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Bush at war, white trash, London in the '60s and hermaphrodites
Our critics pick some good winter reading
Bush At War By Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster; $28 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Bush At War, Bob Woodward"s best-selling look at President Bush"s war Cabinet in the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is the portrait that emerges of Bush himself: compassionate, confident to the point of arrogance and keenly aware of the public relations implications of every action. We see the president genuinely moved by human tragedy, asking the families of victims to tell him about the loved ones they lost. We see him keeping a personal scorecard in the war on terror, drawing X"s across the faces of captured and killed al Qaeda leaders. We see his early and ongoing support for relief efforts in Afghanistan - primarily because they were important in letting the American public and the rest of the world see the U.S. not as an aggressor, but a liberator. Bush At War is a quick read, although its middle bogs down in the endless rounds of meetings among the principals - Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. In his long epilogue, Woodward broaches the topic of war with Iraq, a strategy Cheney and especially Rumsfeld supported from the beginning of the crisis; Powell strongly voiced his own trepidation about further destabilizing an already volatile Middle East, pushing for U.N. resolutions and a broad coalition before launching any kind of attack on Saddam. "As always," Woodward writes, "it was an ongoing struggle for the president"s heart and mind as he attempted to balance his unilateralist impulses with some international realities." Bush At War ultimately leaves the unsettling impression that, although the president would like to be perceived as a compassionate statesman, Bush the cowboy is going to win the struggle this time. -Ken Honeywell The Little Friend By Donna Tartt Alfred A. Knoph; $26 A while ago, I met a young writer who"d just published a short story collection to great critical acclaim. He"d accepted a generous advance for his first novel, which - he confessed with considerable anxiety - was nowhere near completion. A year or so later, when I saw his name on Granta Magazine"s prestigious list of the Forty Best Novelists under Forty, I naturally assumed he"d finished it - and congratulated him next time we met. "Where can I buy it?" I asked. "You can"t," he said, mortified. "I"m still working on it." It was an awkward but instructive moment. I understood something about the book business that I have never forgotten and which comes to mind whenever the media creates a literary event, as it did with the recent publication of Donna Tartt"s second novel, The Little Friend. Reading that book, I came to the same conclusion I came to reading her also greatly acclaimed first novel, The Secret History: Tartt is a wonderful, but undisciplined writer. Both novels create rich, compelling fictional worlds; both raise real, complex human questions. But the events of those worlds are too often rendered without consideration to theme and the questions left unresolved. The Little Friend begins with the murder of 9-year-old Robin Cleve in his own backyard, then jumps forward 12 years to a lush Mississippi summer in which Robin"s sister, Harriet, just a baby when the murder occurred, sets out to find his killer. Harriet is a marvelous creation - smart, bossy, adventuresome, caught in that terrible, strange time between childhood and adulthood; and the first third of the book is a page-turner as Tartt moves her through hot, sleepy Alexandria, Miss., setting down clues and establishing Harriet"s conviction that the killer is Danny Ratliff, once Robin"s "little friend." But Tartt lets her own fascination with Danny"s "white trash" family run away with the last two-thirds of the novel, fatally slowing the forward motion with long passages that have little if anything to do with Harriet"s quest. The Little Friend might have been a compelling mystery and a poignant coming-of-age story. In the end, it is neither. The clues set up early in the novel are left dangling; even more disappointing, Harriet"s escalating adventures lapse into melodrama, contributing little to the reader"s ability to imagine how the events of the summer will shape her adult life. Thus proving again that a literary event is not always the same as a literary accomplishment. -Barbara Shoup Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London by Shawn Levy Doubleday; $24.95 At different times, certain cities have provided our cultural history with significant mileposts. In his new book Ready, Steady, Go!, Shawn Levy sets out to evoke a place and time that continue to have a hold on our collective imagination, the "swinging" London scene of the 1960s. For a brief and brilliant time, London was at the eye of a revolution in music, fashion and art, which is to say, in how an entire generation of post WWII kids thought of themselves and the world they were about to take over. That the London scene fizzled as quickly as a glass of champagne left on a windowsill hardly detracts from the pull of its influence. Swinging London"s story is kaleidoscopic and Levy chooses to tell it anecdotally, through a series