Best Books 2006 from Library Journal
by Van
Annotations are from Library Journal (January 2007)
Belleville, Bill. Losing It All To Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Environmental writer/filmmaker Belleville poignantly reveals how the words of the old Joni Mitchell song have become a grim reality in central Florida, as his traditional Cracker home and rural neighborhood give way to suburban strip malls. Uncontrolled development is an issue not just for the Sunshine State but for America as a whole. (LJ 3/1/06)
Blastland, Michael. The Only Boy in the World: A Father Explores the Mysteries of Autism
As the parent of a severely autistic son, BBC journalist Blastland knows frustration, but it does not fuel his crystalline contemplation. Neither patronizing nor glib, he instead relies on fascination to unlock Joe's head, reminding us how much we “normal” people take for granted. (LJ 7/06)
Brockmeier, Kevin. The Brief History of the Dead
Home to the dead as long as someone on Earth remembers them, the City starts emptying out fast after an epidemic devastates Earth. Beautifully written and brilliantly realized, Brockmeier's second novel delivers a startling sense of what it really means to be alive. (LJ 2/15/06)
Brown, Frederick. Flaubert: A Biography
In his quest to pen the definitive biography of Gustave Flaubert, acclaimed literary biographer Brown (Zola: A Life) takes us on a grand tour of France's history while disentangling the genius of one of the greatest novelists the West has known. (LJ 2/15/06)
Buford, Bill. Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
To satisfy a burning desire to work with famed chef Mario Batali, journalist Buford (Among the Thugs) agreed to become an intern, or “kitchen slave.” In this fascinating book, he describes his varied experiences preparing meals and also profiles the bigger-than-life Batali. (LJ 5/15/06)
Carey, Lisa. Every Visible Thing
Five years after 15-year-old Hugh Furey's disappearance, his parents remain distanced by grief and ignore the emotional needs of their two remaining children, who turn to self-destructive behaviors. Carey's fourth novel is an affecting study of family dysfunction, sorrow, and adolescence. (LJ 7/06)
Cash, Arthur H. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty
Cash elegantly ensures that we remember the London journalist, rogue, agitator, saucy poet, and politician who influenced our Founding Fathers when he fought for rights regarding arrest warrants and search and seizure in the decades before the American Revolution. The personal and public life of a figure who seems out of Fielding or Sterne but whose influence still matters. (LJ 2/1/06)
de los Santos, Marisa. Love Walked In
For Cornelia Brown, it's like a scene from one of her beloved Cary Grant movies when handsome Martin Grace walks into her Philadelphia coffee shop. But this event is only the harbinger of more profound changes. Yes, poet de los Santos's witty and romantic debut novel is chick lit, but it's chick lit with soul and substance. (LJ 9/15/06)
Donohue, Keith. The Stolen Child
Inspired by a W.B. Yeats poem, Donohue's haunting debut reimagines the ancient changeling myth in a modern America. Seven-year-old Henry Day is kidnapped by a group of feral hobgoblins and becomes Aniday, eternally ageless but still clinging to his humanity; his changeling replacement grows up as Henry Day but struggles to find his true identity. (LJ 2/15/06)
Dunn, Jancee. But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous
“Not another memoir” has become a chorus in the LJ bookroom, but here Rolling Stone scribe Dunn effervesces with wit and insight into celebrity journalism. Sparkling storytelling juxtaposes Dunn's coming of age in 1980s suburban New Jersey with her prestige career prodding the A-list. Imagine interviewing your teen hero, Bono, with the Mount Vesuvius of pimples erupting on your forehead. (LJ 5/15/06)
Ford, Richard. The Lay of the Land
Star of The Sportswriter and Independence Day, Frank Bascombe is now leading a somewhat diminished life as a real estate agent at the Jersey Shore, but Ford's enduring portrait is novel-making at its most ambitious. A pitch-perfect recapitulation of late middle age in America. (LJ 10/15/06)
Glover, Jane. Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music
Wolfie's love of women needs no embellishment, so Glover lets the composer speak for himself in a biography that virtually reanimates its complex subject and his intimates. Though beautiful music plays in the background, the book functions foremost as an ardent portrait of Mozart's humanity through his often impish and always diamond-acute correspondence. (LJ 11/15/05)
Grushin, Olga. The Dream Life of Sukhanov
Sukhanov compromises with the regime, trading art for the easy life, then watches everything he's won come cascading down as communism nears its end. In exquisite language, first novelist Grushin captures the fading Soviet era and, even more tellingly, the prime importance of being true to oneself. (LJ 10/15/05)
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
With singular gusto, Haidt measures ten “Great Ideas” against past/present research in psychology and science. LJ's verdict: Dr. Phil et al. don't have diddly on the old-school sages. No man is an island, indeed, and no modern reader should be without this carefully considered demystification of life. (LJ 1/06)
Harryhausen, Ray & Tony Dalton. The Art of Ray Harryhausen
In his 2004 bio, An Animated Life, hugely influential film animator Harryhausen told the story of his career in the predigital era. In this companion volume, the living legend focuses on previsualization, thus illustrating the book not with film stills but with sketches, drawings, storyboards, and wax models. The sensible text is revealing, but the art speaks even louder. (LJ 2/15/06)
Helm, Sarah. A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII
Helm tells a gripping story of World War II heroism, especially of 12 women who volunteered for Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) and were parachuted into Occupied France, never to return, and of the persistence of their recruiter, Vera Atkins, who tracked their fate in postwar Germany. A spellbinding and tragically true spy thriller. (LJ 6/15/06)
Hodes, Martha. The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
Hodes delicately unwraps papers left by Eunice Connolly, a mid-19th-century New England working-class woman who led the kind of life usually lost to history. Connolly ultimately married a black sea captain of the British West Indies and in that unconventional act found an interlude of stability. Both the biography of an unexamined and unexamining woman and an account of mapping her tempest-tossed life. (LJ 9/1/06)
