 KIRKUS REVIEWS
This Week's Featured Reviews
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 | Trynka, Paul IGGY: Open Up and Bleed
February 15, 2007 - Born and raised in Nowheresville, Mich., James Osterberg was every mother's dream: brilliant, charismatic, an all-around good guy. But during high school, Jimmy took up the drums and decided that playing loud was more fun than being an all-around good guy. He joined a band, some music-making thugs introduced him to mind-bending drugs, and before long, our hero was front man for a dumb but charming group called The Stooges. Jimmy Osterberg became Iggy Pop, and Iggy Pop became one of the most iconic musical figures of the late '60s and early '70s. But those drugs took their toll, and Ig's career turned into a peaks-and-valleys mess....The author's love for a flawed-but-deep-down-okay dude, plus his amazing eye for detail, make this one of the finest rock bios of recent memory. ...Full Review
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| Willocks, Tim THE RELIGION
February 15, 2007 - British psychiatrist, screenwriter and novelist Willocks portrays Renaissance warfare with gusto, stirring the depravity of the Inquisition into the siege of Malta, where Suleiman the Magnificent has sent his vast armies to obliterate the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, a monastic order with a power base nearly as rich as the pope's. The story hangs on the broad shoulders of Mattias Tannhauser, son of a German blacksmith, who was abducted and adopted by raiding Moslems, giving him vast insight into both Christian and Moslem viewpoints in the unsettled world of the Mediterranean....Stone walls crumble, war machines rumble, bodies fill the ditches, and once in a while there's some terrific sex. ...Full Review
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Current Issue: Fiction
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| Bennett, Vanora PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN WOMAN
February 15, 2007 - British journalist Bennett's first novel takes a sober approach to a well-trod patch of English history. Her educated heroine, Meg Giggs, is a ward in the home of Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More, giving her a ringside seat overlooking the terrible ...Full Review
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| Bohjalian, Chris THE DOUBLE BIND
February 01, 2007 - Schizophrenic, yes, and alcoholic—but Bobbie Crocker isn't your stereotypical street person. Bohjalian (Before You Know Kindness, 2004, etc.) invests him with mystery; when he dies in Burlington, Vt., he leaves behind photographs from 1960s issues ...Full Review
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| Crace, Jim THE PESTHOUSE
February 01, 2007 - The latest from Britain's Crace will likely draw comparison with Cormac McCarthy's The Road, as both concern love's salvation in a ravaged world on the brink of extinction. Crace sets his plot within an earlier stage of an American apocalypse, a time when most of the assurances of civilization within society have disappeared, even as there remains widespread hope of escape. Whereas pilgrims and pioneers once headed west for a better life, across the ocean to a New World and then across the country in the spirit of Manifest Destiny, the tide of history has now shifted back east....Issues of family (blood or formed), religious faith, fate and the refusal to submit to it enrich an engrossing novel that may be the richest and most ambitious of the renowned author's career. ...Full Review
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| Drabble, Margaret THE SEA LADY
February 01, 2007 - Celebrity-scholar Ailsa Kelman makes plans to accept an honorary degree from a university in northern England because she knows it's a chance to see her old love Humphrey Clark, who is also receiving a degree. Although unaware that Ailsa will be ...Full Review
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| Elon, Emuna IF YOU AWAKEN LOVE
February 15, 2007 - Early on, Maya Dror announces to her mother, Shlomtzion, that she is engaged to be married in three weeks to Ariel Berman, son of the prominent rabbi Yair Berman. Maya, however, has never known of her mothers past life: that a long time ago, ...Full Review
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| Englander, Nathan THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES
February 15, 2007 - Englander focuses tightly on the family of Kaddish Poznan, who scrapes together a living by obliterating despised surnames (those of "the famous Jewish pimps of Buenos Aires . . . [and] their . . . whores") from gravestones in a cemetery unvisited ...Full Review
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| Farris, John YOU DON'T SCARE ME
February 15, 2007 - Chase perches precociously on the edge of womanhood. The Jubilation County, Ga., girl and her little brother, Jimmy, live with their widowed mother on prime acreage left to them by their father. But Chase's mother makes a bad move: She takes up with ...Full Review
