The end of the year marks a time of goodbyes, eagerly chased by introductions. Beginning January 1, 2010, the OLM Blog will be no more. In its place, however, will be three exciting new blogs giving you all much more of the news, views, and book reviews we’ve tried to provide here in the past two years.

The first is called Like Fire. Run by book-blogging veteran Lisa Peet, Like Fire will feature links, short-form reviews, commentary, interviews, and many other features relating to literature and the book world. You will be able to find it here at http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/likefire/

The next is Stevereads. Stevereads is the personal blog of Open Letters managing editor Steve Donoghue. It will showcase all the book talk you can handle, with additional attention paid to new releases, older books deserving of reconsideration, comics, and the latest news from the Penny Press. Find it at http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/

Finally, we are adding a blog to celebrate the distinctive genius of Walt Whitman. Every day, we will publish an excerpt from his brilliant prose work Specimen Days, to which we will append all sorts of footnotes and addenda. It’s an exciting project, and you can find it at http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/whitmanblog/

We want to thank you all, good readers, for joining us these past two years–and we think you’re going to love the new blogs we’ll soon have to offer. So stay with us, and as always, we want to hear from you!

The OLM Blog is dead; long live the OLM blogs!

Teen Dream
Beach House
Sub Pop, 2010

Beach House’s self-titled 2006 debut sounded very much like two people making music in a room somewhere, and that’s exactly what it was – flubbed notes and all. The songs were spare and simple, but what was there was pure gold: basic drumbeats, fuzzy organs, old harpsichords, simple piano and guitar riffs, and, of course, Victoria Legrand’s mournful vocals. Gems like “Saltwater,” “Childhood,” and (above all) “Master of None” still frequent my playlist three years later. It was one of the most promising debuts of the decade.

Devotion, their second album, was a more proper and polished recording, but most of the edge and much of the personality were gone. Teen Dream is their latest and no doubt their worst effort, and fans of Beach House’s first album will no doubt wonder what the hell is going on. The singular tone of their early music has evaporated; the transformation that began with their second album is almost total. Chorale-like vocals and rough-hewn simplicity have made way for syrupy crooning and boring, over-produced melodies.

“10 Mile Stereo” sounds like a pale imitation of early U2. “Lover of Mine” is pretty much a late-seventies soft-rock ballad. “Zebra” starts the set with a dithering, generic guitar riff. Percussion shortly adds itself, then a breathy choir joins in, while Legrand’s increasingly rough voice – it sounds like she’s been smoking a lot in the last few years (another reason to quit, kids) – melodramatically rises and falls, spouting lyrical blandisms that recall Bono at his worst: “anyway you run, you run before us / black and white horse / arching among us.” The whole album trudges along like this – one sadly predictable moment after another.

So it’s back to the old songs for me. Here’s hoping this is the final hiccup before a return to form.

-Greg Waldmann

The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence
Jack Rakove, editor
Belknap Press, 2009

Jack Rakove’s Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997, and his new book, the erudite and fascinating Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, came out in 2009. In 1997, most Americans would have picked up his new annotated guide to their founding documents and idly flipped to the sections on impeachment, perhaps wondering if it was really something that could result over a tryst with an intern, but not really caring either way. In, for instance, 2007, those same Americans (and perhaps many thousands of interested foreigners) would have frantically turned the pages to find out just exactly what the Constitution says about the President’s ability to ignore the law. Their trembling hands would have found Article One, Section Seven, which states in terms so clear as to command their assent that if a President objects to a bill or any part of a bill, he sends his objections to Congress, they deliberate on those objections, and if a majority still finds the bill worthy, it becomes law. Seeing this precise limit set to the President’s ability to do whatever the hell he wants, those same 2007 readers might have read Rakove’s typically engaging commentary with mounting anger:

Rather than veto legislation, some modern presidents – notably George W. Bush – have used presidential “signing statements” to express their intention not to enforce duly enacted provisions of legislation they find of doubtful constitutional validity. The requirement of this clause that presidential objections to legislation be formally registered in the congressional journals indicates that the framers would have looked askance at this practice. Indeed, many of them might well have been surprised to discover that a president who repeatedly used such statements to justify his fundamental obligation to faithfully execute duly enacted laws had not been impeached.

