From Goshawks To Wolfes: Twenty-Five Great Books For Holiday Gift Giving

Pillars of cool hydrogen rise from a small portion of the Carina Nebula
 as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope

Once again, Your Faithful Reviewer plowed through a slew of books in the course of 2016 with an emphasis on the cosmic (getting lost in the stars) and profane (Thomas Wolfe's earthbound novels). Here are the best 25 of the bunch.  

All are great holiday gifts for a literary inclined spouse, other family member or friend.  All but one are available online in paperback.  If your local lending library is a member of Interlibrary Loan, you can borrow a copy through that system for the price of a little bit of shoe leather.   

So no excuses, okay? 

THE ACCIDENTAL CITY: Improvising New Orleans (Lawrence N. Powell, 2012) New Orleans was not supposed to exist, let alone exist where it has existed for the last three centuries — in a mosquito-infested swamp on the banks of a difficult-to-tame river — and that is the premise of this delightful book on the first century of the Crescent City and its Creole roots.  Remnants of the original NOLA can be seen in the orthogonal grid of the French Market, but that only begins to explain the city’s extraordinary racial, ethnic and cultural diversity.  Powell does the rest in this meticulous historical tour de force. 

BACK TO LIFE: A Bladder Cancer Journey  (Frank Sadowski, 2015) Most commonly, cancer survivors want to forget the entire awful experience, which a few devote much of their lives to counseling those with the disease as Sadowski had done.  And in his case, write a brutally candid and profoundly inspiring book about looking death in the face and then staring it down.  But what really shines through this eloquent memoir of his ordeal is his indomitable will to live.   He simply never gave up.  Sadowski writes beautifully, imparting Back to Life with a plain-spoken passion and self-deprecating humor.  (Click HERE for a full review.) 

BARBARIAN DAYS: A Surfing Life (William Flanagan, 2015) Write well and knowledgeably, and any subject can be made interesting.  So it is with surfing, a lifelong passion for journalist and war correspondent Flanagan, who shares his adventures chasing waves all over the world -- including California, Hawaii, the South Pacific, Australia, Africa, Madeira and, surprisingly, metropolitan New York -- in this is elegantly but simply written autobiography, social history, scientific exploration and literary road movie.  Read Barbarian Days and you'll never look at an ocean wave the same way again.  

BORN TO RUN (Bruce Springsteen, 2016) The 500-plus pages of this autobio are lovingly rendered. Informative. Passionate. Mercifully hot air free.  Funny.  Immodest.  Painfully candid.  Insightful. Neurosis ridden.  Deep.  Oh, and The Boss can really write, even if it is in Jerseyspeak. His description of how he wrote his first bona fide hit single -- "Born to Run" -- is worth the price of admission for veteran musicians and especially up and comers.  And answers the question of how the hell you get from Freehold, New Jersey with a $69 Kent guitar to superstardom.  Hint: It takes 50 years.  Talent.  And proving it all night. (Click HERE for a related article.)

THE BURN PITS: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers (Joseph Hickman, 2016 ) Vice President Biden's profound grief over the 2015 death of his eldest son has taken on an awful new dimension: It is possible that Biden unknowingly signed his death warrant.   In this shocking book, investigative journalist Hickman asserts that a subsidiary of Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was CEO before he became vice president, poisoned thousands of American soldiers and many thousands more Iraqis with the toxic smoke from the burn pits they operated in place of the incinerators typically run by the military. (Click HERE for a related article.)  

BUSH (Jean Edward Smith, 2016) Historians have been picking through the entrails of the Bush presidency since well before he left office.  Even allowing that they tend to be a liberal lot, it is difficult to find anyone who has anything remotely positive to say about Bush and his administration, and Smith is absolutely scathing in his condemnation.  "For eight years," he writes, "Bush made the decisions that put the United States on a collision course with reality. . . . [His] refusal to face up to the fact that Iraq had no unconventional weapons suggests a willfulness that borders on psychosis."  (Click HERE for a related article.)  

