If you want to know what the former Monty Python actor Michael Palin was doing at 9:55 a.m. on March 12, 1981, take heed: He was sitting at his writing desk at home in London, longing for coffee. This he recorded in his diary, along with other feelings he had during the Thatcher-/Reagan era. These include impressions on July 9, 1987, when he got a perm, and on May 4, 1984, when he said ''no to the lead in the remake of 'Italian Straw Hat,' but yes to a limerick book.'' He also describes meeting Harold Pinter, who in London on Feb. 17, 1987, was wearing ''a suave blue coat and neat tie''; and Martin Scorsese and Steve Martin, who gave parties for him and the other Pythons in Beverly Hills. Aside from celebrity sightings, the best parts of this book are the descriptions of the Python writing sessions: during one get-/together, they assign one another sexual tasks (''I agree to try and seduce the Queen!''); later they decide they should buy their own nuclear deterrent, so they take out a ''small ad'' in the newspaper saying, ''Nuclear Missile wanted, with warhead, London area.'' Palin gradually establishes his own identity as an actor and chafes at being lumped with the Pythons. A diary is a one-man show, but alas this one drags, featuring thoughts on ''the selection of bedrooms,'' ''restorative'' sleep and other minutiae, for 587 pages. In the last line he writes about a BBC project, ''Around the World in 80 Days,'' noting, ''There's no turning back now.'' You can stop in your tracks, though, as this reader wanted to -- much, much earlier.
THE SINS OF BROTHER CURTIS
A Story of Betrayal, Conviction, and the Mormon Church
By Lisa Davis
Scribner, $27.
The Mormon Church provides a chance for sinners to be forgiven and to seek absolution. Unfortunately, it also extends the privilege to pedophiles. Davis recounts how Frank Curtis, a church member (and Sunday-/school teacher) accused of molesting children, was excommunicated, after which he repented. Following his rebaptism he abused more children; over a decade and a half, at least 20 boys and girls in three different cities suffered. One 10-year-old wrote a note to his little sister and slipped it under his bedroom door: ''Frank is raping me.'' Church lawyers cited the First Amendment as they defended the practice of forgiving people like Curtis and allowing them to mingle with children. Davis, an investigative journalist who has written for SF Weekly, presents a David vs. Goliath case featuring an obsessive lawyer, Tim Kosnoff, who racks up debt and eventually wins a $3 million settlement. Yet the prose is leaden: ''Play was instinctual,'' she writes of a 1970s-era suburban neighborhood. ''If there was a ball, it was tossed.'' Later, she offers perfunctory descriptions of the church's inner workings and recites tedious exchanges. (In one deposition, we learn, a lawyer asked a former private investigator, ''And then you typed the word 'stated'?'') The book duly chronicles abuses within the church and the legal fallout, but it fails to convey the horror.
THE SAVAGE CITY
Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge
By T. J. English
Morrow/HarperCollins, $27.99.
New York may now be the ''Safest Big City in America,'' but it wasn't always. In an account of the city from 1963 to 1973, English tells a story of shocking violence, starting with the murders of a Newsweek copy girl and her roommate in an Upper East Side apartment. ''This is not the way humans should die,'' a medical examiner said as he stood next to their disfigured corpses. George Whitmore Jr., a 19-year-old African-/American high school dropout who lived in New Jersey, was falsely accused of the crimes, and confessed under coercion. Weaving a narrative of Whitmore's life with those of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party in New York, and Bill Phillips, a detective who briefly investigated the Upper East Side murders, English depicts a turbulent decade when the police waged war on the Panthers. None of the characters are particularly ''good'' -- Phillips is on the take; Bin Wahad, armed with a machine gun, tries to rob a Bronx after-hours club; and Whitmore, while innocent of murder, pleads guilty to burglary in a separate episode -- but they all in various ways embody the decade. The tale of Black Panthers and bent cops has been done, but English, the author of ''Havana Nocturne'' (about the mob's dealings in Cuba in the 1950s), is a confident story/teller. He luxuriates in Panther style and in that of hustlers like Phillips, who ''always dressed impeccably in suit and tie, expensive watch, Gucci shoes'' at his East Side ''base of operations,'' P. J. Clarke's; and he places his subjects in the context of the city's wide-scale corruption and institutional racism. Many New Yorkers have at one time or another felt both tremendous pride and utter shame for their city, and English captures that ambivalence.
