2012+Unselected+Books

__**2012 Book Summaries**__

__Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession and How Da Vinci Created the World in His Image__ by Toby Lester This is the story of Vitruvian Man: Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of a man in a circle and a square. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit, the figure appears on everything from coffee cups and T-shirts to book covers and corporate logos. In short, it has become the world’s most famous cultural icon, yet almost nobody knows anything about it. Leonardo didn’t summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was playing with the idea, set down by the Roman architect Vitruvius, that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was therefore to imply that the human body was the world in miniature. This idea, known as the theory of the microcosm, was the engine that had powered Western religious and scientific thought for centuries, and Leonardo hitched himself to it in no uncertain terms. Yet starting in the 1480s he set out to do something unprecedented. If the design of the body truly did reflect that of the cosmos, he reasoned, then by studying its proportions and anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been done before—by peering deep into both body and soul—he might broaden the scope of his art to include the broadest of metaphysical horizons. He might, in other words, obtain an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world as a whole. Vitruvian Man gives that exhilarating idea visual expression. In telling its story, Toby Lester weaves together a century-spanning saga of people and ideas. Assembled here is an eclectic cast of fascinating characters: the architect Vitruvius; the emperor Caesar Augustus and his “body of empire”; early Christian and Muslim thinkers; the visionary mystic Hildegard of Bingen; the book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini; the famous dome-builder Filippo Brunelleschi; Renaissance anatomists, architects, art theorists, doctors, and military engineers; and, of course, in the starring role, Leonardo himself—whose ghost Lester resurrects in the surprisingly unfamiliar context of his own times. Da Vinci’s Ghost is written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester’s award-winning first book, the “almost unbearably thrilling” (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World. Like Vitruvian Man itself, the book captures a pivotal time in the history of Western thought when the Middle Ages was giving way to the Renaissance, when art and science and philosophy all seemed to be converging as one, and when it seemed just possible, at least to Leonardo da Vinci, that a single human being might embody—and even understand—the nature of everything.

__Wolf Totem__ by Jiang Rong this novel wraps an ecological warning and political indictment around the story of Chen Zhen, a Beijing student sent during the 1960s Cultural Revolution to live as a shepherd among the herdsmen of the Olonbulang, a grassland on the Inner Mongolia steppes. Chen Zhen is fascinated by the herdsmen, descendants of Genghis Khan, and by the grassland's wolves, with whom the herdsmen live in uneasy harmony. When Mao's government orders the mass execution of the wolves to make way for farming collectives run by Chen Zhen's own people, the Han Chinese, he makes for a somewhat passive hero. Except for Bilgee, the wise old herdsman, and Director Bao, the face of the Communist government in the Olonbulang, the novel's secondary characters make little impression. The wolf packs, however, are vividly and beautifully described. As Chen Zhen helplessly witnesses the consequences of the order, he risks the enmity of both the herdsmen and the state officials by capturing a wolf cub and lovingly raising it as his own wolf totem. Jiang Rong writes reverently about life on the steppes.

__Country Driving__ by Peter Hessler Hessler investigates the country's lurch into modernity through three engrossing narratives. In an epic road trip following the Great Wall across northern China, he surveys dilapidated frontier outposts from the imperial past while barely surviving the advent of the nation's uniquely terrifying car culture. He probes the transformation of village life through the saga of a family of peasants trying to remake themselves as middle-class entrepreneurs. Finally, he explores China's frantic industrialization, embodied by the managers and workers at a fly-by-night bra-parts factory in a Special Economic Zone. Hessler has a sharp eye for contradictions, from the absurdities of Chinese drivers' education courses—low-speed obstacle courses are mandatory, while seat belts and turn signals are deemed optional—to the leveling of an entire mountain to make way for the Renli Environmental Protection Company. Better yet, he has a knack for finding the human-scale stories that make China's vast upheavals both comprehensible and moving. The result is a fascinating portrait of a society tearing off into the future with only the sketchiest of maps.

