Subway Art, 25th Anniversary Edition
By Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant
(Chronicle Books)







Subway Art, 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant dispenses with the words about their subject (though there are words here) and gets on with the gettin' on of showing the reader the art. And it is artful. Yes, vandalism to be sure, still you will not believe what the subway artists 'get up' to here and the 150 pictures (70 more than initially released in the book's first run, which sold a half a million copies) are spectacular.

The new larger format of this Subway Art edition shows pictures of the artists at work, guys like Dondi painting in a New York train yard in 1980, Lady Pink posing with a shelf of her favorite colors, but it's their art that makes the book so special. As Henry Chalfant says in the book's opening, he started taking pictures of graffiti in 1977 after coming upon the infamous Fabulous Five Crew's 'Merry Christmas' cartoon and in Subway Art we see lots of 'get ups' of colorful cartoons as well as distinctive lettering of names. There's fold-over inserts and centerfolds but the pictures of the trains, running cover to cover, showing their painted sides with pieces that have titles like "Noc is Back" and "Blade Delores" are truly startling.

Colors really jump out at you here in this 25th anniversary edition and with a book this big you are really holding works of art. Subway Art, 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant is a beautiful book about beautiful, often maligned work.

Ralph Greco, Jr.

Perfecting Sound Forever
By Greg Milner
(Faber & Faber)





My hats off to anybody who can weave Thomas Edison and Def Leppard into the same book!

Greg Milner has done just that in his book Perfecting Sound Forever. This is the story of sound recording, from the early days with Edison (and others) when records were made on wax cylnders and Edison’s “Diamond” discs, right through the war over tape speeds, to early folk/blues recordings of Lead Belly, Bing Crosby’s involvement (you’ll be surprised), Les Paul’s self-perpetuated importance (which Milner puts into perspective), studios battling one another for prominence in the 50’s, Phil Spector and Joe Meek’s contributions, Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and right on up to Def Leppard.

A subject like this could be a very dry read indeed but Milner, who has written for Rolling Stone, Salon and Slate (and many others) knows how to keep us moving through his 371 pages of history. This is more a living breathing story of people then it is of hard facts, though Milner’s research is meticulous.

Perfecting Sound Forever might just be the first thing you need to hear about the history of this most unusual, yet far reaching of subjects.

Ralph Greco, Jr.

The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society
By J.D Trout
(Viking Adult)





In The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society, J.D Trout aims to use the findings of social and cognitive psychology to “design personal decision strategies and social policies aimed at making our lives better.” In the first half of the book he explains the various ways in which humans are deeply flawed creatures chronically incapable of making decisions that are in line with their own self-interest. After presenting ways to overcome this, the real solution, he argues in the second half of the book, is an aggressively interventionist government focused on creating political structures and social policies that will prevent people from making the irrational decisions they are prone to make. Psychological research, Trout seems to think, has validated most of the tenets of social democracy.

Among Trout’s suggestions is an amendment of the constitution in order to outlaw poverty and ways to increase direct citizen participation in public affairs. If the “good society” promised in the subtitle sounds a tad utopian, he simply retorts that “there is nothing utopian about a government that is aggressively humane.” Readers vaguely acquainted with the carnage that was the 20th century will understand the implications of that statement. That the road to oppression and misery is often paved with good intentions, completely escapes him; the same is the case with the fundamental contradiction implicit in his supreme trust in governmental policies created by the irrational beings he describes in the first half of the book.

Luis Daniel Caridad

Lowboy
By John Wray
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)





I'd venture to say John Wray has written a very compelling 258 page novel…though I'm not so sure what it's all about. Yes, in some ways it's a rather straight forward telling of a young man's mental state. In another sense Lowboy is a paranoid journey into the fantastic 'twilight' of a city's tunnels and streets. In another sense it's a…

I love books like this. I’m very fond of non-linear story telling even when it is seemingly linear as it is in Lowboyy. That's the trick here, Wray has a deciding great eye for detail but he manages, epically at the beginning of the book to keep you off balance. Wray makes it about more than just his language and the narrator's point of view, it's really how the whole journey’s structure that keeps the reader deep in Will's mind, a protagonist who believes he holds a deep planet-saving secret.

