Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

“It is hard to imagine where American culture would be today without the contributions of Hitler and Stalin — that is, without the thousands of creatively gifted refugees who fled these murderers. A good many cultural historians and writers have explored this meaty subject from different angles since Anthony Heilbut’s 1983 landmark, “Exiled in Paradise” (still the best book on the topic). And now, in “Artists in Exile,” Joseph Horowitz has taken a crack at it. Horowitz, a former music critic for The New York Times and the author of seven previous books, including the superb trio “Understanding Toscanini,” “Wagner Nights” and “Classical Music in America,” is well versed in this subject.” Read the review at the New York Times.

“I Like Food, Food Tastes Good,’ (is) a compendium of recipes submitted by the likes of Mick Cooke from Belle and Sebastian, Sam Fogarino of Interpol, and RJ “RJD2? Krohn. The book takes its title from a Descendents song, and it approaches its topic matter with a similarly unpretentious aura of nonchalant cool.’ Read the review at Flak Magazine.

“Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (is) a British food celebrity. He is forty-two, principally a journalist and television host by trade, who wears inexpensive horn-rimmed glasses so familiar to his British audience that they are now a piece of instant anti-branding branding. The look, like his dress (muddy Wellington boots, soiled linen jacket, the mess of the occasional apron) and his long, sometimes washed, hippyish brown hair (often pictured dangling in his face and over the dishes he is preparing), conveys a no-nonsense disregard for appearances and petty courtesies and an earnest commitment to a higher truth.’ Read the review at the New Yorker.

“(Since Kate) Colquhoun is a writer of lively detail rather than argument - you might say her book is too busy stuffing its face, one course after another, to pause for conversation - the question of why Britain developed such a poor cuisine is never fully addressed.’ Read the review at the International Herald Tribune.

“Without her we wouldn’t have Rachel Ray, Nigella Lawson, or the Jamie Oliver. We wouldn’t have the French cooking bible, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Without her, Bon Appetite would not be in the pop culture lexicon. My Life in France tells the story of how the inspiration epicure, Julia Child, was born.’ Read the review at Small Spiral Notebook.

“In his eccentric and often affecting memoir “Tastes Like Cuba,” Machado, a noted Cuban-American playwright, tells the story of his rootless, self-invented life, using food as his connecting thread. After his grandfather boasts that his arroz con pollo “will taste just like Cuba,” Machado thinks: “How do you make a meal taste like a place? I should have asked him directly. Instead, I spent the rest of my life looking for the answer.” “Tastes Like Cuba” deals with Machado’s struggle to come to terms with the painful and confusing contradictions of exile. It also has a lot of great Cuban recipes. (The garlic chicken with sour oranges is killer.)” Read the review at the New York Times.

“Don’t be surprised if you’re feeling queasy after reading Frederick Kaufman’s brief but comprehensive examination of our collective guts. The glut of information within—and what it all means to (and for) America—is enough to make even the strongest stomach turn.As a country, we are preoccupied with food. Hundreds of diet books line shelves, while the Food Network is available in 90 million homes (and has spawned a troupe of celebrity chefs).” Read the review at Time Out New York.

“Shooting War,’ writer Anthony Lappé and illustrator Dan Goldman’s glossy, all-color graphic novel, is (a) political satire focused on the business of corrupt journalism, wars on terror (specifically the war in Iraq before it smoothly transitions into the war in Iran), and networks shaking hands with governments.’ Read the review at the Austin Chronicle.

“Years before its publication, Alan Moore described “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier” as “not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever. Better than the Roman civilisation, penicillin … and the human nervous system. Better than creation. Better than the big bang. It’s quite good.” The third volume in his “League” series with artist Kevin O’Neill is indeed not Moore’s best comic ever — it doesn’t have the emotional force or formal coherence of “Watchmen” or “Lost Girls” or “V for Vendetta,” and it doesn’t pretend to. But there’s a certain kind of hyper-referential cleverness at which nobody else is even in Moore’s, well, league.’ Read the review at Salon.com.

