Current Books of Note by
Atlantic Contributors
April 2001 — January 2002
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Fiction
April 2001 — January 2002
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The Shell Collector
by Anthony Doerr
Scribner, 219 pages, $23
Doerr's debut collection of stories introduces a young writer blessed with a canny instinct for psychological nuance and a telltale eye for natural detail. Ranging across a tableau of vividly drawn landscapes—the East African coast, wintry backwoods Montana, smalltown Idaho, suburban Ohio—Doerr' s depictions of men and women taking the measure of their worlds are stirring explorations of temperament shaped by will and bewilderment.
Atlantic links:
"Travel Guide for Ameri-Students Touring Former Soviet Countries," Unbound Fiction by Anthony Doerr.
"The Hunter's Wife," a short story by Anthony Doerr (May 2001)
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The
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horseby Louise Erdrich
HarperCollins, 368 pages, $26
The latest in Erdrich's ongoing series of historical novels set on the Ojibwe reservation of Little No Horse in North Dakota reconstructs a century of tribal struggle and intrigue through the eyes of the elderly missionary Father Damien Modeste. Father Damien, it's revealed in the opening pages, is not exactly who or what he seems, and the priest's soul-searching recollections further unravel Erdrich's multigenerational saga of tangled lives and historical travails. Louise Erdrich's previous works of fiction include Tales of Burning Love (1996) and The Bingo Palace (1994).
Atlantic links:
"An Emissary of the Between-World," an Atlantic Unbound interview with Louise Erdrich.
"Sister Godzilla," a short story by Louise Erdrich (February 2001)
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Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail: Storiesby Bobbie Ann Mason
Random House, 209 pages, $22.95
Midlife is a mixed blessing for the restive protagonists in Mason's new collection of stories, as they find themselves drawn back into old family entanglements and enmeshed in new travails of their own making. "I felt strange," says Chrissy in "With Jazz," "as though all my life I had been zigzagging down a wild trail to this particular place." That particular place is Mason's own ancestral homeland of western Kentucky, which she once again portrays with her distinctive stamp of insight and craft. Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) and In Country (1999), among other works of fiction and memoir.
Atlantic links:
"Poised for Possibility," an Atlantic Unbound interview with Bobbie Ann Mason.
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A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriageby Mark Twain
Introduction and Afterword by Roy Blount, Jr.
Norton, 80 pages, $16
Twain wrote what he called his "novelette" for Atlantic editor William Dean Howells in 1876, in hopes that Howells would round up several prominent authors to compose stories based on the same skeleton plot. The project never got off the ground, and Twain's tale was never published. It resurfaced some 125 years later in the archives of the Buffalo Public Library and at long last found its place in the pages of The Atlantic, with accompanying commentary by the humorist and Atlantic contributing editor Roy Blount Jr. This edition includes the four-color illustrations by Peter de Seve commissioned for The Atlantic's July/August 2001 cover story.
Atlantic links:
"Mark Twain's 'Skeleton Novelette,'" by Roy Blount Jr. (July/August 2001)
"Mark Twain in The Atlantic Monthly," in Atlantic Unbound Flashbacks.
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Nonfiction
Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital
by Alex Beam
Public Affairs, 288 pages, $26
McLean Hospital, with its Tudor mansions, riding stables, and leafy hilltop grounds, was never just another mental institution—founded in 1817 and later landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, McLean was the favored retreat of Boston's bluebloods, and its storied roster of patients includes the likes of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Ray Charles, and James Taylor. Alex Beam's engaging social history of this most aristocratic of asylums draws on hospital records and accounts of former patients and staffers to produce a full-scale portrait of McLean's eventful annals of psychiatric treatment and reigning gentility. Alex Beam is a columnist for The Boston Globe and the author of two novels.
Atlantic links:
"The Mad Poets Society," by Alex Beam (July/August 2001)
"The Asylum on the Hill," an Atlantic Unbound interview with Alex Beam.
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Colossus: How the Corporation Changed Americaedited by Jack Beatty
Broadway Books, 528 pages, $30
Atlantic senior editor Jack Beatty's anthology of readings documents the rise of the American corporation from the first "bodies corporate" chartered by the British Crown in the seventeenth century to the current era of multinational global business. Interspersed with Beatty's own short analytical essays, the resulting mosaic of historical and contemporary commentary provides a panoramic view of corporate growth and power in American life even as it "seeks to give perspective to the debate over the corporation's place in the good society." Jack Beatty is the author of The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874-1958) (1992); and The World According to Peter Drucker (1998).
