Indy Reads is once again inviting you to scavenge Massachusetts Avenue.

Come to the Athenaeum at 401 East Michigan Street on Wednesday, June 12th, at 6 p.m., and you’ll get a map of Mass Ave, the rules of the game, and your first clue.

You’ll be off on a hunt of Mass Ave businesses. You may win prizes, including discounts at area businesses, and you’ll be promoting awareness of the literacy efforts of Indy Reads.

Click here, or on the picture of Sherlock visiting Indy Reads Books, to register. The MHS Scavenge the Ave 2013 is co-sponsored by Indy Reads and the Mass Ave Merchant’s Association, and is supported by MHS (Managed Health Services).

Good luck with your scavenging!

Brenda Hillman’s collection Loose Sugar  is described on its back cover as “an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa,” and the book’s structure makes the extraction of poems for purposes of blogging more questionable than ever. I’m up to it, though, and I mention the structure in case you had questions about the text trailing at the bottom of “Symmetry Breaking.”

Brenda Hillman, “Early Sex” and “Symmetry Breaking” from Loose Sugar ©1997 by Brenda Hillman. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press)

I bought Glaciers, the 2012 novel by Alexis M. Smith, because words of praise by Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia, appear on the back cover.

No doubt I would have been attracted to it, anyway, when I learned that Isabel, its main character, works in a Portland, Oregon library. She repairs damaged books.

Up and down the hall are other small offices and meeting rooms for others like her: the subspecialists, the techies, the genealogists, the archivists. The librarians work upstairs, in larger, brighter, carpeted rooms, with newer computers and more comfortable chairs. This part of the basement was once a bomb shelter; her office was once a mop closet.

Yo-ho. We follow this young woman through one day, during which she muses on her family, her history, her identity. She’s interested in a techie guy at the library, a vet who served in “the war.” This is the first novel I’ve read in which the narrator uses those words and assumes that we’ll know she means the war in Iraq. (She gets around to explaining that, but her usage still struck me.)

Isabel’s life, spent in Alaska and the American Northwest, makes for an absorbing tale. There were moments when Smith’s prose felt cute, but the novel is so short that I can read it again, and see if I was just in a funk when I read those bits.

Glaciers is also available as a downloadable e-book

Note: This review was perhaps the least adequate of any I’ve written, so a link to the book’s first chapter has been added below.

I just finished reading Christian Wiman’s new book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, and I’d like to share a quote, but I’m not sure which to pick. You’re likely to read whatever I print and think, “Ah, that’s the kind of book it is,” and you’d be wrong, at least in part. Wiman looks hard at religion, at faith, at poetry, at death, and his “meditation” pulls in different directions. Taking into account that the book is only 182 pages long, I can say that I was moved an unusual number of times.

For seven years, Wiman has been suffering from a rare form of cancer, though as he tells us at the end of his book, “there is every reason to think that I am at the beginning of a long remission.” In June, he will step down from his position as editor of the periodical Poetry, and in July he’ll begin to serve as a lecturer at Yale Divinity School.

I want to reread the book, but I need to turn my copy in.

If I ever sound like a preacher in these passages, it’s only because I have a hornet’s nest of voluble, conflicting parishioners inside of me.

There, now. There’s a quote. Wiman is a Christian, and Jesus is central to his life, but he writes, “I also feel quite certain that the old religious palliatives, at least those related to the Christian idea of heaven, are inadequate.” And he includes Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes among the writers who “are, for the briefest of instants, perceiving something of reality as it truly is.”

If you shy away from inspirational reading but are ready to be inspired, you might give My Bright Abyss a try.

* * *

This blogpost is so weak. Here’s a link to WBUR, Boston’s NPR channel. If you scroll down, there’s a copy of the book’s first chapter. http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/04/05/poetry. You can magnify the font.

There’s also an interview with Christian Wiman, but I’m not going to listen, right now. I’m holding on (mentally speaking) to the book.

From May 15th through the 31st, readers of library e-books all over the world will be able to check out the same e-book at the same time from their respective libraries. Michael Malone’s novel The Four Corners of the Sky will be available for an unlimited number of checkouts by IndyPL patrons. You won’t need to make a request and wait.

Here’s part of a review from Booklist:

Jack Peregrine, con artist extraordinaire, must teach his daughter, 26-year-old navy jet pilot Annie Peregrine Goode, to fly toward life, not away from it. Annie is estranged from her father, who left her with her aunt and uncle when she was 7 years old, but when Jack turns up again, on the run as always–but this time apparently near death–Annie is swept back into the maelstrom of his life. So begins a rollicking roller coaster of a novel that fantails from sleepy Emerald, North Carolina, to Miami and on to Havana, with multiple stops in between, as Jack’s last scam plays itself out. The cast of characters is as large as it is rich. Malone is an absolute master of Dickensian character building, as capable of breathing vigorous life into slow-moving Uncle Clark and worrywart Aunt Sam as he is at imbuing his showstopping heroes with unquenchable spirit.

Click on the cover art or the title above, and you will be taken to the e-book record.

Your reactions to the book can be entered in the comment field below. If there is no comment field below, click this post’s title above, about the Big Library Read.

You might as well brace yourselves. After you die, you may be a background character in the dreams of others. You know those people in your dreams? Where did you think they came from?

This is not a job choice but indenture: you owe the same number of hours of service as you spent dreaming during your lifetime. No one is very pleased about this work except for some former thespians among us. Mostly we give them the interactive roles every night; we’re happy to sit in the background. If we’re lucky enough that the dreamer casts us in a restaurant, we get a free meal out of it. On less fortunate nights, we’re cast as masqueraders at a terrifying party, or as sufferers in deep circles of Hell, or as co-workers who have to point and laugh when the star walks in without clothes.

If this isn’t something to which you want to look forward, David Eagleman has provided 39 alternatives in Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. I had included this book in an earlier post, but I’m three years older, now, and need to review my prospects.

Eagleman is a neuroscientist and the author of the 2011 title Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. If I understood a radio interview with him that I heard recently, his neuroscience affected some of the afterlives in Sum (2009).