For a while there, in the interval between Rakove’s two books, it looked like an annotated guide to the U.S. Constitution would have been an exercise in bitter nostalgia, an autopsy rather than a celebration. Given how close things came, and given how dramatically they seem to have changed, Rakove’s book could be forgiven for gloating – but it never gloats. Rakove never postures in any way, even when we can suppose he has strong opinions. Take another contentious section of the Constitution, the much-abused Second Amendment which guarantees citizens the right to bear arms in a well-regulated state militia – Rakove comments:

In recent decades, the National Rifle Association and its supporters have waged a vigorous campaign to argue that the amendment was really meant to protect a personal right to keep arms for purposes of individual self-defense, and that the preamble to this clause did not limit its purpose to the militia alone. Though the historical evidence for that view is tenuous, in 2008 the Supreme Court sustained the individual-rights reading in its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, overturning a broad prohibition on the private ownership of handguns in the nation’s capital. The Court reached this conclusion by largely ignoring the actual debates that led to the adoption of the amendment. Corresponding provisions in numerous state constitutions now assert an individual right to own and use firearms in language much more explicit than the much-disputed formula of 1789.

See the judicial restraint? See the absence of unhelpful terms like “redneck” or “gun nut” from the sober, evaluative prose? Wonderful!

In short, this is no sad encomium but instead an incredibly informative and ultimately thrilling tour of a still-living – not to say reborn – pair of documents that every American should know well (and most should know better than they do).

Abraham Benrubi

Birds of Eastern North America: A Photographic Guide
Paul Sterry, Brian E. Small
Princeton University Press, 2009

It’s only by working your way through Princeton University Press’ magnificent new Birds of North America page by page and bird by bird that you realize just what an impressive accomplishment it is.

You could guess the size of that accomplishment by the pedigree of the talent that produced it; Paul Sterry has written dozens of books on birds, including the texts of some mighty fine bird-guides from years past, and Brian Small is likewise experienced, the photo editor for Birding magazine and a prolific freelancer.

But even knowing these combined track records won’t fully prepare you for how eye-catching this volume is – and how handy it is. The achievement is made possible by the latest advances in digital photography and page-layout, and the philosophy is a functional revelation at which other guidebooks have usually only made cursory stabs: birds like to change their clothes.

Typical birding handbooks in the last century take a mug shot approach to their subjects. The page on bald eagles will feature a big picture of an adult male, perched majestically. The entire section of wood-warblers will feature one shot of an adult male golden-winged warbler, doing duty for everybody else. The 1990s saw a real revolution in this approach, with books like the seminal Sibley Guide giving aspiring and experienced birders indications of how the appearance of a particular bird species changes, not only between genders but between seasons and from adolescence to adulthood.

Birds of Eastern North America takes this revolution one step further: Brian Small’s digital photography is incredibly clear, and every entry displays its subject in the iterations watchers are likely to encounter (with distribution provided by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology). Since a young red-shouldered hawk looks like an entirely different bird than an adult red-shouldered hawk, this is a mighty helpful thing (and the sexual dimorphism of some species is drastically greater than this).

Whether you explore this volume while tromping through marsh and meadow or blanket-swaddled in your favorite reading nook, you’ll see these old familiar feathered friends in such a wealth of greater visual detail that you’ll have the very pleasant sensation of seeing them all for the first time. This is a guide to keep.

Tuc Macfarland

The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion

Brian Kane
Fantagraphics Books, 2009

The original Prince Valiant Companion has long been out of print, a stalking-horse for collectors. Fantagraphics Books is engaged in an elaborate job of reprinting all the Prince Valiant comic strips, and they’ve taken the opportunity to reprint and significantly update the Companion for a new audience of readers. Brian Kane, author of the Companion and surely the world’s foremost authority on the strip and its creator, Hal Foster, has once again done a herculean amount of work, and Fantagraphics has once again clothed that work in a sturdy, pretty volume. Prince Valiant hasn’t been treated this well since the ersatz King of England sang his praises.