Atlantic links:
"Politics and Prose," an Atlantic Unbound column by Jack Beatty.
"The Author of Modernity," an Atlantic Unbound interview with Jack Beatty.
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Like Young: Jazz, Pop,
Youth, and Middle Ageby Francis Davis
Da Capo, 352 pages, $26
Davis's new collection of essays roams omnivorously over the spectrum of modern American music, from the avant-garde jazz artists Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra to pop icons such as Sinatra, Presley, and Dylan. Francis Davis is a contributing editor of The Atlantic and the author of several books including The History of the Blues and a forthcoming biography of John Coltrane. Several of the essays in Like Young originally appeared in The Atlantic.
Atlantic links:
Other essays by Francis Davis:
"Bill Clinton and His Consequences: All the President's Sidemen" (February 2001)
"I Hear America Scatting" (January 2001)
"Like Young" (July 1996)
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Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travelby James Fallows
Public Affairs, 288 pages, $25
Free Flight looks beyond the airline industry's current plague of troubles and reports on three enterprising programs seeking to transform the business and technology of air travel. Get ready for smaller, more efficient jet aircraft, "air taxi" service based on technology first applied to cruise missiles, and, with any luck, greater comfort and convenience for the average traveller. Fallows is the national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of several previous books, including Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (1996) and Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (1994).
Atlantic links:
"The Soul of a New Flying Machine," an Atlantic Unbound interview with James Fallows.
"Freedom of the Skies," by James Fallows (June 2001)
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The
Holocaust on Trialby D. D. Guttenplan
Norton, 224 pages, $24.95
When the American academic Deborah Lipstadt openly questioned the veracity of controversial British author David Irving and his views on the Third Reich in her 1999 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Irving sued her for libel in English court, where the burden of proof falls on the plaintiff. Lipstadt's defense, in essence, turned on establishing an incontrovertible case that hundreds of thousands of Jews were indeed exterminated at Auschwitz by Nazi decree. D. D. Guttenplan's coverage of the contentious trial, based on exclusive interviews with a number of the principals, explores the impact of the Irving case on Holocaust studies and the issues it raises concerning the stability of historical truth. Guttenplan is a contributing editor of The Nation. An article adapted from his book was The Atlantic's cover story in February, 2000.
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Letters to a Young Contrarianby Christopher Hitchens
Basic Books, 226 pages, $22
Freethinking is an art and a calling, Hitchens argues in his contribution to Basic's new "Art of Mentoring" series, wherein he instructs an imaginary protégé on how to "live at an angle to the safety and mediocrity of consensus." Staking out the principles by which he's conducted his own career as a gadfly journalist and unreconstructed controversialist, Hitchens's manual for mavericks makes a rousing case for contentious nonconformity with his familiar caustic wit and stylistic verve. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation and the author of several books of political and cultural criticism, including Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2001) and No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (1999).
Atlantic links:
"An Omniverous Curiosity," by Christopher Hitchens (June 2001)
"The Work of Words," Fallows@Large: a dialogue with Christopher Hitchens.
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Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistanby Robert D. Kaplan
Vintage, 304 pages, $14 (paperback)
Appearing for the first time in paperback with a new introduction and updated final chapter, Kaplan's first-hand account of life among the mujahidin—the "soldiers of god" who waged a long guerrilla war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s—is a searing portrait of a region and a people now at the center of world events. Upon his return to the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2000, Kaplan discovers that two decades of war and religious conflict have given rise to a "lawless frontier" where a volatile mix of Islamic militancy and ethnic tribalism continues to thwart the prospects of peace and stability. Robert Kaplan is an Atlantic correspondent and the author of several previous books of reportage on international affairs including Balkan Ghosts (1993) and The Coming Anarchy (2000).
Atlantic links:
"The View from Inside," an Atlantic Unbound interview with Robert Kaplan.
"The Lawless Frontier," by Robert Kaplan (September 2000)
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Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethosby Robert D. Kaplan
Random House, 224 pages, $22.95
What do the ancient historians and classical thinkers have to teach contemporary leaders about conducting shrewd foreign policy in a dangerous world? Many old lessons that need to be relearned, argues seasoned combat reporter Robert Kaplan, who advances the case for a "comprehensive pragmatism" in statecraft and global affairs informed by the works of Livy, Thucydides, Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, and Hobbes.
