Page turners

Settle in with a summer read

Among the authors at the 2010 Arkansas Literary Festival was a curly-haired young Chicagoan named Marcus Sakey. He was there to talk about his 2009 novel The Amateurs at a packed question-and-answer session at the Central Arkansas Library System’s Main Library, and later led a session titled “Secrets of Getting Published.” Let’s hope he mentioned “Write a great book” at that session. Because, although The Amateurs is an interesting read, Sakey has really found his voice with Brilliance.

It’s the imaginative and relevant story of “brilliants,” one percent of the population born (starting in 1980) with exceptional abilities. You’d think that would be a good thing, but it turns out that normal people-the vast majority-soon become fearful and prejudiced against the abnorms.

So the normals seek to control the brilliants, resulting in abnormal children being raised in mind-controlling academies, then entering a society that seeks to dominate and contain them. This leads the more rebellious of them to form covert organizations in an often violent fight for their freedom, which eventually gets the most vocal of the abnorms labeled as terrorists.

In the middle is Nick Cooper, a federal agent who, despite being a brilliant, justifies his terrorist-hunting work as the best way he can serve his country. But when the fight gets personal, Cooper takes on a crucial mission that could start a civil war.

The idea, Sakey says, came from his wife. “G.G. recently got her master’s in child development with an emphasis on autism,” he says. “She’s an optimist, and what inspired her was that for all the challenges children with autism face, many have advantages too.

They have difficulty understanding emotional nuance and social dynamics, but many a 4-year old autistic can recite the names, in Latin, of every breed of shark. Or update the operating system on your iPad. Which cranked up my novelistic engine.

“I found myself imagining a world where the 1 in 110 children born with autism have advantages, but not challenges. And what if the abilities were more pronounced; say they could see patterns in the stock market or read a person’s darkest secrets from their body language. What would happen when those children grew up? Bam! there it was, a capital-IIdea, with a bow on it.” Sakey’s talent for creating realistic characters and dialogue that sounds like what people might actually say-even when they’re in extraordinary situations-are hallmarks of his work. His efforts to engage the reader are paying off.

This is a perfect summer book.

And it’s the first in a projected series.

So what else is thereto read? Depends whether you want fiction or nonfiction. Here are some suggestions.

Camille Paglia is no fool, but she is an oxymoron: a celebrity intellectual (as opposed to a public one), a reliably pugnacious interview who can be counted on for an outrageous quote. One can admire her interesting mind and redoubtable critical faculty while allowing for a shtick component. She would have been great on the old Firing Line, mixing it up with the likes of Buckley, Mailer and Vidal.

So while her latest book Glittering Images, a survey of art from the Egyptian funerary images of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti to George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith, is ostensibly “an attempt to reach a general audience for whom art is not a daily presence,” it contains more than its fair share of provocations and at least one shark-jumping moment. It comes when she anoints George Lucas as our greatest living artist. Paglia declares that “no one has closed the gap between art and technology more successfully” and that she’s seen “nothing in the visual arts of the past30 years was as daring, beautiful and emotionally compelling as the spectacular volcano-planet climax of … Revenge of the Sith.” Really?

Still, though Paglia’s politics constantly show through her scholarship-she believes Frida Kahlo’s reputation has been inflated by feminist critics-Paglia’s own embrace of the Jamaican-American performance artist Renee Cox and Art Deco “glamour star” Tamara de Lempicka (Madonna’s favorite artist) seem equally eccentric. It’s not that Paglia doesn’t have anything interesting to say about these artists, or that their work isn’t interesting in itself. It’s just that the whole idea of explaining the universe of the possible through close reading of 29 idiosyncratically chosen works is on its face ludicrous. Glittering Images is simply a map of Paglia’s taste, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, her tendency to drop facile and obliterating comments grows wearying.

For those who missed it when it was published in July 2012, there’s This Dark Earth by John Hornor Jacobs of Little Rock. It’s about Bridge City, an outpost in what was once Arkansas that’s now the last stand for civilization, a fortress to protect the few human survivors of a devastating virus from the moaning and hungry undead at the gates. Within those gates is young Gus, who designed Bridge City and is being groomed to become the next leader of mankind, or what’s left of it. If you read Jacobs’ chilling debut novel Southern Gods, you know you’re in for believable characters and settings, and not-to be-believed plot twists.