I like all the characters we meet in Lowboy too, Will's mom Violet, Emily Wallace, it's a pretty rich short little book. If you like to be shook a bit, get deep into one character's rather odd world view and not really know what's happening at any given moment, John Wray handles it all masterfully in this odd story part sci-fi parable, part mental health drama, part love story.

Give Lowboy a glance.

Ralph Greco, Jr.

Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York
By Joseph G. Schloss
(Oxford University Press)








Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York is an in-depth academic exploration of one of hip-hop culture's most globally expansive exports that sets the record straight on where b-boying comes from and what it means. Incorrectly known the world over as breakdancing, b-boying is a form of Afro-diasporic competitive dance that developed in the Bronx and Brooklyn, NY in the early 1970s. Joseph G. Schloss sets the record straight on b-boying's roots by interviewing hip-hop historians and practitioners and getting down and hitting the floor himself.

Schloss has an authentic credibility that informs his narrative and gives his readers an insiders' perspective. He differentiates between correct and incorrect terminology, and tracks specific dance styles back to specific neighborhoods and even further back to dancers' African roots. Schloss gives hip-hop culture the scholarly credibility it deserves. I highly recommend this book to anyone with at least a passing interest in hip-hop culture, but I must warn you, after turning a few pages, you will want to break out your adidas running suit and start popping, locking, and hitting the floor to some breaks yourself.

Marc Amigone

Vandal Squad: Inside the New York City Transit Police Department, 1984-2004
By Joseph Rivera
(Miss Rosen Editions)







I never really give graffiti all that much thought. I have heard stories of the various ‘crews’ that have terrorized the city with their unique designs on trains, buildings overpasses and store grates, but I didn’t know all that much about the history of this ‘art form,’ how it’s executed, the men and woman who make it and those, like retired city cop Joseph Rivera, who made it their life’s work to catch graffiti artists.

Vandal Squad: Inside the New York City Transit Police Department, 1984-2004 is a breezy read of anecdotes, pictures of graffiti and Rivera’s runs ins…with the people he was trying to arrest, as well as his own department’s grudging respect for the ‘vandal squad’. We meet ghosts (elusive, anonymous guys who ‘bombed’ trains so regularly they became celebs in their world), infamous crews like “KA” and “BTB,” and even a few of Rivera’s more colorful partners.

A policeman’s life really can’t be understood by a layman, but Rivera does a great job of relating his early days sweating in full uniform on subways, his too-often sprint through tunnels and his amassing tons of graffiti Intel when in plainclothes. If you think for a second that graffiti is on the low end of vandalism, and therefore not really a dangerous crime, you really need to read Rivera’s account to see how it all fits into the bigger picture of a city always in need.

Ralph Greco, Jr.

This One is Mine
By Maria Semple
(Little, Brown and Company)





Maria Semple's first novel traces the paths of two protagonists: Violet, a burnt-out, used-to-be-cool-but-now-is-just-fat housewife of a very wealthy record label executive; and Sally, Violet's diabetic sister-in-law who has relied on beauty and extreme materialism to float from one seemingly-eligible-bachelor-turned-loser to another in search of a perfect husband to support her high demand for entirely unnecessarily trendy fashion.

Themes of wealth, disparity, illness, parenthood, and marriage riddle this story of a not-quite broken family facing life's highs and lows over a short period of time. Semple's experience writing for popular television shows (including Arrested Development and Mad About You) certainly explains the well-paced unfolding plot. However, that same background might also explain why her characters are mostly confined to clichés. Rich, married Violet embarks on an affair with a hepatitis-C-laden junkie, while Sally's most promising suitor ultimately reveals a flaw that despite glaring red flags, goes entirely unnoticed by Sally until the most critical moment. Furthermore, few, if any, of the characters can garner audience sympathy, which at times is likely to make this novel difficult to complete, as readers are likely to lose track of why they should care about the fate of the cheating overweight wife of a sold-out executive and his trophy-wife-bound manipulative sister.

That being said, the story flows well and is undoubtedly amusing over time. For readers (particularly fans of Jodi Picoult) looking for an easy-going, deeper-than-Danielle Steele beach read, Semple's novel is guaranteed to please.

Jessica Stein

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Untold History of English
By John McWhorter
(Gotham)








If you’re inclined towards the latest Grisham, or detest books on grammar, I’d avoid John McWhorter’s 215-page little hardcover. But if you’re looking to learn some history about the language we all speak in ‘dees here parts,’ if you have a hankering for the tricky travails of word traveling and how words impact their speakers (and visa versa) then Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Untold History of English is worth your time.

