Pearls Picks for July 1st

Offhand, I can't think of a more appealing popular science writer than Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Natalie Angier. Both in her articles in the science section of The New York Times and in her several nonfiction books, her writing is clear, concise, frequently humorous (she makes terrific use of analogies, puns, and other bits of wordplay), and always interesting. Even if, at first, you doubt that her topic is what you've always wanted to read about, Angier's sprightly style lures you in and keeps you reading. I always come away from reading something by her feeling much smarter and more knowledgeable than I was going in. It's no different with her new book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (which should be required reading for anyone interested in how the world works). Here Angier explains the basics (and innate beauty) of the building blocks of the "hard" sciences, including biology, chemistry, physics, geology, and astronomy. If you found your high school (and even college) science classes to be dull grinds, taken only because they were required -- as, alas, so many of us did -- Angier's book just might be a revelation to you. She'll take you through a thorough explanation of what's what in the natural world, and, even better, show you why it matters. This is a book that is best read slowly, to give you a chance to contemplate what you've just taken in.

You would be forgiven if you thought that a memoir about a newly widowed mother of four who borrows her late husband's dream and becomes a Unitarian-Universalist minister and then works as a chaplain with the Search and Rescue division of the Maine Game Warden's office would be so innately depressing and/or boring that there's no sense reading it. But -- trust me on this -- Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup shows its writer to be a warm, caring, and courageous woman, and these essays (which are uplifting without being smarmy or sappy) are well worth the time you spend with them. She writes about her husband's unexpected death; her experiences on the job dealing with the after-effects of suicides, murders, lost children, accidents; and her everyday life, including trying to answer her children's questions about why God let their father die. Braestrup's ability to see beyond herself (always a challenge with a memoir) and her musings on love (both human and divine) and on the need to live life fully in the face of death make this a special book indeed.

The eponymous (love that word!) "great man" of the title in Kate Christensen's third novel is the great (and fictional) 20th-century artist Oscar Feldman, whose enormous talent for figurative painting (solely the female nude) is matched only by his genius for seducing his models. Feldman sounds like he would make a great subject for a biography -- right? In fact, two competing biographers -- the ink on their signed contracts barely dry -- rush to interview his survivors, who include his wife, Abigail, an autistic son, and his sister Maxine, herself a celebrated painter (but not nearly as well known as her brother was) of Rothko and Pollock-like abstracts. Not mentioned in Feldman's obsequious obituaries is the fact that he also left behind a whole other family: his mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and the couple's twin daughters. As the biographers vie for interview time with the women in Oscar Feldman's life, each one gets the chance to tell her own version of the truth about him as she knew it. The Great Man is a comedy of manners about art and artists, egos, fame, the way we fashion ourselves, and how others make us into the people they want (or need) us to be. 

Marisa de los Santos definitely beat the sophomore jinx with her new novel, Belong to Me. Although de los Santos carries on the story of Cornelia and Teo, two of the central figures in her first novel, Love Walked In, in this follow-up she broadens her canvas to include several other memorable characters. In fact, if I had to choose which of de los Santos's many writerly talents is foremost, it would have to be that she creates remarkably real characters. Each novel tells an interesting tale, and the writing is consistently intelligent, smooth, and quite enjoyable to read, which should come as no surprise, since de los Santos began her writing career as a poet. However, for me, it's the three-dimensional men, women, and children who populate her fiction that I'll remember for a very long time. Two of the people she introduces in Belong to Me are a very bright 13-year-old named Dev Tremain and his mother, Lake. When one of Dev's teachers unfairly labels him a troublemaker, Lake moves the two of them to a suburb of Philadelphia (coincidentally, the same place where Cornelia and Teo have moved for Teo's work) in order to send Dev to a school for gifted kids. (Here's an example of the way de los Santos can capture the essence of a character in one short sentence: "…Dev wanted two things in the world to be as utterly straightforward and unmysterious as possible: one was music, the other was his mother.") The third important new character is one of Cornelia's new neighbors, Piper Truitt, whose improbably high standards of appearance and behavior intimidate Cornelia, and who very nearly abandons her own life to take care of a dying friend. As the plot progresses, friendships are formed, decisions are made, secrets from the past are revealed, and everyone's lives are sent spinning into new directions.

The timeless story of brotherly non-love evidently began with Cain and Abel. There's a 20th-century version of it in John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Now, in the 21st century, in Mary Lawson's The Other Side of the Bridge, we get the story of two brothers growing up on a Canadian farm in the 1930s. Arthur Dunn, the oldest, is stolid, solid, and kind, while his younger brother Jake is the total opposite: flashy, manipulative, womanizing, and devious. (Even their names hint at their differences.) They both fall in love with Laura, who, improbably, it would seem, marries Arthur and settles in to a life of contentment, if not passion. Almost two decades later, Laura's charms and beauty have not noticeably waned, despite the fact that she has three children. Teenager Ian Christopherson, son of the town's doctor, takes a job on the Dunn's farm in order to worship Laura from closer than afar. His appearance, along with the unexpected return of Jake, sets off a series of events that inevitably ends in tragedy. Lawson's prose is poetic and evocative without being mannered or self-conscious. Her descriptions of the beauty and starkness of the Canadian landscape, the difficulties of the farmers getting through the Depression years, and her exploration of different sorts of love are all presented with honesty and care.  

A lot of the hours when I'm not reading are spent searching for thrillers that I might want to read. What I am looking for are those with a smooth writing style, a complex yet fast-paced plot, and a likeable hero. So I was absolutely delighted to finally discover Mike Lawson. (I was a bit late to the party of his fans because I'd already missed his first two, The Inside Ring and The Second Perimeter, but I intend to remedy that situation quickly.) The 3rd in his series about Joe DeMarco is House Rules, and it's an entertaining read. DeMarco is what's known in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. as a "fixer." He's the guy you call when you want to find out what's what (without anyone knowing who's asking) or you want something done that may be everything from just a bit shady to downright illegal. DeMarco's talents for succeeding at these sorts of assignments make him an invaluable asset to his boss, John Mahoney, the powerful Speaker of the House of Representatives. In this go-round, Mahoney calls on Joe when the junior senator from Virginia, responding to two unsuccessful terrorist attacks on American soil, strongly urges Congress to pass a law requiring background checks on all Muslims in the U.S., with instant deportation if they're not citizens.  And, due to the climate of fear that pervades the U.S., it looks like the bill is going to pass both Houses of Congress in a heartbeat. Not only does Mahoney (who's both an effective politician and not a stupid man) know instinctively that this new law is the wrong way to deal with the situation (it hearkens back, in his mind, to such mistakes as the law setting up the Japanese internment camps during World War II), but he has a connection to one of the terrorists that he needs to keep secret.  Enter DeMarco. This smart political thriller offers readers both a wild ride and thought-provoking issues. In many ways, House Rules reminded me of the novels of the late Ross Thomas; this, from me, is high praise, indeed.