October 24, 2004

Paperback Row

ICTION | NONFICTION

Action!
By ROBERT CORT
Robert Cort, who has produced more than 50 films, blends fact and fiction in this novel, a sprawling inside story of life in Hollywood, beginning in the late 1940's.

The Fox's Walk
By ANNABEL DAVIS-GOFF
With an anthropologist's eye, Davis-Goff continues to explore Irish history and the last days of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. In this astutely observed novel, Alice Moore, Davis-Goff's middle-aged narrator, revisits time spent at her grandmother's Waterford estate during World War I, half a century earlier. Gradually 8-year-old Alice comes to love County Waterford, even as her family's privileged status is threatened by the rebellion brewing.

The Poetry Anthology: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine
Edited by JOSEPH PARISI and STEPHEN YOUNG
Marking the publication's 90th anniversary (1912-2002), Parisi, the editor from 1983 to 2003, and Young, a former senior editor, have assembled an invaluable retrospective on 20th-century poetry.

She Is Me
By CATHLEEN SCHINE
In a novel as darkly funny as it is heartbreaking, three generations of smart, stubborn women test the sometimes suffocating bonds of love. Elizabeth, already overwhelmed trying to adapt ''Madame Bovary'' into a contemporary screenplay, moves to Los Angeles to be with her unpredictable mother and imperious grandmother -- both of whom are battling cancer. Schine peppers her story with episodes of Flaubertian adultery; in The Times Janet Maslin called it a ''sweetly disarming testament to the unpredictability of romantic impulse.''

Shipwreck
By LOUIS BEGLEY
Not fame, not wealth, not even a young French mistress can fend off the midlife writer's crisis that plagues Begley's sour hero, a celebrated author who pours his heart out over drinks with a nameless cafe patron.

Still Holding
By BRUCE WAGNER
This prickly third novel in Wagner's ''cellphone'' trilogy -- following ''I'm Losing You'' (1996) and ''I'll Let You Go'' (2002) -- is a nihilistic sendup of Hollywood's honchos and wannabes, including a 25-year-old aspirant who looks like Drew Barrymore. In the Book Review, Dwight Garner called this ''the hippest, funniest and most angrily humane novel written about Hollywood in the last 20 years.''

The Way to Paradise
By MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
Vargas Llosa's bold imagination has produced a passionate novel of two fascinating historical figures. Through intricate, alternative narrative loops, the great Peruvian author reimagines the last years of Paul Gauguin, spent in Tahiti and the Marquesas, and the emergence of his Franco-Peruvian grandmother, Flora Tristan (whom he never knew), as a workers' rights activist. In the ''oddly affecting'' portrait of Tristan, Richard Eder wrote in these pages last year, Vargas Llosa's ''imaginative gifts are in full flower.''

Ziff: A Life?
By ALAN LELCHUK
Writing the definitive biography of Arthur Ziff, a modern literary giant in the mold of Philip Roth, proves much harder than the hero of this quick-witted novel, DannyLevitan, could have imagined. The struggling biographer and former protege, in need of a sizable advance, discovers that the ''true'' Ziff is a ruthless opportunist who crafts his novels with grist from other people's lives -- including Danny's.

FICTION | NONFICTION

Eating Apes
By DALE PETERSON
Dale Peterson questions our predatory nature in ''Eating Apes,'' which argues that the human consumption of apes in equatorial Africa poses a serious threat to biodiversity and public health.

Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time
By PETER GALISON
Galison's sparkling new history of a fundamental scientific breakthrough -- the theory of relativity -- uncovers the convergence of two great minds at the turn of the century: Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician whose work in support of precise mapmaking put the idea of simultaneity in doubt; and Albert Einstein, working as a government patent clerk in Switzerland and swamped with proposals on how to synchronize clocks.

Evolution's Captain: The Story of the Kidnapping That Led to Charles Darwin's Voyage Aboard the 'Beagle'
By PETER NICHOLS
We're far more familiar with Charles Darwin and ''Origin of Species'' than with the man who made this study possible: Robert FitzRoy, the tragic commander of H.M.S. Beagle, whose failed attempt at Christianizing natives of Tierra del Fuego led to a return voyage -- with Darwin, then an unknown young naturalist, on board.

Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
By CAROLINE MOOREHEAD
Beautiful and dynamic, Martha Gellhorn (1908-98) embodied the Hollywood idea of the female ace reporter (she covered almost every major international conflict from the Spanish Civil War to the end of the cold war). Moorehead, a friend who made a careful study of Gellhorn's papers, provides a vivid portrait.

Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir
By HILARY MANTEL
Mantel, a distinguished English novelist and critic, bares her wounds -- and her rage -- in this wry and visceral account of a life permanently compromised by misdiagnosis and foolish medication.

Literary Occasions: Essays
By V. S. NAIPAUL
''Literary Occasions,'' a series of meditations on writing and literature, evolves from personal experience. Variously published over 40 years, the essays testify to the Nobel laureate's exacting eye toward his history as a ''colonial traveling in New World plantation colonies.''

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind
By DAVID QUAMMEN
Blending travel narrative, science, history, myth and adventure, Quammen considers four magisterial alpha predators -- the Gir lions of India, saltwater crocodiles in Australia, Carpathian bears and the Amur tigers of Siberia -- appreciating them as symbols of our own mortality and wondering what life would be like without them. Rich in detail and vivid anecdotes, ''Monster of God,'' Norman Rush wrote in a review last year, ''is a treasury of exotic fact and hard thinking.''

Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticisms,1958-2002
By FRANK KERMODE
This hefty collection of 26 essays condenses a lifetime of careful reading and intense critical activity and addresses some of the last half-century's most persistent questions: What is modernity? What is a classic? What is criticism for? Kermode, a leading interpreter of Shakespeare, exhibits a range of interests -- from opera to modern dance, from the New Testament to Don DeLillo.

Plan of Attack
By BOB WOODWARD
Woodward capitalizes on his extraordinary access to the Bush White House in the wake of his 2002 book about Sept. 11 and Afghanistan, ''Bush at War.'' The result here is an unparalleled behind-the-scenes look at the two years of debate and maneuvering within the administration that led to its defining moment: the march to war against Iraq. In The Times, Michiko Kakutani called this Woodward's ''most powerful and persuasive book in years.''

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet
By JAMES MANN
"Rise of the Vulcans" is a deft group biography of the president's military team, explaining how they came together (nicknaming themselves ''the Vulcans'' during the 2000 campaign) and dissecting the tensions and conflicts among them.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter
By THOMAS CAHILL
Cahill's story of the Western world continues in this wide-ranging fourth volume of his ''Hinges of History'' series. In what our critic, Joy Connolly, called ''a triumph of popularization,'' Cahill outlines the rise of Greek civilization through a close look at several archetypal figures: the warrior, the wanderer, the poet, the politician, the playwright, the philosopher and the artist.

The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, From Utopia to Crisis and Collapse
By PAUL CARTLEDGE
Cartledge traces the evolution of an influential warrior culture, punctuating his story with brief biographies of the city's founder, Lycurgus, and King Leonidas, the commander at Thermopylae.

Stagolee Shot Billy
By CECIL BROWN
Tracing the history of the popular blues song ''Stagolee'' -- recorded countless times by performers including Ma Rainey, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead -- Brown explores how a murder in St. Louis in 1895 became an oral legend, and addresses its place in African-American consciousness and music's function as a form of memory.

Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
With unrestricted access to journals and letters -- and interviews with Kerry and his surviving Swift Boat crewmates -- Brinkley explores Kerry's journey from war to peace, weighing the war's effects and the ambition that characterized his life before and after his military career.

W. C. Fields: A Biography
By JAMES CURTIS
Curtis, the author of acclaimed biographies of the film directors Preston Sturges and James Whale, scrupulously peels away the bluster Fields (1880-1946) projected in his characters, and presents a multidimensional comedian who triumphed in vaudeville and on Broadway, on radio and in film, while enduring bitter personal relationships. Richard Schickel called this ''by far the fullest, fairest and finally most touching account of this sad, solipsistic life.''