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Apples and Oranges

by Marie Brenner
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In this elegiac memoir, the author, a reporter, applies the same investigative skills that led to her exposés of the tobacco industry and Enron to a more intimate subject: her contentious relationship with her late brother, Carl. From an eccentric Jewish Texan family of compulsive record keepers—their father maintained a four-page list of his life’s achievements—Marie became a New York liberal, Carl a diehard conservative who abandoned a legal career to farm apples. As a teen-ager, he smashed his sister’s Joan Baez records; as an adult, given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, he informed her via FedEx. Her attempts to smooth over their differences by mastering the language of fruit (Carl often started conversations, “I am going to give you a quiz”) are at once comic and tinged with regret.

The New Yorker, June 2, 2008

Death by a Thousand Cuts

by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue
(Harvard)

In 1904, a French photographer documented the Chinese practice of lingchi, a form of execution that involved slicing off limbs and pieces of flesh. Europeans recoiled from what appeared to be a gruesome, lingering death, citing it as evidence of a uniquely Oriental ruthlessness. This fascinating study argues, however, that lingchi was not entirely about physical suffering—the victim was typically sedated with opium, and killed early in the process—but about a “loss of somatic integrity,” the posthumous shame of having been reduced to body parts. Crimes that merited lingchi ranged from killing a paternal grandparent to, in at least one case, cheating on taxes. Throughout, the authors do their best to downplay the exoticism of their subject, pointing to such Western practices as drawing (disembowelling) and quartering (dismembering): “It is hard to see much distinction in degrees of cruelty.”

The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

Light Years

by Susanna Moore
(Grove)

When Moore, a novelist, was growing up in Hawaii, in the early fifties, it still took five days to reach the islands by sea from San Francisco. Yet life there for haoles (foreigners) was not unlike that of bluebloods summering in Maine: Moore and her four siblings roamed the landscape at will, while their mother, prone to nervous breakdowns, attempted to outfit them in seersucker shorts. Moore’s recollections are faithful to a child’s purview; she was shocked to learn, later, that “only haoles were allowed to live in the most desirable neighborhoods.” Interwoven in the text are excerpts from Darwin and Woolf, among others, although the most memorable line comes from an early-twentieth-century visitor to Hawaii, who reported that nearly no one was left alive who could play the nose flute “as it should be played, to the excruciation of every nerve in a Caucasian body.”

The New Yorker, April 21, 2008

Dandy in the Underworld

by Sebastian Horsley
(Harper Perennial)

Horsley, a British dandy and putative artist notorious for having undergone a crucifixion, turns a grim childhood into cocktail-party fodder in this compulsively fizzy memoir. He spins tales of his wealthy father’s infidelities and his alcoholic mother’s crashed Jaguars, suicide attempts, sojourns in a mental hospital, and second marriage to a cult member clad entirely in orange. The glee for destructive behavior is less charming in Horsley’s subsequent misadventures with drugs and sex, which, he claims, include sleeping with “more than 1,000 prostitutes, at a cost of £100,000,” and later turning tricks himself. His saving grace is an utter lack of self-pity; instead, he never fails to find himself adorable. The book’s most loving passages detail his quest for sartorial splendor: he shows up for a shark-research expedition carrying a pink lace parasol, and, in the throes of heroin addiction, has his tailor customize his suits to hold hidden syringes.

The New Yorker, April 14, 2008

Ravens in the Storm

by Carl Oglesby
(Scribner)

Writing this memoir, Oglesby was able to draw on more than four thousand pages of government intelligence about himself, gathered in the nineteen-sixties during his time as the president of the protest group Students for a Democratic Society. A former defense-industry employee with a high-security clearance, Oglesby became a prominent antiwar figure—he served on an international war-crimes tribunal with Jean-Paul Sartre and was asked to be the Vice-Presidential running mate of the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver—but he always saw himself as a voice for moderation. This centrist perspective alienated S.D.S.’s militants, including a future leader of the Weathermen, who warned him, “We are not frustrated liberals, Carl. We are enemies of the state.” In the end, Oglesby recounts, he was forced out of S.D.S. on charges of rejecting Marxism-Leninism and possibly being a federal agent. His book is a mournful tribute to the spirit of an age gone awry.