Despite occasional similarities, they are remarkably varied. “Cast,” which I’ve quoted above, may be akin to “Incentive”–in which, after you die, you play a part in another person’s life, rather than her dreams–but they strike out in different directions and each was worth my time. “Oz” is the only dud I’ve encountered, so far–it’s too obvious, especially given its title–but a couple of afterlives later, I was laughing at the rueful conclusion of “Mirrors.” Oz was behind me.

Since I first blogged about this title, it has become available as a downloadable e-book and a downloadable audiobook; and this is my real reason for re-promoting the collection: On the audiobook, the different afterlives are read by Stephen Fry, Emily Blunt, Gillian Anderson and other performers.

I have lower back issues and don’t download much, but the idea of hearing, for example,  Mr. Fry reading “Sum,” the title piece, in which “all the moments that share a quality are grouped together,” is just so exciting.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower.

Until that time.

There really was a Nicholas Hook, and he really was an archer at the battle of Agincourt. When writing his novel Agincourt, Bernard Cornwell took the names of almost all his archers from the muster rolls of Henry V’s army, which he found in the British National Archives.

I don’t know whether the real Nick Hook paired up with a beautiful woman who was the abandoned daughter of a seemingly heartless French lord. But it was archers who to a great extent carried the day at this celebrated battle, and Cornwell wanted to make that clear.

Like many non-historians, I gained my first impression of Agincourt by reading and watching Shakepeare’s play King Henry V. And as Cornwell has said in an interview:

What’s interesting about the Shakespearean account is that it doesn’t mention the longbow. It seems to be one of the court plays. It’s appealing to the aristocrats . . . it goes down in Shakespearean terms as this sort of heroic, chivalric victory . . . it wasn’t, it was the most ghastly slaughter in the mud . . .I’m doing it through an archer. It’s going to be an archer’s story.

Not only is Nick Hook a great archer, but saints talk to him. And not just any saints, but Saints Crispin and Crispinian. The battle of Agincourt famously occurred on Saint Crispin’s Day, so these were the right saints for an archer to have in his ear. Don’t be scared away from the novel by the threat of ghastly slaughter. It’s there, but there is intrigue and romance and a family feud and terror in a tunnel and lots of dysentery. Though I don’t suppose that last one is a selling point.

In a historical note, Cornwell expresses admiration for Juliet Barker’s Agincourt : Henry V and the Battle That Made England, and I’m reading that now, which gives me a chance to settle an important question.

Did King Henry really fight the battle of Agincourt because the French royals had made him mad by sending him tennis balls, implying that Henry was just a kid? Richard Thompson explains this while introducing the song “King Henry” on his wonderful concert DVD 1000 Years of Popular Music , and Shakespeare puts the incident in Act I, though he doesn’t claim that this alone triggered the invasion of France. (The galliard is a kind of dance.)

FIRST AMBASSADOR . . . the Prince our master
Says that you savour too much of your youth,
And bids you be advised. There’s nought in France
That can be with a nimble galliard won;
You cannot revel into dukedoms there.
He therefore sends you, meeter for your spirit,
This tun of treasure, and, in lieu of this
Desires you let the dukedoms that you claim
Hear no more of you. This the Dauphin speaks.
KING HENRY V
What treasure, uncle?
EXETER
Tennis-balls, my liege.
KING HENRY V
We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;
His present and your pains we thank you for:
When we have matched our rackets to these balls
We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.

Juliet Barker: “This simply did not happen.” And I don’t believe Cornwell mentions tennis balls. His archer Nick wonders from time to time why the English are  invading France, but he has other concerns. He gets into military action in the first place to get out of the trouble he caused by slugging a priest who was going to rape a woman. High-level politics aren’t his strong suit.

I enjoyed Cornwell’s novel immensely–thanks again to my colleagues who gave me a copy–and am enjoying Barker’s historical account.

Cornwell’s Agincourt is also available as a downloadable e-book, a downloadable audiobook, an audiobook on CD and in large print

Juliet Barker’s history is also available as a downloadable e-book.

The library owns different editions of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and three treatments of the play on DVD.

By way of wishing Shakespeare a belated Happy Birthday (b. April 1564), click on this picture of actor David Gwillim to watch four versions of the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. (“We happy few, we band of brothers”) Most of the commentors love Kenneth Branagh’s version, don’t think much of Gwillim’s.

Check out RUDigitized‘s response:
1. (Lawrence Olivier, from a British morale-building production during World War II) Meh he’s good.
2. (David Gwillim, BBC production) I guess it was ok. I wish it would have been played by a man though.
3. (Don’t know who this is. Do you?) Getting there.
4. (Kenneth Branagh) My kitten watched this scene with me. It’s now a Lion.

In defense of David Gwillim, I’ll say that (a) for what it’s worth, he bears the closest physical resemblance to the Henry of the portrait, (b) the BBC production leaves in some lines I like, about Henry being a glutton for honor, lines that both Olivier and Branagh cut, and (c) since RUDigitized is so gender-snide about Gwillim, I’ll confess that the most moving recital of these lines that I’ve heard lately was performed by Ann Patchett during her McFadden Lecture in April. (The outnumbered English were independent booksellers and the evil, humongous French army was Amazon.com.)  I was moved in part because of my surprise at hearing the lines while I was reading these books about Agincourt; but even ignoring that coincidence, she delivered the lines wonderfully.

And I think Branagh’s background music is drippy. I say meh to RUDigitized.

WESTMORELAND. O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING. What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will, I pray thee wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It earns me not if men my garments wear:
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace, I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me,
For the best hope I have. O do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day and see old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son,
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Crystal Rhodes and Lillie Evans, the authors of Grandmothers, Incorporated, will host a group of Indiana authors at the East 38th Street Library on Saturday, May 18th, from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. The event begins with the workshop, “How to Publish Your Own Ebook.” Attendees can purchase authors’ books, get them signed and possibly win a free book during a raffle throughout the day. Here’s a list of other authors scheduled to appear:

D. DelReverda-Jennings, author of Horizon : Contemporary Indiana Artists of Color.

Carmen K. Glenn, author of Ambition, Glass Houses, and Overdrive.

Elizabeth T. Parker, author of Financial Health in the Spirit: Your Pockets for Prosperity.

Cynthia Lee Stigger, author of Words I Cannot Say and Shackles from the Grave.