What I especially like about McWhorter’s treatise here is that, as he says in the intro “It’s not, then, all about words that just happened into our vocabulary. It’s also about things speakers of other languages did to English grammar, and actions speak louder than words.” I agree with that sentiment and while there’s plenty of places in this book where I admit to getting a bit lost, it is fun to learn how the Vikings and the Celts impinged on what we say and how we say it, to learn how and why all those peculiarities of our language developed, and the pre history of English, times before Old’ English and how what was done then effects our language now.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Untold History of English is a top flight researched book. McWhorter certainly knows of what he writes, conveys these hard-to-grasp concepts with entertaining prose and creates an overall interesting read about a subject that could read as anything but, in less capable hands.

Ralph Greco, Jr.

Why We Suck
By Dr. Dennis Leary
(Viking Adult)





Dennis Leary is best known for his acting roles in the films Wag the Dog, The Thomas Crown Affair, and The Ref, among others. He now presents, Why We Suck: A feel good guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid, a book most appropriately classified as a 240-page rant.

Although the subheading promises a "feel good guide," Leary's material in no way nurtures the fat, loud, lazy, stupid Americans he assumes to comprise his audience. Chapter by chapter Leary essentially scolds his readers for who we are, what we care about, and the causes and issues for which we may or may not assign our purpose in life. Leary spares few, managing to cover parents, celebrities, children with learning and developmental disabilities, parents who do and do not punish those same children with physical abuse, and the list grows worse. Some people find this funny.

I can appreciate a decent rant and comedic spin on the news when I hear one, but what is missing from Leary's take, aside from credibility beyond his membership in the human race, is any draw for his readers to retain an interest in what quickly becomes a predictable series of Debbie-downer-infested snippets of Leary on pop-culture – slash – why-he-is-better-than-every-one-else-save-his-wife-and-maybe-Oprah. Indeed, his awe for Oprah and her success is probably the one element of the rant that contradicts the otherwise ho-hum-the-world-is-f-ed-up-and-it's-all-our (America)-fault theme that incidentally pervades the remaining chapters.

Occasionally the rant reveals some gems, to Leary's credit, for example, his declaration that "we'd get a lot more done in this country if we finally could put to bed the idea that men need to be more like women and vice versa," but such moments of intrigue ultimately prove to be few and far between. Witty? Sure, at times; but for the most part Leary's greatest success lies in his ability to emote such a rant despite simultaneously presenting himself as the very type of person who he would otherwise most despise.

Jessica Stein

You Must Remember This: The Warner Brothers Story
By Richard Schickel & George Perry
(Running Press)





In the case of Richard Schickel and George Perry’s You Must Remember This: The Warner Brothers Story, you can see the book as well as read the movie. What I mean to say is, the book, a written history of the famous movie studio, is the companion to a five-hour documentary, which aired over multiple nights on PBS. The film and this book celebrate the 85th anniversary of Warners and though you don’t need to see or read one to appreciate reading or seeing the other, taken as a whole, you get just about everything you’ll ever need to know about Warner Brothers’ history.

The book though is a big hardcover, a ‘tome’ in the best sense of the word. Meticulously researched as you’d expect Schickel and Perry to have done, You Must Remember This: The Warner Brothers Story begins with an introduction by Clint Eastwood, a man who has made Warners his home for most of his career (he also narrated the film). We then get a chronological history of the studio; from the Warner brothers beginnings and slow rise early in the century with the new medium of film, through their first real star, canine Rin Tin Tin, through the innovative introduction of sound to ‘talkies’ with their 1927 The Jazz Singer (ironically brother Sam Warner, the one who drove the studio into sound, died on the eve of the film’s premier), through the thirties with ultra-realistic gangster films like Little Ceasar and Public Enemy to classics like Casablanca, 42nd Street, To Have and Have Not, Giant, All The Presidents Men, even Harry Potter…really the list goes on and on. Along the way Schickel and Perry impress upon us how socially responsible Warners were through the real war, cold war, and all the other social concerns of the times. With over 300 hundred rare photos of stars, productions, stars in productions, and historical photographs, You Must Remember This: The Warner Brothers Story is a must for any movie fanatic or budding film historian.

Ralph Greco, Jr.

