Most of you probably know Jon Krakauer, as I do, from his chronicle of an Everest climb gone wrong, Into Thin Air. The book was a massive success, easily the best selling mountaineering book since The Little Engine That Could. Reading Watty Piper’s book was stressful and strenuous enough for me; I figured Krakauer’s breakthrough book, or any of the other adrenaline-lit that leapt onto bookstore shelves in it’s wake, were much too intense for my fragile literary demeanor.

It was this same blind eye to adventure non-fiction that kept me away from Under the Banner of Heaven. I’m not totally to blame: the publisher has mimiced the general design tenants of Into Thin Air for Krakauer’s three other books (Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild are the other two titles): bold black and white text superimposed on an iconic nature photo and, of course, the author’s name at various levels of prominence. But a closer look below Under the Banner of Heaven‘s photo of a jagged red rock outcrop revealed some provocative teaser text: Mormons. Murder. Polygamy.

Giddy up! Now that’s a story!

In 1984, Ron and Dan Lafferty killed their sister-in-law and her 15-month-old child. Their defense? God told them to do it. As members of a fundamentalist spur off the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, this message came to them in a revelation. It wasn’t their first. At the time of the murder the Lafferty’s were practically off the grid: no taxes, no power, no jobs, all in allegiance to a prophet they believed was “The One Mighty and Strong” foretold by the Book of Mormon. Power corrupts, and soon enough Ron suspected that he might be “The One” instead. And apparently, god had some business for “The One” to attend to, including the aforementioned murders.

I’m fascinated by the LDS church, even as I’m repulsed by it. As you might imagine, the lifestyles of the fringe groups are even more disturbing. Krakauer, to his credit, takes no easy swipes. He’s patient with his story, providing a brief history of the church as well as the background of its various fundamentalist movements. His chapter on the abduction of Elizabeth Smart by a polygamous prophet/gardner is less a distraction than a unsettling reminder that the Lafferty brothers aren’t alone in their extremism. When things get gory, he doesn’t flinch, but he also doesn’t glorify. This isn’t true crime sensationalism. It’s a reasonable examinition of the power of faith to transform those who’ve never known to trust in anything else. It’s a lonely, unsettling book. It’s also essential reading.

The New York Times public editor Byron Calame on how the New York Times Book Review tries “to maintain distance from the players in the book industry” as well as protect itself from conflicts of interest.

The Book Review: Who Critiques Whom – and Why? – New York Times (requires password)

Calame’s final conclusion? That the Book Review editors should revisit a shelved idea – rather than reviewing books by their colleagues at the paper, “simply notifying readers of new books by Times staff.”

Or just let Michiko Kakutani write them

Oscar Villalon, book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, addresses the subject of my previous post. He invokes editorial privilege — as he calls it his “bench power” — in his his decision to select a book that was negatively reviewed in the Chronicle Book section (Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men) for the year-end “best” list. KQED | Forum: Reviewing Books

It’s an interesting discussion about how books are chosen and how one editor tries to avoid letting the incestuous publishing industry overwhelm the objectivity of his reviews.

Bob Dylan and I share the same birthday. I know, I know. It’s an insignificant fact, more appropriate for the back of US Weekly or a supermarket astrology book. And yet, since the coincidence concerns Dylan, I can’t help but feel a warm pinch of pride when I think of it. He (with Tom Petty) was my first real concert (not including Cindi Lauper, whom I went to see only because my sister agreed to let me go along – I swear) and I maintain a certain, quiet level of fanatacism.

But really, I don’t feel like a fan at all. Not if Greil Marcus is the standard. After exploring the link between Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes and “the cauldron of the American experience in which it was formed in Invisible Republic, he turns his attention to “Like a Rolling Stone”, one of the definitive singles of its era. This book-length treatment of a song/album is something of a trend, with Continuum’s 33 1/3 series leading the charge. But Marcus has been doing it for years, and his experience shows in ways that might not all be flattering.

Anna Godberson, in Esquire calls Marcus a “master of digression.” I suppose that’s true. I’m not sure it’s a compliment. At the heart of this book is a cogent, even thrilling argument about how a song can both transform and implicate the culture…then again, I find myself trying to nail down what Marcus’ intention is but, as Godberson indicates, he’s always slipping away from it. He’s smart as a whip with a vocabulary and metaphor that he throws around like Dylan in “Desolation Row”. Except this is prose, not songwriting. Anyone who remembers Dylan’s “novel” Tarantula will understand the qualification is an important one.

