Girl Factory review in the NYT

Girl Factory, by Jim Krusoe
9780979419829 | $16.50 pb | in stock
Tin House Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Girl Factory received a very positive review in the NYT Book Review, July 13th: “…it’s precisely the clash of the mundane with the horrific that makes the narrative so absorbing. … Krusoe’s darkly sardonic yet somehow earnest voice is reason alone to pick up this book”:

Test-Tube Babes

By JULIA SCHEERES

Published: July 13, 2008

Is there any food more repulsive than yogurt? Take away the sweeteners, the artificial flavors, the lithe spokesmodels and all you’ve got is a bowl of fermented milk whose viscosity calls to mind certain unmentionable bodily secretions.

In his delightful second novel, “Girl Factory,” Jim Krusoe manages to take lowly yogurt to new heights of repugnance. The narrator, a 30-ish slacker named Jonathan, works at a frozen-yogurt parlor in a strip mall. It’s a banal job, but hints of darkness come early. Soon after he’s hired, Jonathan notices a group of old men who arrive each Sunday afternoon, one by one, and silently let themselves into the locked basement. The proprietor, Spinner — who has forbidden Jonathan from entering the basement under any circumstances and refuses to give him the keys to the shop — tries to deflect his curiosity. The space, he explains, is merely being rented out for meetings.

Waylaid by a cold, Spinner is forced to give Jonathan the keys so he can keep the business running. And, of course, Jonathan’s curiosity overwhelms him. After the last customer has left, he unlocks the door to the basement and — cue Rod Serling — enters a murky dimension where fact, fantasy and political incorrectness swirl together.

Inside six human-size glass cylinders, suspended in a clear liquid, are six naked young women. The scene is eerily reminiscent of the fetus-in-formaldehyde jars once displayed at natural history museums — but the women are still alive. There’s a blonde, a Latina, an Asian, an African-American, an Eskimo and a woman who reminds Jonathan, alarmingly, of his first girlfriend. Each is a sample of nubile perfection, and their flavor-of-the-month variety is more than vaguely pornographic.

Before Spinner is inexplicably murdered, he tells Jonathan that acidophilus — the “friendly” bacteria that yogurt manufacturers claim encourages “regularity” — has in this case preserved the subjects’ youth and beauty. He insists the women volunteered for the experiment, but Jonathan has his doubts. His bumbling attempts at reverse engineering are both comedic and horrifying.

Several motifs from Krusoe’s earlier fiction return here, including a preoccupation with life extension and a subplot featuring animal geniuses. He never explains the creepy old men, who leave behind hundred-dollar bills as well as wrappers for breath mints, antacids and toothpicks. The women are also enigmas. Perhaps they symbolize the rampant exploitation of young women everywhere — by sexist filmmakers, predatory bosses, polygamist sect leaders, infertile couples and so on. Their silence makes their mysterious plight all the more unsettling. Are they victims or pioneers? Women who took an anti-aging obsession a step too far? Do they dream of future violence like the “pre-cogs” in the film “Minority Report”? And what moral obligation does Jonathan have to these inanimate beings — who, because we know so little about them, seem disturbingly more doll-like than human, and therefore less deserving of our pity.

As with the best kind of horror story, “Girl Factory” occurs in a seemingly ordinary setting, and it’s precisely the clash of the mundane with the horrific that makes the narrative so absorbing. Although the ending feels rushed and overly ambiguous, Krusoe’s darkly sardonic yet somehow earnest voice is reason alone to pick up this book.

Julia Scheeres, the author of a memoir, “Jesus Land,” is at work on a novel and a nonfiction book about the Jonestown mass murder-suicides.