Mattie Lee Solomon, author of Missing Link? : Parent Discussions About Their Role in the Education of Their Children.

Bertha M. Davis, author of Growing Up in Mississippi: A Memoir.

Ronald Rice, author of Something Borrowed.

These poems are from Songs of Kabir (2011, New York Review Books), and are used here with the publisher’s generous permission.

Kabir was born in Benares, India, to a family recently converted from Hinduism to Islam, and wrote his poems sometime in the 15th century.

The poems have been translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who has written an introduction; and Wendy Doniger has written a preface (“Thus, though Kabir calls his god Rama (significantly, not Allah), his god is not the sa-guna Hindu Rama who marries Sita and kills Ravana or has any of the features or adventures that the Hindu Rama has; he is simply god.”)

If you haven’t experienced Kabir, before, and his ecstatic impatience with creeds and divisions and shows of piety, you’ve missed something. Please look at the publisher’s page about the book. 

***

Were the Creator
Concerned about caste,
We’d arrive in the world
With a caste mark on the forehead.

If you say you’re a Brahmin
Born of a mother who’s a Brahmin,
Was there a special canal
Through which you were born?

And if you say you’re a Turk
And your mother’s a Turk,
Why weren’t you circumcised
Before birth?

Nobody’s lower-caste;
The lower castes are everywhere.
They’re the ones
Who don’t have Rama on their lips,

Kabir says.

***

Easy, friend.
What’s the big fuss about?

Once dead,
The body that was stuffed with
Kilos of sweets
Is carried out to be burnt,
And the head on which
A bright turban was tied
Is rolled by crows in the dust.
A man with a stick
Will poke the cold ashes
For your bones.

But I’m wasting my time,
Says Kabir.
Even death’s bludgeon
About to crush your head
Won’t wake you up.

***

The mind’s a shortchanging
Huckster with a crafty
Wife and five
Scoundrel children.
It won’t change its ways.

The mind’s a knot, says Kabir,
Not easy to untie.

***

Franklin Road is discussing the middle volume of Conrad Richter’s trilogy. There’s art forgery at Irvington, a divorce for the ages at Spades Park, and . . . Hey, that other group at Spades Park is dealing with some really weird crap from Captain Ahab.

Thursday, May 2nd at 10:30 a.m., Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption will be discussed at the Warren Library. Library

A second book by the author of Seabiscuit would get noticed, even if it weren’t the enthralling and often grim story of Louie Zamperini. An Olympic runner during the 1930s, he flew B-24s during WWII. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he endured a captivity harsh even by Japanese standards and was a physical and mental wreck at the end of the war. He was saved by the influence of Billy Graham, who inspired him to turn his life around, and afterward devoted himself to evangelical speeches and founding boys’ camps. Still alive at 93, Zamperini now works with those Japanese individuals and groups who accept responsibility for Japanese mistreatment of POWs and wish to see Japan and the U.S. reconciled. He submitted to 75 interviews with the author as well as contributing a large mass of personal records. Fortunately, the author’s skills are as polished as ever, and like its predecessor, this book has an impossible-to-put-down quality that one commonly associates with good thrillers. — Booklist

The Shared Reading Group at Spades Park will continue to read and discuss Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

We will meet every Friday, May 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th and 31st from 10:00 until 11:30. You are not compelled to read aloud if you don’t want to. The refreshments are always enjoyable and sometimes life-changing.

The Spades Park Book Discussion, as opposed to us seafarers, will meet on May 22nd as noted below.

Conrad Richter’s The Fields, which is book 2 of his “Awakening Land Trilogy,” will be discussed at the Franklin Road Library on Monday, May 6th at 6:30 p.m.

Conrad Richter’s trilogy of novels The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950) trace the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The Fields continues the saga of the Luckett family that began in The Trees. In The Fields, the oldest daughter, Sayward, has begun the long process of carving a small farm out of the forest. She bears eight children and weathers numerous challenges in this novel, which gives an excellent sense of what pioneer life was really like. The trilogy earned Richter immediate acclaim as a historical novelist. The Town won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1951, and The Trees was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection after it was published. Richter also received the 1947 Ohioan Library Medal for the first two volumes of the trilogy. — Chicago Distribution Center

The Murder of King Tut: The Plot to Kill the Child King, a “nonfiction thriller” by James Patterson and Martin Dugard, will be discussed at the Wayne Library on Monday, May 6th at 6:30 p.m.

[The book] essentially divides into two alternating historical sections, with scenes shifting readily from 1492 B.C. (with the Tut lineage, life and death outlined) to the first decades of the 20th century, when excavator/Egyptologist par excellence Howard Carter finally discovered the young monarch’s elusive tomb. Patterson and Dugard exploit their own extensive research into the available historical facts, then extrapolate accordingly, coming to dramatic conclusions that fly in the face of some official speculations . . . With a simple storytelling style that proves accessible whether focusing on the factual or fanciful, the authors effectively portray the exotic ancient world, including colorful insights into Tut’s brief reign and the soap-opera-like events of his rise and fall, especially as involves his stepmother Nefertiti and his marriage to his half-sister Ankhesenpaaten. The Carter story evokes the atmosphere of an Indiana Jones movie. — BookPage

Central Library will host a discussion of Chris Bohjalian’s novel The Sandcastle Girls on Tuesday, May 7th at 6:00 p.m.

Between April 1915 and April 1916, one and one-half million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire during WWI. Bohjalian uses this as the backdrop for his new novel. Elizabeth Endicott accompanies her father to Aleppo, Syria, to bring aid to the Armenian deportees. While there, Elizabeth meets Armen Petrosian, an Armenian engineer working for the Germans and searching for his wife and child, though certain they are already dead. In spite of the loss and horror around them, they fall desperately in love. The story is told through the eyes of Laura Petrosian, Elizabeth and Armen’s great-granddaughter. After seeing an exhibit of photographs of the Armenian victims, she discovers letters and photos and begins to piece her great-grandparents’ story together. Soon “the slaughter you know next to nothing about” takes over her life, and she makes profound discoveries about her ancestors and herself. This is a powerful and moving story based on real events seldom discussed. It will leave you reeling. — Booklist

A History of God : The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong, will be discussed at the Fountain Square Library on Thursday, May 9th at 1:30 p.m.

