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17

A Belated #FridayReads–Peter Warner’s Smart Spy Novel “The Mole”

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In early November I’d been to the launch party for the spy novel The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates, and am only now getting around to reading it. I’m really enjoying this heady thriller whose narrator and protagonist is a Canadian transplant to the U.S. that finds himself on the staff of the real-life senator from Georgia, Richard Russell. I tweeted about the book last Friday and neglected to share about it here until now. Highly recommended, the sort of book for which I’d like to put my work aside so I can burrow deeper in to the unfolding tale.

Note: This piece is cross-posted at my other blog, Honourary Canadian.

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#FridayReads, Nov 8–Book Proposals & Manuscripts–Examining a Notorious Political Killing, Exploring the Paranormal, etc.

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#FridayReads, Nov 8–While I’m sure I’ll be reading a proper book or two this weekend, my reading this week has been dominated by work-related materials–nonfiction book proposals, fiction manuscripts and lots of promising queries on submission to me in my work as a literary agent, part of my publishing work. Here’s a rundown on some of what I’m looking at, only in generalities out of deference to the writers whose work I’m considering: 1) a proposal for a book that will explore the motive behind one of the most infamous consequential political crimes of the 20th century, while also one of its least examined; 2) a hardboiled crime novel about the theft of an election in a battleground midwestern state; 3) several works by a British scholar with a rigorous approach to unexplained phenomena involving the super- or even the paranormal; and 4) an original manuscript that includes the original heretofore unpublished memoir of Hollywood’s most idiosyncratic, even weird, movie-making mogul.

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#FridayReads, October 25–Grant Lawrence’s “The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie”

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Lonely End of the Rink#FridayReads, October 25–Grant Lawrence’s The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie. Very excited to begin reading my copy of the new book by my friend, Canadian broadcaster Grant Lawrence, which just landed in my mailbox this afternoon. The book, which chronicles his uneasy relationship with the Canadian national sport, was officially launched last night with an event in Vancouver, BC. Grant loves to meet with booksellers and readers and is one of the hardest working authors I’ve ever observed. On his website you can find details on the extensive book tour he’s taking, with stops in many Canadian cities between now and December 12.Lonely End back cover

I loved Grant’s first book Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and other Stories from Desolation Sound, a memoir of the many summers he’s spent in the wilds of coastal British Columbia, in the environs of a family cabin on the vividly named Desolation Sound. It went to #1 on the BC Bestseller List, won the BC Book Prize for the 2010 Book of the Year, an award given by booksellers, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction. I’m hoping for similar success for his new book, which I will begin reading this weekend.Adventures in SolitudeGrant at Radio 3 picnic
[cross-posted at my other blog Honourary Canadian]

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#FridayReads, Oct 18–A.B. Guthrie, Jr.’s Classic Western, “The Big Sky”

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Today my #FridayReads is a re-read, prompted by a book discussion during the past week about novels of the American West. It all began seven days ago, with last week’s post in this vein: “#FridayReads, Oct 11–Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler  & Anne Hillerman’s Spider Woman’s Daughter.”  I had shared the post in my social networks, including with authors Urwand and Hillerman, and was delighted mid-week when I heard from Ms. Hillerman  with a thank you for my piece.* Her new book–a revival of the mystery series written over several decades by her late father, the mystery master Tony Hillerman–though only on sale about a week, had quickly leapt on to the NY Times bestseller list. On the Wordharvest Writers Workshop Facebook page, Anne had linked to an article about books and asked this question:

Craig Johnson’s work [the Sheriff Longmire series] was the subject of an article about Western archetypes. The writer praises Johnson’s Walt Longmire character as a perfect example of the Western hero. Who do you think is the quintessential Western hero in fiction? 