Misha Glenny writing op-eds for the Globe & Mail

McMafia, by Misha Glenny
978-0887842047 | $29.95 | in stock
House of Anansi Press (HarperCollins)

In the op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail this week Misha Glenny wrote an article on the problems in Colombia.  He’s going to do more of these op-eds in the future and hopefully that keeps his profile and the book front and centre going into the Fall:

Alvaro Uribe has more work to do

While Colombia’s President has dealt FARC a crippling blow, his country is still an unholy mess

MISHA GLENNY

July 14, 2008 at 7:49 AM EDT

The liberation of hostage Ingrid Betancourt by Colombian forces is a disaster for the country’s premier guerrilla army, the FARC. It’s been one of those years for the FARC, nothing seems to be going its way. The ideological purity and ruthless methods for which it’s notorious have been eclipsed by the organization’s managerial incompetence. A series of mishaps has brought the peasant army’s very existence into question.

Colombia’s President, Alvaro Uribe, is feeling very pleased with himself – and with good reason. The Bush administration, too, has warmly applauded FARC’s bungling, which has seriously damaged the organization’s ability to sustain its armed resistance to the Colombian government.

But both Bogota and Washington should restrain themselves before celebrating too hard. Colombia is still in an unholy mess and, in the area of human rights, the government has nothing to crow about as the murder of trades unionists continues to mount with no sign of the perpetrators being brought to justice.

And, for all the billions that the U.S. has channelled into Colombia’s anti-narcotics program, once again the area of the country under coca cultivation is up; purity levels of the drug on U.S. streets remain high; and retail prices have reached record lows.

Michael Tucker cooking on Martha Stewart

Living in a Foreign Language, by Michael Tucker 
9780802143624 | $15.50 pb | in stock
Grove Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Michael Tucker was a guest on Martha: The Martha Stewart Show, July 18th, discussing his book and preparing an authentic dish.

Dyson’s April 4, 1968 reviewed in the NYT

April 4, 1968, by Michael Eric Dyson
9780465002122 | $26.95 hc | in stock
Basic Civitas / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Michael Eric Dyson’s book on Martin Luther King received a brief review in the NYT Book Review, July 20th:

Dyson, the Georgetown University sociology professor and author of many books, examines the impact of Martin Luther King’s death on his own world as well as on the national psyche. He was 9 when King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. After that day, Dyson saw the world differently. For a long time, he says, he felt afraid when he was at home in a bathroom that “opened onto a small balcony.” If King could be killed, he could be, too. “The bullet that shattered King’s jaw lodged fragments of fear deep inside my psyche,” he writes. King, of course, predicted his demise long before it occurred: “He ate, drank and slept death.” Ultimately, Dyson says, a violent end helped establish his place in the American pantheon (and speeded up the creation of a national holiday by decades). Dyson describes how close Americans have come to achieving King’s goals — or how far we still have to go (according to 2004 data, 25 percent of blacks live in poverty). He also evaluates the people who carry on King’s legacy, giving high marks to Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Some parts of “April 4, 1968” are hokey (for example, an imaginary interview with an 80-year-old King), yet many passages are lovely and haunting. “His unknowing final request … that chilly spring evening,” Dyson writes, was for the musician Ben Branch “to play the hymn ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ at the rally that night, and to ‘play it real pretty.’”

Globe review of Russell Banks’ non-fiction

Dreaming Up America, by Russell Banks
9781583228388 | $24.95 hc | in stock
Seven Stories Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Russell Banks’ first non-fiction book was reviewed in the Globe & Mail last weekend:

‘Exporter of democracy’ could use some itself

MADONNA HAMEL

July 19, 2008

As a novelist, one of Russell Banks’s greatest skills is his ability to arouse empathy for the "bad guy." His finest works are his most frightening; they shimmer with tension and inevitability. In Affliction and Cloudsplitter, he breaks down his characters’ personal histories into their infinitesimal parts and contexts, revealing the horrific logic behind the actions of murderers and madmen. His books are bad dreams well written; reading them is like watching a sleep-walker head for a cliff and knowing there’s nothing you can do about it.

Dreaming Up America is Banks’s first work of non-fiction. The book, a long essay, really, was originally a narrative accompaniment to a 2006 film by French documentary maker Jean-Michel Meurice. The film, Amérique, notre histoire, takes a look at American history as portrayed in American cinema. Banks was basically given carte blanche when asked to describe the evolution of the American dream. Far less dense and structured than his fiction, Dreaming Up America is more personal and conversational in tone, but like his novels, it pulls no punches.