Those unfamiliar with the character – a young man who finds adventure, fame, and even love at the court of the legendary King Arthur – will find here all the background information they could ever want: there are synopses of every one of the thousands of Prince Valiant strips (compiled by Todd Goldberg and Carl Horak and brought down to the present by Brian Kane), and there are full-color pages showing the strip – including its glorious Sunday extravaganzas – in all the stages of its visual evolution.

But even long-time Prince Valiant fans will find plenty to fascinate them in this volume. There’s an illuminating essay on the fantasy artists who influenced Foster – once-great and now-forgotten names like Malcolm Daniel and Gustave Dore – and there are several in-depth interviews with Foster (Kane somehow manages to be both reverential and warts-and-all about the man). Since I’ve read about Prince Valiant for years (including Kane’s own previous book on Foster), the parts of the book I found most interesting were the chapters devoted to the men who took on the intimidating task of carrying on the strip once Foster retired. There’s a long interview with John Cullen Murphy, Foster’s chosen successor, Frank Bolle, whom Murphy picked to take over from him, and Monstermen creator Gary Gianni, the strip’s current illustrator. The sense of carrying forward a beloved trust for the readers is palpable.

Fantagraphics will continue to bring out deluxe volumes of Prince Valiant reprints. I imagine this new Definitive Companion will be open alongside them for years to come.

Khalid Ponte

Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America
Craig Shirley
ISI Books, 2009

In his smug and useless (but mercifully brief) Introduction to Craig Shirley’s mammoth new account of the 1980 presidential campaign, George Will gets one thing right: the contest at first looked hopeless for candidate Ronald Reagan. Not only was he facing a sitting president (even somebody as “politically tone deaf” – Shirley’s phrase – as Jimmy Carter knew how to use the incumbency to his advantage), but he was also taking on a scion of American political royalty in the person of Edward Kennedy. In Rendezvous with Destiny, Shirley, a longtime Republican operative and apologist, has written a ground-view narrative of that campaign which by its very title cannot hope to be objective but which perhaps entertains other hopes.

If one of those hopes is to join the pantheon of truly great American presidential campaign-histories, fantastic and richly rewarding books like Jules Witcover’s Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 or Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House (about the 1988 race), disappointment looms for Shirley. Though brimming with industry, Rendezvous with Destiny is barred from Olympus for two reasons: first, its insider-politics wonkery is pitched to a particularly annoying nerd-frequency that will alienate readers who are not already political junkies, and second, for all his industry, Shirley can’t write worth a damn.

There’s nothing to be done about the nerd factor (although it reinforces the age-old truism that the best historians never personally know their subjects), but there’s a potential solution to the bad writing: read less Mario Puzo. Political insiders always want to make their pallid, overcaffeinated fishbowl sound sexier than it is (a persistent failing of the otherwise-admirable TV series The West Wing, to which Shirley owes several hundred thousand uncredited debts), but even so, there’s such a thing as overkill. Rendezvous with Destiny (which, it should be pointed out, is about an all-American former lifeguard of Irish descent from the small-town Midwest) is full of people “going to the mattresses,” “taking the cannoli,” and making offers that can’t be refused. The book has more consiglieri than a Palermo gentleman’s association.

Cutting out the gangster-talk would be a start, but it wouldn’t fix everything. Far too much of this enormous book is marred by lazy clichés (“Ronald Reagan was on the brink of political oblivion,” etc), muddled turns of phrase, hilariously mixed metaphors, and an ongoing characterization of candidate Reagan as the hero in one of the Horatio Alger novels he so loved to read, with his nasty opponents being the pool-and-patio set of Marin County:

Washington insiders were proclaiming Reagan to be the William Jennings Bryan of the GOP, just another three-time loser. The country-clubbers of the GOP made fun of Reagan’s movie career. Clinking wine glasses, they were toasting, “Bedtime for Bonzo and Reagan!”