__Oracle Bones__ by Peter Hessler Hessler frames his narrative with short chapters about Chinese artifacts: the underground city being excavated at Anyang; the oracle bones of the title ("inscriptions on shell and bone" considered the earliest known writing in East Asia); and he pays particular attention to how language affects culture, often using Chinese characters and symbols to make a point.A talented writer and journalist, Hessler has courage—he's undercover at the Falun Gong demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and in the middle of anti-American protests in Nanjing after the Chinese embassy bombings in Belgrade—and a sense of humor (the Nanjing rioters attack a statue of Ronald McDonald since Nanjing has no embassies). The tales of his Fuling students' adventures in the new China's boom towns; the Uighur trader, an ethnic minority from China's western border, who gets asylum after entering the U.S. with //jiade// (false) documents; the oracle bones scholar Chen Mengjia, who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution—all add a seductive element of human interest.There's little information available in China, we learn, but Hessler gets the stories that no one talks about and delivers them in a personal study that informs, entertains and mesmerizes. Everyone in the Western world should read this book. //(May)//

__Lost In Translation__ by Nicole Mones A novel of searing intelligence and startling originality, //Lost in Translation// heralds the debut of a unique new voice on the literary landscape. Nicole Mones creates an unforgettable story of love and desire, of family ties and human conflict, and of one woman's struggle to lose herself in a foreign land--only to discover her home, her heart, herself. At dawn in Beijing, Alice Mannegan pedals a bicycle through the deserted streets. An American by birth, a translator by profession, she spends her nights in Beijing's smoke-filled bars, and the Chinese men she so desires never misunderstand her intentions. All around her rushes the air of China, the scent of history and change, of a world where she has come to escape her father's love and her own pain. It is a world in which, each night as she slips from her hotel, she hopes to lose herself forever. For Alice, it began with a phone call from an American archaeologist seeking a translator. And it ended in an intoxicating journey of the heart--one that would plunge her into a nation's past, and into some of the most rarely glimpsed regions of China. Hired by an archaeologist searching for the bones of Peking Man, Alice joins an expedition that penetrates a vast, uncharted land and brings Professor Lin Shiyang into her life. As they draw closer to unearthing the secret of Peking Man, as the group's every move is followed, their every whisper recorded, Alice and Lin find shelter in each other, slowly putting to rest the ghosts of their pasts. What happens between them becomes one of the most breathtakingly erotic love stories in recent fiction. Indeed, //Lost in Translation// is a novel about love--between a nation and its past, between a man and a memory, between a father and a daughter. Its powerful impact confirms the extraordinary gifts of a master storyteller, Nicole Mones.

__Conquistadora__ by Esmeralda Santiago As a young girl growing up in Spain, Ana Larragoity Cubillas is powerfully drawn to Puerto Rico by the diaries of an ancestor who traveled there with Ponce de León. And in handsome twin brothers Ramón and Inocente—both in love with Ana—she finds a way to get there. She marries Ramón, and in 1844, just eighteen, she travels across the ocean to a remote sugar plantation the brothers have inherited on the island. Ana faces unrelenting heat, disease and isolation, and the dangers of the untamed countryside even as she relishes the challenge of running Hacienda los Gemelos. But when the Civil War breaks out in the United States, Ana finds her livelihood, and perhaps even her life, threatened by the very people on whose backs her wealth has been built: the hacienda’s slaves, whose richly drawn stories unfold alongside her own. And when at last Ana falls for a man who may be her destiny—a once-forbidden love—she will sacrifice nearly everything to keep hold of the land that has become her true home. This is a sensual, riveting tale, set in a place where human passions and cruelties collide: thrilling history that has never before been brought so vividly and unforgettably to life.

__Tinkers__ by Paul Harding An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer’s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, //Tinkers// is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.

__Out Stealing Horses__ by Per Petterson Trond's friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on "borrowed" horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day--an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys. Set in the easternmost region of Norway, //Out Stealing Horses// begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.

__The Submission__ by Amy Waldman A jury gathers in Manhattan to select a memorial for the victims of a devastating terrorist attack. Their fraught deliberations complete, the jurors open the envelope containing the anonymous winner’s name—and discover he is an American Muslim. Instantly they are cast into roiling debate about the claims of grief, the ambiguities of art, and the meaning of Islam. Their conflicted response is only a preamble to the country’s. The memorial’s designer is an enigmatic, ambitious architect named Mohammad Khan. His fiercest defender on the jury is its sole widow, the self-possessed and mediagenic Claire Burwell. But when the news of his selection leaks to the press, she finds herself under pressure from outraged family members and in collision with hungry journalists, wary activists, opportunistic politicians, fellow jurors, and Khan himself—as unknowable as he is gifted. In the fight for both advantage and their ideals, all will bring the emotional weight of their own histories to bear on the urgent question of how to remember, and understand, a national tragedy.

__Room__ by Emma Donahue To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer. //Room// is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating--a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.