The New Yorker, March 17, 2008

Inside the Red Mansion

by Oliver August
(Houghton Mifflin)

In 1999, China’s Public Enemy No. 1 was “Fatty” Lai Changxing, an illiterate rice farmer turned real-estate and shipping mogul who fled the country, accused of heading a multibillion-dollar smuggling ring. This account, by a former Beijing bureau chief of the London Times, casts Lai’s rise and fall as a cautionary tale of boomtown China. The author tours the remains of Lai’s empire—a film studio built as a replica of the Forbidden City; a posh brothel where he bribed Party officials with the company of “Miss Temporarys”—but he reserves his most vivid prose for the “fakers and fortune seekers, oddballs and outlaws” he meets along the way: canny dance-hall girls, magnates of karaoke and foie gras, an “honesty doctor” who treats patients in a public park. His portraits are so lively that when Lai is finally arrested, at a casino in Niagara Falls, it’s almost incidental.

The New Yorker, August 6, 2007

Poor People

by William T. Vollmann
(Ecco)

Following Vollmann’s three-thousand-page treatise on violence, this relatively slender book is framed as a collection of “snapshots” showing how “certain poor people experienced their poverty at random moments.” Vollmann disavows the kind of sustained analysis attempted in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” which he considers a failure, “because it consists of two rich men observing the lives of the poor.” But, as Vollmann acknowledges, he, too, is rich, compared to those he encounters, and a sense of guilt pervades these pages. His unsentimental portraits—of Russian beggars, indentured Chinese prostitutes, Kazakh schoolteachers reduced to shovelling snow—are revelatory. When he asks people why they are destitute, almost none lay blame on others or express animosity toward the rich. One says, “We just had poor luck adjusting.”

The New Yorker, April 30, 2007

The Father of All Things

by Tom Bissell
(Pantheon)

In 2003, Bissell travelled to Vietnam with his father, who had fought there nearly four decades before. Their relationship was uneasy: as a child, Bissell once reported his father to an abuse hotline (after an unusually physical game of rock, paper, scissors), and, at the age of twenty-nine, he still felt “diminished” in the man’s presence; meanwhile, his father, only half joking, called him a Communist. In this ambitious, uneven book, Bissell chronicles their pilgrimage to former battlefields and seeks to reconcile his personal “mythology,” as the son of a Vietnam veteran, with the larger context of “the only war in which the United States failed to enact its will.” Bissell writes with conviction, and his prose, if sometimes swashbuckling, has moments of startling beauty. Recalling a childhood hunting trip, he describes how he wept with shock after shooting a mallard, while his father said nothing, recriminatory or consoling: “The erasure of a life—its totality—was something my father understood.”

The New Yorker, March 26, 2007

The High Road to China

by Kate Teltscher
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In 1774, George Bogle, a young envoy for the East India Company, departed from Calcutta for Tibet, a country that no Briton had yet entered. Eager to learn local customs, Bogle grew long whiskers, “drank a Deluge of Tea with Salt and Butter,” and befriended the Panchen Lama, the incarnation of the Buddha of Boundless Light, whom he described as “a short fat Man, and as merry as a Criquet.” This captivating history re-creates Bogle’s epiphany that Tibet’s alien culture was “far from that Barbarism which with transalpine Arrogance is too often considered as the Lot of every Nation unknown to Europeans.” Alas for Bogle, his mission, to encourage the opening of trade with not only Tibet but—the greater prize—China, failed, owing to the Qianlong Emperor’s disdain for the “lonely remoteness” of England, “cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea.”

The New Yorker, March 19, 2007

In Spite of the Gods

by Edward Luce
(Doubleday)

The C.I.A. has projected that India will become, within the decade, the fourth most powerful country in the world. Yet, as Luce writes in this far-reaching study, the Indian government, beset by twenty-four party coalitions, is “fragmented and often incoherent”; fewer than forty million of India’s citizens have “formal” employment and pay any income tax; and three hundred million people—more than a quarter of the population—live in poverty. Luce tackles the contradictions of the subcontinent with a mixture of respect, bemusement, and exasperation. His research is formidable: he traverses vast amounts of territory, and supplements personal encounters—he meets corrupt officials, aggrieved diplomats, Hindu-nationalist adherents of “biofuturology”—with exhaustive economic data. The resulting book is stunning in its breadth, and refreshingly free of exoticism.

The New Yorker, March 12, 2007