THE CHINA COLLECTORS: America’s Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures (Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, 2015) Who has not admired an exquisite porcelain Oriental vase or splendid bronze?  This is the backstory to our love affair with Chinese and Japanese art and the eclectic collectors — ranging from Salem sea captains to Indian Jones types to Gilded Age millionaires — who bequeathed North American museums with the greatest collections outside of East Asia.   The authors do not shrink from the dark side: Much of the art was plundered, and China in particular wants to reclaim its missing patrimony. 

COMING OF AGE IN THE MILKY WAY (Timothy Ferris, 1988) Physician-philosopher Lewis Thomas wrote "The greatest of all accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance."  That is the dramatically huge takeaway from Ferris’s landmark tour de force on how mankind got lost in the stars, which while somewhat outdated nearly 30 years after publication, remains a preeminent example of how the mists obscuring the understanding of a complex science like astronomy from knuckle-headed laymen like myself can be parted through brilliant narrative writing. 

ENGLISH PASSENGERS: A Novel (Robert Kneale, 2000) It is 1857 and Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of smugglers from the Isle of Man have just had their cargo of tobacco and brandy confiscated by British Customs.  Just when it seems like things can't get any worse, he is approached by an eccentric English vicar who offers to charter his ship for a journey to the other side of the globe and Tasmania, where the reverend believes the Garden of Eden to be.  Beyond Kneale's historical renderings, which include deft descriptions of the brutality of British imperialism and Aboriginal life, this is an uproariously funny book.   

THE GREAT JAZZ DAY (Charles Graham et. al., 2000) This is a book about a photograph.  Not just any photograph, but the greatest jazz photograph in history — Art Kane’s immortal 1958 shot of nearly 60 jazz greats — ranging from Art Blakey to Coleman Hawkins to Marian McPartland to Sonny Rollins — gathered on the steps of a Harlem brownstone.  This selection is a little unusual for me because it is a coffee table book, although a modest one, and is sadly out of print, although used copies are available.  There also are some terrific essays by participants in the photo shoot.     

H IS FOR HAWK (Helen Macdonald, 2014) My fascination with goshawks led me to this genre-breaking runaway bestseller.  It is the story of how the author adopted, raised and trained a gossie whom she improbably named Mabel because, as superstition drenched hawkers believe, the more banal the name the better the bird will be. A big reason for the book's success is that it is as much a story of Macdonald going to pieces -- and very nearly succumbing to madness -- following the death of her beloved father.  H Is for Hawk is nothing less than a soaring triumph.  (Click HERE for a full review.) 

LONELY HEARTS OF THE COSMOS: The Scientific Quest For The Secret of the Universe (Dennis Overbye, 1991) Fortunately for me, this terrific tale is short on mind-locking theory and long on fascinating portraits of the brilliant and typically eccentric men and (too few) women who built on Einstein and began to unlock the answers to The Biggest Question of Them All in the latter half of the 20th century.  Although Lonely Hearts is 25 years out of date and there have been enormous strides in the science of wormholes, superstrings and grand unification theories, it remains a great read.  

LOOK HOMEWARD: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (David Herbert Donald, 1987) Wolfe, the great American novelist and playwright, churned out an awful lot of bad prose, but that matters not because so much of his work is "extraordinarily brilliant and moving," in Donald’s estimation, and mine as well.  Nevertheless, there may never have been a writer who was more his own worst enemy.  Donald, who had full access to Wolfe's papers, deftly explains how his massive passions, which complimented his massive physical size, kept colliding with his quest to push the boundaries of the modern novel, which was cut short by his premature death at age 38.  

LUCKY JIM (Kingsley Amis, 1954) My appreciation of English humor of the Wodehouse-Waugh school has diminished over the years, probably in parallel with my realization that the English can be classist bores.  Nevertheless, this story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university, as opposed to Oxford or Cambridge, has its moments.  The stuffy bores who live the cloistered lives of academia can be pretty funny, Dixon's relationship with a drip who strings him along has its moments, and I certainly can relate to his hatred of phoniness.   