In response, I got up from my desk to dig out my copy of a favorite Western novel,  The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., a terrific novel set in the old West. I needed to check the year of publication, to include it in my answer, so I went over to a nearby bookcase where, though it’d been a long time since I took it off the shelf, I knew I’d find my old copy of Guthrie’s modern classic. There, residing between a New Directions edition of Lars Gustafsson’s The Death of a Beekeeper and a Dover Classics copy of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha. I quickly found the copyright page in the Guthrie–1947. Then my hand landed between the cover and the book’s first leaf, discovering there an inscription. Hmm, I didn’t remember this book had one. Looking at it, I realized it was to me, written by my brother Joel, who died suddenly in December 2009, age 58. Dated 9/22/72, on what would’ve been my 18th birthday, the note was written in Joel’s still-familiar hand, a firm print that brought with it an instant evocation of his personality and character. Joel wrote:

Phil– 9/22/72

You will like this story and the following two, The Way West and These Thousand Hills. Do not ! read the foreword by Stegner until you finish  The Big Sky; he gives everything away. Love, Joel

Over the years I’ve also noticed the way old samples of handwriting from my father Earl or mother Sylvia prompt a strong sense of them. They died respectively in 1992 and 2006. Though Earl’s been gone the longest, his handwriting–also in print, not script except for his signature–still carries all the sweetness of him. My mother’s less legible script is tremulous, bespeaking some nervousness when she sat down to write.

The Big Sky beautifully captures the era of the lone mountain man, as personified in pop culture by the 1972 Robert Redford film, Jeremiah Johnson, which was itself based on a novel, Mountain Man, by Idaho writer Vardis Fisher. Guthrie’s later novels, which Joel also recommended to me in his inscription, cover subsequent epochs–the wagon trains in The Way West and the advent of the first great ranch herds of cattle in These Thousand Hills. The three books are a proper trilogy, with each covering about a twenty-year period of American history.  To Guthrie’s trilogy I will also add  The Awakening Land Trilogy, a great series by Conrad Richter, made up of The Trees, The Field, The Town, again describing one arc of American history.  

By the way, my answer to Anne Hillerman’s good question went like this:

I do like the literary character of Walt Longmire [also a good TV show], but to keep climbing higher up the pinnacle of literary greatness I’d go to A. B. Guthrie’s Boone Caudill from The Big Sky (1947). Also, from history, I want to put in a word for Hugh Glass, true life survivor of a grizzly bear mauling in the 1820s, who’s been a character in fiction as recently as 2001, when I edited Montana writer Michael Punke’s terrific novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge. 

Thanks to Anne Hillerman, for prompting me to re-read A.B. Guthrie’s fine novel. Here are pictures I’ve taken of all the relevant books in this post. The links to the books above are all ‘live,’ and if clicked on will take you to Powell’s Books of Portland, OR, where you can buy any of them if you wish, with a fraction of the purchase price being returned to me for the upkeep of this website.
* Coincidentally, I also had a pleasant encounter with Ben Urwand, author of The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, when I heard him lecture last night at the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, which I will write about in the week to come.

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#FridayReads, Oct 11–Ben Urwand’s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact w/Hitler” & Anne Hillerman’s “Spider Woman’s Daughter”

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Collaboration#FridayReads, Oct 11–Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler & Anne Hillerman’s Spider Woman’s Daughter, a new installment in the long-running Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mystery series established by her late father, the mystery master Tony Hillerman.
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Notwithstanding the controversy I’ve reported on earlier that’s greeted publication of The Collaboration, which I had made part of my #FridayReads a few weeks ago, I have been continuing to methodically read it, even while still reading fiction. It’s ironic about all the hubbub, because I am finding it so far, about 80 pages in, an unsensational, moderately engrossing and well-documented account.

The narrative opens by examining “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the 1930 WWI drama released by Universal Pictures that to German officials, dangerously advocated pacifism while also showing cowardice and dishonorable conduct by their troops. The government, two years before Hitler was to win power, viewed it as a threat to to the nation, and sought to have whole passages of the film cut, scenes changed, and dialogue rewritten.  They threatened to remove it from all German screens, and to make it harder for other American pictures to be exhibited in Germany.