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| Gaige, Amity THE FOLDED WORLD
February 15, 2007 - Gaige was honored as one of the National Book Foundation's "5 [exceptional authors] under 35" for her debut, O My Darling (2005). Her second time around again showcases a gift for capturing the simultaneous proximity and distance in a relationship. ...Full Review
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| Garc"a, Cristina A HANDBOOK TO LUCK
February 01, 2007 - Its structure of juxtaposed episodes follows the pattern employed in her earlier books The Agüero Sisters (1997) and the NBA-nominated Dreaming in Cuban (1992). In a compound narrative spanning the years 1968–87, we observe the distinct paths ...Full Review
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| Goonan, Kathleen Ann IN WAR TIMES
February 01, 2007 - In 1941, Sam Dance, an army volunteer with a talent for engineering, sleeps with his physics professor, Eliani Hadntz, a refugee from Eastern Europe. She leaves him a set of advanced scientific papers on esoteric subjects and a set of plans for ...Full Review
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| Hall, Oakley LOVE AND WAR IN CALIFORNIA
February 15, 2007 - Payton Daltrey feels lost, a condition shared in some degree by virtually everyone he knows. The reason is the dismaying, disorienting war, of course, the war that renders all the solid old verities alarmingly porous. On top of that, San Diego State ...Full Review
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| Hall, Steven THE RAW SHARK TEXTS
February 01, 2007 - Narrator Eric Sanderson suffers from what his psychiatrist, Dr. Randle, calls "psychotropic fugue," a recurring amnesia. The only clues he has to the catastrophe that triggered his psychosis are those provided by Dr. Randle and through letters and ...Full Review
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| Jacobson, Howard KALOOKI NIGHTS
February 01, 2007 - Jacobson's ninth novel (The Making of Henry, 2004, etc.) makes powerfully relevant use of his trademark ferocious wit and excoriating commentary. His narrator is cartoonist Max Glickman, who grew up in central England in the 1950s, the son of a Jew ...Full Review
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| Johnston, Wayne THE CUSTODIAN OF PARADISE
February 15, 2007 - That novel told the Dickensian story of Newfoundlander (and historical character) Joseph Smallwood's circuitous ascent to the positions of provincial prime minister and father of its act of union (or "confederation") with Canada in 1949. Here, ...Full Review
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| Kerrigan, Gene THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR
February 15, 2007 - While Garda Joe Mills tries to talk a jumper in from a ledge in Galway, his boss, Inspector Harry Synnott, is interrogating young Teresa Hunt about a rape charge in Dublin. On a nearby street, drug addict Dixie Peyton uses a syringe filled with red ...Full Review
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| Lippman, Laura WHAT THE DEAD KNOW
February 01, 2007 - No one thought trust-fund brat Chet Willoughby would make a good cop, but in the 20 years before he retired to care for his ailing wife, Evelyn, he cleared every case but one. Willoughby never learned why or how someone abducted Sunny Bethany, 15, ...Full Review
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| Mankell, Henning DEPTHS
February 15, 2007 - In this soul-torn work, Mankell (The Man Who Smiled, 2006, etc.) has imagined a perfect existentialist hero—a man who does not know himself. Naval Commander and hydrographic survey engineer, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman is masterful at his work: ...Full Review
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| Mostert, Natasha SEASON OF THE WITCH
February 15, 2007 - Following an arresting Prologue, which describes an eerie, fateful seduction, Mostert introduces her protagonist, Gabriel Blackstone, a 30-something Londoner who has turned his psychic "gift" into a thriving career as an "information thief." When we ...Full Review
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| Mu˜oz, Manuel THE FAITH HEALER OF OLIVE AVENUE
February 01, 2007 - They live on the wrong side of the tracks in a small Valley town near Fresno, Calif. They clean houses, do maintenance work at the paper mill. They suffer under "the fists of daily living," and their marriages are "as tenuous as spiderwebs." Several ...Full Review
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| Paton Walsh, Jill THE BAD QUARTO
February 01, 2007 - Imogene Quy, nurse and fellow of St. Agatha's College, is a curious, compassionate and clever sleuth. Her interest in the nightclimbers, daredevils who over the years have scaled most of Oxford and Cambridge's historic buildings, is aroused when ...Full Review