“The comics collected in this book range fairly far and wide, but the strong center of gravity is plaintive tales of everyday life, set in the present, and usually about the social groups that comic artists themselves belong to. The appeal of such work is its emotional directness - in this age of highly branded, executive-produced cultural output, comics promise a more resonant and unadulterated link between creator and reader.’ Read the review at the New York Times.

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“It lurks in the background of our childhood imagination, now and again roaring back in adulthood to remind us of possibilities. A map of the world, that fixture in elementary classrooms, has always been a book masquerading as a flat piece of paper. Like layers of the earth for geologists, maps offer a glinting sample of the past. And when it comes to the Waldseemüller map, the Universalis Cosmographia that forms the subject of The Naming of America by John W. Hessler, there are earth-shattering discoveries to be found. Let it be said, up front, that The Naming of America is not a popular work in the vein of Doris Kearns Goodwin or Stephen Ambrose. Hessler’s is a scholarly affair, impeccably printed, where the footnotes are as long as the text, and controversies are discussed with dry impartiality.” Read the review at the California Literary Review.

“Dean Wareham was the guitarist for Galaxie 500, a much-loved indie trio whose droning atmospherics and oblique lyrics owed as much to Dadaist prose as they did to the Velvet Underground. The indie-rock world of the late ’80s and early ’90s now seems as distant as only the recent past can. Wareham’s memoir of the era, “Black Postcards,” stings with loss for those of us who took part in it, whether as performers or as fans.” Read the review at Bloomberg.

“Masumoto is an American farmer whose family arrived from Japan in 1898 and today embodies a century long history of farming “the other California,” the agriculturally rich Central Valley . . . As literary essays, Masumoto’s letters are occasionally uneven. His unwavering adherence to the letter format sometimes adds an “aw, shucks” clumsiness, especially in letters to those who have died, as he finds he must insert disruptive contextual explanations for the anonymous reader.’ Read the review at the San Francisco Chronicle.

“In 1949, Noël Coward wrote to his childhood friend Esme Wynne, who was trying to get him to find God: “My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noël Coward… In spite of my unregenerate spiritual attitude, I am jolly kind to everybody and still attentive and devoted to my dear old Mother.” This seems a fair appraisal. His kindness is much in evidence in his letters, as well as his devotion to his mother, but he remained resolutely “shallow” and unwilling to be drawn on serious topics.’ Read the review at the London Telegraphy.

“Generations from now, what will your personal writings reveal about you and the time in which you lived? Would you want them preserved, or destroyed? Former first lady Martha Washington destroyed most of her letters from George. Mother Teresa had not wanted her letters to see daylight. Fortunately, the illustrious Adams family of Massachusetts has been careful to preserve the remarkable correspondence of John and Abigail. More than a thousand letters exist, which have generated many collections since the first (severely edited) one was first published in 1876. Now, readers can enjoy a new view of these prolific writers who were so devoted to each other and to their country. “My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams” is an extraordinary set of 289 of their personal letters.’ Read the review at the Boston Globe.

“Richard Greene (no relation), a professor of English at the University of Toronto, has edited a collection of Graham Greene’s letters. The novelist once estimated that he wrote 2000 letters a year, and he lived to be 86: publishing all those letters would have taken decades. The editor has sifted through Greene’s correspondence and come up with a fascinating selection ranging across seven decades; they have been arranged chronologically and divided into chapters.’ Read the review at the Australian.

“The superbly edited and extraordinarily modestly priced Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron is an invaluable resource with which to find out exactly how a promising early nineteenth-century author was marketed and promoted by his entrepreneurial young publisher, and how this most competitive of writers, in turn, kept his finger on the literary pulse.” Read the review at the Times Literary Supplement.

“Aldous Huxley and Maria Nys met at Garsington in 1916. He was in his early twenties, she still in her teens. She was exceptionally attractive – as her photographs show. They married in 1918 and lived together happily and more or less inseparably until her death in 1955. That event is recorded with a mixture of dignity, devotion and utter wretchedness in a letter from Huxley to their son Matthew, included in James Sexton’s new selection. Cancer had reached Maria’s liver, leaving her unable to keep down even fluids, but her husband managed to relieve the nausea by hypnotizing her. This was particularly difficult to do because he kept wanting to cry. It was always clear to people who knew her that Maria was bisexual and that she had been in love with Ottoline Morrell.” Read the review at the Times Literary Supplement.

