Like some transatlantic Rip Van Winkle, Bryson is an Iowan who woke up after 20 years of sleepy English country life and moved back to America. As a result, the best-selling author of A Walk in the Woods is bewildered and grumpy—and funnier than almost anyone on either side of the pond. I'm a Stranger is a collection of Bryson's newspaper columns that explain his new life in New Hampshire to the British, a task only slightly less difficult than explaining a dog to a cat. The America he affectionately presents is filled with choices one doesn't want to make ("caramel latte, mocha, espresso, espresso mocha ...") and rules he would like to enforce across the entire planet, for example, "It is no longer permitted ... to say in any context whatever that one is seeking closure." (Broadway, $25)
Bottom Line: Comically prodigal son has fun with American foibles
by Ernest Hemingway
It's hard to imagine Hemingway approving a "fictional memoir." But this account of his life in Kenya in the early 1950s, an absorbing if hardly profound 311 pages, was reconstituted by the writer's son Patrick from a longer manuscript.
While the nationalist Mau Mau uprising that led to Kenya's independence in 1963 serves as backdrop, the book focuses on the crusade of Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary, to shoot a lion. Papa, meanwhile, pursues an affair with a young African woman. Hemingway's notable difficulty with female characters extends to Mary, whose tolerance for the affair with Debba is endless ("I'm glad you have such a nice fiancée," she says, unconvincingly, at one point).
The book never equals Hemingway's best hunting writing, Green Hills of Africa. And his always parody-ready style sometimes sinks to self-satire: About the lion hunt, he says, "It would have certainly been very bad for my writing if I had been killed." When someone calls him "hopeless," Hemingway foreshadows his own suicide. "No," he says. "I'm not hopeless because I still have hope. The day I haven't you'll know it bloody quick." (Scribner, $26)
Bottom Line: Not the master's best, but still the master's
by Tama Janowitz
Queen of the '80s literary brat pack, which also numbered Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, Janowitz reemerges with a trenchant novel about urban (bad) manners in the '90s. Florence Collins is a pretty blonde associate at an auction house, scaling the gilded ranks of New York City's upper crust. Alas, she is also unattached and—gasp!—already past age 30. In her world, a grim place of sneering waiters and designer toddler duds, this is a problem. "If they don't give me a raise or I find a rich man to marry," Florence says, "I'm going to do something desperate!"
Instead, desperation is thrust upon her, in classic Jane Austen fashion. Weekending in the Hamptons as the guest of a couple so rich they keep an aromatherapist on retainer, Florence is wrongly accused of nearly drowning their daughter and putting moves on the husband. A comical downward spiral follows, but what makes this book fly is its knowing wink at a decaying demimonde. Indeed, Florence's quest for rich men verges on pathological. She spurns Daryl, a kindly advocate for the homeless, to pursue Raffaello, a vapid but wealthy drug addict. Though Janowitz's premise wears thin, her story amuses to the end. (Doubleday, $23.95) Bottom Line: Tart modern women's morality tale
by Russell Andrews
Beach book of the week
This one must have been cooked up over veal chops at Elaine's, the famed Manhattan hangout. Under the nom de plume Russell Andrews, writer-editor Peter Andrew Gethers and mystery novelist David Russell Handler serve up a saucy thriller that has some peppery fun with the literary scene. No one will publish failing author Carl Granville's serious novel Getting Kiddo, so he scrapes by as a ghost—he once wrote a series of mysteries for Kathie Lee Gif-ford. When he's offered $200,000 to fictionalize an old diary about a southern childhood and a murder, he thinks he's landed on easy street. But dead bodies are soon cropping up everywhere, and quicker than you can say "advance against royalties," Carl is running for his life, trying to track down the diarist and the powerful people who are determined to squelch the story. With , crisply paced terror and a delicious cast that includes a hit man who hates "bottled salad dressing, the films of Meg Ryan and failure," Gideon leaves a reader hungry for more. (Ballantine, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Sizzles like haute cuisine
by Carolyn Wyman
Even if you've never tasted it, you know that the mere mention of Spam—a mixture of pork shoulder and ham—makes some Americans shudder and others rhapsodize. Launched by the Hormel company in 1937, Spam has long been a staple of popular culture, first as a sponsor of Burns and Allen's radio show, then as a fixture of World War II mess halls, where it gained its bad rep (due to later government substitution of an inferior tinned meat product that was overfed to GIs). Syndicated newspaper columnist Carolyn Wyman's witty, extensively illustrated overview playfully mixes Spam's history with examples of its use and abuse (as material for sculpture, playing cards, cyberbowling pins and as fodder for a notorious Monty Python skit). Although it remains popular in Polynesia, Hawaii and the South, Spam has a campy quality that helps explain why the name has been adopted as a term for electronic junk mail and provides Wyman's juiciest tidbits. For example, Spam is essential to Do-Spam-Key, the martial art of breaking Spam slices against your forehead, and it has even inspired haiku: "Man wearing white shirt/ Drops meat, causing greasy stain;/ Cries, 'Out, out, Spam dot!' " (Harcourt Brace, $15)
Bottom Line: Unexpectedly tasty dish
>KEEPING FAITH Jodi Picoult
This tale of a young girl who talks to God and heals people—inciting a media riot in the process—raises significant questions about faith, religion and society. (Morrow, $24)
HOW MEN HAVE BABIES Alan Thicke From the star of Growing Pains, a part-serious, part-comic guide for the man who needs to know what to expect when the woman in his life is expecting. (Contemporary, $15.95)
MORRIE: IN HIS OWN WORDS Morrie Schwartz Lessons on life and death from the college professor who became the subject of the bestselling Tuesdays with Morrie. (Walker, $18)
- Contributors:
- Harry Bauld,
- Ralph Novak,
- Alec Foege,
- J.D. Reed,
- Edward Karam.
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!
