Word: novelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Oakland is hardly regarded by most people as a must-see tourist destination. But novelist-poet Ishmael Reed is determined to change perceptions of this Northern California city, his adopted hometown, which he argues is still vital, despite ongoing problems with crime and budget cuts. In his new book, Blues City (Crown; 191 pages), Reed recommends the following Oakland sights and activities...
...Double Vision (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 258 pages) ought to be a must to avoid. It's anything but. Granted, it has all those things, plus 9/11, Slobodan Milosevic and a good many predatory birds. But it's also the work of the subtle British novelist Pat Barker, whose dry-eyed manner and nuanced view of good and evil made her Regeneration trilogy, about World War I, a triumph. Her spare but still sometimes resplendent writing, her gift for menace--it's all in this book, and it makes you want to follow her even when she gets lost...
...Opposite of Fate, Chinese-American novelist Amy Tan reveals that one of the reasons she became a writer was to make a testament to her mother, Daisy, who emigrated from China in 1949. The formidable Daisy, who appears frequently in this collection of essays, had a distinct voice of her own, typified by this Talibanic pronouncement on the mortal perils of dating: "Don't ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can't stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill yourself...
From the age of 10, Meehan was set on becoming a writer, and he went to college fully expecting to be a "serious" novelist one day. At Hamilton College in upstate New York, he earned the senior writing prize of $350 before graduating and moving to New York City. By age 24, he had landed a job at the New Yorker, where his first editor, Roger Angell, remembers him as being "terrifically funny" even then...
...Modern Indians regard Nehru with more ambivalence. As novelist Shashi Tharoor points out in his new biography, Nehru: The Invention of India, the architect of modern India turned his country into a democracy and an industrial giant but also shackled it to a heavily regulated socialist economy. If Nehru managed to fuse a disparate jumble of regions and principalities into a united nation, he also bequeathed India its most serious political problem, the insurgency in Kashmir. Although Tharoor's biography lacks the exhaustiveness and depth of some of its predecessors, its attitude is perfect for the times. Writes Tharoor, "What...