Paris, Athens, New Zealand, Washington, Laos, Mexico--we go around the world for tales beguiling and grim with more nonfiction Monday on a Wednesday on a Thursday.
Joe Bennett, A Land of Two Halves: Looking for a Lift in Both New Zealands (Kirkus says this is a coming release but the only version I found on Amazon is already in release, in paperback, from Sribner UK). The author goes hitchhiking (hitch-hiking? Hitchiking? Frankly, they all look wierd. For the authorotative answer, we turn now to Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. And the answer is: "hitchhiking." And for the record, it's authoritative.)
ANYWAY, as Chuck Klosterman would say, the author (that would be Joe Bennett--remember how we were talking about his book before the Webster's segue?) goes hitchhiking (still looks wierd to me. And for that matter, why do you say "hitch a ride" but call it "hitchhiking"? Shouldn't it be "hitchriding"? Maybe because when you are hitchhiking, you spend more time hiking than hitching? Which reminds me of an interesting piece in the October Outside by Jane Smiley. Did you know she is over 6 feet tall? Neither did I. Now we do. )
Joe Bennett. Book. Hitchhikes around New Zealand. And for it's moment of world-weary candor, I love this review, from John Whelan, writing in the Taranaki Daily News (which is the local paper for the Taranaki region "located on the West Coast of the North Island" which is the "major energy and dairy region of New Zealand." So now we know that too):
"Joe Bennett set out to discover the New Zealand he didn't know, to write about the country he'd lived in for 15 years yet had seen so little of," begins Whelan. OK, so far, your standard sort of book review, but then Whelan goes on,
"His observations about the places we're all familiar with are spot on. God, there are some crap little towns in New Zealand, aren't there? "
I like this John Whelan. Nothing against New Zealand, which I've never visited, and which may, or may not, be full of crap little towns. But what a great intrusion of the unexpected, eh?
After that observation, Whelan settles down to an unexceptionable: "However, it is the people he encounters on his journey that are the most revealing and amusing. To add spice to his trip he decides to hitchhike around the country and as a consequence learns more than he bargains for," concluding, "This warts-and-all travel book often out-Brysons Bill Bryson.”
More world travel after the jump (not to hyperspace, just to the long version).
Sofka Zinovieff Euryidice Street: A Place in Athens (Granta Books) In release (paperback).
From the publisher: "Sofka had fallen in love with Greece as a student, but little suspected that years later she would return for good with an expatriate Greek husband and two young daughters. This book is a wonderfully fresh, funny, and inquiring account of her first year as an Athenian."
In this review, the Times Literary Supplement called it “a modest and a magnificently well-judged book” adding that Sofka, an anthropologist by training, “sees her adopted country with the eye both of affectionate parent and dispassionate field researcher.”
Marjorie Williams, The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate (PublicAffairs, November) . PW says:
This posthumous collection presents a series of remarkably well-observed and intelligent profiles of the great and minor figures who have made D.C. for the past two decades. Williams, a longtime writer for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair, has a fine eye for telling details—the license plates on a bureaucrat's car, the folds of satin in a dying socialite's dress—but it's more than just details that make Williams's profiles so engaging. Underlying each representation is Williams's ability to make her characters as complicated on the page as they are in real life. It's that same concern that governs the heartbreaking personal pieces in the last third of the book, which covers Williams's losing battle with cancer. Here she is on her impending death: "whatever happens to me now, I've earned the knowledge some people never gain, that my span is finite and I still have the chance to rise and rise to life's generosity." In these final pieces, Williams steps out from under the self-effacing veil that made her such a fine journalist and speaks of her own experiences. The result is a collection of writing that dissolves the boundaries between the personal and the political to arrive at an obvious but no less startling conclusion. political to arrive at an obvious but no less startling conclusion.”
Robert Rivard, Trail of Feathers: Searching for Philip True (PublicAffairs, November). Again, from PW:
Philip True was the epitome of a reporter's reporter, at least as described in this moving account of his murder in a remote corner of western Mexico, written by his editor at the San Antonio Express-News, for which True was the Mexico City correspondent. In December 1998, despite a lack of editorial interest, True set off on a 10-day expedition into the canyons of the Sierra Madre, hoping to write a story on the region's Huichol Indians. Rivard's book follows the agonizing six-year-long process by which he and others worked to find out what happened to True. First, there was the discovery of True's hastily buried corpse (which Rivard helped dig out with his bare hands); then, the tortuous journey through the opaque Mexican legal system. Rivard thoroughly fleshes out True, a California hippie with a troubled upbringing who became an ace foreign correspondent, and such characters as the sullen Huichols accused of the murder, the delusional crusader defending them, and Mexican president Vicente Fox. Rivard's engaging, compassionate, though sometimes long-winded story goes beyond the tragedy of True's death to include the vast, beautiful and troubling world of Mexico itself, "where people are preyed on by the very forces that exist to protect them."
Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. (St. Martin’s, November).
And for a change of pace, let's go to PW:
His graceful narrative follows struggling writers as they live on potato soup and dreams at Paris's famous expatriate bookshop. Mercer, a former Ottowa Citizen crime reporter, finds himself at Shakespeare one gloomy Parisian day in 1999, in his late 20s, with not much money and no plans for the future, trying to evade some angry newspaper sources back home. With little fanfare, he is taken into the store by its owner, George Whitman, a kindly yet scatterbrained man, who explains, "I run a socialist utopia that masquerades as a bookstore." Mercer begins working as an eager unpaid employee, running errands, acting as a referee between the writers who hang out there and ringing up sales (it's no B&N superstore: when Mercer asks where the credit card machine is, he's told, "Dude, Shakespeare and Company doesn't even have a telephone. Of course we don't take credit cards"). Mercer portrays the assorted characters and their adventures with an eye for detail and a wry sense of humor. Francophile book lovers will enjoy his finely crafted memoir.
John T. Halliday, Flying Through Midnight : A Pilot’s Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam War (Scribner, October) . Yes, PW. But it's a starred review:
When now-retired lieutenant colonel Halliday reported for duty as a 24-year-old air force officer with the 606th Special Operations Squadron at a U.S.A.F. base in Thailand in 1970, he thought he'd be hauling cargo to Thai air bases. But as the first-time author recounts in this gripping memoir, he was ordered to fly a C-123 on top-secret nighttime combat missions instead. Assigned to an operation nicknamed "Candlesticks" for the flares the pilots dropped to illuminate enemy targets, Halliday played his role in this hush-hush part of the Vietnam War by bombing along the Laotian part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. With snappy prose, machine-gun-fast dialogue and techno-pilot speak, he recreates his forays with immediacy. The heart of the book is Halliday's blow-by-blow chronicle of the amazing midnight crash landing he made on an unlit airstrip in treacherous mountainous territory in Long Tien—no-man's-land in northern Laos. There, he and his crew were greeted by initially suspicious U.S. forces and commanding general "Bang-Pow" of the Royal Laotian Army. This dramatic, firsthand war story from a veteran who earned an Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions barrels toward the heroic climax with novelistic momentum.
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