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

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

Vampire Stories
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Skyhorse Publishing, 2009

When you first see the title of this new Arthur Conan Doyle anthology from Skyhorse Publishing – ten tales under the heading Vampire Stories – your first impulse is to beg for mercy and feel betrayed; et tu, Arthur? you want to cry. In the current heyday of the undead, it seems like vampire stories have hijacked every genre of fiction going. Blood-sucking fiends infest the Romance section of every bookstore; they’ve long had a claw-hold in the Science Fiction section; and let’s not even talk about the Teen section, where Encyclopedia Brown was turned two years ago and Nancy Drew is a dark brood-mother by now. Surely, surely, if there’s one bastion that will hold out against this necrophilic onslaught, it’s the creator of that rational icon, Sherlock Holmes, who once reprimanded Watson with words that should be spelled out for Stephenie Meyer with holy water: “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”
Those words, ironically, come from the 1924 tale “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” which is of course featured in this delightful, indispensable collection – and just as the vampire in that Holmes story turns out to be far more subtle and substantial than a pretty boy who glitters (glitters!) in the sunlight, so too this Skyhorse volume, edited by vampire-lore expert Robert Eighteen-Bisang and veteran anthologist Martin Greenberg, is far more satisfying than its title implies. For although Conan Doyle was friends with Bram Stoker, he almost entirely avoids the literal kind of undead so crowding bookstores these days. Instead, he gives us a much wider variety of creatures who prey, in various ways, on the vitality of those around them.
There’s Isadora Klein of “The Adventure of the Three Gables,” who flourishes while her lovers languish; there’s Baron Gruner of “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” (another Holmes story), a truly vile blackmailer who ruins women as methodically as ever the evil Count did; there’s the diminutive Miss Penclosa of “The Parasite,” who exercises a powerful mental coercion over the men in her life, who resist her at their peril:

“You fiend!” I cried. “You have come to the end of your tricks now. I will have no more of them. Listen to what I say.” I strode across and shook her roughly by the shoulder. “As sure as there is a God in heaven, I swear that if you try another of your deviltries upon me I will have your life for it. Come what may, I will have your life. I have come to the end of what a man can endure.”
“Accounts are not quite settled between us,” said she, with a passion that equalled my own. “I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other. It will take a little more to break your spirit, I see, but broken it shall be…”

And there’s Octavius Gaster, the mysterious gaunt-faced figure at the heart of “The Winning Shot,” an eminently fascinating character who will have readers momentarily forgetting all about the consulting detective of 221b Baker Street. These nine stories (the tenth is a pastiche by Bill Crider that’s effective enough but can’t help but look a little, shall we say anemic, alongside works by a master like Conan Doyle) fully deserve the wider audience this book’s canny angle will certainly bring them. And Eighteen-Bisang’s brief, incredibly comprehensive bibliography (included as an appendix and listing every imaginary encounter between Holmes and Dracula, in books and comics) is an added treat. So there’s no betrayal here after all, just vintage Arthur Conan Doyle probing the dark edges of the human condition every bit as effectively as his friend Stoker did, and every bit as entertainingly. I highly recommend this book.

–Khalid Ponte

How Some People Like Their Eggs Webs trailer
By Sean Lovelace
Rose Metal Press, 2009

Sean Lovelace is clever. His chapbook How Some People Like Their Eggs, the winner of the 2009 Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest, is brimming with shrewd, energetic comparisons: two people aimlessly walk “like two paper cups blown across a grassy courtyard”; bubbles in beer rise “like glass elevators”; a pamphlet makes someone’s grip feel like “pin-pulled grenades.” Leukemia is described as a “disease wherein the white cells run amuck and drink too much cheap beer and urinate in public and hang from motel balconies and generally harm themselves and others like teenagers on spring break in Florida.” And all this comes from the opening story.

Sean Lovelace is funny. Here he offers excerpts from Charlie Brown’s diary. Yes, that Charlie Brown, the bald kid with a beagle named, well, you know. CB wakes up each day to “birds coughing” and reflects that his familiar refrain Good grief is “[a]n oxymoron, or maybe life.” Then there’s the story of a guy obsessed with bocce, who feels like “a cloud in someone else’s dream.” With inimitable style, Lovelace describes a stomach as “flopping like a halibut in an ice chest,” and rain falling on a roof “like a giant herd of tiny, tiny horses running circles of free-living gallop.”