Frequent too are Shirley’s lapses into cloying backroom patter that’s almost Willesque in its arrogance, as at the conclusion of his account of the presidential debate in Cleveland:

Carter had been right when he said that there were “stark differences” between the two candidates.
But many of the elites – a.k.a. the “Beautiful People” – were not sure how to respond. It couldn’t be possible that Ronald Reagan – that actor – had beaten President Carter, could it? Nawww.

(Generally speaking, three consecutive w’s will scuttle any chances you might have of one day entering the Library of America).

It’s like nobody involved with the production of Rendezvous with Destiny ever took its author aside and warned him that such heavy use of right-this-minute slang taken from Entertainment Weekly and Saturday Night Live would only serve to make large chunks of his book incomprehensible to any reader who doesn’t already know the same slang. It distracts repeatedly:

[Republican power broker James] Baker planted the notion with the media that Reagan needed to do well in the big industrial states and his man [G.H.W.] Bush had done just that in the primaries, and that Reagan needed someone with Washington experience and with foreign-policy experience. Oh yes, and Bush wasn’t interested in the job. Wink, wink.

(As in the real world, so too in print: being wink-winked at like this makes one feel both scornful and slightly soiled).

Shirley’s book has undeniable energy, and that energy never flags (his main character – and, clearly, hero – Reagan was once described as “inexhaustible,” and the same word could be used legitimately in praise of this book). Reading his highly partisan descriptions of all this recent history is never less than entertaining, as in this quick aside on the quirks of the Carter team:

But the Carter campaign was not a seamless operation. There were internal disputes over tactics, strategy, and turf. If the Carterites were good at anything, it was writing memos. Memo after memo went out laying out various opinions and positions. Pat Caddell alone was a threat to American forestry, notorious for excruciatingly long memos. Carter’s team heard complaints from some state leaders centering on the president’s adman, Gerald Rafshoon. They were barking up the wrong tree in going after Rafshoon, who was close to Carter and a member in good standing of the Georgia Mafia.

But if Shirley’s goal here is to write a great campaign account, he needs more than a pile of newspaper clippings and uncounted hours of private conversations with the key players to make it happen. He needs a broad perspective, which he only intermittently displays; he needs a genuine sense of humor and the absurd, rather than the rather schoolboy aptitude for razzing he summons here; and most of all, he needs a polished prose style if he has any hopes of standing in the company of his betters – and there’s no hint of that prose style here. Instead, what we have is a massively detailed record of what happened during the 1980 presidential campaign, told by someone who thought Reagan was great long before he wrote a word of it. If that’s all our author intended to produce, he’s succeeded admirably. For anything more, the rest of us will have to keep waiting.

Abraham Benrubi

the reviewer's dog-eared copy

The Roman Revolution
Ronald Syme
Oxford University Press, 1939

As impossible as it seems, Ronald Syme’s classic study of ancient Rome, The Roman Revolution, turns 70 in 2009. The difficulty of taking this in stems not from mere temporality (seventy years being, as everyone knows, an unimaginably long time) but from the nature of the work itself: the lively insight and exquisitely controlled anger of The Roman Revolution read as fresh and vital today as they did when the book was first published.

Certainly the experience of reading it is every bit as invigorating as ever. Syme took a particular style of writing history – overlaying a sparse, almost telegraphic voice on a consummate mastery of the whole of the classical canon – and polished it to a level of art unseen in the writing of classical history since Gibbon laid down his pen. It’s a muscular, incredibly assured style, achieved through meticulous self-editing, and it everywhere reveals a keen ear for the perfect little twist of a concluding point, as in describing the Roman world’s last piecemeal surrender to dictatorship:

And now for a moment a delusive ray of hope shone upon the sinking hulk of the Republic. Two veteran legions from Africa arrived at Ostia. Along with a legion of recruits they were stationed on the Janiculum and the city was put in a posture of defence. Whether the Senate now declared Octavianus a public enemy is not recorded: these formalities were coming to matter less and less. Octavianus marched down the Flaminian Way and entered the city unopposed. The legions of the Republic went over without hesitation. A praetor committed suicide. That was the only bloodshed. The senators advanced to make their peace with Octavianus; among them, but not in the forefront, was Cicero. ‘Ah, the last of my friends,’ the young man observed.