MINOR CHARACTERS (Joyce Johnson, 1983) I would like to say that Johnson and other woman friends and lovers of Beats like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs had important roles in making these famous iconoclasts who they were, but Johnson has the good sense to not go there, because for the most part the Beats treated women like crap.  Minor Characters chronicles Johnson’s years with Kerouac, beginning a few months before his seminal On The Road was published, and I kept asking myself how she could keep on loving the bum.  I guess you had to have been there.  (Click HERE for a related article.)

MR NICE: An Autobiography (Howard Marks, 2003)  How you feel about a book I found to be a compelling and often delightful read may depend on whether you believe marijuana and hashish are relatively harmless recreational drugs or should be classified with cocaine and heroin, which are anything but harmless.  And whether you support the U.S. War on Drugs or see it for what it is: An enormous waste of money that demonizes, criminalizes and incarcerates harmless people like Marks, denying them of their most fundamental constitutional rights.  You have been warned.  

ON THE MOVE: A Life (Oliver Sachs, 2015) When he was 12, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote, "Sachs will go far, if he does not go too far."  Indeed, the British neurologist naturalist and author, who spent his professional life in the U.S., never slowed down until his death last year at age 82. He is widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders.  Less well known are his  youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, as well as drugs.  On the Move is engaging, but has a thrown-together feel, and there is too little about his signal accomplishment: illuminating the ways that the brain makes us human.    

PETER PAN MUST DIE: A Novel (John Verdon, 2014) Former NYPD homicide detective Dave Gurney is an ingenious puzzle solver, but unraveling who fatally wounded a charismatic politician felled by a rifle bullet to the brain while delivering the eulogy at his own mother's funeral, triggering a bizarre murder spree, is his most challenging case yet.  With methodical precision, Gurney identifies and then lures and traps the psychopath behind the crime wave by setting himself up as the next target in this exquisitely paced whodunit, Verdon's best so far despite a little too much psychobabble for my taste.  

PURITY: A Novel (Jonathan Franzen, 2015) This is the great Franzen's most intimate and least self conscious book yet, and his best.  Pip Tyler, whose real name is Purity, is the heroine of this novel of idealism, fidelity and (yes) murder, with all of the characters, in their own way, seeking purity in their lives.  Franzen has fashioned a typically sprawling and ambitious plot, with innumerable subplots chockablock with the 21st century Dickensian twists.  His musings on the dark underbelly of our cyber society are profound ("The Internet had come to signify death for him").  And the ending is just about perfect.    

RAGTIME: A Novel (E.L. Doctorow, 1974) It is fitting that I finally got around to reading this evocation of the dreams and prejudices of pre-World War I America in the era of Black Lives Matter and during a presidential election year.  Although Ragtime is chockablock with luminaries like Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Pierpont Morgan and anarchist Emma Goldman, it is the humbling story of a suburban upper-class New York family whose lives are dramatically changed by a Jewish immigrant and a black man’s fight for racial justice that makes this book so deserving as a classic of American literature.     

A ROYAL EXPERIMENT: The Private Life of George III (Janice Hadlow, 2014) This engrossing book was titled The Strangest Family when first published in the UK, which seems misleading until you consider that the monarchs who preceded and followed George were royally dysfunctional while he, by comparison, was rather down to earth, at least until dementia overtook him toward the end of his eventful 60-year reign.  Hadlow explores George's efforts to do better in raising his many children (he failed miserably) while rejecting the caricature of him as a tyrant responsible for the failures of British imperialism.    

A SHORT HISTORY ABOUT A SMALL PLACE (T.R. Pearson, 1985) You won't find Neely, North Carolina on any map, but this fictional town's characters -- as described in a resolutely deadpan voice by young narrator Louis Benfield -- impart a wisdom that their simple surface selves do not betray.  Therein lies the beauty of this nicely written take on small-town Southern culture, which while witty is unsparing when it comes to the realities of class and race prejudice.  And while A Small Place may not be the great American novel some critics claim it to be, it's is danged good.  

