Part 8 (1/2)

Victor Carl is the main character in a series of novels by William Lashner. How could anyone resist a dubious hero who frequently resorts to ”yowza” and ”gad” to express his feelings? Not me. Carl's not a particularly successful attorney, always teetering on the edge of going broke, so he's frequently forced to take cases no one else will, and he's not above using deceit, dodgy ethics, and downright trickery to get his clients off. One of my favorites is A Killer's Kiss. As in all of the Victor Carl mysteries, the plot is satisfyingly complex, making it almost impossible for anyone (except Victor) to finally figure out whodunit.

Gillian Roberts has written many mysteries about schoolteacher Amanda Pepper. The first one is Caught Dead in Philadelphia, and they're all perfect for cozy mystery fans.

Bennie Rosato, the Philadelphia attorney who stars in Lisa Scottoline's series has a particularly tough time of it in Mistaken Ident.i.ty, because there's a woman out there who swears she's Bennie's long-lost twin sister.

And here are two books-one fiction and one nonfiction-that showcase Philadelphia's love for its football team, the Eagles: Matthew Quick's The Silver Linings Playbook is a heartwarming, humorous, and soul-satisfying first novel (but not at all soppy or overly sweet, I promise).The main character is thirty-year-old Pat Peoples, a former high school history teacher, who believes in happy endings and silver linings-despite the fact that his father won't even talk to him, there are huge gaps in his memory, and he's become addicted to working out.As Pat slowly begins to remember and come to terms with the painful realities of his past, he's aided by an eccentric (but effective) psychiatrist named Patel (who shares Pat's love for the Eagles) and Tiffany, the widowed sister-in-law of his old best friend, Ronnie.

It's probably enough to say that the content of Jere Longman's If Football's a Religion, Why Don't We Have a Prayer?: Philadelphia, Its Faithful, and the Eternal Quest for Sports Salvation is as entertaining as the t.i.tle.

But there are a few novels about Philadelphia that have nothing to do with either sports or crime: Lorene Cary's moving historical novel, The Price of a Child Richard Powell's The Philadelphian (which was made into one of my very favorite movies; it was called The Young Philadelphians and starred a very young Paul Newman and Gig Young) John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (and all his others) And last, probably the most unusual novel about Philadelphia I expect we'll ever encounter is Kathryn Davis's h.e.l.l. You never know quite what to expect from Davis, but in this, her third exceptionally well-written work, she really outdoes herself.

POLISH UP YOUR POLISH.

Books about Poland-both fiction and nonfiction-don't often have the happiest of themes. It's a country that's been buffeted by history. Or maybe swamped is a better choice of verb. There are memoirs beyond number, oodles of histories (frequently offering contradictory interpretations of the past, especially as it relates to World War II and the treatment of Polish Jews), and fiction from eminent writers such as the Singer brothers (Isaac Bashevis and Israel Joshua), Jerzy Kosinski, the science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, as well as poetry from the likes of Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska. It's quite clear that if you want to read Polish writers and/or books set in Poland before you actually go there, you'd better start early and plan on reading late into many a night.

Here are some t.i.tles that I've been either entertained or moved by: Brigid Pasulka's A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True is set in both the Krakow of the early 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Poland of World War II. It's a story of war, love, and the way the human spirit can triumph over unlikely odds. It was a pleasure to read. Fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson won't want to miss it.

For a sweeping overview of Poland's history-especially good if you aren't demanding fine writing and three-dimensional characters-try James Michener's Poland.

Czeslaw Milosz turned to prose in Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-43, which offers readers an up-close and personal account of life in Warsaw under n.a.z.i rule.

The beautiful writing of The Zoo-Keeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman illuminates the true story of Warsaw zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who together contrived to save hundreds of lives during World War II. This is a must-read.

Other books about Poland, both its past and its present, include: Nonfiction: Michael Moran's A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland;The Lost:A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn is revelatory; Eva Hoffman's Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (I read-with great admiration- everything that Hoffman writes); Adam Zagajewski's Another Beauty; and n.o.bel Prize-winning Isaac Bashevis Singer's memoir In My Father's Court.