Syme attempts to float the same standard dispassionate phraseology that historians of the 20th century typically employ, but he doesn’t try too hard; though The Roman Revolution is in many ways a stunning work of historical detachment, it’s never difficult to tell where Syme’s likes and dislikes fall. He loathes Cleopatra, for instance, and drips a quizzical contempt all over her besotted lover Antony. And his richest ambiguities he saves for the central character of his narrative, the willowy, hypocritical twentysomething Octavian, whose cynical attempts to re-invent himself as the benevolent dictator Augustus draw repeated jabs from our historian, who’s no fan of fascism:

Special commands were no novelty, no scandal. The strictest champion of constitutional propriety might be constrained to concede their necessity. If the grant of extended imperium in the past had threatened the stability of the State, that was due to the ruinous ambition of politicians who sought power illegally and held it for glory and for profit. Rival dynasts rent the Empire apart and destroyed the Free State. Their sole survivor, as warden of the more powerful of the armed provinces, stood as a guarantee against any recurrence of the anarchy out of which his dominion had arisen.

But Augustus was to be consul as well as proconsul, year after year without a break. The supreme magistracy, though purporting no longer to convey enhanced powers, as after the end of the Triumvirate, still gave him the means to initiate and direct public policy at Rome if not to control through consular imperium the proconsuls abroad. For such cumulation of powers a close parallel from the recent past might properly have been invoked: it is pretty clear that it was not.

(The unforgiving starkness of this becomes all the more evident when contrasted with the rhetoric used in standard biographies of Augustus, like this from a work popular when Syme’s book came out: “As he [Augustus] went on there gradually awoke in him a nobler ambition, that of restoring and directing a distracted state. Neither now nor afterward do the more vulgar attributes of supreme power – wealth, luxury, and adulation – seem to have had charms for him.” After Syme, such innocence was no longer critically tenable).

Watching how Syme handles all his sources –watching the intricate, hitherto unseen connections and uprootings that he effects by sifting through everything so carefully (he’ll find a passing comment in an epic poem that sheds light on legionary cooking techniques, or a well-known paragraph from Cicero that can be read in a startling new way) – is at once humbling and exciting, and it’s no wonder The Roman Revolution has cast such a long shadow. The subject matter – the carefully-implemented plan by which Octavian took sole, personal control of the Roman Empire (and the equally careful plan to prevent the Romans from realizing the full import of what he was doing) – has been taken up many times by many historians in the ensuing seventy years. Syme’s masterpiece is in all their bibliographies, and most of those later histories of Augustus or the end of the Roman Republic would have been unthinkable had not Syme so impeccably paved the way.

The sobering fact is how little any of those later books manage to offer even a small amplification of Syme. Even now, The Roman Revolution is the first, best modern history of Rome’s preventable and misunderstood transition from Republic to Empire. Surely a Penguin Classic of it is finally in order?

Steve Donoghue

Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England
Maria Hayward
Ashgate Publishing, 2009