In an extraordinary survey, Armstrong traces the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from their inception to the present day, and shows how they were created and shaped by their historical surroundings–which, in turn, they helped form and alter. Although this approach is standard among religious scholars, Armstrong uses it to particular advantage in underscoring the historical correspondences among the three faiths- -for example, examining the messianic fervor that surrounded the career of the Sabbatai Zevi (the 12th-century rabbi who built up an enormous apocalyptic cult among diaspora Jews prior to his imprisonment and conversion to Islam) in light of the early Christian response to the crucifixion of Jesus or of Jeremiah’s prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem. It’s particularly in the mystical traditions, according to Armstrong, that the different faiths corroborate each other–in large part, she says, because the mystical apprehension of the divine is more abstract and therefore less dependent upon the traditional symbols by which most religions distinguish themselves . . .[Armstrong] manages against the odds to provide an account that’s thorough, intelligent, and highly readable. Magisterial and brilliant. — Kirkus Reviews

On Monday, May 13th, Sandra Chapman’s The Girl in the Yellow Scarf: One of Indiana’s Most Notorious Cold Case Murders Solved as a Town Tries to Leave Behind Its Past will be discussed at the East 38th Street Library at 6:00 p.m.

In 1968, a young black woman was brutally murdered on the streets of Martinsville, Indiana. Carol Jenkins’ stabbing death appeared racially motivated. For thirty years, there were no arrests. The case sat dormant until unsettled rumors, a family’s pursuit of justice, and a new State Police Cold Case unit all came together to confront the past. Investigative Reporter, Sandra Chapman was on the case too, uncovering startling new facts, and prompting a break in the murder mystery that eluded so many for decades. A child witness, a long-held secret and the admirable determination of the victim’s family all play into this suspenseful, dramatic true crime story. It’s skillfully recounted by the reporter who lived it – and often told through the eyes of a daughter who had to make a painful choice – between her own father and the lives impacted by the Martinsville Mystery forever. — Publisher’s note

The Flanner House Library will host a discussion of Kimberla Lawson Roby’s novel The Perfect Marriage on Monday, May 13th at 6:30 p.m.

Roby’s new novel proves that appearances can deceive because still waters run deep. Derrek, a top administrator at a local hospital, and Denise, the head nurse of a local nursing home, appear to be the perfect couple. They have it all: high-paying jobs, a nice home in a posh Chicago suburb, and a beautiful daughter, MacKenzie. But they are both deeply wounded by a long history of family secrets, leading the couple to seek escape in cocaine, pills, and crack. When their addictions spiral out of control, Derrek and Denise face losing their only child. VERDICT: Roby, a skilled storyteller, once again weaves together a compelling plot by placing ordinary, sympathetic characters in difficult situations. Roby’s many fans and readers who enjoy African American pop fiction will want this one. — Library Journal

The Romance Potluck book discussion at Eagle Library will occur on Wednesday, May 15th, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.

This month’s theme will be “Nora   Roberts and Friends.”

B. A. Shapiro’s novel The Art Forger will be discussed at the Irvington Library on Thursday, May 16th at 1:30 p.m.

The catalyst for Shapiro’s classy and pleasurably suspenseful debut is the legendary art heist of 1990, in which 13 masterpieces were stolen from Boston’s strange and wonderful Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum. Claire, a superb but frustrated painter who, like art collector Gardner, has been the target of scandal, supports herself by creating high-quality reproductions of Degas paintings for an online art retailer. So when Boston’s most prominent and sexiest gallery owner brings one of the missing Gardner paintings, a Degas, to her studio and offers her a veritable deal with the devil, Claire cannot resist. But she detects the painting’s stunning secret and turns out to be as fine a sleuth as she is an artist. Shapiro dramatizes Claire’s creation of a perfect forgery in fascinating detail and performs some elegant fabrications of her own in the form of risqué letters allegedly written by Gardner. The result is an entrancingly visual, historically rich, deliciously witty, sensuous, and smart tale of authenticity versus fakery in which Shapiro artfully turns a clever caper into a provocative meditation on what we value most. — Booklist

Wish You Well by David Baldacci will be discussed at the Southport Library on Monday, May 20th at 6:30 p.m.

Baldacci triumphs with his best novel yet, an utterly captivating drama centered on the difficult adjustment to rural life faced by two children when their New York City existence shatters in an auto accident. That tragedy, which opens the book with a flourish, sees acclaimed but impecunious riter Jack Cardinal dead, his wife in a coma and their daughter, Lou, 12, and son, Oz, seven, forced to move to the southwestern Virginia farm of their aged great-grandmother, Louisa. Several questions propel the subsequent story with vigor. Will the siblings learn to accept, even to love, their new life? Will their mother regain consciousness? And in a development that takes the narrative into familiar Baldacci territory for a gripping legal showdown, will Louisa lose her land to industrial interests? . . . what the novel offers above all is bone-deep emotional truth, as its myriad characters . . . grapple not just with issues of life and death but with the sufferings and joys of daily existence in a setting detailed with finely attuned attention and a warm sense of wonder. This novel has a huge heart and millions of readers are going to love it. — Publishers Weekly

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines will be discussed at the Pike Library on Monday, May 20th at 6:30 p.m.

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson’s godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting–and defying–the expected. Ernest J. Gaines brings to this novel the same rich sense of place, the same deep understanding of the human psyche, and the same compassion for a people and their struggle that have unformed his previous, highly praised works of fiction. — Random House

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will be discussed at the Lawrence Library on Tuesday, May 21st at 10:15 a.m.

The “first immortal human cells,” code-named HeLa, have flourished by the trillions in labs all around the world for more than five decades, making possible the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, and many more crucial discoveries. But where did the HeLa cells come from? Science journalist Skloot spent 10 years arduously researching the complex, tragic, and profoundly revealing story of Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African American mother of five who came to Johns Hopkins with cervical cancer in 1951, and from whom tumor samples were taken without her knowledge or that of her family. Henrietta died a cruel death and was all but forgotten, while her miraculous cells live on, “growing with mythological intensity.” Skloot travels to tiny Clover, Virginia; learns that Henrietta’s family tree embraces black and white branches; becomes close to Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah; and discovers that although the HeLa cells have improved countless lives, they have also engendered a legacy of pain, a litany of injustices, and a constellation of mysteries. Writing with a novelist’s artistry, a biologist’s expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force. — Booklist

Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall will be discussed at the Spades Park Library on Wednesday, May 22nd at 6:00 p.m.