Atlantic links:
"Looking the World in the Eye," by Robert D. Kaplan (December 2001)
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What
Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Responseby Bernard Lewis
Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $23
The distinguished historian of the civilizations of the Middle East surveys the last three centuries of Islamic and Arabic culture, the period that has seen its economic and cultural achievements overshadowed by the West and its traditions of humanistic learning and social order eclipsed by repressive regimes and religious turmoil. The downward spiral need not continue, Lewis maintains, but today's Arab governments must undertake a searching examination of their recent history and overcome their reflexive hostility toward civil values they associate with the Christian West. Bernard Lewis is professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and the author of numerous books including The Arabs in History, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (1996), and The Muslim Discovery of Europe.
Atlantic links:
"What Went Wrong," by Bernard Lewis (January 2002)
"The Roots of Muslim Rage," by Bernard Lewis (September 1990)
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The
CEO of the Sofaby P. J. O'Rourke
Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pages, $25
The irreverent political humorist O'Rourke holds court from the homefront, surveying the world from his new post on the living-room couch. As these acerbic dispatches on cellphones, celebrity culture, the NASDAQ, and other follies and irritants of millennial American life attest, midlife domesticity has neither tempered O'Rourke's vitriol nor dampened his gusto for partisan broils. P. J. O'Rourke is the author of several books of reportage and political satire including All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty (1995) and Give War A Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer (1993).
Atlantic links:
Other essays by P. J. O'Rourke:
"Squishier Than Thou" (December 2001)
"Zion's Vital Signs" (November 2001)
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Will
the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a
Faithby Studs Terkel
New Press, 384 pages, $25.95
Studs Terkel's new work of oral history explores "the one experience none of us had, yet all of us will have," as a variety of Americans reflect on their mortality and voice their beliefs about death. "Why not speak of it while we're in the flower of good health?" Terkel writes in his introduction. "How can we envision our life, the one we now experience, unless we recognize that it is finite? In listening to these testimonies, this book is about life and its pricelessness, and of a vision, inchoate though it be, of a better one down here as well as, possibly, up there." Terkel is the author of ten books of oral history, including Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two.
Atlantic links:
"Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" by Studs Terkel (October 2001)
"The Language of Life and Death," an Atlantic Unbound interview with Studs Terkel.
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The
Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern
Geologyby Simon Winchester
HarperCollins, 352 pages, $26
The story of how an obscure English canal digger's discovery of stratified layers of fossilization in 1793 led to his singlehanded creation of the world's first geological map. Although he was ultimately heralded as the father of modern geology, Smith would first endure years of trial and ruin before his achievement was recognized for what it was—a landmark breakthrough that ushered in a new age of earth science. Simon Winchester is a former Oxford geologist and the author, most recently, of the bestseller The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998).
Atlantic links:
"The World Beneath Our Feet," an Atlantic Unbound interview with Simon Winchester.
"Word Imperfect," by Simon Winchester (May 2001)
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Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choiceby Alan Wolfe
Norton, 256 pages, $24.95
Drawing on in-depth conversations with Americans in eight diverse communities across the country, the sociologist Alan Wolfe takes the pulse of contemporary American morality and finds continuity within change. Traditional virtues such as honesty, loyalty, and forgiveness are alive and well, Wolfe discovers, but so, too, is a determined individualism that increasingly views the moral life in terms of personal ideals rather than conventional social dictates. Alan Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
Atlantic links:
"The Opening of the Evangelical Mind," by Alan Wolfe (October 2000)
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Poetry
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
by Billy Collins
Random House, 172 pages, $21
The first major retrospective volume by the current U.S. Poet Laureate features an ample gathering of work from several previous collections in addition to a selection of new poems. Winsome and inventive, Collins's disarmingly readable verse has won him a flourishing popular following thanks to their knack, in John Updike's words, for describing "all the worlds there are and were and some others besides." Billy Collins's books of poetry include Picnic, Lightning (1998) and The Art of Drowning (1995). He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate last year.