“On Aug. 11, 1941, as massed German armies were advancing on Moscow, Colonel-General Franz Halder, chief of the Nazi general staff, wrote in his diary that “we have underestimated the Soviet colossus.” Since the German invasion had begun, some seven weeks before, the unprepared Soviets had been steadily pushed back toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, and had already suffered more than two million casualties. “But,” wrote Halder, “there they are. . .” “The ferocity of the Soviet resistance,” writes British military historian and war correspondent Chris Bellamy, became a key factor in “the most absolute war ever fought,” a war marked by “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity; the play of chance and probability; and [its] political direction . . . If you want to understand war,” writes Bellamy, “study this one.’ Read the review at the Boston Globe.

“Amazon.com lists more than 36,000 books on the American Civil War, and my guess is that most of them depict battles and heroes, and describe wartime deaths as noble and tragic. Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering” does something different. It’s a shattering history of the war, focusing exclusively on death and dying — how Americans prepared for death, imagined it, risked it, endured it and worked to understand it.’ Read the review at the Los Angeles Times.

“Sometimes you see it said in a fiction review that the geographical setting is as much of a character in the novel as, well, the characters. It seems this observation can be extended to nonfiction, as well, for in James Campbell’s superb “The Ghost Mountain Boys,” the island of New Guinea is one of the most fearsome characters you will ever want to come across, in fiction or real life. The Ghost Mountain Boys were the men of 2nd Battalion, 32nd Infantry Division, who made an appallingly grueling trek in late 1942 from near Port Moresby on the south coast of New Guinea, across the Owen Stanley Mountains, to do battle with the Japanese solidly entrenched at Buna on the north coast. Campbell, author of “The Final Frontiersman,” ably explains how they did it — they did it with excruciating difficulty. Why they ever were made to do it is another question entirely.” Read the review at the Denver Post.

“In his “New History,” Barry Strauss tells the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning. Paris, the “cosmopolitan prince” from Troy, abducted the unhappy Helen in Sparta, not for love but for political reasons. Strauss sees the adulterous couple as “less like Romeo and Juliet than Juan and Eva Péron.” Helen escaped Sparta, and Paris “carried out a bloodless raid on enemy territory.” The war ignited in this way between two mighty powers, Troy and Greece, had been looming for a long time because “Troy invites war.” Read the review at Michigan War Studies Review.

“John Ferling toiled for years in relative obscurity at West Georgia University, churning out at least nine books, dozens of articles, and uncounted reviews, almost all dealing with war and politics in eighteenth-century America, the same subjects that have brought fame and riches to Joseph Ellis, David Hackett Fischer, and David McCullough. His prose may lack the elegance of Ellis’s or McCullough’s, and he may not have plumbed the depths of manuscript evidence as Fischer has done, but his work is solid–clear, sensible, and intellectually nourishing. His most recent book, a 575-page, detailed narrative of the American Revolutionary War, is a personal masterpiece.” Read the review at Michigan War Studies Review.

“Mask Market’ is the (Andrew) Vachss’ 16th book starring Burke, “a two-time felony loser” and abuse survivor who works this other side of the city for those that need to rent his code of ethics, allowing themselves the illusion of not soiling themselves. The novel opens with Burke having recently recovered from being shot in the face and pretending to be his brother.’ Read the review at Blogcritics.

“In the absence of something genuinely profound,’ says a character in “The Art Thief,” “always say something quotable.” There’s a whole lot of quoting going on in Noah Charney’s debut novel, a pleasant if diluted stew of police procedural, art history and mystery writing.’ Read the review at the Charleston Post and Courier.

“Here’s a very human story with the plot nearly buried among the twists and turns of the characters’ lives. A heavy hitter from the Serious Organized Crimes Agency arrives in a seaside village armed with new evidence she thinks will finally nail a slippery crook. Entwined are subplots about child abuse, pregnancy, career sacrifice, unrequited love and more.’ Read the review at the Charlotte Observer.