I picked up my review copy of the book on the way out of town. I was headed south to a small town in Michigan and the timing was good; it was the 4th of July. Patriotism filled the airwaves. One country music program had a young servicewoman as a guest, along with her parents and two toddlers. She was about to begin her tour of duty in Iraq. The host saluted her courage and took a jab at all the cowards who resisted enlisting to "bring democracy to the rest of the world."

I stopped for gas and the young fresh-faced attendant wished me a happy 4th of July.

"I’m Canadian, so our big day isn’t the 4th, but thanks, anyway," I replied.

"They don’t let you celebrate it up there?" He looked crestfallen.

That evening I cracked open Dreaming Up America while sitting in a lawn chair, one of a couple of hundred lining Main Street in preparation for the Independence Day heritage car parade. Appreciating the context of flag-waving and horn-honking, I hunkered down to Banks’s critique of America’s "hucksterism," "naivety" and "bullying" – in the heart of the country.

Banks assesses America with his trademark blunt manner, beginning with phrases such as, "The true American is a killer … a religious sense of mission produces killers." So much of American violence arises because of a conflict between reality and perception, he goes on to say. For example: When your perception of indigenous people is that they are hostile enemies, extermination comes easily. As America solidifies its self-perception as the Rescuing Nation, the reality of the "unwelcome invader" fades from view.

Add American movie heroes to the mix – cowboys, soldiers and gangsters who might be "morally unstable but never morally unsure" – and you get a nation that sees itself as "the only light that shines in the night."

George Soros book reviewed in Globe & Mail

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, by George Soros
9781586486839 | $24.95 hc | in stock
Public Affairs / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

A rave review for The New Paradigm for Financial Markets ran in Saturday’s Globe & Mail book section (reviewed along with Jim Stanford’s Economics for Everyone). The reviewer called it "a brilliant chronicle and analysis of the credit market meltdown":

Capitalism takes its lumps

ANDREW ALLENTUCK

July 19, 2008

Two books, one by a critic of capitalism, the other by a hugely successful maestro of hedge funds, offer insights into the current crisis of the financial system. Jim Stanford, an economist for the Canadian Auto Workers union, sees many of the problems as the result of capitalist economics. Soros, a Wall Street profiteer, focuses on the present credit crisis in which banks and other financial institutions are suffering huge losses on loans that cannot be repaid, backed by assets that cannot be collected.

Their reasons and their prescriptions are very different. Stanford offers the conventional protests of the left in a fresh package. Neo-liberalism, his name for global capitalism driven by liberals turned raptors, is the problem, as he sees it. This is exploitation theory with a soft edge and a bit of humour. "Never trust an economist with your job," he quips.

Stanford follows a line of historical materialism made famous by Karl Marx. "Capitalism first emerged in Western Europe … in the mid- 1700s … evolved from advanced feudal monarchies." Actually, such capitalist institutions as floating rate loans and bonds discounted from their matured value were being used in Venice in the 13th century. Labelling capitalism as an 18th-century innovation focuses mostly on land enclosures and the rise of an urban proletariat, as the post-Marxist writers still like to say.

Stanford says that profits have risen in much of the world. The statement is true, although the more meaningful question is whether the profits are anything more than payments for risk and inflation. In any case, a well-fed managerial class has emerged in Russia, Brazil, Singapore, South Korea, India and China. The reasons are diverse. Central planning died and liberated talent and money in Russia. Brazil, like Canada, is enjoying a boom in natural resources. India abandoned high tariffs that subsidized an inefficient economy. Singapore has low tariffs, terrific economic management and a superb infrastructure. South Korea is about incredibly hard work in an unfettered economy. And China is about the unleashing of a capitalist economy within a communist shell. "It is glorious to be rich," said a high Chinese Communist government official at a party congress last year. Marx would have been appalled.

