December 25-31, 2003

books

Under the Covers

Books that kept us up at night.

Yellow Dog

By Martin Amis Hyperion, 340 pp., $24.95

Xan Meo dubs himself a "gynocrat": "Give the girls a go," he thinks to himself, on a morning that ends with this happy London family man being beaten to a pulp by a male assailant. As Meo struggles to recuperate, and his atavistic desire for revenge drags his behavior back to the Stone Age, newspapers ignore growing rumors of an approaching meteor, while widow Reynolds Traynor transports her husband's corpse back home by air. All eyes -- and ours too -- are torn between menace on the streets and streaks in the skies.

With Yellow Dog, Amis goes macrocosmic, gnashing at supposed harmless tendencies -- rivalries, titillation, the diffident failings of male relationships -- which he sees as shredding social fabric. His dystopian parable charts a sort of parabola: Swelling to a chain-saw melody of concordant themes at its middle, this indictment of violence and machismo fades away like airplane trails. Meo returns to the fold, and almost as a kindness, the ending of the book glances away from reality toward hope for the future. It's almost as if Amis knows we don't want to see how it ends.

--Juliet Fletcher

Any Human Heart

By William Boyd Knopf, 512 pp., $24.95

Why Any Human Heart by William Boyd was the best book I read this year: Because at 500-plus pages (including index!), Lord Mountstuart's intimate journals take him and the reader through an extraordinary life at a breathtaking pace. Because it contains all of the best elements of life and literature: youth, sex, war, art, politics, finances and writing, which propel the narrative in unexpected directions every few pages. Because Boyd seamlessly weaves history and famous people into his complex, fictional story. Because there is both humor and anguish in equal measure -- yet all of the characters and emotions are heartfelt. And because Boyd -- who has never written the same novel twice -- gets better with each book.

--Gary M. Kramer

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

By Al Franken Dutton, 368 pp., $24.95

Al Franken's jeremiad will forever be remembered for spurring the silliest lawsuit of 2003, when Fox News sued Franken over his use of "fair and balanced" before being literally laughed out of the courtroom. But this bestseller should be appreciated as a finely honed broadside against the conservative media.

Besides calling "lying, splotchy bully" Bill O'Reilly on his claims that he won a Peabody or catching the author of Bias wrongly accusing TV commentators of pro-Communist rants ("I Bitch-Slap Bernie Goldberg"), Franken knows when to switch gears. In the middle of the lampooning is a sober chapter describing the way conservative pundits deliberately exploited the Paul Wellstone memorial for political gain, what Franken terms "the story of how the right-wing media repeats its fabrications until they echo into the mainstream press." It is a masterpiece of controlled rage.

--Andrew Milner

The Unprofessionals

By Julie Hecht Random House, 228 pp., $23.95

Julie Hecht's narrator, a curmudgeonly, new-age vegan, is simultaneously sickened and fascinated by pop culture and the ways of the modern world. Her points of reference are things like A&E biographies and The Larry Sanders Show. She justifies her quirks with offhand comments by David Letterman. She chooses psychotherapists by the shirts they wear. She shops at drugstores only a half-hour before closing and picks up all of the medium-green Reach toothbrushes with firm bristles she can carry. She's "forced" to leave these stores when she hears songs with insipid lyrics. All of this is perfectly normal to only one other person in her world: "the boy," an equally meticulous 21-year-old, a friend of the family who struggles with heroin addiction, and to whom she speaks on the phone for hours at a time about everything from old movies to existentialism to the appalling behavior of most other people. Hecht's funny, touching book is the story of their relationship -- loving, tragic and utterly original.

--Lori Hill

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century

By Paul Krugman W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $25.95

The Great Unraveling, by Princeton economist/New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, collects his columns from the Gray Lady, and it also, unwittingly, traces his increasing radicalism; his disgust with the second Bush administration should prove both instructive and inspiring to any citizen experiencing a sinking feeling that the United States' founding tenets are having the rug pulled out from underneath them. And the book's introduction -- in which Krugman compares the rhetoric and actions of the Bush administration to that of other revolutionary movements (via the doctoral dissertation of none other than Henry Kissinger) -- is a Common Sense for these increasingly incoherent times.

--Maura Johnston

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

By Michael Lewis W.W. Norton, 288 pp., $24.95

I'm a baseball fan. I'm also a nerd with a head for numbers. I can tell when coaches or players say something stupid about baseball, I know why they're wrong and I can back it up with statistics. Moneyball is for baseball fans like me. In it, Michael Lewis asks Oakland GM Billy Beane how his team has managed to win games recently despite having significantly less money to spend on players than nearly every other team. The answer? Beane listens to a group of stat geeks who understand the market for baseball players better than baseball insiders. Who knew? Unathletic geeks like me can be useful to baseball teams after all.

--Matthew Hotz

Green Grass Grace

By Shawn McBride Touchstone, 286 pp., $13

You may think you know all you need to know about seemingly autobiographical first novels by unassuming, smarty-pants types. Or that you'd only dig a book about Philly in the '80s because it's about Philly in the '80s, and no matter your capacity for nostalgia, heartstring-tugging does not a good book make. You're wrong. Henry Toohey, 13-year-old protagonist, is delightful whether you grew up in Holmesburg as the son of a mailman or not. The book's overarching wistfulness and simultaneous realness aside, here it's the little things that'll get you: The descriptions of homemade ads for locally owned businesses are spot-on, and Henry's continual identification of men by hairstyle ("combover") and women by bra-size ("boring B-cups") will have you giggling all up and down Frankford Ave.

--Nancy Armstrong

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care

By John McWhorter Gotham, 304 pp., $26

In Doing Our Own Thing, African-American linguist and show-tune aficionado John McWhorter explores how formal language and well-crafted music in America have slowly gone the way of the ascot. With examples of early-century oratory, McWhorter blames today's sorry state of speech on the individualistic, multicultural values of the 1960s. McWhorter's antipopulist thesis, born out of the conservative strain of linguistics that posits black English as "slang," and hip-hop as a musically inferior genre, is dubious at best. But with Doing Our Own Thing McWhorter manages to make an academic debate as digestible as the pop culture he shuns, and that's keeping it real for sheezy.

--Elisa Ludwig

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About

By Mil Millington Villard, 384 pp., $12.95

The plot's so-so and the style is solid if unremarkable. So what made Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About worthy of inclusion here? The book is a riot. Based on a blog the British Millington keeps at www.milmillington.com chronicling arguments he has with his German-born girlfriend, Margret, TMGAIHAA is perhaps a thinly veiled takeoff on Millington's life. To wit: Protagonist Pel Dalton, like pre-writing-career Millington, works in a university IT department and bickers incessantly with his German girlfriend, Ursula. These coincidences, as it were, do nothing to diminish the humor and, let's face it, love, Millington squeezes from the ridiculous and oddly adorable argument scenes that propel this novel.

--Brian Howard

Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia

By Dubravka Ugresic Dalkey Archive, 221 pp., $13.95

With 100 words to spend on the marvelous, often-scathing essay collection Thank You For Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia by the Croatian novelist Dubravka Ugresic, I should allow the author speak for herself: "Stalinist writers had to take great care to follow the rules of the game: the rules of socialist realism. And those rules were not only ideological but also commercial. Literature had to be comprehensible to the broad reading masses. In short, if Stephen King has found himself in Stalinist Russia, he would undoubtedly have gotten the Stalin Prize."

--Andrew Ervin