As Henry VIII’s go-to man for his dirty work, Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540) isn’t a likely candidate for a sympathetic portrait. He dirtied his hands too often. In the end, Henry dropped him just as he had Cromwell’s mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, who counseled the king before him. But as Mantel (Beyond Black) reminds us, Cromwell was a man of many parts, admirable in many respects though disturbing in others. Above all, he got things done and was deeply loyal to his masters, first Wolsey and then the king. Nor was Henry always bloated and egomaniacal: well into his forties, when in good spirits, the king shone brighter than all those around him. VERDICT Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this is in all respects a superior work of fiction, peopled with appealing characters living through a period of tense high drama: Henry’s abandonment of wife and church to marry Anne Boleyn. It should appeal to many readers, not just history buffs. And Mantel achieves this feat without violating the historical record! There will be few novels this year as good as this one. — Library Journal

Sent by Susanne:

There are long, epic poems, and then there are concise, simple poems. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) epitomized the simple form, living as she did a relatively small and simple life. For example:

“To make a prairie”

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

In honor of National Poetry Month , I have two recommendations, both edited by Garrison Keillor:

First, a book, Good Poems

This title is also available as a downloadable e-book and an audiobook on CD

And then a website, The Writer’s Almanac, which features a poem a day.

Brian Kimberling’s first novel Snapper is scheduled for publication on Tuesday, April 23rd, and at 5:00 p.m. there will be a reception at Big Hat Books in Broad Ripple. The author will give a reading around 6:00, which will be followed by Q & A and book signings.

Click here for more details. The reviews of Snapper available in our catalog are all positive. Here’s Booklist‘s “starred review:”

In those awkward, drifting, postcollege years, when many young men find themselves working behind a counter, Nathan Lochmueller learns he has a gift for tracking songbirds. Given a job as a research assistant, he becomes intimately familiar with one square mile of south central Indiana near Bloomington, where he imagines himself in kinship with the great naturalists of early America. The pay is poor, but the woods provide solace through rocky, hand-to-mouth years, during which Nathan pines for the lovely but free-spirited Lola and experiences the growing apart that accompanies growing up. Told with precise and memorable prose in beautifully rendered, time-shifted vignettes, Snapper richly evokes the emotions of coming to adulthood. Nathan’s fascination with the physical world and with living an authentic and meaningful life, his disdain for jingoistic environmentalism, and his struggle to find balance between the cloistered liberalism of college towns and the conservatism of small towns are thoughtfully explored. All this, and it’s funny, too. Whether it’s a snapping turtle biting off a friend’s finger or a borrowed dog finding a human thigh bone in a cemetery, Kimberling writes gracefully about absurdity, showing a rich feeling for the whole range of human tragicomedy. A delightful debut.

“To Obscure Men” and “German Fries” appear in Norbert Krapf’s first full-length collection Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins (©1993).

The rights to these poems have reverted to the author, who has generously given his permission to reprint them.

For purposes of clarity, I should say that Daniel Buechlein is the bishop and archbishop being referred to in “German Fries.”

To Obscure Men

This is a belated letter
to lonely old men like
the uncle who taught us
how to hunt, the neighbor
who took us on our first
camping trip, or the friend
of our father who organized
the excursion to our first
big-league ball game in
Cincinnati or St. Louis.
This is an inadequate,
belated letter to old men
everywhere who, after we
grew up, moved away from
the town, and never wrote
back, sustained themselves
for a few years on bitter-
sweet memories of laboring
in factories, sweating on
county road gangs, or working
the earth on hand-me-down
farms . . . A long overdue,
unsuccessful letter to
unhappy old men who withered
away in parlors, hanged
themselves from two-by-four
rafters in garages, or shot
themselves in smokehouses
with the twelve gauges
they’d hunted with for fifty-
five years . . . An impossibly
late but nevertheless contrite
letter from those of us
who have just grown old
enough to begin to remember.

German Fries

An old man whose German name
means “little book” stands
at a gas stove in a house
in Jasper, Indiana.

The smell of onions sizzling
in bacon drippings between
slices of peppered potatoes
boiled in their skins
and chilled overnight
permeates the kitchen.

A wife who hobbles when
she walks sits in a rocker
near the table. Wife
and husband, mother
and father, seem sad.

Someone knocks on the door.
You can bet it’s no one
terribly important, just
a neighbor come to deliver
a small bulging envelope.
The neighbor’s German name
means “jelly-filled pastry”
and she seems even sadder
than the couple in the kitchen.

The woman hands the man
at the stove the envelope
and announces in a voice
too cheerful that donations
in the name of her late husband
for the Catholic charity
the two men had worked for
over several decades have
come to a good total.

You can believe it’s not
fried onions alone
that bring tears to the eyes
of the man at the stove.
He will miss my father,
as his wife will; as my mother,
their neighbor, and we
four children will.

And as the smell of German fries
fills that kitchen in the hills
of southern Indiana to the level
of small lives deeply lived

no one knows that in a few years
the wife in the rocker will die
and several years after that
the soft-spoken son
of the old couple in the kitchen
who has lived most of his life
in a monastery on a hill
will become Bishop of Memphis
and later Archbishop of Indianapolis
and a few minutes before
being invested will quote
to a reporter some simple words
of warning impressed upon him
by the woman in the rocker:

When you lead, don’t ever think
you’re better than those you lead.

If you understand this simple
scene you know the Archbishop
of Indianapolis will never be able
to overcome his urge to eat
German fries in the kitchen.

Winners of the 2013 Pulitzer Prizes, and the finalists, were announced on Monday, April 15th. The book-related categories are listed below. The results in other categories can be found at the Pulitzer Prize website.