George Soros is also a critic of capitalism, at least the capitalist excesses that have created the credit crisis. He is an insider, connected to heads of state and managers of central banks – and a part-time philosopher.

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets is two books in one. The beginning and end deal directly with the credit crisis. In between, there is an essay on Soros’s concept of what he calls "reflexivity," the observation that since perceptions about markets influence how they work, economic analysis is wrong to assume the existence of immutable laws that are valid regardless of human action. It’s nice to know his thoughts on epistemology, but Soros is at his best discussing finance.

Soros offers up a brilliant chronicle and analysis of the credit market meltdown that began in August, 2007. His subject is the worldwide buildup of debt that exceeds the world’s gross domestic product. In other words, there is much more credit and debt than underlying economic activity to support it. All this creative finance went on, he explains, because "cheap money engendered a housing bubble, an explosion of leveraged buyouts, and other excesses."

He identifies the ogre behind the bubble as none other than the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, headed by chairman Alan Greenspan. At each crisis, the Fed lowered interest rates – that is, the cost of money – encouraging the belief that it would fix every problem of bad investment decisions allowed by cheap money with still cheaper money. The Fed organized the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 when its $1.2-trillion (U.S.) bag of interest-rate bets made it too big to be allowed to fail. In 2000, after the dot-com bubble burst, the Fed began dropping interest rates to a level below the inflation rate, creating what amounts to free loans.

Snoop on Nightline, in New Scientist, and at Google

Snoop, by Sam Gosling
9780465027811 | $26.95 hc | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Sam Gosling’s Snoop has been featured on ABC’s Nightline, his talk at Google’s headquarters has been posted on YouTube, and the book got a great review in New Scientist magazine:

Ever wondered what your handshake, your CD collection, or even the way you walk says about you? Or perhaps you have always wanted to be able to glance at a colleague’s office and instantly gain a stunningly accurate insight into their personality. If so, Snoop is for you. In this charming and well-written book, academic psychologist Sam Gosling brings a mass of research to bear on a simple question: just how much can you really tell about a person from their possessions, living spaces and non-verbal behaviour?

Central to much of the work is the view, now held by many psychologists, that personality consists of five main factors: extroversion, emotional stability, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness. The usual way of scoring someone for each of these parameters involves asking them to complete a long and tedious questionnaire. Gosling, however, argues that there are much quicker, yet still surprisingly accurate, ways of assessing your friends, family and colleagues. All you have to do is snoop.

These five personality traits, Gosling says, manifest themselves in almost every aspect of our daily lives. Take, for example, the bedroom. In one classic snooping study, Gosling and his colleagues fearlessly entered the bedrooms of college students and carefully rated them on various scientific scales: were there numerous pairs of underpants strewn across the floor? What types of posters were on the walls? Were lots of books on show? What magazines were hidden away under the bed? (I made this last one up.) Next, they compared the students’ personalities with their bedroom ratings, and discovered several fascinating correlations.

You might think that highly creative types (creativity is often seen as an important facet of “openness”) would have books and magazines covering every inch of floor space, and that friendly people would decorate their rooms in warm colours. You would be wrong on both counts. In fact, according to the analyses, it is the variety, not quantity, of reading material that is the real giveaway of a budding Leonardo, while colourful walls are not indicative of friendliness. Inspirational posters, by the way, are signs of emotional instability.

Snooping, though, is not always straightforward. Advanced snoopers can distinguish between the image a person is trying to project and who that person really is. For instance, you can quickly tidy up your room when you are expecting visitors, but there’s no faking true organisation. By-products of our behaviour (like a wilting plant in the corner) rather than explicit signals we provide (like a prominent photo of Karl Marx hanging above a desk) are more telling of our true personalities.