Houpt, Simon. Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
Who would dare steal an original Rembrandt or Picasso? Plenty of people; as we learn here, more than 20,000 stolen artworks are still missing. If your interest in learning about art theft wasn't spurred by the 2004 snatching of Edvard Munch's The Scream (recently recovered), it surely will be after reading journalist Houpt's crime novel–like investigation. (LJ 8/06)
Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Even the weak-stomached will agree that Johnson has a way with lethal intestinal disease. From microscopic bacteria (cholera), he builds a sweeping nail-biter of groundbreaking science and sociology that drops readers in the dead center of malodorous Victorian London. An intellectual appreciation of life and death that packs the punch of histories double its size. (LJ 9/15/06)
Kamp, David. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
In this captivating story of the American food revolution, Vanity Fair magazine writer Kamp pays special tribute to the “big three” pioneer chefs (James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne) who changed the way we shop, cook, and eat. (LJ 9/15/06)
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile
In The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), English curate/naturalist Gilbert White noted the behavior of a tortoise named Timothy who lived in his garden. Now his subject (who actually was female) returns the favor, offering her wise and wry perspectives on the foibles of White and the other Selborne residents. Nature writing at its most original and delightful. (LJ 12/05)
Ledgard, J.M. Giraffe
On April 30, 1975, secret police in Czechoslovakia circled a small-town zoo and slaughtered nearly 50 giraffes, the largest domesticated herd in the world. In dreamlike yet incisive language, Ledgard tries to make sense of that event, offering a heartbreaking debut novel that compels us to confront suffering even as it limns the awful human weakness for doublethink. (LJ 8/06)
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road
A man and his son wander a devastated landscape, scavenging as they can and avoiding the few people they meet as real threats. Will they reach their destination? Will they even survive? In spare, brutally beautiful language, McCarthy offers the postapocalyptic novel against which all others will be measured. (LJ 9/1/06)
McMahon, Darrin M. Happiness: A History
Forget “To be or not to be.” The modern dilemma is more complicated, often revolving around our relentless pursuit of happiness. But what is happiness? In this accessible study, historian McMahon teaches us that its definition has evolved over time; at first embracing virtue and prosperity, happiness later became synonymous with God and is now perceived as an earthly entitlement. (LJ 1/06)
Messud, Claire. The Emperor's Children
Nothing works out as expected for three friends from Brown—earnest journalist Danielle; insecure, gay Julius; and spoiled Marina, who's still living at home and struggling to write that big book. But Messud effectively captures the insecurities and little successes of these three fledglings, at the same time giving us an unerring snapshot of contemporary society. (LJ 6/1/06)
Moore, Christopher. A Dirty Job
Having retraced Jesus's “missing years” in Lamb, satirist/fantasist Moore now turns his rapier wit to an equally weighty subject: Death. Meek beta male Charlie Asher becomes Death's assistant after walking in on a strange man dressed in mint green collecting his wife's soul. This mock epic of mortality and love is bizarre, outrageous, and very, very funny. (LJ 3/15/06)
Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie
It's weighty but reads like a breeze, surmounting the life of the industrialist and philanthropist who systematically accumulated a fortune and then just as systematically gave it away. (Where would our public libraries be without him?) Not just a Horatio Alger story but a thorough and engaging study of a steel titan who never departed from idiosyncratic human aspirations. (LJ 9/1/06)
Némirovsky, Irène. Suite Française
Before she was swallowed up by Auschwitz, Russian-born French Jewish author Némirovsky completed two parts of a five-part opus intended to capture the madness around her as the Germans invaded France. The result, which lay undiscovered for decades, is a landmark publication that powerfully delivers the era and the horrible suffering that defined it. (LJ 6/15/06)
Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker
A terrible accident leaves Mark Schulter with Capgras Syndrome—he thinks his sister is an identical imposter. But by deftly blending issues of identity and memory with a palpable sense of mystery, all rendered in faultless prose, Powers again proves himself to be the real thing. (LJ 7/06)
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day
Ranging from the Chicago World's Fair to the bad, bad American West to Venice, Mexico, and the trenches of World War I, this grand Wellesian fantasia is a superlative act of imagination. Readers may sometimes feel that they are on a runaway horse, but when the ride is over, every other book will seem ordinary. (LJ 11/15/06)
Reece, Erik. Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness—Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia
Reese's gripping work of literary journalism chronicles the systematic destruction of one Kentucky mountain through the brutal strip-mining process known as mountaintop removal. His portrait of the resulting environmental, economic, and social devastation will leave readers heartbroken and angry. (LJ 2/1/06)
Scurr, Ruth. Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution
Scurr chose one of history's most complex and contradictory figures for her first book, following the path of the provincial lawyer who rose with astonishing speed during the French Revolution and fell even faster—an apparent fanatic devoured by his own Reign of Terror. With integrity, Scurr draws in her readers and allows them to reach their own conclusions. (LJ 4/1/06)
Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
Theoretical physicist Smolin argues that string theory is a scientific dead end, having led to unprecedented stagnation in theoretical physics over the past 30 years. Provocative and groundbreaking. (LJ 8/06)
Zoellner, Tom. The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire
Diamonds are the hardest substance, but what's really hard about them is the poverty, corruption, smuggling, and tenacious cartels they inspire. Zoellner's lucid text takes us into the blood and mire of diamond mining's racism and political corruption, showing us that the jewelry we buy comes at a global cost. (LJ 5/1/06)
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