10 Terrific Reads of 2009
The books that gave us comfort, joy—and lots to talk about.
The BolterBy Frances Osborne
320 pages; Knopf
The Bolter chronicles the life of Idina Sackville, a wellborn British woman who defied convention by having “lovers without number” and choosing a decadent expat life in Kenya in 1918. Was Sackville a protofeminist free spirit à la Isak Dinesen or a spoiled rich girl who couldn’t resist a scandal? Author Frances Osborne—Sackville’s great-granddaughter—traces her ancestor’s journey from madcap to just plain mad.
see the rest below: Click to go to Oprah’s Top 10 list.
http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200912-omag-terrific-books-2009Books of The Times
Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign
// // “Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the presidential campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000 on fancy designer duds for her and her family.
Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska on the campaign trail in September 2008 with Senator John McCain.
GOING ROGUE
An American Life
By Sarah Palin
413 pp. HarperCollins. $28.99
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The most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the news media, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million advance for writing this book.
In what reads like payback for disparaging comments by John McCain’s aides about her after the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunderheaded — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insisted, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”
Although Ms. Palin writes that she is “proud of the senator” for being bold enough to put her on the ticket, some of her loudest complaints in this volume are directed at the McCain campaign’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt, ironically enough, was one of the aides to most forcefully make the case for putting her on the ticket in the first place, arguing to Mr. McCain, as Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported in their recent book, “The Battle for America 2008,” that she would shake up the race and help him get his “reform mojo back.” Over the weekend McCain aides fired back at Ms. Palin: Mr. Schmidt was quoted on Politico.com saying that charges about him were “all fiction.”
Back in 2008 Robert Draper reported in The New York Times Magazine that neither Mr. Schmidt nor Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, apparently saw Ms. Palin’s “lack of familiarity with major national or international issues as a serious liability,” and that Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot, saw the idea of upending the chessboard as a maverick move.
All in all Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, ungrateful to the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
In “Going Rogue” Ms. Palin talks perfunctorily about fiscal responsibility and a muscular foreign policy, and more passionately about the importance of energy independence, but she is quite up front about the fact that much of her appeal lies in her just-folks “hockey mom” ordinariness. She pretends no particular familiarity with the Middle East, the Iraq war or Islamic politics — “I knew the history of the conflict,” she writes, “to the extent that most Americans did.” And she argues that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.”
A CNN poll taken last month indicates that 7 out of 10 Americans now think Ms. Palin is not qualified to be president, and even as ardent a conservative as Charles Krauthammer lamented in September 2008 “the paucity of any Palin record or expressed conviction on the major issues of our time.”
Yet Mr. McCain’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, an Alaskan town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate underscores just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge. Ms. Palin herself had a surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot, writing that she was not astonished, that it felt “like a natural progression.”
Ms. Palin suggests that she and her husband, Todd, are ideally qualified to represent the Joe Six-Packs of the world because they are Joe Six-Packs themselves. “We know what it’s like to be on a tight budget and wonder how we’re going to pay for our own health care, let alone college tuition,” she writes in “Going Rogue.” “We know what it’s like to work union jobs, to be blue-collar, white-collar, to have our kids in public schools. We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”
“Going Rogue” (written with an assist from Lynn Vincent, the features editor of World, an evangelical magazine) is part cagey spin, part earnest autobiography, part payback hit job. And its most compelling sections deal not with politics but with Ms. Palin’s life in Alaska and her family. Despite an annoying tendency to drop the names of lots of writers and philosophers gratuitously — in the course of this book she quotes or alludes to Pascal, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Paine, Pearl S. Buck, Mark Twain and Melville — she does a lively job of conveying the frontier feel of the 49th state, where television broadcasts were tape-delayed in her youth and they shopped for clothes “via mail order through the Sears catalog,” where “we don’t have big-league professional sports teams or many celebrities (except famous dog mushers),” and so regard politics as a local sport.
She recalls her initial feeling — “I don’t think I could handle that” — and her “sudden understanding of why people would grasp at a quick ‘solution,’ a way to make the ‘problem’ just go away,” though her own pro-life stance would deny women the choice of having an abortion.