Such insights are what make Snoop such a readable and practical guide to understanding the people around you. Whether it is discussing the music they listen to (fans of rock music tend to be less friendly than most), the words they use (neurotics tend to employ a high frequency of first-person singular pronouns, like “I”, “me” and “my”), or the state of their car’s brake pads (Gosling speculates that anxious people wear out their brakes more quickly than those with a relaxed view of life), Snoop points out the revealing signals that we unknowingly emit all the time. Some insights may seem a tad obvious (people with a firm handshake tend to be more extroverted than their loose-wristed friends, while narcissists tend to wear expensive clothing), but the majority of the work is fascinating.

With this book, Gosling joins a small but growing band of scholars who are keen to present to the public the important and practical insights that can be gained from experimental social psychology. Unlike many current books on behaviour, Snoop does not contain a single brain scan or discussion of neural activity. Instead, it adopts a shamelessly social approach, focusing on how people behave in the real world rather than in a brain scanner, and presents explanations at the level of individual personalities and social interactions. It works, not least because it has the huge advantage of being exclusively concerned with the one topic that most people find endlessly fascinating: themselves.

Science magazine reviews Reinventing the Sacred

Reinventing the Sacred, by Stuart Kauffman
9780465003006 | $28.95 hc | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Stuart Kauffman’s book got a great review in Science magazine:

“[Reinventing the Sacred] sparkles from every angle as its author gallops through the relevant science, philosophy, economics, history, ethics, poetry and – well, we had better use the word because Kauffman does: religion…. Bringing science and religion together globally in the way that Kauffman wishes is not going to be easy – as other ecumenical movements have repeatedly found – but it is necessary.”

Globe review of Mr. Karp’s Last Glass

Mr. Karp’s Last Glass, by Cary Fagan
978-0-88899-835-4 | $8.95 pb | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

Susan Perren has reviewed Mr. Karp’s Last Glass in the weekend’s Globe & Mail:

The narrator of this short, sweet, beautifully constructed novel, 11-year-old Randolph ("Did I mention that my name is Randolph? That I have a name used only by characters in old black-and-white movies?"), is a collector. At the moment, he has three collections on the go: beer-bottle caps, writing instruments and words, his source of which is the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary given to him on his most recent birthday.

The lives of Randolph and the eponymous Mr. Karp converge when the latter becomes the tenant of Randolph’s family’s third floor. Renting out the third floor of their house became necessary when Randolph’s dad was fired from his job as manager of the hardware section of the neighbourhood Lo-Pri store. He is accused of stealing "a metal gardening shed, a DVD collection of I Love Lucy television shows, a Barbie camper van, five bags of red licorice, a pink imitation Christmas tree with musical angel, a coffee-bean grinder, a Sidney Crosby hockey stick, a pair of steel-toed work boots and a five-string banjo with instruction manual."

The back story here is Randolph’s father’s quest to clear his name of the spurious charges. It won’t be giving too much away to say that, as this novel ends, there is much to celebrate on that front.

The front story is all about Randolph and the very curious Mr. Karp, who, like Randolph, is a collector – a collector of glass jars, hundreds of them, filled with water. Water from the Delaware River just after George Washington’s crossing, 1776, and the bath water of Sarah Bernhardt after a performance of Cleopatra, 1891, are just two examples of a collection that places Mr. Karp as the self-described "second-foremost collector in the northeast."

Getting to first place involves a trip by Mr. Karp to buy the most coveted sample of all: melted snow from the upturned hat of Napoleon, gathered during the Russian campaign. The business of collecting undergoes a sea change for Randolph by the end of this tale.

globeandmail.com: CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Sex and Bacon in the Globe and Mail

Sex and Bacon, by Sarah Katherine Lewis
978-1580052283 | $16.50 pb | in stock
Seal Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The Globe & Mail ran a review of Sex and Bacon on the weekend:

Sins of the flesh? Bring ‘em on!

