'Crooked Little Heart,' by Anne Lamott. An evocative slice of anxious suburbia through the eyes of a teenage girl tennis prodigy. As always, Lamott gets at the crooked little hearts of the insecure selves behind our boxy strip-mall conformities.
‘Heat.’ New Yorker writer/editor Bill Buford’s fabulously fun, charming, harrowing description of working in Mario Batali’s restaurant kitchen and for various pasta and butcher maestros and divas in Italy. Weaves in, with a light touch, a bit of food history and other scholarship. Guaranteed to whet your appetite for good cooking and writing.
'Killshot,' by Elmore Leonard. Spare and unsparing as always. Deranged criminals force a hunted couple to become the hunters. A bracing, moral mud bath that leaves you invigorated, scared, and unsure of your innocence. In short, vintage Leonard, coming soon to a theater near you (saw a preview--Diane Lane as the heroine, Mickey Rourke as the psychopathic Armand--looks promising).
'Let Me Finish,' by Roger Angell. A charming, forthright memoir, with the New Yorker star writer's attention to gritty detail and personalities without the sepia manual-typewriter-days sighing. Chapters on his stepfather, E.B. White, on car road trips, on martinis, on sailing, and on rough luck ("Hard Lines") are particularly affecting.
‘Redemption.’ I loved Frederick Turner’s first novel, ‘1929,’ a historical narrative about boozy jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke and the Chicago mob. This tale of a down-and-out Storyville, New Orleans ex-runner and cop, crippled by a race-riot sniper and working for a gang leader in the nineteen-teens, has similar stylistic chops and gives a great feel for time and place. But it’s also an unrelenting downer sliding toward an uninspired OK-Corral ending. Its dark spots need bright spots for contrast and don’t get them.
'Saturday,' by Ian McEwan. McEwan's prose is as sharp and refined as the scalpel of the brain surgeon whose London life he describes. Plugs Woolfian tropes into the wired world in which the information highway nonetheless informs us mostly how primitive and vulnerable we are.
'The Catastrophist.' Darkly funny midlife-crisis novel set in academe riffs boldly and often insightfully on Holocaust studies, tenure, reproduction, and other delicate topics.
'The Company.' Robert Littell's sprawling, captivating CIA epic follows a handful of characters, and their families and friends, from WWII into the jihadi threats of the '80s and '90s. The politics are sometimes jingoistic, the writing sometimes clunky, and the book's 900 pages could have benefitted from some more aggressive and careful editing. Nonetheless, the masterful plotting will grab your attention and remind you just how hot the cold war got.
'The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine,' by Rudolph Chelminski. No need to be a foodie to savor this well-informed, carefully written, and psychologically astute portrait of a bipolar French three-star chef, Bernard Loiseau of La Cote d'Or. You'll never look at food--or at any single-minded quest--quite the same way again.
'Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner,' by Dean Karnazes. Legendary endurance runner describes his exploits in straightforward but often astonishing detail. His motivation seems to be largely a mystery even to him, though the death of a beloved sister apparently played a part. You'll cheer for him even as you fear for the future of his knees, shins, arches, and hips.