Elsewhere in this volume she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”
Just as Ms. Palin’s planned book tour resembles a campaign rollout — complete with a bus tour and pit stops in battleground states — so the second half of this book often reads like a calculated attempt to position Ms. Palin for 2012. She tries to compare herself to Ronald Reagan by repeatedly invoking his name and record. She talks about being “a Commonsense Conservative” and worrying about the national deficit. And she attempts to explain, rationalize or refute controversial incidents and allegations that emerged during the 2008 race.
She says she “never sought to ban any books” as mayor of Wasilla, and has always had a “special passion for reading.” She suggests that the $150,000-plus designer clothes were the campaign’s idea, that she and her family are actually frugal coupon clippers who shop at Costco. And she says that she was manipulated into doing that famous series of Katie Couric interviews (which would do much to cement an image of her as an easily caricatured ignoramus) by Nicolle Wallace, a communications aide for the campaign, and that Ms. Couric just seemed to want “to frame a ‘gotcha’ moment.”
Along the way Ms. Palin acknowledges that she is a busy, “got to go-go-go” sort of person — and for an average hockey mom, pretty ambitious.
“As every Iditarod musher knows,” she writes of the well-known Alaska dog-sled race, “if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.”
Books of The Times
For Master of Surreal, This Cast Feels Real
by Janet Maslin – New York Times
“Under the Dome” gravely threatens Stephen King’s status as a mere chart-busting pop cultural phenomenon. It has the scope and flavor of literary Americana, even if Mr. King’s particular patch of American turf is located smack in the middle of the Twilight Zone. It dispenses with his usual scatology and trippy fantasy to deliver a spectrum of credible people with real family ties, health crises, self-destructive habits and political passions. Even its broad caricatures prompt real emotion, if only via the damage they can inflict on others. Though the book’s broad conspiratorial strokes become farfetched, its ordinary souls become ever more able to break hearts.
This book has the heft of a brick. It also has a premise that can be summarized in seconds. On a beautiful autumn day in Maine a transparent dome materializes over the town of Chester’s Mill. Once the Dome falls, all vestiges of normal life are suspended. Things run amok. They get scary. The townsfolk become fate’s playthings. And Mr. King, who can manipulate this crisis in any way that occurs to him, becomes a kid in a candy store.
The premise provides so many options that Mr. King’s decisions about how to tell this story are of special interest. The King book that is most readily brought to mind by “Under the Dome” isn’t an earlier large-scale apocalyptic fantasy like “It” or “The Stand”; it’s “On Writing,” the instructive autobiographical gem that cast light on how Mr. King’s creative mind works. In the spirit of “On Writing,” “Under the Dome” takes a lucid, commonsense approach that keeps it tight and energetic from start to finish. Hard as this thing is to hoist, it’s even harder to put down.
Consider the book’s step-by-step way of defining the Dome. Mr. King isn’t about to do the easy thing, which would be to give a straightforward description of what it is and how it works. Instead he offers a textbook demonstration of how to make action and explication one and the same. First step: A woodchuck on the ground and a pilot in the air named Chuck are sudden victims of the Dome’s guillotinelike slicing descent.
Second step: The book’s hero to be, a short-order cook and Iraq war veteran named Dale Barbara, looks upward. He sees the front of Chuck’s plane fall off and the back get crushed by the invisible barrier that, we now know, reaches sky high. Big sigh of relief here: Dome calamities, while definitely deadly, will not be (by Mr. King’s high standards in this area) described gruesomely at all.
Third step: Barbara, a k a Barbie, waves frantically to a stranger for help. The stranger walks right toward him — and smashes into an invisible wall. So the Dome’s extent is making itself known. Then Mr. King defines the perimeter by ticking off the various roads that lead to Chester’s Mill. “And shortly before noon on Dome Day,” he writes, now attaching a name to this calamity, “every one of them snapped closed.”
