This appealing first novel puts a fresh spin on a familiar tale. On a moon-drenched Halloween in the 1950s, Anna Anderson Thomas, a mother of five in rural Mississippi, conceives a baby she cannot keep. Times are hard: Her husband, the gruff, bow-legged J.T., is fired from the local mill; Anna's job as a maid ends when her employers move. Only the couple's brooding teenage son, Junior, earns a living wage. For five months, Anna conceals her pregnancy. She shares her fears, memories and dreams with the unborn child she intuits will be a daughter and writes letters to a childhood friend who went north. Unless Anna defends her nest, the child will be raised by J.T.'s barren sister, a grating, self-important preacher's wife.
Jackson crafts Anna's odyssey from voicelessness to authority with daring, assigning much of the narrating duty to the unborn baby. The result, with nods to works by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, is a triumph. (Pocket, $22)
by Karen Stabiner
Amid the growing confusion and controversy surrounding every aspect of the breast cancer epidemic—from the value of annual mammograms for women under 50 to the most effective course of treatment—To Dance with the Devil is a levelheaded and valuable dispatch from the front on which the war against this disease is waged. At the center of the fray—and the heart of Stabiner's book—is Dr. Susan Love, 49, the surgical oncologist, author and women's health advocate who was made director of the UCLA Breast Center in 1992. Love's multidisciplinary approach, which allows women with breast cancer to see all the relevant specialists at once instead of following a "chain of referrals," has inspired fierce loyalty from center patients even as it has alienated more traditional colleagues.
Recalling And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts's 1987 book on AIDS, To Dance with the Devil tells its story through a series of interlocking narratives and perspectives: case histories of women suffering from various stages and forms of breast cancer, a recounting of successes and setbacks experienced by scientists racing to find a genetic cause for the disease and profiles of activists trying to persuade the government to increase research funding. Although the stories of some patients are harrowing, Stabiner's account of Dr. Love's near-visionary dedication is uplifting; most women will be comforted to know that someone is working tirelessly and selflessly to improve—and prolong—their lives. (Delacorte, $25.95)
by Martha McPhee
This is an original, peculiarly American story of a family unhappy in its own way. It is 1970 when 8-year-old Kate and her two sisters are dragged by their lost soul of a mother, a divorcée who has fallen hard for her smooth-talking Esalen therapist, into a life on the road with him and his five children. For Kate there is too much pot, alcohol and freedom, not to mention every permutation of sibling and stepfamily rivalry. She clings to the fantasy that the geologist father who abandoned her will return, and with him her once rock-solid life.
McPhee writes with assurance in her first novel. Her story flows smoothly, and she dissects her characters kindly. There are no villains here, just damaged, well-meaning people who are only as strong as their weakest dysfunction. But in a climactic passage at the Grand Canyon, the author hammers the symbolism too hard, and the story's resolution lacks the conviction of the journey that came before it. (Random House, $23)
by David Ignatius
How do you tell the editor of a prestigious national newspaper that his star reporter—and your colleague—is secretly working for a foreign power? That, it turns out, is the least of New York Mirror newsman Eric Truell's problems in this well-turned thriller. Truell's wrestle with journalistic ethics comes dangerously closer to home when he is approached by the CIA to help a French biochemist escape from China. His decision sets in motion a series of startling and all-too-believable events that resonate from Beijing to Washington.
An editor at The Washington Post, Ignatius (Agents of Innocence) is obviously having fun, but his mordant commentary on the sagging and compromised state of American journalism may make a reader wonder why journalistic mediocrity, as well as taking money from outside sources, is not also a firing offense. (Random House, $23)
by Michael Lewis
Most political writers are either policy rats (who bore us with the minutiae of bills destined to be diluted nine times and then killed) or process nerds (who bore us with breathless replays of how a TV commercial or "unrehearsed" zinger changed the course of the nation). But in his keenly observed portraits of last year's Republican presidential wannabes, the brilliant Michael Lewis skips the banal in favor of goofy details that reveal the character of the candidates—and the country. "[Steve] Forbes," he writes, "takes the fine art of buffet repression to a ridiculous extreme—he takes precisely the same amount of everything as the Rotarian and arranges his plate so that it's identical." Of Bob Dole, Lewis asks incisively, "How can you speak to men's hearts when you house your soul in the aluminum siding of modern politics?"
At his best, Lewis becomes Cervantes to the Don Quixote of wheel and tire assemblies, industrialist Morry Taylor, whose brief candidacy is doomed by impolitic good sense and an inability to talk out of more than one side of his mouth: "perhaps the only presidential candidate in history to be overconfident while running eighth in a field of eight just four days before the Iowa caucus." Finally, a campaign journal with all of the camp and none of the pain. (Knopf, $25)
by Stephen J. Cannell
That Cannell's latest novel reads like a script should come as no surprise. The author is, after all, best known for his work as a prolific television writer and producer (The Rockford Files, Hunter and The Commish). And indeed, months before this book went to press, John Travolta had already signed to star in the screen version.