A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY  EVERYTHING (Bill Bryson, 2003) If Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is Greek to you, and it has been to me despite years of trying to penetrate its meaning, then Bryson will unlock these mysteries and many more about what made the universe and our little old primordial selves in this drop-dead delightful — and by now classic — brick of a book.  Bryson manages the neat trick of being profound and funny at the same time in decoding everything from quantum mechanics to the genetics of the fruit fly while rendering the scientists who solved these puzzles in delightfully human terms.     

THE SON (2014) and MIDNIGHT SUN (2015) Jo Nesbø, one of the leading practitioners of Arctic Noir, is best known for his 10-book Harry Hole series (of which The Snowman is a personal favorite).  But in The Son and Midnight Sun, he turns away from a homicide detective-centric plot.   A junkie in prison for crimes he didn't commit and a kind-hearted hit man on the run are the unlikely heroes in these short but compelling reads.  Nesbø remains a master of the deeply complex psychological thriller, and separating the good guys from the bad is just part of what makes these books terrific additions to the genre.  

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (Thomas Wolfe, 1940) This deep and beautifully written classic of 20th century fiction weaves the stories of George Webber, an aspiring young writer aching for fame and love in all the wrong places, with the saga of America and Europe from the Great Depression through the pre-World War II years.  Wolfe's last great work (posthumously if controversially assembled by his editor) is a searing critique of capitalism and fascism, but although you indeed can't go home again — that is relive the past — Wolfe expresses through Webber, who of course is himself, an optimism and hope for the future.     

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Meanwhile, here are my holiday gift giving lists for 2015, 2014 and 2013, as well as a 2012 post on the books that have most influenced me over the years and a random list of great war books published through 2009.

From Richards To Rivers: A Dozen Great Books For Holiday Gift Giving

Your Faithful Reviewer plowed through another 30 or so books in the course of 2014, some new, some not so old and a couple of classics that I had not gotten around to reading.  Here are the best dozen of the bunch, actually the best 14 because one offering is a trilogy.  All are great holiday gifts for a literary inclined spouse, other family member or friend, and all are available online in paperback.

AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS (Taylor Branch, 1988, 2006, 2012) This three volume biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. runs to some 1,600 pages and is the definitive retelling of the great civil rights leader's life from his birth in Atlanta to his assassination in Memphis at the age of 39.  Branch does not pull any punches, confirming that as great as King was, he was a profligate philanderer who could be his own worst enemy.

THE BARBAROUS YEARS: THE PEOPLING OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA (Bernard Bailyn, 2012) Establishment of British, Dutch and Swedish colonies in America in the early 17th century would seem to be well-trod ground, but Bailyn sheds often fascinating light on the socio-economic aspects of colonization, as well as the brutal encounters between the Europeans and native peoples.

​ A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH (Jussi Adler-Olsen, 2013) Adler-Olson's Department Q murder mysteries are the latest Arctic Noir sensations, and deservedly so.  A Conspiracy of Faith is the second of five starring Copenhagen Detective Carl Mørck and his sidekicks, Assad and Rose, who take on the coldest of cold cases, Department Q's specialty, this one involving the double murder of a brother and sister two decades earlier.

THE GOLDFINCH (Donna Tartt, 2013) This is the best book, fiction or nonfiction, that I have read in a very long time.  The improbable plot works, sometimes despite itself, gripping me on an intellectual and emotional level.  While its length (771 pages, count 'em) seem to be daunting, the adventure therein -- at its core a dissection of the screwed up-edness of the human condition in the guise of a coming-of-age story -- is nothing short of amazing.​

THE HUMAN STAIN (Phillip Roth, 2000) Roth, as usual, magnificently interweaves American history in this tour de force about Coleman Silk, a classics professor, who is forced to retire when his colleagues decide that he is a racist.  He is not, and the real truth as conveyed by narrator Nathan Zuckerman (who also appears in Roth's American Pastoral and I Married a Communist) is incredible.

