genius for understatement” regarding its Nazi past really drew Arendt's ire. There was a political implication to this criticism as Ben-Gurion was busy selling arms to the Germany of Konrad Adenauer at the time of the Eichmann trial and was already under fire for this activity.

Arendt pointed out that Eichmann's illegal arrest was justified by Ben-Gurion only because the verdict of the trial could be safely anticipated. Eichmann was clearly from the Nazi “B” team. His role in the Final Solution was “vastly exaggerated” because the defendants at the earlier Nuremberg trials had tried to exculpate themselves at the expense of the guy who was not at the trial. He had a terrible habit of boasting about his wartime exploits. He was also the one Nazi official who had been in close contact with Jewish officials.

In Arendt's view the Eichmann trial failed in at least four respects: Eichmann did not participate in Einsatzgruppen activity in the East; he was not the officer in charge of transporting Jews from Polish ghettos; he was not liable for what happened in the extermination camps; he was not responsible for the conditions in the Jewish ghettos.

If only Hannah Arendt could see the course history has taken since the Eichmann trial. At least Eichmann was charged (and not held in indefinite detention), he did not appear before a military tribunal, and he was not tortured.

Burling Library 1st Floor DD247.E5 A7