Fiction: Madame:A Novel by Antoni Libera (Soviet-era Poland); Louis Begley's Wartime Lies; Charles T. Powers's In the Memory of the Forest; JaneYolen's Briar Rose (ostensibly a book for teens, but it's perfect for any age); Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (at least the first half); Lilian Nattel's The River Midnight; Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz (or any other of his autobiographical novels); and Alan Furst's The Spies of Warsaw. Furst's novels are great for their splendid sense of place-World War II Eastern Europe.

POSTCARDS FROM MEXICO.

The t.i.tle of this section is the name of one of my favorite songs by the group Girlyman. (At one point I wanted to use song t.i.tles for all the sections, but gave it up as an impossible dream.) Any stray thoughts I might have entertained of going anyplace in Mexico besides Oaxaca, Cuernevaca, and Mazatlan immediately vanished upon reading G.o.d's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant. Not that I regret reading it-to the contrary, it's a mesmerizing account of one of the most dangerous areas in North America, where drug growers, buyers, and sellers are prevalent, murders are many, and the folklore of the place is difficult to separate from the facts (think Humphrey Bogart, the Apaches, and Pancho Villa). But I have to say that sharing Grant's (often harebrained) adventures through the pages of this book is adventure enough for me.

Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields also shook me to the core. It describes how this city-right across the Rio Grande from El Paso-continues to disintegrate into an anarchy of crime and violence.

But on to happier books: The Copper Canyons in the Sierra Madre provide much of the setting for Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. It's a must-read for runners, of course, but even non-runners should find it interesting, as it includes other topics as well, especially an introduction to the little known and understood Tarahumara Indians, their beliefs, culture, and way of life. I especially enjoyed McDougall's chatty and yet informative writing style.

Bruce Chatwin (no slouch as a travel writer himself, of course) called Sybille Bedford's A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller's Tale from Mexico one of the best travel books of the twentieth century. Set right after World War II, it's a sublimely well-written portrait of the country.

Nonfiction fans will also want to take a look at these: Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude is a 1950s book that helps us get a handle on the country even today-half a century later; Alan Riding's Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans is also many years old now-it was published in 1989-but it still makes excellent reading for anyone interested in trying to understand how Mexico's past is informing its present; Earl Shorris's The Life and Times of Mexico is a well-written narrative history; Tony Cohan's eminently readable Mexican Days: Journeys into the Heart of Mexico; and Rebecca West's Survivors in Mexico, which explores-with her usual panache-the dark clash between the Aztecs and the Spaniards. Finally, Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads explores Mexican att.i.tudes in the tumultuous 1930s-the research and travel that went into writing this book provided Greene with the setting for one of his best novels, The Power and the Glory.

Who knew that the renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks (author of, among many other books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales) was also a fern fanatic? I certainly didn't, until I picked up his Oaxaca Journal, a charming account of fern hunting in Southern Mexico. Another book set in Oaxaca is Peter Kuper's Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico. As a friend wrote me, ”it gives an earthy and organic feel to what living in Oaxaca can be like. It combines a journalistic eye for political events with the close-up gaze of a people (and bug) watcher.” All true.

Following hard on the heels of two well-reviewed t.i.tles (the novel The Hummingbird's Daughter and the nonfiction work The Devil's Highway), Luis Alberto Urrea once again scores high with Into the Beautiful North, in which nineteen-year-old Nayeli, who works at a taco stand in a small coastal Mexican village called Tres Camarones, decides to travel to the United States to find her father and bring him home. The characters are three-dimensional (especially Nayeli); the plot is fast paced and filled, somewhat unexpectedly, given the subject, with humor. Book clubs, especially those interested in reading multicultural novels, will want to add this to their list of books to be discussed.