IRONWEED (William Kennedy, 1984) This final book of the so-called Albany Cycle is the best of the three because Kennedy really fires on all of his writerly cylinders in telling the story of Francis Phelan, a once great ballplayer turned drunk who has come home to make peace with his sometimes violent past -- he has hallucinations of three of the people he killed in the past --and rekindle his relationship with the only woman he truly loved.​

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LAST CALL: THE RISE AND FALL OF PROHIBITION (Daniel Okrent, 2010) The 18th Amendment ostensibly addressed the single subject of intoxicating beverages, spawning the 13-year Prohibition, but this delightfully trenchant book reveals that it did much more, including enormous changes in international trade, speedboat design and marketing, as well as the establishment of national crime syndicates and even women's rights.

THE LIES OF SARAH PALIN: THE UNTOLD STORY BEHIND HER RELENTLESS QUEST FOR POWER (Geoffrey Dunn, 2011)  I read a half dozen or so books about or by Palin in the last year for a research project, and if you're going to read only one about the Killah from Wassila, this is it.  Dunn more than makes the case that the right-wing darling is a pathological liar and, when in positions of power, is downright dangerous.

LIFE (Keith Richards and James Fox, 2011)  Okay, like most folks I had low expectations for an autobio by this Rolling Stones' founding member, but the cat can write almost as well as he can play -- and survive drug binges and busts.  In fact, the beyond endless accounts of his over-the-top embrace of hard drugs are the only downers, while his confirmation that Mick Jagger is an asshole, albeit an extraordinarily talented one, is affirming.

THE MARSH ARABS (Wilfred Thesiger, 1964) It was a big year for travel books (see The Road to Oxiana below), but Thesiger's account of living among the fiercely independent tribal Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq is as much a magnificent and moving account of a people whose lives changed little for many centuries, untouched by the modern world, as a traditional travelogue.   

THE ROAD TO OXIANA (Robert Byron, 1937) Historian Paul Fussell calls this delightful and sometimes downright zany travel book what Ulysses is to the novel and The Waste Land is to poetry.  A bestseller upon its publication, it chronicles a fascinating journey through the Middle East to the land of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya on the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.

​THE SECRET RIVER (Kate Grenville, 2005) The story of early colonial Australia has never been told better than in this magnificent work of historical fiction, which tells the story of William Thornhill, an illiterate English bargeman who is deported, along with his beloved wife, Sal, to the New South Wales colony where they are confronted with having to forcibly take land from the Aborigines who came before them if they are to survive and prosper.

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Meanwhile, here's my list for last year, as well as a list from 2012 of the books that have most influenced me.

From Marley To Mayans: Twenty Five Recommended Books For Holiday Gift Giving

DETAIL FROM THE DRESDEN CODEX

I read some great books in 2017, but the big thrill of the year did not make itself apparent until I read a book whose author thoughtfully tipped me to a second book, whose author tipped me to a third. 

The first book was The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, the title of which well summarizes the subject.  The second was Proust and the Squid, which explores how the brain transforms itself into a reading organ, while the big payoff was the third, Breaking the Maya Code.  This is the story of the last ancient script to be deciphered, finally unlocking what the glyphs on the monuments, ceramics and extremely rare codices found in the Mayan city-states of Mexico and Central America actually meant. As well as baring the secrets of one of only four codices ever found -- the Dresden Codex, the oldest surviving book from the Americas at 800 or so years old. 

The following 25 books make great holiday gifts.  Most are available in paperback, or if your local lending library is a member of the Interlibrary Loan network, you can borrow a copy for the price of a little bit of shoe leather.  

AMERICAN DUNKIRK: The Waterborne Evacuation Of Manhattan on 9/11 (James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf, 2016) A little appreciated aspect of the response to the collapse of the Twin Towers was the unofficial maritime response — ranging from ferry and tugboat operators to pleasure boat owners — that resulted in the successful evacuation of 500,000 people from Lower Manhattan.  This uplifting account succeeds by moving well beyond the academic-social scientific template in which it is organized through crisp, lucid writing and a willingness to tackle and answer tough philosophical questions.  

