BOOKS: JUNE

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some recent books that have knocked our respective socks off.

ONE MORE THEORY ABOUT HAPPINESS: A Memoir
by Paul Guest
(HarperCollins, 2010)

Paul Guest broke his neck when he fell from a bicycle at age twelve. His memoir recounts the accident and his life ever since: a convalescence marked by the agony of hope—waiting “for one muscle out of the six hundred gone slack to convulse back to life”; the excitement of small improvements—“Soon I could feel both arms, my chest and stomach. And then my legs, like ghosts”; and, finally, acceptance and even gratitude—“If I couldn’t lift my arms, I could breathe. I could feel. I could move more of my body than any diagnosis could have ever sanely promised.” He returns to junior high in a wheelchair, goes to college (he’s mugged in an elevator) and then to graduate school (in Tuscaloosa, “the staging ground of the Rapture”), dates some girls, and writes poems. Guest now lives in Atlanta with his fiancée and is the author of three poetry collections. His body is paralyzed but his good humor and literary finesse most certainly are not.

—CAF

LINES WE LIKED: “For all the gentle curiosity, the questions about which batteries my wheelchair used, or how I used the bathroom, people couldn’t help their fascination with ruin. With their future selves. The downward arc of dotage. In me, they could see a rehearsal of the flesh, how it might all end.”

THE SURRENDERED
by Chang-Rae Lee
(Riverhead, 2010)

War is horrifying but its aftermath is even worse. Chang-Rae Lee’s epic novel THE SURRENDERED focuses on the Korean War, but it might as well be any recent international conflict: inevitably, the violence of the battlefields punctures civilian terrain, seeping across borders; terrible choices are made in order to survive; and children are orphaned. Lee’s dark novel is not exactly a pleasure to read but it is awe-inspiring. Following the armistice of 1953, his central characters—a scrappy Korean girl and a gruff American soldier—land in an orphanage near Seoul, where their wounds begin to heal, at least on the surface. Lee meticulously details the consequences of trauma, how it both strengthens and weakens the spirit, permanently. 

—CAF

LINES WE LIKED: “He was looking for something to befall him, to strike him down, he was a man clambering to the top of a hill in a lightning storm, waving an iron rod.”

LAST CALL: THE RISE AND FALL OF PROHIBITION
Daniel Okrent
(Scribner, 2010)

Though nonfiction, Daniel Okrent’s LAST CALL: THE RISE AND FALL OF PROHIBITION reads like a scabrous crime drama—albeit one with the journalistic humor and insight of H.L. Mencken, who happens to be a key figure—both of the book and liquor advocacy. The memorable cast—liquor czar Smedley “Old Gimlet Eye” Butler, the axe-grinding Carrie Nation, the KKK’s Imperial Wizard, Elliot Ness and his Untouchables, Alphonse “Scarface” Capone, and Prohibition’s Machiavellian mastermind, Wayne Wheeler—was drawn together in the national debate over America’s overwhelming thirst. Whether out of conviction or self-interest, the teetotalers and the bibulous alike politicized the issue, making for unsettling alliances, courtroom histrionics, and draconian muscle flexing. We all know how the story ends, but the historical play-by-play, with all its sensational headlines and criminal ingenuity is something to be savored.

—BS

LINES WE LIKED: “By 1930 the U.S. speakeasy was so ubiquitous, so indelibly part of American culture, that H.I. Phillips, a columnist for the NEW YORK SUN, was led to declare that ‘the history of the United States could be told in 11 words: Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Volstead, two flights up and ask for Gus.’”

SAFE FROM THE NEIGHBORS
by Steve Yarbrough
(Knopf, 2010)

For a married man, Steve Yarbrough is unusually perceptive about the nuances of adultery. Take Luke May, a middle-aged history teacher in a small Mississippi town who gets mixed up with a woman from his past. Notice how solicitous he becomes of his lawful wife as the illicit affair deepens. The plot thickens as May starts unraveling a family mystery linked to the "big mess" of 1962, when James Meredith integrated the ivory towers of Ole Miss. One of Yarbrough's talents is his cinematic ability to paint the Delta South—its people and places—without any of the predictable stereotypes. His writing style is so natural and straightforward and bristly with suspense that you hardly notice his abundant insights into the complicated history of the region.

—CAF

LINES WE LIKED: “You can find some of the worst people in the world in Mississippi, but also some of the best, and the quickest way to tell them apart is to look where they stand on race.” And: “You can’t hope to make sense of what happened if you don't understand the environment in which it happened.”

STILL LIFE: ADVENTURES IN TAXIDERMY
by Melissa Milgrom
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)

Milgrom’s examination of the oft-misunderstood world of taxidermy focuses on the careers of two contemporary stars of the field: Ken Walker, a rustic Canadian savant whose mammalian recreations appear in such lofty venues as the Smithsonian, and Emily Mayer, whose “erosion-molding” technique becomes the carcass sculptures of provocative pop-artist Damien Hirst. Milgrom sprinkles in the history of animal stuffing, from the days of novel humanoid curios (like tuxedoed lobsters sitting at a dinner table) popularized in the Victorian era, to the cruel specimen “collecting” of twentieth-century big game fanatics. The author even takes it upon herself to study and mount a squirrel for some firsthand experience, all the while maintaining the credo that taxidermists are, paradoxically, obsessive naturalists.

—NE

LINES WE LIKED: “Fortunately, you can see just about everything Mayer has ever said, because she is a master archivist who has been documenting her own life since she was thirteen. Her JPEG files of her work for Hirst, for instance, are practically in real time. ‘I keep a record of my breathing,’ she said, exhaling smoke.”

THE QUEEN OF PALMYRA
by Minrose Gwin
(Harper Perennial, 2010)

In her first novel, the Southern lit scholar and memoirist Minrose Gwin examines the complexities and contradictions of small-town Mississippi through the eyes of an adolescent narrator, Florence Forrest, during the Civil Rights summer of 1963. Florence passes the sweltering days being shuffled between three homes—those of her parents, her grandparents, and her grandparents’ African-American housekeeper/babysitter—in the fictional town of Millwood. Each household is struggling with its own brand of family ties and racial tensions, and it will be many years before Florence is able to fully process the weight of all that happens.

—SCA

LINES WE LIKED: “I take the one sip Mama allows, cough because it burns my throat the way ice sometimes does. A little beer and my own spit spray my arm. The air blowing on it cools me down. I’m thinking what a good life it is that we lead in our own secret ways.”

Photographs by Southern Girl.