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| Pollero, Rhonda KNOCK OFF
February 01, 2007 - Champion discount shopper Finley Tanner has never thought of her job in the Estates and Trusts Department of Dane, Lieberman and Zarnowski as anything but a means to keep her in last season's Lilly Pulitzer—until Victor Dane makes her babysit ...Full Review
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| Talton, Jon CACTUS HEART
February 15, 2007 - The History Shamus was born on the December day in 1999 which Prof. David Mapstone failed to get tenure at San Diego State. Through the agency of old friend Mike Peralta, Chief Deputy of Maricopa County (Ariz.), the hunky ex-history professor got a ...Full Review
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| Wilcox, James HUNK CITY
February 01, 2007 - Citizens of fictional Tula Springs, La., the site of such formidably funny predecessors as Modern Baptists and Miss Undine's Living Room, cluster around protagonist Burma Van Buren, widowed, passing 60 and hell-bent on supporting numerous liberal causes abominated by her bone-deep conservative neighbors. Burma's rich, you see, thanks to the fortune left by her octogenarian spouse, a prosperous catfish farmer and big-time lottery winner. But commercial schemes aimed at turning Burma's rundown-lavish domicile "Graceland II" into a mockery of her charitable ideals involve and divide the novel's other characters. These include Burma's drop-dead gorgeous (and duplicitous) accountant Travis Harper, her equally attractive landscape designer Hunter Schine (who's gay, but what the hell) and the man she loved and lost...Enormous fun, and arguably the author's best since the sublime Modern Baptists. ...Full Review
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| Willocks, Tim THE RELIGION
February 15, 2007 - British psychiatrist, screenwriter and novelist Willocks portrays Renaissance warfare with gusto, stirring the depravity of the Inquisition into the siege of Malta, where Suleiman the Magnificent has sent his vast armies to obliterate the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, a monastic order with a power base nearly as rich as the pope's. The story hangs on the broad shoulders of Mattias Tannhauser, son of a German blacksmith, who was abducted and adopted by raiding Moslems, giving him vast insight into both Christian and Moslem viewpoints in the unsettled world of the Mediterranean....Stone walls crumble, war machines rumble, bodies fill the ditches, and once in a while there's some terrific sex. ...Full Review
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| Yizhar, S. PRELIMINARIES
February 15, 2007 - Herein fall the shadows of Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Faulkner (As I Lay Dying) and Woolf (The Waves), for, like those masters, Yizhar (Midnight Convoy and Other Stories, 1969, etc.) is preoccupied with the way the mind works, ...Full Review
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Current Issue: Non-Fiction
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| Bascomb, Neal RED MUTINY
February 15, 2007 - Bascomb (Higher, 2003, etc.) presents the gripping events of June 1905 with sharply focused immediacy and a flair for high drama. The mutiny aboard the Potemkin, which threatened the entire Black Sea Fleet, was eventually suppressed, but it helped ...Full Review
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| Gawande, Atul BETTER
February 15, 2007 - Diligence, ingenuity and "doing right," he answers. Gawande illustrates each of these qualities with stories from his own experience, as well as his observations of and conversations with other physicians. Being diligent about the simple act of ...Full Review
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| Geng, Steve THICK AS THIEVES
February 01, 2007 - Literary folk may have recognized Geng only as the drugged, thieving brother of legendary New Yorker humorist Veronica Geng, but on the sketchier side of Manhattan, he was himself a legend, albeit of a very different kind. Record Steve, or just ...Full Review
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| Godwin, Peter WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN
February 01, 2007 - Godwin's powerful story combines vivid travelogue, heart-wrenching family saga and harrowing political intrigue. Mugabe's pillaging of Zimbabwe is a crime still grossly underreported by the international press and largely ignored by the world community. It is all the more harrowing when seen through the lens of its impact on the lives of Godwin's intrepid parents, an engineer and physician who came to Rhodesia as newlyweds. Hardly the stereotypical colonial exploiters, George and Helen Godwin helped build and nurture the country; they even applauded many of the changes that overthrew white rule and saw Zimbabwe's transformation in 1980 into a black-governed land....Despite Africa's numbing violence and despair, Godwin never loses sight of the natural beauty and native spirit that drew his parents there in the first place. ...Full Review