It might be depressing to poll Americans on what they know about the War of 1812. So let’s stipulate that everyone knows it was a rematch with the British, that it occasioned Francis Scott Key’s writing of “The Star Spangled Banner” and the British sacking of our nation’s capital (and the burning of the White House that figures prominently in the new Channing Tatum-Jamie Foxx movie White House Down). And maybe,thanks to Jimmy Driftwood, we also know something about the Battle of New Orleans-though if you believe it occurred after the war was over, you’re wrong. The battle, which took place on Jan. 8, 1815, did occur after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent (on Christmas Eve 1814) but before the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty. So technically the battle did not take place after the war, though news of the treaty reached the British forces soon after Andrew Jackson and his troops drove them from Louisiana and caused them to abandon their Plan B option of attacking Mobile.

Those looking for a fuller account would profit from the Library of America’s recently released The War of 1812: Writings from America’s Second War of Independence, edited by Donald R. Hickey, which collects chronologically the writings of witnesses to this obscure conflict. Beginning with President James Madison’s “War message to Congress,” the volume offers first-person narratives from American, British, Canadian and Indian participants in the war, among them officers, infantrymen, prisoners of war and political leaders.

Hickey, professor of history at Wayne State College in Nebraska, contributes an introductory essay that supplies needed context and sets the stage for a mosaic comprised of 140 documents, from Thomas Jefferson’s letters to Madison, John Adams, Madame de Stael and Jefferson’s old friend the Marquis de Lafayette to accounts by ordinary seamen and soldiers about battles and the routines of readiness. Shawnee chief Tecumseh criticizes the strategy of his British allies while Chief Blackbird of the Ottawas writes about the terrorist tendencies of American “Big Knives”: “Whenever they get any of our people into their hands they cut them like meat into small pieces. We thought white people were Christians. They ought to show a better example.” Later, Dolley Madison and her slave Paul Jennings give markedly different accounts of the British invasion of Washington.

It adds up to a satisfying primer on what has been, for most of us, a murky and misunderstood chapter of history.

Good Kings Bad Kings by playwright Susan Nussbaum uses alternating perspectives to reveal the unenviable lives of tough, engaging, funny, self-deprecating and ultimately hopeful institutionalized juveniles with disabilities. Set in the south side of Chicago, the story comes alive through the voices of Yessenia, Teddy, Mia, and other kids whose hard-won alliances give them the strength to resist mistreatment and draw attention to their neglected community. The unique subject and unsentimental presentation make this a compelling read for adults as well as for its intended target of teens.

Scandinavian crime stories are all the rage, thanks to the late Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). A major player in the fast-growing genre is The Bat by Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo. The hero is Inspector Harry Hole (pronounced Hoh-lay) of the Oslo Crime Squad, who’s sent to Sydney to observe-but not involve himself in-the murder of a 23-year old Norwegian semi-celebrity. As we get to know Harry, we soon figure out that there’s no way he can stop himself from getting mixed up in the investigation being led by Australian aboriginal police detective Andrew Kensington. The mystery starts out slowly to accommodate what’s probably too much cultural background information, then accelerates toward a lively ending.

Then there’s Midwinter Blood by Sweden’s Mons Kallentoft. It follows 34-year-old police superintendent Malin Fors, clever but prone to missteps and second-guessing herself, as she is confronted by a grisly murder-mutilation of an eccentric loner on a frigid February night, a crime that draws her into a world populated by a near-feral family living by its own rules. It’s not the most brilliant writing out there (maybe because it’s translated) but the story is inventive and intense.

Also from the the Library of America is The Civil War: The Third Year Told By Those Who Lived It, edited by Brooks D. Simpson, the third volume in what will eventually be a four-volume set in the LOA’s continuing series on the war. Like the aforementioned War of 1812 volume, it consists mainly of first-person accounts, personal correspondence and official documents, and offers a multitude of viewpoints covering that most brutal of American conflicts. The third volume spans from January 20, 1863, to March 10, 1864, and covers among other things the Gettysburg Campaign and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Vicksburg Campaign, andthe Battles of Chancellorsville, Chickamauga and Chattanooga.

These LOA volumes are an indispensable part of any Civil War library-or any library that pretends to a comprehensive grasp of American history. And they are endlessly fascinating.

Perspective, Pages 76 on 07/28/2013

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