With the same tight efficiency, Mr. King goes on to introduce the various businesses (restaurant, newspaper), institutions (hospital) and officials (police and town selectmen) on the Chester’s Mill map. “Under the Dome” even comes with a map, but the town in the narrative is much too sharply drawn to need one. Special editions of this book also come with playing cards featuring illustrations of the main characters in this story’s huge cast, among them its mega-villain, a used-car salesman and diabolically devious second selectman known as Big Jim Rennie. He has been drawn to look just like Dick Cheney.
The Dome traps the air in Chester’s Mill. But for Big Jim it creates an exploitable vacuum. His power grab is soon under way, and just in case that isn’t sinister enough, Big Jim’s son, Junior, turns out to have homicidal tendencies. Meanwhile Mr. King’s neighborly array of well-sketched locals intertwine in dozens of subplots, to the point where Chester’s Mill really does seem to operate as one cohesive organism. When the local storekeeper and huckster decides that Dome Day’s famine-inducing possibilities can help him unload a lot of old hot dogs, someone at the hospital is told to “expect an influx of gastroenteritis patients this evening.”
All of this — along with the smog that starts to choke off Chester’s Mill and make the Dome as visible as a dirty windshield — is a way of blowing smoke. It gets Mr. King through nearly 1,100 fast-moving pages without his having to answer the obvious questions: what is this thing? How did it get here? Why did it get here? What if it doesn’t go away? “Under the Dome” can’t avoid these thoughts forever. But it can postpone them with an ease that is one more measure of its author’s having placed more value on humanity than on horror.
“Under the Dome” has a well-stocked emotional arsenal. It also has a great capacity for escapist fun, without which Mr. King could never lure readers through such a long trek. As usual he takes every opportunity to dispense winks and shout-outs, and he summons whichever cult-favorite references strike his fancy. A Warren Zevon lyric crops up; so does James McMurtry’s red-hot “Talkin’ at the Texaco,” which immortalizes a gritty, sidelong small-town spirit and might as well be this book’s theme song.
The local Christian radio station usually plays music that is, in Mr. King’s opinion, straight from Hell. And one tough female police officer has been hired on the recommendation of a certain Jack Reacher, said to have been the toughest darn cop the Army ever saw. Big currents flow through this book along with the small ones. There are echoes of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and Iraq that help to shape this small town’s view of the wider world. News crews (notably CNN’s) arrive at the perimeter of the Dome to stake out this colossal human-interest story. And what they observe, on a visiting day when loved ones outside of Chester’s Mill are allowed to venture near the Dome’s dangerous surface, conveys genuine tragedy. As Mr. King puts it, describing what the TV cameras see:
“They observe the townspeople and the visitors pressing their hands together, with the invisible barrier between; they watch them try to kiss; they examine men and women weeping as they look into each other’s eyes; they note the ones who faint, both inside the Dome and out, and those who fall to their knees and pray facing each other with their folded hands raised; they record the man on the outside who begins hammering his fists against the thing keeping him from his pregnant wife, hammering until his skin splits and his blood beads on thin air; they peer at the old woman trying to trace her fingers, the tips pressed white and smooth against the unseen surface between them, over her sobbing granddaughter’s forehead.” Nowhere in Mr. King’s immense body of work have his real and fantasy worlds collided with such head-on force.
Interesting read. Ms. Matlin is obviously a fan — the review is practically a rave.
I haven’t read this latest book from King so I comment with some caution. Be that as it may…
Ms. Maslin writes that this is a different King book, a literary gem no less. It is no It nor The Stand. However, everything she writes, and every example she presents, don’t suggest anything different from King. The characters, the pop culture references and examples, the use of lyrics — all are the same style and writing elements King has used in most of his earlier works. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s one reason King is one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
King has always been annoyed that the literary establishment has not given him any due but rather has treated him as a boorish peddler of the masses’ preference for the literary equivalent of Aqua Velvet. King has worked this annoyance into many of his novels.
Seems Ms. Maslin seems willing to take up his fight in her medium.
I totally agree…I wish I could “peddle” that much!