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| Hagedorn, Ann SAVAGE PEACE
February 01, 2007 - Hagedorn writes that the immediate aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe was the onset of a paranoid anti-communism, of anti-all-things-un-Americanism, in fact, in which domestic spying was at a level about which the current attorney general can ...Full Review
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| Isaacson, Walter EINSTEIN
February 15, 2007 - "A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in Einstein's universe," writes Aspen Institute president and former CNN head Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, 2003, etc.), "one defined on the macro scale by his theory of ...Full Review
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| Jonnes, Jill CONQUERING GOTHAM
February 01, 2007 - Historian Jonnes (Empires of Light, 2003, etc.) evidently had to spend much time burrowing into the slime and muck of Tammany politics before she could get down to digging through the Hudson River silt and mud. The Tammany-dominated Board of ...Full Review
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| Large, David Clay NAZI GAMES
February 15, 2007 - The 1936 Games were also a victory for the Nazis in several senses apart from medal count. They had long reviled the Olympics, whose apolitical ideals and independence from ethnic, religious and racial considerations were anathema to a party founded ...Full Review
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| Lee, Hermione EDITH WHARTON
February 15, 2007 - She was hailed as both a "citizen of the world" and "the last Victorian writer" when she died 70 years ago. Edith Wharton was indeed an accomplished traveler who transcended idle moneyed tourism to endure a few discomforts in search of an ...Full Review
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| McGrath, Melanie THE LONG EXILE
February 01, 2007 - At the outset of this vigorous work of historical detection by UK journalist McGrath (Motel Nirvana, 1996), Canadian outdoorsman Robert Flaherty arrives at Cape Dufferin, in the northeastern Hudson Bay country. He has been here before, having ...Full Review
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| Mordden, Ethan ALL THAT GLITTERED
February 15, 2007 - Anyone who wishes they had witnessed the Great White Way's great past gets a second chance in this latest from Mordden (Beautiful Mornin', 1999, etc.). A vivid stylist, he seats readers fifth-row center as Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie, ...Full Review
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| Neffe, Jürgen EINSTEIN
February 15, 2007 - Neffe, a German journalist specializing in scientific topics, is supremely qualified for his complex task. Although Albert Einstein (1879–1955) lived his final decades in Princeton after fleeing Nazi Germany, he never learned much English and ...Full Review
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| Preston, Richard THE WILD TREES
February 01, 2007 - His tale begins in 1987 with a group of college students visiting one of California's state forests to climb a tall redwood. One of them, Steve Sillet, became a botanist studying the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, where redwoods and ...Full Review
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| Quigley, Joan THE DAY THE EARTH CAVED IN
February 15, 2007 - She begins in 1981, when a schoolboy slipped into a Centralia sinkhole and was nearly killed by the underground heat and toxic fumes. The narrative then retreats to Memorial Day 1962, when a blaze that began at the town dump moved underground to ...Full Review
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| Smith, Jean Edward FDR
February 15, 2007 - Franklin Roosevelt was callow and arrogant when he entered politics. Descended from the colonial aristocracy, he had all the prejudices of the moneyed class. But, recounts an admiring Smith (John Marshall, 1996, etc.), the polio that confined him to ...Full Review
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| Stubbs, John JOHN DONNE
February 15, 2007 - In his impressive debut, Stubbs moves with ease through the complex life of a man who lived in a time of profound religious, political and cultural upheaval. Because John Donne (1572–1631) was such a public person for much of his life—a poet, a ...Full Review
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| Talty, Stephan EMPIRE OF BLUE WATER
February 01, 2007 - Port Royal, Jamaica, England's tenuous toehold in the West Indies, was home to runaway slaves, indentured servants, adventurers, political refugees and other refuse of the New World who constituted the pirate armies of Edward Mansfield and Henry ...Full Review
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| Tooze, Adam THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION
February 01, 2007 - In the 1930s, writes Tooze (Economic History/Cambridge Univ.), Germany's economy was comparable to Iran's or South Africa's today, of middling importance internationally but regionally influential. Well into the Hitler years, Germany still had 15 ...Full Review
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| Trynka, Paul IGGY: Open Up and Bleed
February 15, 2007 - Born and raised in Nowheresville, Mich., James Osterberg was every mother's dream: brilliant, charismatic, an all-around good guy. But during high school, Jimmy took up the drums and decided that playing loud was more fun than being an all-around good guy. He joined a band, some music-making thugs introduced him to mind-bending drugs, and before long, our hero was front man for a dumb but charming group called The Stooges. Jimmy Osterberg became Iggy Pop, and Iggy Pop became one of the most iconic musical figures of the late '60s and early '70s. But those drugs took their toll, and Ig's career turned into a peaks-and-valleys mess....The author's love for a flawed-but-deep-down-okay dude, plus his amazing eye for detail, make this one of the finest rock bios of recent memory. ...Full Review
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| Woolley, Benjamin SAVAGE KINGDOM
February 15, 2007 - Perhaps because its purpose was forthrightly monetary, perhaps because it had the dubious distinction of robustly introducing tobacco and slavery to the country, Jamestown, Va., has never held a place in the nation's collective consciousness ...Full Review
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Current Issue: Children's
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| Anderson, Laurie Halse TWISTED
February 15, 2007 - Anderson returns to weightier issues in the style of her most revered work, Speak (1999), and stretches her wings by offering up a male protagonist for the first time. Tyler was always the kind of guy who didn't stand out until he spends the summer ...Full Review
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| Banks, Kate FOX
February 01, 2007 - The team behind The Great Blue House (2005) bestows yet another treat, this time tracing the maturation of a fox pup from his spring birth to fall, as he leaves his parents. Banks's patterned, ruminative text pares great planetary cycles down to ...Full Review
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| Barasch, Lynne HIROMI'S HANDS
February 15, 2007 - Barasch frames this profile of Hiromi Suzuki, a childhood friend of her daughter's who grew up to be an itamae-san, or professional sushi chef, as both an American story and a first-person tale of a young woman's success in a trade traditionally ...Full Review
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| Brown, Margaret Wise NIBBLE NIBBLE
February 01, 2007 - Five poems, originally published in 1959, are newly illustrated with lovely, detailed illustrations of bunnies, mice and other animals in natural surroundings. Reminiscent of Leonard Weisgard's classic illustrations for Brown's The Golden Egg Book, ...Full Review
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| Bunting, Eve HURRY! HURRY!
February 01, 2007 - Bursting from the barn on the title page, a proud hen exhorts all critters to hasten in and witness the "tap, tap, tappity-tap" of the farm's incipient addition. Mack's full-bleed, double-page acrylics crackle with a bright exuberance derived from ...Full Review
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| Hemphill, Stephanie YOUR OWN, SYLVIA
February 01, 2007 - Perhaps at this literary juncture, where novelists supply bibliographies for their fiction and memoirists fictionalize to liberate certain "truths" and dramatize their memories, a "verse portrait" seems entirely in order. Here, though, this ...Full Review
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| Henkes, Kevin A GOOD DAY
February 15, 2007 - What makes a good day good? This deceptively simple work opens with calamity: Little yellow bird has lost his favorite tail feather; little white dog's leash has gotten tangled up in the fence; little orange fox has lost his mother; and little brown ...Full Review
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| Ruurs, Margriet IN MY BACKYARD
February 15, 2007 - At night, during the day and throughout all the seasons, a backyard is a wonderful place for spotting wildlife. Among the animals that Ruurs highlights are wrens, a toad, spiders, bats and an opossum. A single lyrical sentence describes the action, ...Full Review
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| Wallace, Nancy Elizabeth SHELLS! SHELLS! SHELLS!
February 15, 2007 - On a trip to the beach, Buddy Bear collects seashells and his Mama teaches him about the animals that made them. Buddy is the perfect curious pupil; young readers will experience the sights, sounds and textures of the beach through his senses. Mama ...Full Review
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