There are thrills in this 200 page book. Marcus’ take-by-take transcription of the recording session is fascinating. And the intensity of his thinking, even though obscured by his penchant for literary crosshatching, kept me plowing ahead. I just can’t help but feel that this material would have been better served by a 10,000 word essay.

For a free peek at Marcus’ writing read this review of Martin Scorcese’s documentary No Direction Home, which recently aired on PBS.

Here’s what the New York Times Book Review had to say about Prep, one of their top 5 fiction books of the year.

Most novels are autobiographical in some way, first novels in particular. But even allowing for that, ”Prep,” both in structure and in narrative, feels like a memoir. Without an author photo of a teenage Sittenfeld posed on the quad of an elite East Coast boarding school, we can’t know. And it doesn’t really matter. What is of interest, and why ”Prep” deserves pride of place on any summer recommended reading list, is the incisive and evenhanded way in which Sittenfeld explores issues of class.

Read as fiction, Sittenfeld’s novel sets up dramatic expectations that aren’t met. By the end of the book — which culminates in graduation, naturally — we see that life at Ault hasn’t changed Lee in any profound way. She is still awkward, perhaps less vigilantly critical, but you wonder if perhaps she would have become this person even if she had spent her high school years in South Bend. As it is, there is no defining moment, no Knowlesian Gene-and-Finny-in-the-tree scene where we feel that life will never be the same again, or some truth about human nature is revealed.

So it’s a novel that feels like a memoir that sets up dramatic expectations that aren’t met. Maybe the Gray Old Lady should have a disclaimer in each edition:

The views expressed herein are not those of the New York Times, but rather just content, mostly from freelance contractors, filling space, really, making friendly with publishers, what have you. In the end, we reserve the right to contradict ourselves at the behest of thsoe same industry connections, good friends, or on sheer flights of whimsy .

What galls me is the editorial audacity. At least offer a disclaimer, or a rationale for choosing a book that was negatively in your pages as one of the top books of the year. I’ve got no truck with Prep – I’ve not read it, I probably won’t. I’ve heard good and bad things about it from friends. Maybe this was the controversial choice, something to stir up debate. Fair enough. Job done. But at what cost? I know it’s not a matter of national security, but editorial consistency starts at home. If you fluff the easy stuff, how on earth can you be trusted with WMDs?

You can read the whole review here. (registration required)

The 10 Best Books of 2005 – New York Times

Discuss…

There’s no secret about Shakespeare’s endurance: the astounding adapatability of his works. Summer stock crews costume them with anything from cowpoke chaps to Facist brownshirts to skin-tight space suits. Last year’s Merchant of Venice used the Venetian canals and brackish mist of the title’s city to underscore the characters’ serpentine motives. The MTV-fuelled Romeo + Juliet outed his most famous love story as a hangover lurking behind saccharine pop culture. Whatever the setting, one thing remains the same: the bard’s works continue to provoke as many questions as they answer, unwittingly providing a nice nest egg for English professors around the globe. This line of inquiry dead-ended for me inShakespeare in Love; it might have seemed confirmation that all those owly-eyed english majors are just as interested the bard’s life outside the theatre. I suspect they all went for a clever love story smarted up by its . Or to see Gwyneth Paltrow’s bubbies.

Yet the debate about Shakespeare’s “real” identity persists, resurrected every few years during a slow news week. In his preface, Greenblatt lays out the basic question that keeps the question alive:

A young man from a small provincial town — a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections, and without a university education — moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time…How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained?

From these, the first sentences of the book, the author streaks forward as a true believer, juggling existing evidence with aplomb until the truth of what’s being presented is less important by the cohesive story being told. Constrained to write largely in the subjunctive, he pulls details from the plays, from property records, from the culture of Elizabethan England to create a complelling, altogether believable portrait of Literature’s Grand Old Man. The fact that the greatest dramatist in English history comes off as a respectable, fiscally conservative gent somewhat unexpected, even a little disappointing. But, as Jerry Stahl and many others proved, we don’t need our writers to be characters. Just good writers.

And he’s got that going for him.