General Nonfiction

Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, my predicted winner, turns out to have not been in the running for the General Nonfiction award. The winner was Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King

This account of the Groveland Four, defendants in the 1949 Jim Crow-era rape case, sheds new light on the fate of four African American men. King shows the lengths to which Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund went to defend them, and to which Lake County, Florida, Sheriff Willis McCall and his deputies, prosecutors, and jurors went to enforce race-based justice. Drawing on FBI investigation files and personal papers of key NAACP lawyers, King elucidates the gendered and racial assumptions that denied the Groveland Four a fair trial and that justified arson, bombings, beatings, and murder to uphold southern racial mores. The case reached the US Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial for two of the defendants, who were then shot under suspicious circumstances. One defendant, Walter Irvin, survived, and his death sentence was commuted. King demonstrates that no rape likely occurred, and the examining physician’s testimony was deliberately excluded from both trials. Set against the Cold War and on the eve of the Brown case, this saga illustrates that equal justice under law was honored in the breach in the post-WW II South. — Choice

General Nonfiction Finalists

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

Half an acre. 335 huts. 3,000 people. And a concrete wall that is supposed to hide them from view: this is Annawadi, the Mumbai slum that comes vibrantly to life in this book’s pages. Ms. Boo says that she chose Annawadi because the scale of this “sumpy plug of slum” bordering a lake of sewage was small, and its location was fraught with possibilities. Annawadi sits beside the road to the Mumbai airport, on “a stretch where new India and old India collided and made new India late.” In 2008, at the time the events in the book unfolded, scavenging and trash sorting were the children of Annawadi’s most promising career choices. — The New York Times

The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell

An extraordinary, intimate view of life in an old-growth forest. “Can the whole forest be seen through a small contemplative window of leaves, rocks, and water?” This is the question Haskell (Biology/Univ. of the South) set out to answer by examining one square meter of old-growth Tennessee woods. Highly informative and entertaining, these short essays are dense with sensory details and deserve to be read slowly and carefully. The sights, smells and sounds of the forest permeate the pages, bringing readers face to face with a panoply of simple natural wonders: leaves, wildflowers, mosses, ferns, snails, salamanders, deer and more. Throughout an entire calendar year, Haskell scrutinizes this “mandala” of space, connecting the microcosm of birds, plants and animals in this patch of woods to the macrocosm of the outer world. This in-depth look into the natural biosphere emphasizes the idea that nothing–not even the small microbes that exist in the leaf litter–lives unrelated or unconnected to any other thing. — Kirkus Reviews

Fiction

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

Johnson’s novel accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an American writer has masterfully rendered the mysterious world of North Korea with the soul and savvy of a native, from its orphanages and its fishing boats to the kitchens of its high-ranking commanders. While oppressive propaganda echoes throughout, the tone never slides into caricature; if anything, the story unfolds with astounding empathy for those living in constant fear of imprisonment–or worse–but who manage to maintain their humanity against all odds. The book traces the journey of Jun Do, who for years lives according to the violent dictates of the state, as a tunnel expert who can fight in the dark, a kidnapper, radio operator, tenuous hero, and foreign dignitary before eventually taking his fate into his own hands. In one of the book’s most poignant moments, a government interrogator, who tortures innocent citizens on a daily basis, remembers his own childhood and the way in which his father explained the inexplicable: “…we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands.” In this moment and a thousand others like it, Johnson (Parasites Like Us) juxtaposes the vicious atrocities of the regime with the tenderness of beauty, love, and hope. — Publishers Weekly

Fiction Finalists

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander

It’s a tribute to Englander’s verve and scope that the eight stories in his new collection, although clearly the product of one mind with a particular set of interests (Israel; American Jewry and suburbia; writing and reading; sex, survival, and the long shadow of the Shoah) never cover the same territory. Each is particular, deeply felt, and capable of pressing any number of buttons. The title story, which features a reunion of old friends, a lot of marijuana, and a series of collisions between Israel and America and Orthodoxy and laxity, starts out funny and gets funnier, until suddenly it’s not a bit funny. “Sister Hills” traces an Israeli settlement from its violent founding to its bedroom community transformation and reads like a myth, simple, stark, and, like many a myth, ultimately horrifying. And as you spend a few days with the beleaguered director of “Camp Sundown,” a vacation camp for elderly Jews, you’ll find, as he does, that things you think you’re sure about–guilt, justice, silence, and the morality of revenge–start to get fuzzy. What we talk about when we talk about Englander’s collection turns out to be survival and the difficult–sometimes awful, sometimes touching–choices people make, and Englander, brings a tremendous range and capacity to surprise to his chosen topic. — Publishers Weekly

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Here’s a modern retelling of the Russian fairy tale about a girl, made from snow by a childless couple, who comes to life. Or perhaps not modern–the setting is 1920s Alaska–but that only proves the timelessness of the tale and of this lovely book. Unable to start a family, middle-aged Jack and Mabel have come to the wilderness to start over, leaving behind an easier life back east. Anxious that they won’t outlast one wretched winter, they distract themselves by building a snow girl and wrap her in a scarf. The snow girl and the scarf are gone the next morning, but Jack spies a real child in the woods. Soon Jack and Mabel have developed a tentative relationship with the free-spirited Faina, as she finally admits to being called. Is she indeed a “snow fairy,” a “wilderness pixie” magicked out of the cold? Or a wild child who knows better than anyone how to survive in the rugged north? Even as Faina embodies a natural order that cannot be tamed, the neighborly George and Esther show Jack and Mabel (and the rest of us) how important community is for survival. VERDICT A fluid, absorbing, beautifully executed debut novel. — Library Journal

History

Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall

Most American studies of the Vietnam War concentrate on the period following the introduction of U.S. combat units under President Johnson. However, contemporary Vietnamese accounts view the “American phase” as the concluding act of a prolonged nationalist struggle to gain independence from Western imperialism. Logevall, professor of history at Cornell, leans toward the latter approach–that is, American involvement must be inseparably linked to the doomed French effort to maintain imperial control over Indochina. Of course, American policy makers insisted their goals were different; unlike the French, they wanted an independent South Vietnam free from both colonial and communist control. Yet, as Logevall eloquently illustrates, the U.S. followed essentially the same dreary path and made the same errors as its French predecessors. We failed to comprehend the nationalist yearnings of Vietnamese “communists” and were blind to their support among a wide swath of the people. That blindness led us to prop up hopelessly inept or hopelessly compromised Vietnamese “leaders” like Ngo Dinh Diem. This is a superbly written and well-argued reinterpretation of our tragic experience in Vietnam. — Booklist