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963
By Susan Sontag
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)







In Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, the first of three volumes of Susan Sontag’s personal journals to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, readers are offered an exhilarating glimpse into Sontag’s early experiences of school, marriage, lesbian relationships, motherhood, and life in Paris. Sontag’s writing, mainly brief, one sentence thoughts that encapsulate an entire experience or theoretical thought, often stream-of-consciousness or simply composed of lists of books to read or items to research further, still manages to retain a thought-provoking profundity and complexity that rushes us through the early years of her life.

Perhaps the reading of others’ diaries is essentially a voyeuristic act, but in Reborn Sontag writes: “One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people…” For a woman who thought and wrote extensively about how photographic representation distances its subjects from its viewers and relegates experience to a form of surveillance without an ethics (although she would not write her significant theoretical essays until after the period of this volume) this statement is prescient: Sontag already understood that the reading of journals, private writings, and even personal letters serves the vital purpose of connecting us to each other, of offering us a chance to peer into the heart and mind of another person and identify with her on a profoundly sincere level. Certainly in Sontag’s case, the vulnerability and privacy that is exchanged for this social purpose bestows upon us a model of a powerfully analytic mind that is deeply useful.

Miranda Ganzer

Descent into Chaos
by Ahmed Rashid
(Viking)






Descent into Chaos is a timely and critical book about the ongoing turmoil and degeneration in Afghanistan and Central Asia, written by acclaimed veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid (Taliban and Jihad). He surveys this region to reveal to us the failure of U.S. policymakers' (both past and present) at nation building because of their refusal to commit the forces and money needed to rebuild after the invasion of Afghanistan.

Rashid also shows us the powerful extremist forces at work in that region of the world and explains how U.S. policy makers made corrupt alliances with warlords to impose a superficial calm while continuing to ignore the Pakistani government's support of the Taliban and other Islamic extremists, instead choosing to focus on Iraq. Afghanistan and Pakistan, he argues, are greater threats to the West than Iraq.

The material in the entire book is extremely detailed and significant, and it is revealed to us by such a qualified writer. Rashid walks us through the history of Afghanistan and explains the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan, laying out past events clearly and chronologically. He explains how U.S. ally Pakistan has armed and financed the Taliban. He also outlines future scenarios of where we may be headed, so it's a good wake-up call for our future policy-makers and the ill-informed public in the West.

Although this book is not an easy read, it begins to clear up a lot of the confusion, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

Christine Thelen

Somebody Else's Daughter
by Elizabeth Brundage
(Viking Adult)






Elizabeth Brundage takes a much bigger bite than she can chew in the complexity and multitude of issues she tries to address in Somebody Else's Daughter. Included among the many conflicts her characters face, are those of post-adoption identity crises (on the part of both parent and child), the return of an adult to childhood haunts, eating disorders, drug abuse, physical abuse, animal abuse, sexual assault, prostitution, AIDS and confrontations resulting from socioeconomic disparity.

Perhaps the most relevant theme of the novel is that of women's rights. Brundage's message however, seems to be lost, as the female character who initially demonstrates the greatest strength, ultimately is lured first, by the male protagonist whose wealth is secretly acquired through his success as a bigwig in the porn industry, and later by the weakest male character who sheepishly harbors an identifying secret of his own, that he is the true father of the female protagonist, adoptive daughter to Mr. Porn CEO.

The title subject manages to retain a healthy sense of stability for the majority of the novel, yet the downward spiral that she eventually enters is somewhat abrupt. Furthermore, the author could stand to do, as English teachers say, a lot more showing than telling.

Clearly this novel involves a tangled web of characters, and Brundage absolutely deserves to be lauded for her ability to develop all of her characters' in full via a plot that is easily followed and, at times, pretty suspenseful. That being said, maybe next time she will consider implementing a narrower focus on the conflicts her characters address.

Jessica Stein

Slam
by Nick Hornby
(Putnam)







Readers familiar with Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and About a Boy will find much to appreciate in his latest novel Slam.

While in many ways Hornby’s novel, told from the point of view of a disaffected youth named Sam who often speaks in British slang, invites comparison to another tale of teenage angst—J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye—Slam is neither as psychologically penetrating nor ultimately bleak enough to represent the real experience of being forced to cope with the responsibility of parenting at 16 years old, its ostensible topic.