BILL GRAHAM PRESENTS: My Life Inside Rock and Out (Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, 2004) Concert impresario Graham was known for three things: Foul language, picking up trash wherever he encountered it, and a deep and abiding love of music -- if not necessarily musicians -- that he parlayed into the most extraordinary run of concerts in rock 'n' roll history.  The oral history format of this book works superbly as he tells the story of escaping Hitler's armies as a child, growing up on the streets of New York and in the dining rooms of Catskills hotels before heading for San Francisco where he founded the Fillmore and launched the careers of innumerable rock icons.  

THE BOOK NOBODY READ: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (Owen Gingerich, 2004) Four and a half centuries after the 1543 publication of De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), astrophysicist Gingerich embarked on an epic quest to see in person all the 600 or so copies of the first and second editions of the landmark book in which Copernicus first suggested that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe.  Three decades and hundreds of thousands of miles of globetrotting later, he was able to offer stunning insights in the form of his remarkable little book.  

BREAKING THE MAYA CODE (Michael D. Coe, 1992, updated 2012) The decipherment Mayan script was, according to Coe, "one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of our age, on a par with the exploration of space and the discovery of the genetic code."  He makes that case eloquently and in such detail that this book is not for the casual reader.  But no matter your interest level, this is a rewarding read as Coe reviews three centuries of breakthroughs as anthropolists and archaelogists grappled their way toward realizing that Mayan was a sophisticated mix of logograms and syllabic signs and not the simplistic representations of a primitive people.  

BRIGHTON: A Novel (Michael Harvey, 2016) This is a beautifully written thriller about Kevin Pearce, a baseball star, honor student and the pride of Boston’s Brighton neighborhood, who is 15 when he leaves town in the back of his uncle’s cab after helping commit a murder.  Some 26 years later, Pearce is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for the Boston Globe with a secret past tangled up in lies and broken promises that threaten to destroy his future as he realizes he can never really leave the old neighborhood as he is forced to return there in search of a serial killer who is striking uncomfortably close to home.  

BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME (Ross King, 2000) How to build an immense (143 feet in diameter) dome literally over thin air?  Improbably, a committee supervising construction of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence’s immense cathedral, turned not to an engineer, but to a goldsmith and clockmaker named Filippo Brunelleschi, a demented genius who spent 28 years in the mid-15th century solving the problems of the construction of the dome — then and now the largest in the world — by discarding commonly used flying buttresses and enlisting the forces of nature, in the process reinventing the field of architecture.  

THE CASTLE CROSS THE MAGNET CARTER: A Novel (Kia Corthron, 2016) The narrative voice of this debut historical novel by playwright Corthron was a bit too unemotional in places for such a deeply emotional story, but the tale she tells is beautifully rendered: The trials and travails of two sets of brothers — one black and one white — that moves back and forth between the early days of World War II and the new millennium, touching on the barbarity of Deep South racism, the civil rights movement, love and death, and the deaf culture.  The culmination of The Castle is powerful, and both extraordinarily devastating and uplifting.   

THE HISTORY AND UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF HANDWRITING (Ann Trubeck, 2016) This delightful and delightfully brief (192 page) book traces the history of handwriting from Sumerian cuniforms 4,000 years ago to the digital age, and from the elegant John Hancockian cursive to today’s barely readable scrawl.  Trubeck eloquently argues — correctly, I believe — that the decline of handwriting in daily life is not a signpost of a decline in civilization as much as the next stage in the evolution of communication, and that the fixation with writing by hand is driven more by emotion than evidence.  

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME (Marcel Proust, 1909~1922) Inexcusably perhaps, it wasn’t until recently that I got around to reading what many critics believe to be the greatest novel in any language (previously and better known as Remembrance of Things Past), and after slow-marching through Volume 1 (a spare 1,070 pages), I can see what all the buzz is about.  Proust’s recounting of growing up, participating in society and falling in love is gorgeously rendered, but the snail’s pace at which the story advances eventually wore me down — and then out — and the remaining six volumes will have to wait.  