History Finalists

The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn

This weighty book distills a lifetime of learning of one of our most authoritative historians of colonial America. Continuing his exploration of the demographic origins of the colonies (begun in The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction), Harvard professor emeritus Bailyn offers a history of the colonies built up of brilliant portraits of the people who interacted in these strange and fearsome lands. Much of it is the story of the costs, savagery, terrors, and conflicts that attended the establishment of European outposts in what became the U.S. This is not your school-book colonial history; there’s no Anglo-American triumphalism in its pages. Rather, Bailyn describes “confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility” and the extraordinary heterogeneity of the white and Indian populations. Only a historian as penetrating and stylish of pen as Bailyn could convince you that there was something important to say about the few Finns settling in the colonies. And the squeamish should be forewarned: the true barbarousness of people, European as well as Indian, and white against white, is appalling and shows how thin the veneer of civilization often is and was in the colonies’ early decades. An extraordinary work of profound seriousness, characteristic of its author. — Publishers Weekly

Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History by John Fabian Witt

“Let slip the dogs of war,” proclaims Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Yet even in the most merciless wars, efforts have been made to put restraints on the violence perpetrated upon both soldiers and civilians. In a civil war, as President Lincoln quickly realized, that task is particularly difficult, since Lincoln viewed the rebels as traitors rather than an army of a foreign nation. Witt, professor of law at Yale, shows how Lincoln’s struggles with this dilemma resulted in a “civilized” code that still governs American and international military behavior. Witt first examines the conduct of soldiers in earlier American conflicts, from the Revolutionary War to the Mexican War. But Lincoln found those precedents as well as the advice of military professionals inadequate as he tried to fight and win the war. Late in 1862, a commission chaired by Francis Lieber, a college professor, gave Lincoln what he wanted. It was a code that allowed him to apply the “hard hand of war” to both southern soldiers and civilians without descending into pure savagery. This is a well-written and provocative examination of the effort to modify the inherent barbarism of war. — Booklist

Biography or Autobiography

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

Alex Dumas, an extraordinary man whose sensational life had been largely lost to history solely because of his race, takes the spotlight in this dynamic tale. Thanks to Reiss’s excellent research, combined with the passionate memorial his son, Alexandre Dumas, consistently built in his own novels and memoir, Dumas’s life has been brought back to light. Father to the well-known novelist and clear inspiration for The Count of Monte Cristo, as well as the adventurous spirit of The Three Musketeers and other stories, Dumas (1762-1806) rose through the ranks of the French army from a lowly private in the dragoons to become a respected general who marched into Egypt at Napoleon’s side. (The rivalry and juxtaposition between these two leaders proves fascinating.) Born in what is now Haiti to a French nobleman father and a slave mother, the biracial Dumas chanced to come of age during the French Revolution, a brief period of equality in the French empire; he was thus granted numerous opportunities that the son of a slave 20 years before him (or even 20 years later) would not have enjoyed. Reiss capitalizes on his subject’s charged personality as well as the revolutionary times in which he lived to create an exciting narrative. — Publishers Weekly

Biography or Autobiography Finalists

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra

In this innovative biography, written with flair and unostentatious erudition, Smith College English professor Gorra tells the life of Henry James through the story of the composition of his novel, The Portrait of a Lady. First published in 1881, the novel was a landmark work: James’s scrupulous devotion to craft led him to dramatize the interior life of his heroine, Isabel Archer, in unprecedented fashion. Instead of transparent plots and clear moral conflicts, James opted for subtle clashes of personality and morally ambiguous stories in which action was character and character action. Analyzing James’s letters, journals, stories, and travelogues, Gorra traces the author’s life and literary milieu, alternating a reconstruction of his travels with extensive attention to the novel’s composition and reception. The book reads like an exciting voyage of discovery, beginning with James revising his novel 20 years after it was written, and later depicting his blooming consciousness as an author torn between an American and a European identity. Gorra’s highly engaging introduction to James will be most attractive to lovers of literature who want to learn more about the craft of novel writing and will likely send readers back to the shelves to discover James all over again. — Publishers Weekly

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw

When one reads in the introduction that Nasaw was asked by the Kennedy family to write this biography, the obvious question is, How did the request affect the finished product? Nasaw was granted access to papers denied to other researchers and worked for six years on the project. Some of his conclusions clash markedly with what has been written about Kennedy (Nasaw dismisses rather lightly the long-held conclusion that Joe made part of his fortune as a bootlegger). But he gives readers a much fuller look at various accusations made against Kennedy, especially the charge that he was an anti-Semite. Through quoted letters, it is clear that Kennedy did have a grudge against the Jews, mostly because they interfered with what he wanted, be it getting a foothold in the movie industry or keeping the U.S out of WWII. His isolationism never really wavered. He believed that “victory over Hitler had cost much and accomplished little.” Perhaps the key element to Kennedy, Nasaw suggests, is that rather than being larger than life, he was much smaller. He was all about protecting his family and his fortune. Though fortune remained, the family shattered, cutting Kennedy, in many ways, adrift. The book becomes more fascinating the farther one gets into it, and while there may be areas for dispute here, there’s no doubt it makes a major contribution to Kennedy history. — Booklist

Poetry

Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds

Known for her unadorned, emotionally direct, sometimes sexually explicit free verse, Olds has amassed a large and loyal following over 30-odd years and 10 books. In her new collection every poem speaks to the collapse of a 30-year marriage, precipitated by the ex-husband’s affair. Hence the memorable title: “The drawing on the label of our favorite red wine/ looks like my husband, casting himself off a/ cliff in his fervor to get free of me.” Olds begins as the marriage is ending: “I want to ask my/ almost-no-longer husband what it’s like to not/ love, but he doesn’t not want to talk about it.” Years later, he is a memory: Olds can “watch my idea of him pull away/ and stay, and pull away,” like a kite. In between there are violently mixed feelings, erotic memories, loneliness, anger, and resolve in a book that takes its arc from the divorce, but its organization from the seasons, moving from winter to spring to “years later,” and frequently looking back: “Maybe I’m half over who he/ was, but not who I thought he was, and not/ over the wound, sudden deathblow/ as if out of nowhere.” — Publishers Weekly

