Books recommended for the month
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-07 08:52
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The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008
By Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster)
What is most consequential about The War Within, the final volume in Bob Woodward's four-part Bush oeuvre, is the evolutionary shift it marks for the author. Woodward is famous for his flat, just-the-facts-ma'am style, if one can call it that. It is the old-fashioned newspaperman's credo of show, don't tell. He rarely pauses in his narratives to synthesize or analyze, let alone to judge his powerful subjects, especially those who have been his sources. He has only one angle, the close-up. The striking lack of contextual analysis in all his books about presidents going back to Richard Nixon has angered some readers.
In contrast to his other Bush volumes, The War Within does provide interstitial analysis and judgments throughout. It also renders an extremely harsh final appraisal of President Bush. In a stinging epilogue, Woodward (pictured) concludes: "For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut." Sure, these books can be a slog. But they stand as the fullest story yet of the Bush presidency and of the war that is likely to be its most important legacy.
Hurry Down Sunshine
By Michael Greenberg (Other Press)
Few things in life are sadder or more frightening than watching a loved one transported far away, swiftly and irrevocably, by illness. In the summer of 1996, Michael Greenberg's vivacious 15-year-old daughter, Sally, was gripped by a psychotic episode from which she and her family are still recovering. "I feel like I'm traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to," a troubled Sally says in the opening passage of Hurry Down Sunshine, Greenberg's remarkable account of his attempts to reckon with his daughter's manic depression - or madness, as he prefers to call it. Sally's transformation is sudden and devastating. "She had learned to speak from me; she had heard her first stories from me," Greenberg writes. "And yet from one day to the next we had become strangers." With little fanfare or commentary, Greenberg lays bare tangled family dynamics in all their raw power.
Nothing To Be Frightened Of
By Julian Barnes (Alfred A. Knopf)
"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," the book begins. Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death - why should an agnostic who has no faith in an afterlife fear death? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter. It is a beautiful and funny book.
Happy Families: Stories
By Carlos Fuentes, translated by Edith Grossman (Random House)
Did Tolstoy really believe the throw-down challenge with which he began Anna Karenina? Are happy families really all alike? Is every unhappy family unhappy in its own way? Carlos Fuentes' new story collection not only takes its title and epigraph from Tolstoy's famous opening, but also makes us reconsider the bold statement the Russian writer uses to draw us into his novel. It's true that the households at the center of these 16 stories could hardly be gloomier or, on the surface, more dissimilar, as each labors under its own burden of tragedy and grief. Yet as we read through this offering from one of Mexico's most celebrated literary figures, the author of more than 20 books, certain patterns emerge, likenesses suggesting that the wildly dysfunctional may share more in common than do their harmonious neighbors. The problem is that we sense these stories are getting something wrong. And that makes us question how much energy Fuentes has put into creating a world, real or imaginary, that we can believe in.
The New York Times Syndicate
(China Daily 10/07/2008 page20)