Rather, Hornby’s representation of young parenting is a romp through male teenage adolescence, pop-culture therapy in the form of a talking poster of Tony Hawk, and countless awkward teas between families that don’t have much to say to each other (although when they do the fallout is frequently hilarious). That’s not to say such a light-hearted approach isn’t an enjoyable read, but as usual in Hornby’s fiction, life just ends up feeling a little too perfectly imperfect.

While Sam and his ex-girlfriend/mother of his child don’t end up holding hands and walking into the sunset, they do find new, apparently better-matched partners (who can all sit down at a civil dinner together) and seem to be managing childcare division and their careers just fine. Teen parenting is a tricky, complex subject to say the least and Hornby avoids all the pain and real destructiveness of it in favor of a charming, hilarious, enjoyable read.

Miranda Ganzer

Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him
by Humberto Fontova
(Sentinel Trade)







Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him, by Humberto Fontova wastes no time doing exactly what it sets out to do. In debunking the myth and idolatry surrounding Che Guevara, Fontova provides legitimate historical insight into the life of a man who saw to the execution of hundreds of political prisoners during the Cuban revolution and early years of the Castro regime, yet is hailed as a figure for the common people's struggle against oppression.

Fontova prefaces his book with the story of his family's escape from Communist Cuba in the early 1960's. He blames the biases of the liberal United States media for the image of the man we know as Che, but in working against that bias, he replaces it with his own. He is vehemently prejudiced against anything the Cuban government has ever done and staunchly in favor of any position the United States government holds. While he pokes many holes in the research of Che's most highly-regarded biographer, John Lee Anderson, his own anti-Cuba, pro-America biases make his position subject to a different, yet equally present, bias and prejudice that diminishes his credibility.

Marc Amigone

I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China
By Zhu Wen
(Columbia University Press)





For anyone wondering what the moral landscape of the next great superpower looks like as it struggles to fuse its ancient past and politically oppressive present with a seemingly boundless economic future, the answer from writer and filmmaker Zhu Wen is – venal.

In each of the five novellas and the short story that comprise I Love Dollars And Other Stories Of China, a collection published by Columbia University Press, Wen's anti-heroes prowl through cities, hospitals, capital backwaters, and nightmarish factories where everything is for sale.

The title story, the work that catapulted Wen to national fame in China, tackles head on the conundrum of living life in a country caught between Communism and Capitalism. In Wen's China, money is the only comfort, defense, and source of meaning. The rest is noise, brutality, and privation. If a fiction is a mirror for its society, then China's face – in Wen's mirror – is horribly disfigured.

John Shieber

Split: A Memoir of Divorce
by Suzanne Finnamore
(Dutton Adult)






There is no denying that getting divorced is no fun, and in her recent novel, Split, Suzanne Finnamore reminds us just how not fun it is.

In an entirely candid portrayal of her struggle with divorce, Finnamore reveals a journey wholly undesirable. Relying on the support from relationships with her mother and close friends, Finnamore depicts a journey through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, grief and acceptance. We follow her path in coping with the various setbacks with her ex, including acknowledging the “other woman,” and those issues that arise when a young child is also in the picture. (The child saves the novel from becoming entirely focused on the downward spiral and, seems to also be dually responsible for saving his mother from complete dismay.)

Split is subtitled, “A Memoir of Divorce,” but as far as “memoirs” go, there is no hint of sentimentality or anything cherishable in this tale of woe. It seems unfair to accuse Finnamore of being overdramatic, and it should not go unsaid that this “memoir” is in some ways redeemed by its humanity. Finnamore does deserve praise for making it through such a difficult journey. However, despite the fact that overnight she became a single mother and victim of adultery, her character is still not entirely sympathetic. The novel ultimately seems self-indulgent, as Finnamore sharply contrasts the woman this reader wanted to see, a woman defined by those efforts of the second wave of the feminist movement, the movement that otherwise affords Finnamore her prestigious position as a journalist who has contributed to several highly trafficked women’s magazines.

However quickly this 253-page “memoir” may read, exposure to every moment of heartbreak proves excessive. She might have drawn more sympathy from this reader had she not compared the tears streaming from her eyes to melting butter or, in a different instance, as “ineffectual bullets,” but perhaps this is what the modern day divorcee seeks for solace and comfort? If so, Split has much to offer. At the very least, it forgives her for indulging in yet another cocktail.

Jessica Stein