After this key opening example, the book becomes a chronicle of the willing cooperation of some American film industry executives–who along with a number of American functionaries and bureaucrats, and at least one Jewish communal organization, the Los Angeles branch of the Anti-Defamation League–worked to suppress American-made movies being produced about contemporary Germany.  Some of this suppression was triggered by German trade officials who after the Great War’s ignominy zealously attacked films from foreign countries that seemed to hyper-sensitive German governments (even preceding Nazi rule) prejudicial against their country and “damaging to their reputation abroad,” or potentially “demoralizing to morale” at home, as they put it, as with “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Hitler was an enthusiast of cinema and theatrical performances of all kinds, as earlier shown in a book I edited and published,  Ibsen and Hitler: The Playwright, the Plagiarist, and the Plot for the  Third Reich. Once Hitler was in power, with hyper-awareness of both the positive and the damaging  effects of propaganda, he focused his regime on how messages might be spread by movies. With that, the Nazis began even more aggressively lobbying foreign filmmakers to alter the scripts of movies in production, or edit and recut ones already being exhibited on German screens.

For a rundown of the controversy surrounding the book and the overheated things some of its critics have said about it, please see my recent post, Questioning the Critical Reaction to Ben Urwand’s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact w/Hitler”Collaboration blurbs

A Second #FridayReads, Spider Woman’s Daughter, Anne Hillerman’s new Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Mystery Novel

While reading The Collaboration, I am intercutting it with Anne Hillerman’s Spider Woman’s Daughter. I’ve read and loved the Leaphorn and Chee series for years, and made his 1982 book Dark Wind one of my #FridayReads last year.Hillerman paperbacks

Tony died in 2008. About the revival of the series, Anne has written, “When I emerged from the worst of my grief after Dad’s death, I realized that I was also mourning the end of his mystery series. I missed those detectives [Leaphorn and Chee], and I especially regretted that Bernadette Manuelito would never get a book that put her in the spotlight. And then I thought: I could try writing Bernie’s book myself. . . .In addition to Tony Hillerman’s Landscape, I had written several other books, so I knew part of the challenge that faced me. I jotted down some ideas as a rough outline and got to work.”

I’m loving her new book. The protagonist, Bernadette, is a young police officer in Navajo Country, married to Jim Chee, who learned how to be a cop under the tutelage of Joe Leaphorn, wise man of the tribal police force. She witnesses a startling assault on a fellow cop in the book’s opening chapters, which forces her to the sidelines of an important investigation. Despite her chief’s order to drop any involvement with the case, she continues trying to riddle it out, even while Chee and her fellow officers pursue every lead. Bernie’s unauthorized efforts take her all across the dramatic landscape of Navajo Country, speaking with people who may help her understand what’s really going on. Just as in Tony’s books, the sense of place and people is indelible.

Coincidentally, over the summer, working as literary agent for author J. Michael Orenduff, I licensed his 6-book POT THIEF mystery series to Open Road Integrated Media who will publish them in ebook and print editions in January 2014. The books are are set in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and feature dealer in Native American pottery Hubie Schutz. They’re titled The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras, The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy, The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein, The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier, The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence, and The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid.  When not digging in the desert for ancient pots, or crafting copies of artifacts with his own hands, Hubie’s usually absorbed in reading a classic text. In their earlier editions, the POT THIEF books won numerous awards and raves from mystery readers, including this one from Anne Hillerman herself: “I inhaled this book. Witty, well-crafted and filled with unexpected plot turns, The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid will delight J. Michael Orenduff’s many fans—and win him new ones.”

It’s a small world out there for mystery writers and readers and I’m really excited that Anne Hillerman’s brought back her father’s great characters, and that fans of the Leaphorn and Chee books will soon be able to discover and enjoy the POT THIEF mysteries.Anne HillermanAnne Hillerman back cover

 

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#FridayReads, Oct. 4–Katie Hafner’s Exquisite Memoir “Mother Daughter Me”