And these: Sandra Benitez's A Place Where the Sea Remembers; Consider This, Senora, an unforgettable novel by Harriet Doerr; the first half, especially, of Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which includes wonderfully nuanced portraits of Diego Rivera, Frieda Kahlo, and Leon Trotsky; Amigoland, Oscar Casares's warm and funny story of two aged brothers who take a road trip to Mexico to try to find out-at long last-the true story of their grandfather's kidnapping; News from the Empire by one of Mexico's best writers, Fernando Del Paso; and last, but not at all least, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which has always struck me as being the uber viscerally painful novel.

PROVENCE AND THE SOUTH OF FRANCE.

For anyone going to spend time in the south of France, Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence is a good place to start. But don't stop there: all of the following books-as different as they may seem-make superb armchair reading. And they're good to take with you, should you actually be traveling.

Ford Madox Ford's Provence is a lovingly written account of la vie boheme, as lived by Ford and his artist lover, Biala, in Provence during the 1920s. It seems to be written by a different man than the one who began The Good Soldier, his novel of pa.s.sion and betrayal, with the sentence ”This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Incidentally, when Ford's Provence was published both Graham Greene and Dorothy Parker found it to be splendid-and that's a most unlikely pairing of critics!

Two Towns in Provence by M. F. K. Fisher contains two of her most appealing memoirs: Map of Another Town (about Aix-en-Provence) and A Considerable Town (an appreciation of Ma.r.s.eille).

The selections in Travelers' Tales: Provence, edited by James O'Reilly and Tara Austen Weaver, remind me of the amuse-bouche that a chef will sometimes send out to diners: small tastes that indicate the quality of the rest of the meal.

Fiction fans should check out these: Jean Giono, born in Provence in 1895, gives readers a joyous sense of the Provencal countryside in many of his novels, including my favorite, Joy of Man's Desiring, although he's probably best known for his short story, ”The Man Who Planted Trees.”

I am a huge fan of award-winning Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay. I love the way he writes very realistic novels with just a bit of fantasy thrown in. I'd urge you to read The Lions of Al-Ra.s.san, The Last Light of the Sun, or Under Heaven. But since we're talking of Provence here, don't miss Ysabel. Although it's mostly set in twenty-first-century Aix-en-Provence, there's enough history and adventure to satisfy even non-fantasy fans.

Madam, Will You Talk was Mary Stewart's first work of romantic suspense, and if that's your fiction genre of choice, it's a cla.s.sic. Not only is there the requisite romance and suspense, but Stewart gives us a palpable sense of the city of Ma.r.s.eille.

I was quite taken with the tale of American poet W. S. Merwin's purchase of a ruined house in the rural province of Quercy, which he recounts in the more-or-less autobiographical grouping of three stories in The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France.

History fans will want to take a look at these two books: Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone is a captivating overview of the daughters of the King and Queen of Provence-Marguerite, Eleanor, Beatrice, and Sanchia-and their memorable marriages, which, together, shaped thirteenth-century Europe.

Lawrence Durrell's Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence is an a.s.sortment of history, literature, cultural commentary, and diary-like entries.

ROMAN HOLIDAY.

To really understand contemporary Rome, I think it's necessary to get a feel for its storied past. There are, of course, more histories written of Rome and its Empire than anyone could probably get to in one lifetime, but I'd actually give those a miss (unless you're really interested, and in that case I'd read anything that Michael Grant wrote about the city), and head instead for Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series. They are, in order, The First Man in Rome, The Gra.s.s Crown, Fortune's Favorites, Caesar's Women, Caesar, The October Horse, and Antony and Cleopatra.

There are several terrific series of mystery novels set in Ancient Rome-check out the novels of Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis. I've always felt, in fact, that after reading all of the Saylor and Davis books I could easily get an advanced degree in Roman history.

Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World is pure delight, and not only for new parents, those with a trip to Rome in their immediate future, or somebody trying to write a novel.

Paul Hofmann, onetime bureau chief for the NewYork Times, spent more than thirty years living in the Eternal City. His descriptions of people and places, and-what I found immensely interesting-the art of living in Rome make The Seasons of Rome: A Journal worth seeking out.