Henry VIII issued four sets of sumptuary laws during his reign, in 1510, 1514, 1515, and 1533, each designed to place restrictions on what kinds of clothing (made from what kinds of materials) his subjects could wear. Warnings were frequent, like the one issued in 1520 in preparation for Henry’s meeting with France’s king at the Field of the Cloth of Gold: “All noblemen and others are to be apparelled according to their degrees, and no man must presume to wear apparel above his degree.”
Such warnings in such numbers were necessary (at least from the royal point of view) because 16th century England saw an explosion of ways to warrant them. The traditional strata of feudal society – the king, the nobility, the clergy, and then pretty much everybody else – were rapidly blurring as more and more of the ‘middling’ sort, lawyers, businessmen, traders and the like, were amassing fortunes and land holdings great enough to give them aspirations their grandfathers would scarcely have dreamt. Henry VIII was not hidebound enough to scorn employing such men, even swelling their fortunes – but their increasing power made him all the more protective of his own. And then as now, a great deal of power lay in perception.
Maria Hayward does remarkable, often eye-opening spadework on this subject in her comprehensive new book Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (solidly put together by Ashgate Publishing). She focuses her study first on the pinnacle of English power, the king – who was, as she shrewdly points out, “the one individual for whom there were no clothing constraints” – and then on downward, through the landed nobility, the clergy, and spreading out to that burgeoning mercantile class. She scrutinizes wills, estate inventories, guild regulations, import and export figures, and of course she’s as grateful as everybody else for the scrupulous details preserved in the paintings and sketches of court artists like Hans Holbein. Her goal is to lay before the reader as wide and detailed a picture of the role apparel played in Tudor times as the primary sources will allow, and she succeeds admirably.
Readers should be cautioned that this is expository, almost testamentary historical writing – there is no unifying narrative, no bursts of rhetorical fireworks, no argumentative conclusions. It can often be quite technical too, although here it’s uniformly saved by Haywood’s clear, evocative prose:

Taffetas and sarsenets originated in the East but by the fourteenth century were being woven in a number of Italian cities. Both were lightweight, thin silk fabrics that were often used for linings. Both could be woven incorporating metal threads, often to produce a striped effect. Taffeta could also be produced as a shot, tabby weave (with the warp and weft a different color to produce a slightly iridescent effect).

Rich Apparel contains many charts, and its appendixes feature the texts of several Tudor wills and inventories – coming after so many pages of Haywood’s astute use of their contents, the documents themselves prove unexpectedly interesting. The guiding intelligence here makes the entire book interesting, although the steep incline of the scholarship may deter all but the most dedicated fans of the Tudor era. The book’s one major shortcoming (an utterly astounding one, given the subject matter) is that aside from the cover portrait of insufferable hatchet-faced Tudor moneymaker wunderkind Thomas Gresham, none of the book’s other illustrations is in color. True, color plates would add to Rich Apparel’s already considerable price tag, but considering the fact that clothing’s appearance is at the very heart of Haywood’s topic, the addition would certainly be worthwhile in future editions.

Steve Donoghue

The Silver Skull – Swords of Albion
Mark Chadbourn
Pyr (an imprint of Prometheus Books), 2009

The year is 1588, and an assault has been made on the Tower of London by England’s most implacable enemy – but the foe is not the Spanish, and the goal was not coin or carnage. For twenty years, Queen Elizabeth’s government has kept a mysterious ancient artifact – the Silver Skull – locked up in the Tower, trying to figure out how it works and more importantly, how it could be used against England’s great Enemy, the otherworldly Unseelie Court. But in this eerie nighttime assault, the Skull is stolen by the Enemy – and promptly lost by them. And now it’s up to England’s most renowned swashbuckling spy, Will Swyfte, to retrieve the Skull before it becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of England’s nemesis.
Such is the slam-bang premise and opening action of Mark Chadbourn’s The Silver Skull – Swords of Albion (two perfectly good titles, used in weird conjunction – maybe the author couldn’t decide between them? Or maybe it’s meant to be Swords of Albion Book One?), an alternate-reality Elizabethan novel in which England not only faces the hatred (and rumored Armada) of Spain but also the long cold war with its supernatural Enemy, the war a disillusioned young Christopher Marlowe characterizes bitterly:

“As children we walked in summer fields and dreamed of the wonders that lay ahead. Yet we sold those dreams, and our lives, to defend England against something that can never be defeated, which waits, quiet and patient and still, until we let our guard slip, as it always will, and then we are torn apart in a gale of knives and teeth, unmourned even by our own.”