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Mother Daughter MeI began reading Katie Hafner’s journalism in the NY Times in the ’90s in what was known as “Circuits,” a section of the Thursday newspaper that covered the era of Web 1.0. Everything about tech was new, to me at least. Katie, and “Circuits,” helped make obscure things clear to me, then a not very tech-oriented book editor. Around 1999 I read a cover story Katie had written for Wired magazine and now I was really smitten by her work. Her story was a long one by magazine standards, about 40,000 words, on The Well, an early online community that emerged in the Bay Area starting around 1984. I was amazed–members of The Well had used a kind of proto-listserv and chat system that allowed them to share cyberspace together in a way no one had done before. But that historical first-ness wasn’t the only reason I wanted to make Katie’s article in to a book if I could. It was because of the extraordinary insight in to people that accompanied her reporting. In its early days, The Well had been a tight world where members supported each other like neighbors in a small town. They abided by founder Stewart Brand’s credo, “You own your own words.” Katie’s narrative, with used long threads of online conversations including multiple characters that the reader came to know and care about, was riveting.

In 2000–after a three-year stint for Random House, where the bulk of the time I worked at Times Books, with a big part of my job liasing with editors at the Times to make books with content from such departments as the Book Review, Real Estate, City, and Dining–I joined Carroll & Graf Publishers and contacted Katie with one of my first new book acquisition ideas. I asked if she’d be interested in turning the Wired article in to a book. I remember one day when she was in NYC from the Bay Area we met for coffee near Times Square. She was petite and had a great smile; I found her immediately likable. She talked like the voice of her journalism: a bit funny, and economical with her words that every so often sported a memorable phrase. Though she had not been trying to turn the Wired reporting in to a book, she was intrigued with my idea, and we made a deal to go ahead with it. I edited it with her revising and expanding the manuscript a bit and in 2001 we brought out The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in The Seminal Online Community. Among the many superb endorsements we printed on the back cover was this one from the proponent of communitarian philosophy Amitai Etzioni: “The best book ever written about communities and the Internet.” The book didn’t set any records, but it did well enough to justify C&G’s investment in it, and I was quite proud of it, as I believe Katie was, especially once the World Wide Web became such a big part of modern life that it was hard to remember a time before it existed. For anyone who wanted to know the prehistory of online interaction, it was right there in The Well.The Well cover

After the book had run its course, Katie and I stayed in touch, but only occasionally. In 2002 I was startled and saddened when I read that her husband Matthew Lyon had died suddenly while on a visit to Seattle for his job with the University of California. He was 45. Katie and their young daughter survived him. I found something to say and wrote her a card with my condolences, grieving with her from a distance.

Katie HafnerLast year, I read that Katie would be publishing a memoir with Random House. I was excited because I had never read anything by Katie about her own world. Mother Daughter Me came out in July and I was thrilled when I got a copy two weeks ago. After making it my #FridayReads last week, when I was only a little ways in to it, I now can say that it is gripping throughout, and likable, like Katie, even while it chronicles some pretty difficult and sad but ultimately transcendent Hafner family business. It begins with her mother’s move from San Diego to be with Katie and her now-teenaged daughter in San Francisco. I finished it the other day during a break while on a bike ride, and scrawled these words on a piece of scrap paper, anticipating I would use my first impressions in this #FridayReads essay:

“Exquisite, in many senses. Exquisitely painful, as it recounts the failures of her drink-addled mother to provide parental stability for Katie and her older sister when they were young. Exquisitely produced and edited with nary a typo or broken letter in the volume. Exquisitely truthful and unflinching in the way Katie examines her own behavior, no less than that of her mother and her daughter. As good a reporter as Katie is when writing about other people, she is somehow even more insightful and penetrating when the subject is herself, her widowhood, and her own family. I walked with her every step of the way on the difficult journey that she takes with her mother and daughter and am very glad I did. An amazingly honest book.”

I recommend Mother Daughter Me to anyone who’s still trying to riddle out truths about their family; to anyone who’s ever argued with a sibling, child or parent; to anyone with an aging parent who ponders future options for them, from living with you to “aging in place,” a term you will encounter here. I will add that like a particular Vaughan Williams symphony that I love–I believe it’s his 6th–this book winds up with a beautifully orchestrated cascade of multiple endings that transit from tragic to reconciled to fulfilled. If you’re like me, your eyes will be very moist as you finish reading Mother Daughter Me. This is a great book.