__The Desert Queen__ by Janet Wallach Turning away from the privileged world of the "eminent Victorians," Gertrude Bell (1868—1926) explored, mapped, and excavated the world of the Arabs. Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. E. Lawrence's brawn. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire. In this masterful biography, Janet Wallach shows us the woman behind these achievements–a woman whose passion and defiant independence were at odds wit the confined and custom-bound England she left behind. Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure.

__The China Study__ by T. Collin Campbell Referred to as the "Grand Prix of epidemiology" by //The New York Times//, this study examines more than 350 variables of health and nutrition with surveys from 6,500 adults in more than 2,500 counties across China and Taiwan, and conclusively demonstrates the link between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. While revealing that proper nutrition can have a dramatic effect on reducing and reversing these ailments as well as curbing obesity, this text calls into question the practices of many of the current dietary programs, such as the Atkins diet, that are widely popular in the West. The politics of nutrition and the impact of special interest groups in the creation and dissemination of public information are also discussed.

__The Road of Lost Innocence__ by Somaly Mam Born in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia. Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking—rape, torture, deprivation—until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind. Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, //The Road of Lost Innocence// recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls. She has orchestrated raids on brothels and rescued sex workers, some as young as five and six; she has built shelters, started schools, and founded an organization that has so far saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. Her memoir will leave you awestruck by her tenacity and courage and will renew your faith in the power of an individual to bring about change.

__In Defense of Food; An Eater’s Manifesto__ by Michael Polan Not all scientific study of Mars is about extraterrestrial exploration. Some of it is about chocolate. Scientists at Mars Corporation have found evidence that the flavanols in cocoa have beneficial effects on the heart, thus allowing Mars to market products like its health-minded Rich Chocolate Indulgence Beverage. In the same spirit, nutritionism has lately helped to justify vitamin-enriched Diet Coke, bread bolstered with the Omega-3 fatty acids more readily found in fish oil, and many other new improvements on what Michael Pollan calls "the tangible material formerly known as food." Goaded by "the silence of the yams," Pollan wants to help old-fashioned edibles fight back. So he has written "In Defense of Food," a tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential. "We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again," he writes. In this lively, invaluable book — which grew out of an essay Pollan wrote for The New York Times Magazine, for which he is a contributing writer — he assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice. Experts, he says, often do a better job of muddying these issues than of shedding light on them. And it serves their own purposes to create confusion. In his opinion the industry-financed branch of nutritional science is "remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study."

__The Shadow of the Wind__ by Carlos Ruiz Zaphone Daniel was ten when he was taken into a cemetery and told he was allowed to save one soul. His father owned a bookstore packed full of contemporary titles of his 1940's Barcelona, but Daniel's father's real love was the appropriately named "Cemetery of Forgotten Books," a guarded vault filled with a labyrinth of shelves, covered, top to bottom, with volumes wasting away in obscurity. Daniel is told to take one book, read it, and protect its story for the rest of his life. Carlos Ruiz Zafon's //The Shadow of the Wind// seems born of a different time. An ode to its own genre, a love song to itself, the story of a boy who is shown the power of a book, one so powerful that it threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves. The novel Daniel picks transforms him. Written by a Julian Carax, Daniel goes on a quest to find out more about the author and is surprised to learn that other volumes of his books have been disappearing through the hands of a mysterious stranger determined to burn the last remaining few. Fans of the classics will find the tale utterly compelling, with its magical interweavings of fate, time, and romance, and Zafón's knack for mapping out every inch of a scene through a liquid flow of words.

__Those Who Save Us__ by Janet Bloom The narrative shuttles between the story of Anna, a young woman living in Weimar during World War II, and Trudy, her daughter, who lives in Minneapolis in the late 1990s. These differing points of view allow Blum to convey the moral complexity of her subject matter, and she can enhance the suspense of Anna's dramatic wartime life by ending on cliffhangers. When Anna falls in love in 1939 she breaks the law that forbids relationships between Germans and Jews. Her father's sympathies to the Nazi party make her position all the more precarious. Fleeing his house, she finds refuge in a local bakery run by a member of the Resistance. When she begins taking pastries to officers at Buchenwald concentration camp and simultaneously carrying bread and information to the camp prisoners, she enters into a dual role that will last long after she stops baking. Anna's beauty is noticed by one of the camp officers and she is forced to make terrible choices. Anna has never told Trudy the details of her life during the war; all Trudy has is a photograph of Anna, herself and a Nazi officer posed together as a family, and some persistent nightmares. Her career as an academic historian and her research project to record German memories of the Nazi regime is obviously motivated by this mystery, even if she won't admit it to herself. Anna insists to Trudy that "the past is dead, and better it remain so", but the novel demonstrates the ongoing power of the past, how the Nazis' cruelty caused shockwaves that travel through the years, carrying anger, hurt and grief. Listening to a Jewish man, Rainer, reciting his experience of the war, Trudy is overcome by guilt about her German ancestry, but her interviewee is himself consumed by his failure to protect a younger brother.