JONATHAN SWIFT: The Reluctant Rebel (John Stubbs, 2016) As the subtitle of this marvelous biography suggests, the author of Gulliver’s Travels did not set out to be a satirist and humorist of legenday stature, let alone a formidable defender of the downtrodden in general and Irish in particular against the abuses of the English crown.  Stubbs artfully captures Swift’s many contradictions, not the least of which was being a devout priest who both upheld and defied the dogma of the Anglican church.  His treatment of Swift’s peculiar if chaste attachments to his “Stella” and other unmarried women is especially exemplary.  

THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD: A Novel (António Lobo Antunes, 1979) Forgive me the comparisons with Faulkner and Márquez, but Antunes is very much their equal.  This little masterpiece by the prolific Portuguese novelist lays bare the atrocities visited upon colonial Angola as told through the eyes and voice of Costa, a Portuguese medic.  His haunting account of his memories makes it one of the great 20th century war novels.  Antunes’ imagery is so hallucinatory and unceasing that it reads like one long fever dream, and I sometimes found myself wishing he could dial back on the prose — at least a little bit.  

THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ (John Steinbeck, 1941) In 1940, a year after he published Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck and best friend Ed Ricketts, a biologist, set out from Monterey, California on the chartered sardine boat Western Flyer with an eclectic crew for a 4,000-mile journey of exploration and littoral exploring around the Baja Peninsula and deep into the Sea of Cortez.  The resulting book is fascinating from a scientific point of view, but Steinbeck’s insights into man and his world make it special and his biographical sketch of Ricketts ("Doc" in Cannery Row) is superbly sweet.  

MAD ENCHANTMENT: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (Ross King, 2016) Who has not gazed upon the French Impressionist's paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny with amazement and adoration?  King reveals that behind these lovely depictions of a peaceful and harmonious world was the intense frustration Monet experienced at the challenges of capturing the fleeting effects of light, water and color, as well as his personal torments.  A most readable and beautifully illustrated book, but if anything a bit too detailed unless you really want to know what Monet ate for breakfast every day.  

MISSING MAN: The American Spy Who Vanished In Iran (Barry Meier, 2016) Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent turned private investigator who disappeared in Iran in 2007 on a mission for the CIA, has never been heard from again despite the halting efforts of the U.S. to learn his fate and try to negotiate his release.  Meier does a commendable job in piecing together a story with no ending, but my deeply negative views of the post-9/11 FBI and CIA color my thinking. What they did and did not do in Levinson's case was criminal, but that seems minor to the damage they have inflicted on the U.S. because of their over-weaning self importance.  

NO SIMPLE HIGHWAY: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (Peter Richardson, 2015)  While most of their peers blazed brilliantly and burned out quickly, the Grateful Dead became the counterculture's most durable musical institution, playing over 2,100 shows and selling 40 million albums.  No Simple Highway claims to be the first book to ask why the Dead survived, and while the answer is pretty obvious to anyone who has reveled in their music, this is an informative and enjoyable read, especially in exploring how the band continually defied predictions of their demise and became the model for the modern-day concert experience.  

NOTHING EVER DIES: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Viet Nguyen Than, 2016) Wars are fought twice over -- once on the battlefield and once in our memory -- and that is the subject of this scholarly, profound and challenging but hugely readable book by the author of The Sympathizer.  Nguyen cites the works of philosophers, historians, journalists, filmmakers and artists who have plumbed the murky depths of the psychological impact of war on combatants and civilians.  Nothing Ever Dies is the paradigm exploration of the subject as it applies to war in general, but especially Vietnam.  (Click HERE for a full review.)  

ORDERS TO KILL: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (Amy Knight, 2017) The timeliness of this book cannot be understated with new Russia scandal revelations emerging by the day.  Vladimir Putin's use of murder — whether in Russia or aboard, including the U.S. — has been hiding in plain sight for years.  Emiment KGB scholar Knight traces Putin's rise to absolute power and the many bodies that he left along the way, including Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB officer poisoned while living in London, while revealing that terror attacks in Russia, as well as the Boston Marathon bombing, are part of the same campaign.    

