Word: mifflin
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...HAYSTACK, by Bonnie and Arthur Geisert (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95), is a prize: a fascinating, beautifully drawn progression of Midwestern farmscapes showing the yearly building and slow consumption of an enormous, barn-sized haystack. Hay in a big field is cut with a tractor and sickle bar, then raked into windrows and stacked with a hydraulic lift and pitchforks. The great hay pile then serves as both food and shelter, first for cattle, then for pigs, through the long winter. There's no preaching, but important lessons are learned about work and weather, and how life might seem in the vast...
...secrets are as various as the exorcists. In The Blue Suit: A Memoir of Crime, just published by Houghton Mifflin (216 pages; $19.95), Richard Rayner, a British writer now living in Los Angeles, tells of how, while a Cambridge University undergaduate in the 1970s, he drifted into a yearlong crime spree of shoplifting, check forgery, housebreaking and bank fraud--following the mysterious disappearance of his father, who had been sent to jail for embezzlement. The writing is stripped-down Dostoyevsky ("My head itched. Cold sweat ran down my flesh...."), the overall effect as unnerving and oddly exhilarating as the life...
Perhaps the finest of Copley's family portraits is that of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin, done in 1773. Mifflin was a rich young radical Whig of Quaker origins, who would become George Washington's aide-de-camp and, after the Revolution, Governor of Virginia. The portrait is very sober in color--browns, grays and silver, the only bright note being a red flower pinned to Sarah Mifflin's bodice. What is especially striking about it is the way it preserves Quaker ideas of matrimonial equality. Conventional 18th century portraits have the wife looking adoringly at the husband, who looks...
Remember when cockroaches were romantic? Mary Cantwell's Manhattan, When I Was Young (Houghton Mifflin; 214 pages; $21.95) is an unusually deft contribution to the durable genre of memoirs on the theme of How I Came of Age in a Greenwich Village Walk-Up, Married an Intellectual and Learned to Survive on My Own in the Big Apple...
MORRIS (MICKEY) SABBATH is a 64-year-old former puppeteer with a prostate gland that belongs in the urology hall of fame. In addition, the randy creation of Philip Roth's new comic novel, Sabbath's Theater (Houghton Mifflin; 451 pages; $24.95), is an Olympic-class misanthrope, an example of homo invectus so addicted to wrath that he rejects suicide on the ground that "everything he hated was here...