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2003 Lit Roundup
Our favorite books of the year
By Erik Spanberg, Ann Wicker, Max Childers, Amy Rogers, Jennifer Saylor, Dana Renaldi and Bruce Nims
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Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi (Grove Press). In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, a young Iraqi going by the pseudonym Salam Pax began posting his weblog reports of everyday life in Baghdad on the Internet, in English. He became a worldwide Internet sensation, writing about pop culture, his CD collection, and the brutal absurdities of the Hussein regime. As war drums beat louder, Salam's blog gave real-time glimpses into the anxieties large and small of regular people trying to live their lives under the simultaneous threat of invasion and repression. Salam's irreverent, hip sense of humor and obsessions with pop culture were an unexpected, fascinating peek into a culture portrayed by our "leaders" as alien. As commentator Peter Maass of Slate eloquently put it, "Salam Pax was the Anne Frank of the war. . . and its Elvis."
From The Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins). A beautifully written memoir, subtitled "A Burmese Odyssey," offering loving descriptions of life growing up with 10 siblings in the pre-modern world of rural Burma, in passages that at times seem like dreams. When Khoo Thwe went off to school, he became involved in government reform efforts, and in 1988, at age 19, was forced to flee to the jungles bordering Thailand. While working as a waiter, Khoo Thwe was "discovered" by a Cambridge don who brought him to England, where he now lives.
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King (Walker & Co.). A masterful and very accessible look at the immortal artist's struggles to paint what turned out to be one of the great masterpieces of human history. Michelangelo emerges here as a fully three-dimensional flesh-and-blood man, not the quirky myth that's been handed down to us.
Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories of a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman (Simon & Schuster). A powerful memoir by a NC writer tells how, one year after the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping, her mother -- slipping into schizophrenia and believing she'd been inducted into a secret army -- kidnapped Holman, then age 8, and her one-year-old sister, to live in the family's small Virginia cottage and set up a "field hospital." They lived there over three years. This is a harrowing tale, yet it still respects the humanity of everyone involved while taking the reader on a galloping narrative ride.
Game Time: A Baseball Companion by Roger Angell (Harcourt). This collection of some of the best essays and reporting by The New Yorker's resident baseball scribe rarely fails to delight. Angell loves baseball; what makes his passion all the more enjoyable is the absence of sentimentality. Unlike some more flowery baseball writers, he doesn't believe baseball mirrors life or represents a higher ideal. For him, it's just a marvelous game fraught with the frailties, faults and variations of any human endeavor.
An Unfinished Life by Robert Dallek (Little Brown). Information gleaned from previously sealed Kennedy medical records reveals just how poor John F. Kennedy's health was, and throws a new light on his service as President -- which included his clear-headed decision-making in some of history's most intense foreign policy crises, his gradual awakening to support of the civil rights movement, and his management of a nuclear test ban treaty. The eternal playboy turns out to have also been a model of courage, stoic resolve and public service.
12,000 Miles In The Nick of Time by Mark Jacobson (Atlantic Monthly Press). New York writer Jacobson and his wife, two daughters and son lived in Greenwich Village, yet he still despaired over the shallow values his kids picked up from American techno-pop culture. So he cashed in his savings and traveled, family in tow, around the world; specifically, to some of the greatest, longest lasting works of the human race in places like Nepal, Thailand, India and the Middle East -- while reliving old travels with his wife in their pre-kids hippie days. They stay in seriously Third World accommodations, get to really know people who are vastly different from themselves, continually explore the differences between East and West. . .and argue nearly every minute they're awake. This is an alternately enthralling and maddening book about a family of hardcore individualists whose search for something more than snapshots from their travels reminds us of how exhilarating and difficult real traveling, as opposed to being tourists, can be.
Latest in Books
Calendar
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Improv Game Night @ CATCh
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Robots, Rockets, & Rovers @ The Schiele Museum of Natural History and Planetarium
- Sat., June 14, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
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DoubleTree by Hilton South Charlotte Tyvola @ DoubleTree by Hilton South Charlotte Tyvola.
- Sat., June 14, 6-8:30 p.m. and Sat., June 28, 6-8:30 p.m.
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Double Trouble Improv Comedy Night @ CATCh
- Sat., June 14, 7:30-9 p.m.
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ANNIE LEIBOVITZ / WORK @ Mint Museum Uptown at Levine Center for the Arts
- Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Continues through Aug. 31
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More Spring Events
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New Documentary Will Showcase Untold Story of Melungeon People 9
From infamy to diversity
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Broadway Bound
CL theater critic checks out the current crop