PAY ANY PRICE: Greed, Power and Endless War (James Risen, 2014) The hidden costs of the so-called War on Terror have been immense, ranging from billions of dollars in stolen money to abuses of power to the sanctioned use of torture.   Although Pay Any Price is now three years old, the abuses laid bare by veteran New York Times investigative reporter Risen have, if anything, grew worse in the closing years of the Obama administration, which dared not say that the war was over and a return to normalcy was called for.  Because the war will never be over and a return to normalcy is no longer possible.  

PROUST AND THE SQUID: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Maryanne Wolfe, 2007) This is a fine if occasionally dense book about a remarkable journey: How human beings, who were never born to read, learn to do just that as the brain transforms itself into a reading organism.  (Or in the case of dyslexia, struggles.)  Wolf traces the history of reading from the clay tablets of the Sumarians to the digital age and its instant-information implications, some of them dire because of the possibility that future generations will never be able to read with a comprehension and lucidity we take for granted.    

RAILROAD TRAIN TO HEAVEN (Dan Leo, 2017) This delightful pean to a simpler time when both culture and soda were pop focuses on a self-effacing poet by the name of Arnold Schnabel who communes with a chain-smoking Jesus.  It is a coming-of-age novel, although Arnold is 42 years old, and has the elements the best pulp of L. Sprague de Camp, descriptive richness of Marcel Proust, open tap consciousness of Jack Kerouac, whimsy of Terry Pratchett and a dollop of Philip K. Dick.  Yet is truly original and  its seemingly simple, laugh-out-loud narrative belies deeper meanings. (Click HERE for a full review.)  

THE SLEEP WALKERS: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (Arthur Koestler, 1959) Gingrich's The Book Nobody Read (above) is a book about a book, De revolutionibus by Nicolaus Copernicus, while this is a book nominally about the strange man who first suggested that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe, his place in the history of cosmology and how the tragically stupid split between science and religion set back the scientific revolution for centuries.  Dense at times, but written with a trenchant wit by the well-known author of Darkness at Noon, who turned to writing about the history of science later in life.  

SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY: The Oral History of Bob Marley (Roger Steffens, 2017) For an average white boy from the suburbs, reggae grabbed me hard and has never let go.  Beyond Marley's stupendous abilities as a songwriter, he had a unique capacity to take the suffering of Jamaicans and other people and turn them into poetry, and he was and arguably remains the only global superstar.  Oral histories can be messy, but that is why they can be far more illuminating than straight nonfiction prose.  In Steffens' deft hands, this format renders a humanness to a man who has been endlessly mythologized.  (Click HERE for a full review.)  

THE THIRST: A Harry Hole Novel (Jo Nesbø, 2017) All the weird elements we have come to expect from master Norwegian craftsman Nesbø are here in spades, but the dean of Scandinavian crime writers outdoes himself in creating an especially lurid cast of psycho killers and weaving especially labyrinthine plot twists in this 11th book in the Harry Hole series.  Harry is retired from the Oslo Crime Squad and happily married, but is drawn to a series of murders because of the haunting memory of the one man he let get away over his storied career.  It is, he says, like hearing "the voice of a man he was trying not to remember."   

WHEN HEAVEN AND EARTH CHANGED PLACES (Le Ly Hyslip with Jay Wurts, 1989) This extraordinary memoir captures the horrors of the Vietnam War unlike any other.  Le Ly is 12 when U.S. helicopters arrive in her Central Coast village, and by the time she turns 16 she has been a Viet Cong spy and saboteur and endured imprisonment, torture, rape and the deaths of several members of her close-knit Buddhist family.  Two decade after Le Ly escapes the agonies of war for America, her love of family and faith in humanity draws her back to her devastated homeland and scenes of joy and sadness related with a profound poignance.  

ZHOU ENLAI: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (Gao Wenquian, 2007) Zhou was premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976 and was the invisible but all-important hand in the modernization of China.  This absorbing if sometime too inside baseball bio hammers home the reality that the signature accomplishment of the man Richard Nixon called "the greatest statesman of our era" was not surviving the Long March or Cultural Revolution, but the brutish and incredibly cruel Mao, to whom he always deferred.  And that Zhou ended up being more powerful in life than death.    

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Meanwhile, here are my holiday gift giving lists for 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013.