Poetry Finalists

The Abundance of Nothing by Bruce Weigl

Throughout his award-winning career, Bruce Weigl has proven himself to be a poet of extraordinary emotional acuity and consummate craftsmanship. In The Abundance of Nothing, these qualities are on full display, animating and informing poems that combine rich, metaphoric imagery with direct, powerful language. Deftly weaving history and everyday experience, Weigl transports readers from the front lines of the Vietnam War and all the tangled cultural and emotional scenes of that time to the slow winds of the American Midwest that softly ease the voice of the veteran returning home. Though the poems struggle with themes of mortality and illness, violence and forgiveness, the poet’s voice never wavers in its meditative calm, poise, and compassion. Elegiac yet agile, ethereal yet embodied, The Abundance of Nothing is a work of searching openness, generous insight, and remarkable grace. — Chicago Distribution Center

Collected Poems by the late Jack Gilbert

Gilbert has long held legendary status among poetry readers for his wise, hard-won poems about the joys and complexities of romantic love, about grief and about the power of experience deeply felt. His 1994 collection The Great Fires (which is included here in its entirety) is, for many, practically a sacred text. The publication of Gilbert’s complete body of work to date is doubtless a literary event. From his Yale Younger Poet’s Prize-winning debut, Gilbert’s poems have felt wise beyond their years and yet youthful, full of contradictions that give them life: “Joy has been a habit,” he writes in one early poem, which concludes, “Now/ suddenly/ this rain.” Here are also many and many kinds of poems about travel or life in far-flung places, particularly Greece. Plentiful, too, are poems of marriage–its difficulties (“Eight years/ and her love for me quieted away”), its ecstasies, and its ending: divorce is memorably figured as “looking/ out at the bright moonlight on concrete.” Gilbert is perhaps best known, however, for the grief-stricken poems that chart the dying of and then mourning over his wife, Michiko, of whom he writes, “The arches of her feet are like voices/ of children calling in the grove of lemon trees,/ where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.” All poetry lovers will want this book. — Publishers Weekly

I’m not in the habit of sloshing coffee on my library books, thus forcing myself to pay for them and bond with them, but I seem to have made an exception in the case of Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree : Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.

And it’s just as well. When (fearless prediction) this book wins the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction on Monday, April 15th, I won’t have to worry about new requests that are made on library copies.

Solomon was interested in children whose identities are in some way problematic for their parents, so the book has chapters on a number of “disabilities,” but also on prodigies, children of rape and criminals. He interviewed 300 families over a period of ten years, enabling him to write sentences that begin “Five years later, I asked Deirdre how Catherine’s education was going.”

Not once while reading the earlier portions was I tempted to skip ahead to the chapters on Down syndrome and autism, with which I had the most personal connection. I was too interested in the way Solomon considers his dyslexia a handicap, while being gay is part of his identity. He hasn’t always managed to feel this way, and when he was younger he attempted to remold himself.

When I was nineteen, I read an ad in the back of New York magazine that offered surrogate therapy for people who had issues with sex . . . I knew the back of a magazine was not a good place to find treatment, but my condition was too embarrassing to reveal to anyone who knew me . . . I began “counselling” with people I was encouraged to call “doctors,” who would prescribe “exercises” with my “surrogates”–women who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else.

The question of whether a condition is a handicap or a part of one’s identity is at the center of the book, and a question that’s with me all the time. If my elder son didn’t have Down syndrome, he would look completely different, speak differently, and our lives as we’ve lived them together wouldn’t have happened. So I’ve known for years that I didn’t wish he didn’t have Down syndrome, because that would amount to wishing him out of existence.

But an email group to which I subscribe is called D.A.D.S., which stands for Dads Appreciating Down Syndrome, and that feels like a stretch. I appreciate Thomas, but do I appreciate Down syndrome? As I sit hear, typing, I don’t know how to answer that.

Some of the passages on autism remind me that our autistic guy, in addition to being a sterling fellow, has also been a piece of cake, relatively speaking. The conditions that have been assigned that term autism cover a lot of ground, as do most of the conditions explored in the book. I learned here that some autistic individuals think of autism as part of their identity, and resent the idea that there’s a “real” identity being cloaked by the autism. Sitting here, typing, I realized that I don’t spend time, as I used to, waiting for moments when my “real” son would shine through; but I didn’t deliberately stop out of respect for his identity.

Solomon speaks of vertical identities–elements of identity derived from one’s parents & family–and horizontal identities–which one shares with others in society, not usually with family members. In Solomon’s case, being gay and depressive are horizontal components of his identity. (His 2001 title The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the National Book Award.)

My own battles with depression have contributed to a meaningful identity for me, but if I were choosing between a depression-prone child and one who would never suffer such ravages, I’d go with option B in a heartbeat. Even though the illness would probably become a locus of intimacy for us, I still wouldn’t want it to happen.

I’m about halfway through Far From the Tree, just finishing the chapter on schizophrenia. As always with blogging, I continue to learn how little I know.

Interviewing schizophrenics, I was struck by the way those deep in the disease seemed not to feel self-pity, which contrasted sharply with my experience of people with depression and other psychiatric disorders–a frequently whiny group to which I myself belong. People in the early stages were horrified and sad, but those who had been sick a long time were not. They complained about their particular delusions or felt guilty not to be functioning better, but there was surprisingly little railing at the disease itself. Many had once been headed for wonderful lives, but the woman who had been a great beauty seemed, unlike her parents, not to think about the adventures in love she would have had; a sweet-natured fellow who had been wildly popular in high school could not tell me, as his parents could, how much pleasure a lifetime of friendships could have given him; a man who excelled at Harvard at the time of his first psychotic break never talked, as his parents did, about the career he so narrowly missed. It seemed that illness had cut these schizophrenics off from those lives so entirely that they were hardly conscious of them. They had stoic grace in relation to their illness and I was consistently moved by it.