CRITIC'S CHOICE
In September 1991,14 deep-sea scuba divers traveled 60 miles off the New Jersey shore to a spot where a fishing boat captain had told them about a possible shipwreck lying on the ocean floor 200 or so feet below the surface. Even for experienced divers, 200 feet is "crazy deep," Kurson writes, and fraught with danger: "If a deep-wreck diver stays in the sport long enough, he will either come close to dying, watch another diver die or die himself." But the group overcame their fear as they soon learned this was no ordinary wreck: It was the remains of a World War II-era German submarine, and the discovery would ultimately dominate their lives.
According to German and American military records, no U-boats were sunk anywhere near this location. So what boat was this, and how did it get here? For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, both experienced deep-wreck divers, those questions became obsessions. Along the way, the pair turned into first-rate amateur historians whose sleuthing led them to realize that official histories aren't always trustworthy. Beset by colleagues' deaths and false leads, Chatterton and Kohler persisted in unraveling the mystery–as impressive a feat as their daring dives–even as their single-mindedness took its toll on their marriages and mental health.
Exquisitely researched and superbly told, this hard-to-put-down first book by Esquire contributing editor Kurson delves into the psyches of these men and helps explain why a wreck came to mean so much to them. The book's harrowing accounts of shark encounters, equipment malfunctions and the severe physical rigors of deep-sea diving, meanwhile, will leave even armchair adventurers gasping for breath.
NON-FICTION
By Sarah Grace McCandless
Welcome to Grosse Pointe, Mich., where well-groomed families are steeped in American Beauty dysfunction and Mean Girls culture. Sixth grader Emma Harris is the new kid in this tony Detroit suburb. Emma's auto-exec dad has bought a house next to the wealthy Krauses, whose daughter becomes Emma's cool pal. But when the school hunk asks, "Will you go with me?" and Emma replies "Where?", her journey into the cringe-worthy years of adolescence begins.
This is the '80s–Emma longs to slow-dance to Prince's "Purple Rain"–but the humiliations and pretensions are timeless. In vignettes accompanied by Christine Norrie illustrations, McCandless, a Grosse Pointe-bred former comics exec, hilariously captures teen politics ("Laugh at his jokes, but act like you can't stand him," the school's Queen Bees tell Emma). But there's compassion beneath the dead-on details, and Emma's self-awareness sets her apart in a place where girls grow up to become "supermodel pregnant...no bloated ankles," and "nothing ever changes."
NOVEL
By Anthony Weller
Yankee stubbornness informs a hilarious David vs. Goliath struggle in Weller's third novel. Salt Cove is a speck of a town in Massachusetts, north of Boston. When the state condemns the town's historic (i.e., rotting) wooden bridge and announces that a concrete span will replace it, the villagers turn into hopping-mad revolutionaries. The government tries to demolish the bridge in the middle of the night, prompting residents to dump state workers into the cove. Fittingly, after this 21st-century Boston Tea Party, the village secedes from the United States.
It's a gloriously strange book, both whimsical and brooding. The chapters are narrated by different townsfolk, providing a detailed sense of the community. Perhaps the portrayal of the corrupt and wasteful government is an easy exaggeration, but this is comedy, after all, and hyperbole is the cornerstone of humor.
COMIC NOVEL
By Nicholas Rinaldi
Between Two Rivers records bits and pieces from the lives of the residents of Echo Terrace, an upscale apartment building in Lower Manhattan, as seen through the eyes of the building's opinionated concierge, one Farro Fescu. Beginning his richly textured story before the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and ending it on Sept. 11, 2001, the author uses the final catastrophe as a way of parsing disasters, both private and public, and in particular, American disasters: glossy, grand, symbolic.
Through multinational characters including Theo Tattafruge, a plastic surgeon who specializes in gender reassignment, Muhta Saad, a spice trader, and Juanita Blaize, a pop star, Rinaldi (The Jukebox Queen of Malta) paints a complex, compelling portrait of the ways in which we flirt with the American Dream. His maybe a more desperate picture than we'd like to see, full of loneliness and longing, but it has a melancholy power that's strangely memorable.
COMIC-NOVEL
By Nichelle D. Tramble
The greatest crime-mystery writers root their stories in specific urban milieus as vivid as any of their characters. With The Last King, Tramble proves that she is in line to become one of the greats, magnificently turning Oakland into "a way station for lost souls...the damaged hordes of lost boys roaming the city."
Picking up where she left off with her debut The Dying Ground, Tramble sends her troubled hero Maceo Redfield back onto Oakland's meanest streets, where his childhood friend, NBA All-Star Cornelius "Cotton" Knox, has become tangled up in the murder of a local call girl. Maceo haunts the city's dark corners, coming up against present enemies and past ghosts. Though its athlete-in-trouble plot seems ripped from the headlines, King digs deep into the psyches of its characters and provides insights into the African-American community that go beyond current events. Tramble is a hell of a writer with an ear for the spoken word. And she can go hard-boiled with the best of them: Gems like "He mainlined failure straight to the vein" appear on every page. With The Last King, Tramble catapults to the upper echelon of crime noir.
MYSTERY
A Jane Austen Moment
With a slew of Austen-Inspired novels including Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife and Vanity and Vexation just out and another film version of Pride and Prejudice (starring Keira Knightley) in production, the Brit-lit lioness is having a revival. Why now? Austen scholars explain it all.
HEROINES WHO ROCK Austen protagonists are "strong-minded, they know what they want, and they're articulate," says Jacqueline Labbe, a reader in literature at the University of Warwick in Britain.
THE FIRTH EFFECT Pride and Prejudice, Emma and other '90s films were "heated up" with hunks like Colin Firth, says Deborah Kaplan, associate professor at George Mason University; novelists and filmmakers are mining those sexier themes.
PAST PERFECT Austen's "rule-bound society" offers a kind of escape from the chaos of 2004, says Claire Lamont, a professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
The Men We Became
In a new memoir, JFK Jr.'s college roommate and close pal Robert Littell writes about a man who was loyal, funny—and very human. Some highlights:
BLUE PERIOD After he failed to pass the New York State bar exam for the second time, John "drove his blue truck...to a motel near Lake George, N.Y., checked in and slowly drank a bottle of Scotch over the course of the weekend, alone and listening to self-help tapes."
LUCKY STAR John and Madonna had a "curiosity encounter" in the late '80s. John described a tryst "in a hotel room...stuck without contraception. While they managed to entertain themselves, they never achieved what would have been the definitive celebrity coupling."
GOING ONCE... John and his sister were criticized for auctioning off Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's things, such as furniture and household goods, after she died, but offering them had been Jackie's idea. She had said to John, "Sell them! Tell them it was from Jackie's love nest"
LOVE AND HONOR John sometimes found monogamy challenging and "mused over managing his carnal urges" in long talks with Littell, but he never cheated on his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. "John was determined not to publicly humiliate his wife," since Jackie had been forced to live with constant whispering about JFK Sr.'s infidelities.
- Contributors:
- Joe Heim,
- Lori Gottlieb,
- Jeremy Jackson,
- Margaux Wexberg,
- Champ Clark.
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!