Chadbourn’s premise is exciting but hardly original (this is by my count the seventh ‘supernatural Elizabethan times’ novel in the last five years), but The Silver Skull – Swords of Albion stands out from all the others on the strength of two things: first, its hero. In Swyfte Chadbourn has danced as close to parody as he can come without tipping his whole story into farce; Swyfte is strong, sure, handsome, endlessly experienced, and cool under pressure. Everyone knows who he is, and melodrama his name invokes is almost worthy of the silent film era:

“If William Swyfte is captured [says Walsingham, the queen's spymaster], we will deny all knowledge of his mission. He has been driven half mad by grief over the loss of his close friend, Grace Seldon, and holds a personal grudge against Spain.”
“You will abandon him?” Burghley said. “He will be tortured and executed.”
“That is the price we must pay.”
“If Swyfte does not reclaim the Skull, all is truly lost!” Elizabeth raged. Even with his caution, Walsingham could see that Elizabeth understood the true situation. “He cannot fail. He cannot!”

All this is saved by the second thing – Chadbourn’s writing. It’s got a good deal more snap and energy than the common run of current fantasy novels; the action sequences (of which this one volume sports hundreds of examples – there’s scarcely time to draw a breath, and that’s wonderful) leap off the page, and the characters are drawn with deft, precise strokes. Almost any amount of old-timey melodrama can be forgiven if it comes dressed in a narrative this adult and assured.
One thing that certainly doesn’t distinguish this book from its competitors is its cover! It features a computer-manipulated photo of professional male model Paul Marron wearing vaguely period clothing and pouting purposefully, and in that it’s virtually identical to about five hundred romance novels currently on bookstore shelves. Don’t get me wrong – Marron is a good-looking young man (although his main claim to modeling fame, his chiseled chest and abs, are totally obscured on this present cover), but his presence on so many covers feels like imaginative bleed-through, an impoverishing state of affairs that could be easily rectified if publishers like Pyr would hire good old-fashioned fantasy illustrators to create their covers.
But provided you don’t judge a book by its cover, The Silver Skull – Swords of Albion is very much worth your time. This book has all the marks of being the first in a series; it’s a hell of a book, so let’s hope it’s a long series.

Khalid Ponte

Great White: The Majesty of Sharks

Chris Fallows
Chronicle Books, 2009

Photographer and shark expert Chris Fallows opens his visually stunning new coffee table book with a quick autobiographical sketch:

I had no money, no car and still stayed at home with my fantastically supportive mother after my folks had divorced a few years earlier. I had not achieved a great amount by the age of 20, but I was content. I was following my passion and I know worked with the greatest fish in the sea, the great white shark.

If that ‘worked with’ sounds a bit naïve (like they were collaborating on a stage musical, Fallows hatching out the lyrics, the shark tentatively plinking away at the piano), it’s to be forgiven – Fallows was passionate even then about showing people the wonder and ecological fragility of the world’s big shark species. His later work will be familiar to nature fans (and YouTube idlers) the world over: he made the groundbreaking observations of great white sharks leaping entirely out of the water at Seal Island off the coast of Cape Town – the so-called “Air Jaws” that was the subject of two popular documentary films. This book – full of gorgeous photos only somebody in Fallows’ line of work could get – continues his mission, as he succinctly puts it:

To see the magnificence of a great white shark firsthand is the fastest way to change perceptions and separate fact from fiction. This is the only way people will ever learn to love and not fear sharks.

Again, just a bit naïve. I’ve been in semi-murky water when a great white suddenly showed up, and I can tell you what countless other divers could second: there’s not much to love about a predator the size of a Volkswagon who tends to bite first and ask questions later. And Fallows himself perhaps unwittingly perpetuates the very reaction he dislikes: this book is filled with pictures of 13-foot 1-ton sharks hurling themselves entirely out of the water in a single-minded desire to not only kill but pulverize seals swimming at the surface. It takes absolutely no stretch of the imagination whatsoever to picture a human swimmer in place of those seals. It takes absolutely no stretch of the imagination whatsoever to picture that human swimmer is you. This is, therefore, a deeply terrifying book.
But terror is a primordial kind of respect, and humans have always been fascinated by what they fear. Maybe Fallows isn’t so naïve after all.

Tuc Macfarland