Other books for the traveler to Rome include Rome from the Ground Up by James H. S. McGregor (great for architecture and history buffs); Rome and a Villa by Eleanor Clark; Jonathan Boardman's Rome: A Cultural and Literary Companion; Margaret Visser's study of the Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura church, The Geometry of Love: s.p.a.ce, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church; and A Traveller in Rome by H. V. Morton.

Gritty-mystery aficionados should check out The Dogs of Rome: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel, the first in a projected series by Conor Fitzgerald.We're introduced to Blume as he works on a particularly inept murder that leads into an increasingly complex investigation.

ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT.

According to the New York Times, 1896 was a good year for rowers. It was the first time that anyone managed to cross the Atlantic in an open boat: George Harbo and Gabriel Samuelson rowed from New York to France.The next time that feat was accomplished was seven decades later.

Tori Murden McClure is an incredibly accomplished woman with many degrees and good jobs, and she definitely fits in this category because she was the first woman to row-solo-across the Atlantic Ocean.The story of how-and why-she chose to attempt the crossing (twice, actually, since her first trip was halted by a hurricane) is uplifting without being at all sappy. I loved the first line: ”In the end, I know I rowed across the Atlantic to find my heart, but in the beginning, I wasn't aware that it was missing.” And I was taken by the fact that it was Muhammad Ali who encouraged her to try the solo crossing a second time, by saying to her that she didn't want to be the first woman who ”almost rowed across the Atlantic.” She describes her journey(s) in A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean.

Other courageous rowers have written about their trips in these enjoyable and sometimes heart-stopping accounts: Both Challenging the Pacific: The First Woman to Row the Kon-Tiki Route and Across the Savage Sea: The First Woman to Row Across the North Atlantic by Maud Fontenoy are well worth your reading time.

Jill Fredston's accounts of her and her husband's self-propelled journeys to some of the most remote places they could find are well told in Rowing to Lat.i.tude: Journeys Along the Arctic's Edge. (When they're not rowing, Jill and her husband, Doug Fesler, research avalanches and train rescuers. Their experiences doing that would make another great book.) Between them, Colin and Julie Angus have written several books about their rowing experiences, both together and apart, including these two: Rowed Trip: From Scotland to Syria by Oar, which describes their trips to countries far and near, including an effort to rediscover their ancestral homes; and an account of Julie's unaccompanied adventure, Rowboat in a Hurricane: My Amazing Journey Across a Changing Atlantic Ocean.

In Roz Savage's Rowing the Atlantic: Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean, she writes about her experience as the only solo female contestant in the 2005 Atlantic Rowing Race, which she entered despite having little previous rowing experience. Here's one of the best lines-or a least one that shows she maintained her sense of humor despite the pain and the dangers that beset her: ”I loved the solitude, the wildness, the beauty. But the ocean and I would have got along better if she would stop trying to get in the boat with me.”

I really enjoyed Rosemary Mahoney's Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff both because of her writing style and the varied characters that she describes.

An older t.i.tle that is still great fun (partly because it's filled with references to children's books like Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows , and Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle books, especially The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle) is A. J. Mackinnon's The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow: A Mirror Odyssey from North Wales to the Black Sea. (I learned, through reading this book, that a ”mirror” is a small, unimpressive in appearance, but hard-working and dependable dinghy/sailboat.) THE SAHARA: SAND BETWEEN YOUR TOES.

Before you start any of these books, I'd suggest that you have a big gla.s.s of water close at hand-otherwise your thirst might quickly get unbearable. I included Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle's Sahara: A Natural History in Book l.u.s.t, but it does such a fabulous job of bringing the place alive-making the desert bloom-that I felt I needed to include it here, too. You'll discover more than you ever probably imagined about the history, geography, legends, lore, and people of the great African desert, which was called ”The Endless Emptiness” and ”The Great Nothing” by early explorers.

In a way, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert by William Langewiesche updates the de Villiers book-there's more about contemporary travel (by roads and cars rather than by camels, for example) than the past. As always, Langewiesche's writing is clear, concise, and a pleasure to read.