Atlantic links:
Selected poems by Billy Collins:
"The Iron Bridge" (March 2001)
"Snow Day" (February 2000)
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Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero: Poemsby Brooks Haxton
Knopf, 81 pages, $23
Attuned to the American vernacular and Attic graces alike, Haxton's latest book of poems once again finds him at home in an eclectic assortment of forms and affinities: terse lyrics and exuberant verse narratives, well-wrought stanzas and wide-ranging sequences, nature and history, the sacred and the profane. Haxton is the author of five previous collections of poetry as well as two recent books of classical translations, Dances for Flute and Thunder: Praises, Prayers, and Insults (1999) and Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus (2001).
Atlantic links:
Selected poems by Brooks Haxton:
"From the Greek" (June 1998)
"Sanskrit at First Snowfall" (June 1997)
"Molybdenum" (July 1995)
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The
Long Marriageby Maxine Kumin
Norton, 72 pages, $21
Kumin's twelfth collection of poetry, her first since 1997's Selected Poems, takes the long view of her fifty years of married life in rural New Hampshire, once again confirming her abiding intimacy with the natural world and her flinty regard for the marriage of hard experience and expansive vision. The book is also notable for its evocative tributes to poets, including such buoyant poems as "Skinnydipping with William Wordsworth" and "Imagining Marianne Moore in the Butterfly Garden." Maxine Kumin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1973. Inside the Halo, a prose memoir of her recovery from a near-fatal equestrian accident, was published last year.
Atlantic links:
Selected poems by Maxine Kumin:
"Oblivion" (2000)
"The Nuns of Childhood: Two Views" (1992)
"The Art of Living," an Atlantic Unbound interview with Maxine Kumin. Merwin.
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The
Street of Clocksby Thomas Lux
Houghton Mifflin, 50 pages, $22
Puckish wit and a flair for offbeat satire are Lux's calling cards, and his first all-new volume of poems in seven years confirms his standing as one of the wiliest jesters of his generation. Here are cockeyed odes to misfit beasts and unruly landscapes, quixotic obsessions and historical conundrums, all delivered up with Lux's customary spare strokes and signature comic piquancy. Thomas Lux is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry including New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 and Split Horizon (1994).
Atlantic links:
Selected poems by Thomas Lux:
"Lucky" (April 2001)
"Henry Clay's Mouth" (August 1999)
"The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball" (October 1998)
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They
Can't Take That Away From Meby Gail Mazur
University of Chicago Press, 96 pages, $12 (paperback)
Mazur's fourth collection of poems, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, surveys "the hungry world, / the fallen world, the loony world" with sidelong irony and hard-won gravity, vigilantly attentive to both the moral complications and the tonic consolations of the examined life. Cast in supple colloquial language that's as unflinching as it is finespun, Mazur's searching mediative lyrics transform the raw materials of memory and desire into "something shapely, useful, new, delicious." Gail Mazur's previous books include The Common (1995) and The Pose of Happiness (1986).
Atlantic links:
Selected poems by Gail Mazur:
"To a Young Apple Tree, December" (December 1999)
"They Can't Take That Away From Me" (March 1998)
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The
Pupilby W. S. Merwin
Knopf, 112 pages, $23
A new volume of lyric poems by one of the country's most acclaimed and prolific poets. The Pupil once more finds Merwin on intimate speaking terms with the spectral and the sublime, invoking the passage of time in his uniquely oracular tenor of praise and lamentation. W. S. Merwin is the author of more than thirty works of poetry, translation, and nonfiction. Among his recent books are The Folding Cliffs (1998), a book-length verse narrative set in nineteenth-century Hawaii; and a verse translation of Dante's Purgatorio.
Atlantic links:
Selected poems by W.S. Merwin:
"The Sleeper" (May 2001)
"In the Open" (January 2001)
"Swimming Up Into Poetry," an Atlantic Unbound essay on the career of W. S. Merwin.
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Miracle Fair: Selected Poemsby Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak, with a foreword by Czeslaw Milosz
Norton, 192 pages, $24.95
New translations of both unpublished and previously collected poems by the 1996 Polish Nobel Laureate, a substantial number appearing in English for the first time. Agile, mordant, and often slyly subversive, Szymborska's poems are animated, as Czeslaw Milosz writes in the foreword, by "a playfulness that gives us, in spite of everything else, a feeling for the enormous diversity and splendor of human existence." Several of Joanna Trzeciak's translations originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.
Atlantic links:
Selected poems by Wislawa Szymborska:
"Two Love Poems" (February 2001)
"A Little Bit About the Soul" (July 2000)
"A Word on Statistics" (May 1997)
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