SEX AND THE RIVER STYX
By Edward Hoagland
Chelsea Green, $27.50.
In the essays collected here, Hoagland, a writer of fiction and nonfiction born in 1932, describes growing up in Connecticut and the ''concentrated happiness of listening by a lake to the lap and hiss of rustling water''; working for the Ringling Brothers circus in the 1950s; writing ''local appreciations of nature'' for the Times editorial page in the 1970s; and aging, which, he explains, is ''not a serene occupation.'' Like most of us, he thinks about sex a lot and comes back to the subject frequently. His passages about wildlife are evocative; a toad has an ''ethereal, extended trill'' that ''seems like spring's angelic epitome -- whereupon the male may clasp the female for many hours.'' When it comes to humans, the sex is less memorable, at least where it concerns the women he loved. Those relationships were complex, and ''the sex in the package cannot be extricated from the stymieing cowardice or passivity, the misperceptions that diluted our passion.'' That does not sound hot. Later, things get worse. At 70, he observes how ''some men keep an eye peeled for a final chance to implant themselves clear to the last,'' adding, ''I seem to be among them.'' He relates how he once picked up a hitchhiker who was fleeing an abusive husband, and how he drove her for a stretch on a Vermont highway. During the ride, he noticed the woman's vulnerability -- her face was ''pale,'' though he didn't ''detect any bruises'' -- and then he became aroused. While these essays are full of elegiac writing, the sex stuff (where people are involved) is a disaster.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: TANK TANKURO: PREWAR WORKS 1934-1935: By Gajo Sakamoto. 240 pp. Presspop/Last Gasp. $29.95. With his absurdist ''Tank Tankuro,'' the manga pioneer Sakamoto smuggled an antiwar message under the noses of the militarist Japanese government. This volume includes essays on the artist and his era.
By TARA McKELVEY
Source Citation
Mckelvey, Tara. "Nonfiction Chronicle." The New York Times Book Review 14 Aug. 2011: 22(L). Gale Power Search. Web. 8 Feb. 2012.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA264198967&v=2.1&u=22054_acld&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w
Gale Document Number: GALE|A264198967
If you want to know what the former Monty Python actor Michael Palin was doing at 9:55 a.m. on March 12, 1981, take heed: He was sitting at his writing desk at home in London, longing for coffee. This he recorded in his diary, along with other feelings he had during the Thatcher-/Reagan era. These include impressions on July 9, 1987, when he got a perm, and on May 4, 1984, when he said ''no to the lead in the remake of 'Italian Straw Hat,' but yes to a limerick book.'' He also describes meeting Harold Pinter, who in London on Feb. 17, 1987, was wearing ''a suave blue coat and neat tie''; and Martin Scorsese and Steve Martin, who gave parties for him and the other Pythons in Beverly Hills. Aside from celebrity sightings, the best parts of this book are the descriptions of the Python writing sessions: during one get-/together, they assign one another sexual tasks (''I agree to try and seduce the Queen!''); later they decide they should buy their own nuclear deterrent, so they take out a ''small ad'' in the newspaper saying, ''Nuclear Missile wanted, with warhead, London area.'' Palin gradually establishes his own identity as an actor and chafes at being lumped with the Pythons. A diary is a one-man show, but alas this one drags, featuring thoughts on ''the selection of bedrooms,'' ''restorative'' sleep and other minutiae, for 587 pages. In the last line he writes about a BBC project, ''Around the World in 80 Days,'' noting, ''There's no turning back now.'' You can stop in your tracks, though, as this reader wanted to -- much, much earlier.
THE SINS OF BROTHER CURTIS
A Story of Betrayal, Conviction, and the Mormon Church
By Lisa Davis
Scribner, $27.