In the title story, Lovelace describes how General Patton, Yogi Berra, Andy Warhol, Howard Hughes, Bonnie Parker, and Archduke (take a breath) Franz Ferdinand Karl Anikò Belschwitz Mòric Bálint Szilveszter Gömpi Maurice Bzoch János Frajkor Ludwig Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen (why Giuermo, Strezpek, Pinche, and van Haverbeke are left off is never answered) like their eggs served. For instance, Billie Holiday likes hers

Sunny Side Up, inverted. Like two dreams dropped from a great height. Big and round and shiny and flat. Served with a glass of rusty tap water. Served fourteen minutes after cooking. While cooling. While cool.

And most astutely of all, Lovelace, recognizing the famed genius’s inscrutability, observes that “[n]o human being knows how Thelonius Monk likes his eggs.”

Blood Sisters video Sean Lovelace slips easily between fantasy and reality, enough to make your own world spin. Besides members of the Peanuts gang, Ingrid Bergman makes a salacious appearance in “A Sigh is Just a Sigh.” You’ll also find Humphrey Bogart, admonishing that “a man needs to face what he’s made for himself.” In another story, a lawnmower gives a man “a don’t-even-think-about-it” look. How convincing the pathetic (remember the term is not pejorative) fallacies, how easy to suspend disbelief here.

And while Lovelace is a trickster and a jokester, he’s also empathetic, for even when his stories pirouette, go pyrotechnic, and slip the stream, he goes beneath the surfaces of things and finds as much gold as he does mud, lava, and earthworms. In “Crow Hunting,” Lovelace waxes lyrical and the results are masterful. You can’t help but sway to this line describing reappearing crows: “that final image, spiraling frame, buckling wings and heart, the curvature of returning.” Like Anne Sexton’s eggs, these stories “bloom and bleed.” And if you squint, you too might just see “a peony, a water clock, a lioness clutching at a crow,” swimming inside of them.

You could call these short stories, “short shorts,” without, of course, that Nair commercial from the eighties rattling your brain case; better yet, call these “flash fictions.” Actually, no, these are the word made flash. To tweak a Hilaire Belloc quote, “just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable,” so it is with fiction. And with How Some People Like Their Eggs we get the best of both feasts: culinary and literary.

—John Madera

Bone Warriors download Koyaanisqatsi
Bron Bahlmann
Sweetwater Books, 2009

Bron Bahlmann, the author of the exciting, affecting new novel Bone Warriors, is a teenaged boy and seems in many ways typical of the species (in his Acknowledgments, he writes “And finally, thanks to all my enemies for making me stronger” – who but a teenaged boy, or Norman Mailer, could write such a line with a straight face?): his book is chock-full of fast-paced action, brutal reversals of fortune, lots of exclamation points, and even a cool girl.

The plot of this first book in a projected series stars fifteen-year-old Derrik and his antic (and therefore doomed) little friend Tweaks, who return to their village after an errand only to find everything in ruins and their families missing. The book’s villain, a necromancer who animates bones to do his bidding, has risen to power in the land, and the evils he’s unleashed have enveloped the boys’ families – or so they assume, and they set about immediately on a quest to find their lost loved ones. What follows features lots of magic, fighting, snake-men, boar-men, and menacing servants of the necromancer – but all of this stuff is saved from becoming stale and derivative by the surprising strength of Bahlmann’s prose, which is always immediate and very strong on sensory details:

Russian Rhapsody movie The Million Dollar Duck psp A current hit Derrik’s legs, strong enough to wrap wet strands of grass around him like thin fingers tugging him down. Derrik clutched the tangle of grass rising above the water, bracing himself against the relentless pull. He knew with sudden, sobering clarity that if he lost his footing and fell into this strange grass river, he’d never get his face above water again. He would drown, trapped forever in the interwoven mesh of water roots that doubtless held the bones of those forest-goers who’d never returned to Bylon. This had to be the mysterious sink grass his father had warned him about. скачать видеоролики с детской порнографией

You can see some of the plot-turns coming a mile away, and Derrik himself suffers more than a little from the blandness that afflicts so many of the male heroes of teen fiction, but on balance this is a remarkably assured debut from a writer with a long career ahead of him. He already knows more than most would-be writers do about how to handle prose – the rest (plot, idiosyncrasy, trusting his readers) he can learn as he goes.

– Leah Lambrusco

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