of extended profiles of such scene-makers as the actor Terence Stamp, photographer David Bailey, hairstylist Vidal Sasson, designer Mary Quant, Mick Jagger and Beatles" manager Brian Epstein. Choosing a handful of important players to serve as representatives of their time and place is a handy, if rather pat, strategy for dealing with such a dense yet evanescent historical episode. Levy"s book tends to be as good as the stories these people have to tell - or that he can tell about them. Thus the material that"s most interesting comes from characters like Bailey and Stamp, figures the times have largely passed by, whereas the Jagger and Epstein bits, while fairly entertaining and certainly significant, have been covered at length elsewhere. Although Levy"s book is short on analysis of why London happened the way it did, he still manages a few trenchant observations. The first, well-documented by other chroniclers, is that the period"s trajectory can be described by the evolution of its taste in intoxicants, beginning with booze and amphetamines, followed by the discovery of marijuana, graduating to psychedelics and, finally, succumbing to junk: Cut to the bags beneath Brian Jones" dying eyes. To his credit, Levy also notes that it was the iconoclastic satire of comedy groups like Beyond the Fringe and David Frost"s That Was the Week That Was that set the stage for "60s social breakthroughs and that, before music blew the lid off things, there was The Look. The London scene got its start thanks to the fashion sense of designers like Mary Quant and the raffish visual style of David Bailey and a few fellow photographers. Unfortunately, though, the character of London itself during this time remains elusive. Though Levy acknowledges the postwar, post-empire social and economic changes that provided the basis for London"s emergence from a city of beleaguered bed-sitting rooms to the world capital of hip, he"s either unwilling or unable to delve into what, besides a collection of extraordinary personalities, accounted for its brand of urban magic. Apart from the specks of nifty gossip Levy offers, you can learn as much about what London must have felt like in the "60s by listening to Ray Davies. Readers wanting more are encouraged to seek out George Melly"s Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts in the "50s and "60s for a firsthand account and Jonathon Green"s marvelously encyclopedic oral history, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1971. -David Hoppe Normal Transsexual CEOs, crossdressing cops, and hermaphrodites with attitude By Amy Bloom Random House; $23.95 Perhaps because it was published around the same time as Jeffrey Eugenidies" monumental second novel, Middlesex, which chronicled the epic genetic and cultural history of its intersex narrator, Amy Bloom"s elegant, insightful new book of essays about people living at the edges of the landscape of gender and identity has been somewhat overlooked. Bloom, a psychotherapist and fiction writer, seems uniquely qualified to examine both the psychological and emotional aspects of people whose bodies, predilections and politics are considered anything but normal. Normal begins with "The Body Lies," in which Bloom explores the little-known experiences of female-to-male (FTM) transsexuals. Along with Bloom - admittedly skeptical about the motivations for undergoing such a difficult transformation - we meet biological women in various stages of the painful and expensive series of surgeries needed to achieve male gender identity, and the surgeons who perform the operations. Some patients keep their transitions secret, while others are open about it, but all seem relieved to finally feel at home in their bodies. In "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses," Bloom goes inside the world of male heterosexual crossdressers, a practice, she estimates, engaged in by 3 to 5 percent of the population. Attending several crossdressers" conferences across the country, Bloom finds men who are "normal" in every way, save for their penchant for dressing up in women"s clothing, and wives who quietly resign themselves to coping with their husbands" unusual hobby - or, wonders Bloom, is it a compulsion? - as best they can. About 2,000 babies are born each year with ambiguous genitalia, neither entirely male nor female, nor both. Until recently, surgeons quickly picked a sex for the child and removed the "offending" extra genitals, often not telling the parents. In "Hermaphrodites with Attitude," Bloom talks with several victims of this cruel practice, and an activist who has made great strides in advocating the rights of intersex people. Bloom"s voice is compassionate and genuinely curious throughout, leaving ample space for readers to enrich their own perspectives. In the afterword, Bloom concludes that there is often no such thing as "normal" where nature is concerned; rather, "Nature is more like Aretha Franklin: vast, magnificent, capricious - occasionally hilarious - and infinitely varied." -Summer Wood
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Aug 20, 2008
Herron School of Art and Design
Thirty-two works of art -- rhinestone embellished mixed media images -- by renowned artist Thomas Woodruff. Aug. 8-Oct. 4. Public reception Sept. 5, 5-8 p...
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