__Emma__ by Jane Austin (at her finest) Available free on project Guenburg [] Published in 1815, Emma was written at the height of Jane Austen’s popularity. The novel focuses on a heroine who takes an interest in matchmaking. The Prince Regent, George, did Austen the "favor" of allowing her to dedicate Emma to him. Austen probably wasn’t so excited about the prospect of dedicating her novel to a man who was, by all accounts, dissipated, drunk, and superficial. George set the standards of "gentlemanlike" behavior during his time. According to him, fashionable men were dandies – the sort who would ride sixteen miles to London just to get a haircut. Interestingly, Austen’s novel also takes up the question of gentlemanly – (and gentlewomanly) behavior – but she comes to very, very different conclusions than the Prince Regent. It might not be a coincidence that Mr. Knightley, the rugged, thoughtful, honest hero of our novel, is also named George. Ironic? Just a little. We like to imagine the good prince squirming in his seat as he read this novel. Emma contains one of Austen’s most remarkable heroines. That’s a huge claim, we know – Austen is known for her strong, intelligent, amazing women. Emma is, of course, strong and intelligent and pretty amazing – but she’s also amazingly flawed. She charges right in to mistake after mistake, convinced that she’s somehow impervious to the sorts of errors in judgment which she’s so quick to notice in those around her. Misguided heroines are actually pretty common in literature, but rarely do they display the sorts of tenacity and charm that Emma exudes. We love her even when she’s screwing up – largely because she’s able to accurately dissect most peoples’ characters even as she remains blind to her own.

__The Things They Carried__ by Obrien A fictionalized Vietnam memoir, not always true, but all about truth. Told in vignettes about characters. Many people think this is the best work of fiction ever written about Vietnam. Some even think it is the best work of fiction ever written about war. Both are right, and they were right 20 years ago when this book came out for the first time. In a rarely done tribute to one of its most successful books and its author, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt has re-issued “The Things They Carried” in both hardcover and paperback. That it appears near the seventh anniversary of a dual war effort that has many similarities to the war in Vietnam may not be coincidental. But it is not consequential, for this book is so good, it bears reissue every year. In 1968, Tim O’Brien, newly graduated from Macalester College in his home state of Minnesota and accepted for graduate school at Harvard, went to war reluctantly. Opposed to the war, he’d even flirted with the idea of “running,” as some put it then, to Canada to escape the draft. But he didn’t. He went to war, survived, came back, did go to Harvard, worked for an unhappy while for The Washington Post and then went home to Minnesota. Twenty years later, in 1990, he published this book. To say it was successful would be an understatement. “The Things They Carried” won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. It deserved to win them. A qualification may be in order here. If by fiction, one means imagined events, accounts of people and things who never actually lived or happened, then maybe Mr. O’Brien’s work isn’t fiction, because so much of it is based on his real-life experiences in Vietnam 40 years ago. But as he writes in “How to Tell a True War Story,” one of the almost two dozen interrelated and interwoven stories that comprise this book, “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.” (Got that?)

__Red Mars__ (a sci-fi trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson 100 people are sent to Mars to colonize. About the sociology of the colonization against a backdrop of world chaos on Earth as the large multinational corporations take over the world. Some books are worth reading more than once. Kim Stanley Robinson’s //Red Mars// falls into this category. Like //Dune// and other great science fiction epics, the book succeeds on a variety of levels, including technology, environment, and characterization. I don’t agree with everything the author says in the book, but I still believe strongly that this book is well worth reading. From a technological level, Robinson populates the book with massive, vehicles and tools that NASA and Russia could only dream about in the best of times. The “First Hundred” astronaut-colonists are sent to Mars aboard a massive rotating spacecraft made of Space Shuttle External Tank segments, and the toys only get better from there. Some come from a chaotic Earth, some are home-grown: massive dirigibles; genetically engineered microorganisms for terraforming the planet; lightweight “tenting” material capable of providing domes to cover entire cities; stealthy rovers; space elevators; life-extension treatments; and on and on. The tale covers a large tapestry of places, technological marvels, and years. As civilization is established on Mars, the tools of survival gradually become more sophisticated as well, and these tools eventually create many of the conflicts that propel the characters across the surface of Mars.