The Mormon Church provides a chance for sinners to be forgiven and to seek absolution. Unfortunately, it also extends the privilege to pedophiles. Davis recounts how Frank Curtis, a church member (and Sunday-/school teacher) accused of molesting children, was excommunicated, after which he repented. Following his rebaptism he abused more children; over a decade and a half, at least 20 boys and girls in three different cities suffered. One 10-year-old wrote a note to his little sister and slipped it under his bedroom door: ''Frank is raping me.'' Church lawyers cited the First Amendment as they defended the practice of forgiving people like Curtis and allowing them to mingle with children. Davis, an investigative journalist who has written for SF Weekly, presents a David vs. Goliath case featuring an obsessive lawyer, Tim Kosnoff, who racks up debt and eventually wins a $3 million settlement. Yet the prose is leaden: ''Play was instinctual,'' she writes of a 1970s-era suburban neighborhood. ''If there was a ball, it was tossed.'' Later, she offers perfunctory descriptions of the church's inner workings and recites tedious exchanges. (In one deposition, we learn, a lawyer asked a former private investigator, ''And then you typed the word 'stated'?'') The book duly chronicles abuses within the church and the legal fallout, but it fails to convey the horror.
THE SAVAGE CITY
Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge
By T. J. English
Morrow/HarperCollins, $27.99.
New York may now be the ''Safest Big City in America,'' but it wasn't always. In an account of the city from 1963 to 1973, English tells a story of shocking violence, starting with the murders of a Newsweek copy girl and her roommate in an Upper East Side apartment. ''This is not the way humans should die,'' a medical examiner said as he stood next to their disfigured corpses. George Whitmore Jr., a 19-year-old African-/American high school dropout who lived in New Jersey, was falsely accused of the crimes, and confessed under coercion. Weaving a narrative of Whitmore's life with those of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party in New York, and Bill Phillips, a detective who briefly investigated the Upper East Side murders, English depicts a turbulent decade when the police waged war on the Panthers. None of the characters are particularly ''good'' -- Phillips is on the take; Bin Wahad, armed with a machine gun, tries to rob a Bronx after-hours club; and Whitmore, while innocent of murder, pleads guilty to burglary in a separate episode -- but they all in various ways embody the decade. The tale of Black Panthers and bent cops has been done, but English, the author of ''Havana Nocturne'' (about the mob's dealings in Cuba in the 1950s), is a confident story/teller. He luxuriates in Panther style and in that of hustlers like Phillips, who ''always dressed impeccably in suit and tie, expensive watch, Gucci shoes'' at his East Side ''base of operations,'' P. J. Clarke's; and he places his subjects in the context of the city's wide-scale corruption and institutional racism. Many New Yorkers have at one time or another felt both tremendous pride and utter shame for their city, and English captures that ambivalence.
SEX AND THE RIVER STYX
By Edward Hoagland
Chelsea Green, $27.50.
In the essays collected here, Hoagland, a writer of fiction and nonfiction born in 1932, describes growing up in Connecticut and the ''concentrated happiness of listening by a lake to the lap and hiss of rustling water''; working for the Ringling Brothers circus in the 1950s; writing ''local appreciations of nature'' for the Times editorial page in the 1970s; and aging, which, he explains, is ''not a serene occupation.'' Like most of us, he thinks about sex a lot and comes back to the subject frequently. His passages about wildlife are evocative; a toad has an ''ethereal, extended trill'' that ''seems like spring's angelic epitome -- whereupon the male may clasp the female for many hours.'' When it comes to humans, the sex is less memorable, at least where it concerns the women he loved. Those relationships were complex, and ''the sex in the package cannot be extricated from the stymieing cowardice or passivity, the misperceptions that diluted our passion.'' That does not sound hot. Later, things get worse. At 70, he observes how ''some men keep an eye peeled for a final chance to implant themselves clear to the last,'' adding, ''I seem to be among them.'' He relates how he once picked up a hitchhiker who was fleeing an abusive husband, and how he drove her for a stretch on a Vermont highway. During the ride, he noticed the woman's vulnerability -- her face was ''pale,'' though he didn't ''detect any bruises'' -- and then he became aroused. While these essays are full of elegiac writing, the sex stuff (where people are involved) is a disaster.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: TANK TANKURO: PREWAR WORKS 1934-1935: By Gajo Sakamoto. 240 pp. Presspop/Last Gasp. $29.95. With his absurdist ''Tank Tankuro,'' the manga pioneer Sakamoto smuggled an antiwar message under the noses of the militarist Japanese government. This volume includes essays on the artist and his era.
By TARA McKELVEY
Source Citation
Mckelvey, Tara. "Nonfiction Chronicle." The New York Times Book Review 14 Aug. 2011: 22(L). Gale Power Search. Web. 8 Feb. 2012.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA264198967&v=2.1&u=22054_acld&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w
Gale Document Number: GALE|A264198967
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