Zipping along with few pretensions to literature, this novel is pure fun. The story begins when charming con man Beano X. Bates cheats a New Jersey Mafia boss at poker and is nearly beaten to death with a golf club as a result. Lest his own nefarious doings be exposed, Bates—whose skillful scamming has earned him the honorific King Con—sneaks out of town before the case goes to trial. But when a witness is murdered before she can take the stand, a guilt-ridden Bates and state prosecutor Victoria Hart team up to bring the mafioso down—and fall in love while they go about it.
Chock-full of con-game lingo and lovable flimflam artists, King Con may sometimes feel grounded more in Hollywood than in reality, but it's so entertaining the venue hardly seems to matter. (Morrow, $24)
by Philip Kerr
Beach Book of the Week
AFTER DISCOVERING A HUMANLIKE skull in a Himalayan ice cave, mountaineer Jack Furness presents the find to his girlfriend, who is stunned, delighted, thrilled! And why wouldn't she be? Stella Swift is a feisty Berkeley paleoanthropologist for whom Jack's gift offers compelling evidence that the legendary and—by all accounts—exceedingly hairy Abominable Snowman really exists. Swift dubs the skull Esau—after Jacob's hirsute Old Testament brother. Soon, she and Jack are leading an expedition back to the Himalayas to capture one of Esau's kin, called yeti by the locals.
Kerr, a British suspense writer (Dead Meat), serves up some deliciously Spielbergian twists. There's a pregnant Snowwoman, whom the explorers later teach crude English ("Foo-ooo-dah!"she cries), and a Snowman with abominable table manners: He munches on human drumsticks. Yet the yeti come off, credibly, as an endangered, intelligent, even superior species. Kerr has crafted a summer sizzler with plenty of foo-ooo-dah for thought. (Holt, $22.50)
>CANAAN ABLE Having been selected in April for Oprah's Book Club, Sheri Reynolds's The Rapture of Canaan surprised no one when it rocketed onto the bestseller lists. But when Jan Karon's similarly titled Out to Canaan also made the lists, industry insiders speculated the windfall was due to mistaken identity. No way, says Karon, 60. "In the 22 cities I have toured," she says, "I have not heard anybody mention any confusion or Rapture of Canaan to me." She could have pointed out that Oprah fave Song of Solomon didn't put King Solomon's Mines back on the charts.
TAKING WING Will John Travolta's latest career move get off the ground? An avid pilot, Travolta has written and illustrated Propeller One-Way Night Coach, a 96-page fable he made up several years ago for his now 5-year-old son (named Jett, natch). The story, about an 8-year-old boy who dreams of flying, "should be shared," says Travolta's literary agent Susan Crawford. The Warner Books hardback lands at bookstores in October. What's next in the Travolta oeuvre? Pulp fiction?
SILVA STAR Watch out, Tom Clancy. With his first novel, The Unlikely Spy, ex-CNN producer Daniel Silva has staked out some primo real estate on the bestseller lists. Silva is gold, says Adam Rothberg of Villard, which signed him to a second two-book deal. "We have a surefire No. 1 bestselling author."
>Vanna White
KNIT PICK
WHEN WHEEL OF FORTUNE'S CAMERAS go dark, Vanna White stops sashaying and starts crocheting. "People think you have to be 70 years old to do this, but you don't," says the 40-year-old letter-turner as she signs copies of her new page-turner Vanna's Afghans All Through the House, at a Brentano's bookstore in Los Angeles. She pauses to needle one harried-looking young man. "Have you ever tried?" "Right now," he replies, "I have a bar exam to worry about."
Vanna's second yarn about her favorite patterns for the colorful coverlets (her first, 1994's Vanna's Afghans A to Z, was a tribute to her grandmother and crochet coach Albertene Nicholas) comes complete with directions for some of the 70-odd afghans she has completed (as well as works in progress stashed in her bedroom, office, even the trunk of her car). Such pals as Merv Griffin and Pat Sajak have received her creations as gifts.
"Every time I make someone an afghan, I'm thinking of that person with each stitch," says the mom of Nicholas, 3. "There's a pink afghan being made as we speak," confides Vanna, who's expecting a baby girl next month. "I'd better finish it before the baby arrives."
- Contributors:
- V. R. Peterson,
- Francine Prose,
- Paula Chin,
- J.D. Reed,
- Kyle Smith,
- Michael A. Lipton,
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Lan N. Nguyen,
- Linda Friedman.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