LISA CRYSTAL CARVER

July 5, 2008

Sarah Katherine Lewis is a size 10 former porn actress/model/dancer bisexual 35-year-old who loves meat, cooking and eating all kinds of meat. Even marrow, even guts. Loves sex. In Sex and Bacon, she combines these two loves: animal flesh for eating and human flesh for … everything just short of actually ingesting or being ingested. Completely non-judgmental, SKL even loves Britney Spears, dedicating an entire chapter to her. She’s funny. Very incorrect. She has swayed me. I had grown practically vegan and into humane farming and so monogamous I don’t even look at porn any more, but her book is making me want to lick and suck bacon! And whale meat! And girls!

Seriously, this book makes me want to live. And to try out recipes that include "a glug" of olive oil, a "small chunk" of butter or bacon fat along with "leftover chunks of cooked ham, bacon, chicken, or sausage." It makes me feel good about food (instead of seeing it as a clogger of arteries, destroyer of organs, or instrument of torture for dumb creatures, or rapist of the Earth). She makes me feel hungry, and confident about my ability to create, experiment, be a great cook/hostess just as I am, to make mistakes that are fun. I think it would have to be a very loving person who would suggest that: "oregano and cumin are nice. Maybe add some chili powder. Or try a little fennel." She’s really not the least bit careful.

As if this open-ended, experimentative attitude weren’t encouraging enough to make the scaredy-cat go for it, SKL exhorts us to get a little drunk while cooking, and to "drunkefy" our guests. And have sex with them after we eat. In a world dedicated to making women feel they have to get it right, SKL is saying all you have to do is go ahead and get it on.

It seems to me that our greatest fear in this electronic, Lysoled era is to live. We barely even recognize it – life – any more in its unadulterated form. To live is messy; it smells. It tends to be bad for you. It’s nothing like the Internet, where information is total and people never die. My theory is that life died with death. It used to be people died at home; their bodies were then dressed fancy, laid out, kissed, photographed and gazed at by a stream of visitors: a sombre party. Now we don’t know what goes on. With no visible end to life, no border to it or to our bodies (our photos stay beautiful on MySpace forever), both have lost their preciousness.

It’s too bad they decided to put SKL’s photo on the cover, because in the advanced reader copy I got, there was none, and I had to imagine. I pictured a crazed mouth, prominent nostrils and two fists roaming, grabbing, throwing things into things. Very rarely as an author does she use her eyes to see, describing instead the scent, texture, squishiness, taste, or feel, and emotion, of the thing. So I didn’t picture her having eyes – more these pulsating sensor detectors. I see now that the woman is pretty, and has interesting tattoos, but no real human could compare with the sense-y entity SKL’s prose conjured for me.

Sex and Bacon makes me want to shout from a rooftop. Not sure which rooftop, or what I would say. Maybe just some guttural hoots. Maybe that this book, this book is great! This book is life! This book is about sorrow, smells, meat, joy, sex – professional and non – heartache, heart burst, contentment, kindness, connection, isolation, snuggling, colonoscopes, handfuls of rosemary thrown into the pot, realizing you’re a fraud, realizing you’re awesome, bereavement, discovery, mistakes, the money that comes from being naked and all the exciting, semi-horrifying foods in unusual locales that can be bought with that money, budgeting when you give up being naked and try typing instead and the couple of pieces of brown thigh meat that can be bought after the rent is paid, and what you can do with that past-the-best-used-by date brown meat, one wilted potato, dried beans and Tabasco.

Also like life, the book is non-cohesive. I guess you could say it’s not well-done. She didn’t follow the recipe right. Our author starts off gangbusters in different directions, falls back, then completely falls apart somewhere around page 200. Her boyfriend leaves her and she turns out to not be so free and roaming and lusty as she thought. As we thought. She is doubtful and poor and fat. She is human.

Not so many of us are any more. Human, that is. SKL’s an explorer, and whether she’s using the "tiny, long-handled meat coke-spoon" to reach excitedly into the upright femur bone to dig out marrow to slurp, or diving deep into a wanna-die, my-baby-done-left-me blues, SKL goes all the way down.

Lisa Carver lives in New Hampshire with two children, one man, one cat, two African clawed frogs, one hermit crab and one shrimp. Her latest book is Drugs are Nice.