.Express Reviews

Hot new books for your delectation.

Girl with the Golden Bouffant
By Mabel Maney
HarperEntertainment, $14.95

When Jane Bond, James Bond’s lovely lesbian sister, is recruited to stand in for her misfortune-prone playboy/secret-agent brother, Her Majesty’s Secret Service doesn’t know what it’s in for: Unknown to all but the mild-mannered Miss Tuppenny, who moonlights as Chief of Operations for Girls in Europe Organized to Right Grievances and Insure Equality, Jane is a double agent for the all-girl spy ring and poised to pull off a crucial G.E.O.R.G.I.E. mission. In this smart, outrageous, laugh-out-loud spoof, no bit of Bond business is safe from satire. Readers are led on a riotous romp as Jane, decked out in her brother’s drag and the Secret Service scientists’ best efforts to hide her femaleness, travels to Las Vegas with her lover and sister agent Lady Bridget St. Claire and the scheming Mimi trailing at a not-so-safe distance. She is accompanied by the wonderfully fussy, terribly British Cedric, a delightful old queen, who is unaware that in her role as double agent, Jane has come to Sin City with a far different mission than to merely hush rumors of her brother’s demise. Then, of course, there’s the murder. Maney’s thriller comes with a ridiculously complicated plot, surprisingly fresh characters, and a commanding knowledge of the secret-agent genre. An impressive waste of time, brilliantly funny, oddly enlightening, it’s just about as much entertainment as one can squeeze between two covers. — Joy Parks

Providence of a Sparrow

By Chris Chester
Anchor, $13.95

B was a house sparrow that electronics technician Chester felt moved to rescue after the bird fell from a nest into Chester’s Portland, Oregon, backyard. Then B moved in, taking over the author’s life as well as a room in his house. “I could have chosen wrongly — I’d be unaware that a remarkable mind had died in my yard,” Chester writes in this tale of observation and love. “If he were trapped in the house, I’d tear it down to the foundation, steal a supermarket cart for my stuff, and live in a bus kiosk with my rescued bird.” It sounds clichéd to say that B (short for Bird Brain, emphasis on the brain) is no ordinary sparrow — but it’s so true. Given pretty much free rein, B plays intricate games involving bottle caps, and displays a beguiling array of emotions and intelligence. Heck, he can even type. No cuckoo in the nest, B wins over Chester’s wife, Rebecca. “Thank God no one else was around,” she says, her hair finessed with bird droppings while showering at her spa. “The people there already think I’m strange because I don’t wear anything with a logo on it.” Providence works best when focusing on B, but strays when it moves to other creatures in the Chester household — obsession is best denoted in mono. Providence is an entrancing portrait of an outsider life with an indoor sparrow. — Susan Compo

Beasts of Eden
By David Rains Wallace
University of California, $24.95

The story of mammals, in the hands of a skilled science popularizer, could be one of the most amazing ever. That’s why Beasts of Eden is such a letdown. What unsuspected evolutionary advantages did warm blood, fur, and mammary glands confer? How has mammalian evolution, in its diversity, reflected the caprices of geology and climate, from region to region and from epoch to epoch? What little-known clashes among scientific viewpoints have given rise to our present-day understandings of mammals? And, while we’re on it, why the heck does the male opossum have two penises? Wallace engages with no colorful questions, grand or trivial, in a field of study that must be rife with them. Instead, we get a painstaking rehash of the classification of ancient fossils, including the biography of each minor scientist involved. Wallace makes the mistake all too common among specialists who, when writing for lay audiences, assume that readers are already very familiar with key concepts and terms in the discipline at hand. The result, in this case, is a confounding stew of a narrative, without a discernible direction. Perhaps the author was hampered by a fear of producing a work that would read, in effect, little more than a high-school textbook, if he tried to explain too much. It’s an understandable concern, but one that hasn’t stopped any of a spate of popular-science writer-scholars in recent decades from producing memorable, erudite, yet accessible works on biology, cosmology, and psychiatry, to name a few. — Karen Armstead

Wakefield

By Andrei Codrescu
Algonquin, $24.95

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Wakefield,” a man ditches his life for two decades and abruptly returns. In his latest novel, Codrescu adds a poignant midlife-crisis spin to this conceit. After a brief visit with the devil — whom Codrescu imagines as a sensitive, if bored, consumer of souls — the novel’s eponymous hero discovers he has been sleepwalking through life. Satan allows Wakefield a one-year reprieve, so he hits the road looking for lives he could have lived, ideas he could have embraced. In the process he discovers America. A lecturer who dabbles in art, literature, and architecture, Wakefield has been delivering seat-of-the-pants addresses for corporations for years. The difference now is that he pays attention to the people he visits. In a Midwestern town called Typical, he flirts with becoming a suburban father. Visiting the stuffy World Art Museum in Wintry City, he privately remembers that art can make a difference. On a balcony in Santa Barbara he questions whether culture matters at all. Though baggy in structure, this novel plays well to Codrescu’s strengths of poetic observation and scabrous riff-making. He rants about airline seats and the size of Americans’ asses; he throws verbal Molotov cocktails at the enshrining of profit over people. Wakefield taps into every one of Codrescu’s veins of interest and, in the end, comes home dry. There is no belief, Wakefield suggests, that can tidy up our lives or our world — only engagement. It’s a principle this author has embodied himself for thirty years. — John Freeman

Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes
By Robert M. Wachter and Kaveh G. Shojania
Rugged Land, $24.95

Two UCSF Medical Center doctors and professors have produced the patient-safety book, and not a moment too soon. They write in a calm, intelligent voice that is the literary equivalent of a good bedside manner. And that’s important, given that they must deliver such horrible news, cautioning readers early on: “It would not be surprising for you to emerge a little gun-shy as you approach your next hospitalization or surgery.” Malpractice is only the beginning. The case studies herein are chilling and dramatic — operations on the wrong limb, the wrong side of the brain, the wrong patient; patients sewn up with instruments still inside them; and so on. It puts you in mind of Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant black comedy, The Hospital, in which, among other disasters, patients get “forgotten to death.” But what makes Internal Bleeding so real and relevant is that it takes a long, clear-eyed look at the usual suspects of the modern American catastrophe: systems, cultures, institutional policies. Thus are the operations of the FBI and NASA, of the San Francisco International Airport, and the International House of Pancakes all relevant to a proper discussion of the country’s medical protocols. While it’s true, as they write, that “safety is not very telegenic,” it is, in their hands, conducive to powerful, cautionary storytelling. They make an effort to keep it colloquial, alluding here and there to pop culture, quoting from movie characters and famous football coaches. Perhaps they are self-conscious about seeming too cerebral: This is a book that took plenty of homework. But the education is essential for anyone who might ever get sick. — Jonathan Kiefer

Animal Crackers

By Hannah Tinti
Dial, $22.95

Even Doctor Dolittle couldn’t bring peace to the animal kingdom in this creepy debut story collection. In Tinti’s world, giraffes at a zoo demand bigger pens and rare monkeys elude poachers. In one tale, a woman’s departing boyfriend leaves behind a boa constrictor. When he returns three months later, she fillets the serpent and makes a meal of it. Nor is Tinti a sentimentalist when it comes to small, fuzzy critters: Another story features a boy who repeatedly tries to make his pet rabbit fly. What’s most impressive throughout is Tinti’s understanding of humans embalmed by loneliness. The stories resonate with one mournful grace note after another, giving the book a chilly poise most uncommon in debuts. Like Poe and Highsmith, Tinti has a brilliant feel for the uncanny, how it can turn situations inside out and drape our lives in mystery. In the title story, a zookeeper demonstrates his trust in an elephant by lying on the cement and putting his head beneath the animal’s foot. The big creature then gently rolls his head back and forth as she might a coconut. In this sense, the animals are not merely symbols but phantoms. They stalk the shadows of the human characters’ worlds, conveying what it feels like to be alone or have your heart broken. To borrow an image from one unlucky animal in this collection, it’s like being plucked of one’s feathers, skinned alive, and hung upside down to dry. — John Freeman

Twelve-Step Fandango

By Chris Haslam
Dark Alley, $13.95

Martin Brock, this debut novel’s antihero, is by his own admission the kind of guy who keeps bars busy on sunny afternoons. A Brit living in a deserted castle near the Spanish coast, Martin lives from fix to fix and scrapes together an income dealing drugs to fellow expats. His fortunes briefly change when an old friend in very ill health stumbles into the castle one summer day and bequeaths to Martin the big score he has been dreaming of. All too soon, however, an unsavory cast of characters show up to claim the booty as their own, and a drug-addled caper ensues. With thugs in hot pursuit, Martin flees to supposed safe havens throughout Andalusia and in the process is betrayed by nearly every member of his joyless little band of misfits and crooks. As the hectic plot careens forward, Haslam bares his ample descriptive powers — witness the henchman “[s]o fat that he looked short, with a ZZ Top beard and rotten denims held together by decomposing organic compounds.” But this dizzying prose can also veer toward sensory overload and linguistic grandstanding. A hundred pages in, one longs for the days to pass simply, but alas: “Tuesday died of good intentions and slipped away on a funeral barge bedecked with stoned dreams and cocaine promises.” Still, Haslam successfully drives home the theme that there truly is no honor among thieves, and you can only trust yourself. As Martin puts it, “In our business it paid to listen to one’s inner chicken.” — Blair Campbell

The Virus and the Vaccine
By Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher
St. Martin’s, $25.95

Let’s face it, medical and scientific real-life thrillers are a genre — the medical advances must be “miracles,” the doctors and scientists male and arrogant, concerned only with their reputations and personal gain, and it helps to have at least one mistreated and undervalued female scientist working diligently away in the background. This book has all these elements, as it describes the history of polio vaccine development in this country and, more specifically, the controversy regarding the contamination of early vaccines with a monkey virus called SV40. That early vaccines were contaminated is now widely accepted, an unavoidable (in those days) consequence of using monkey kidneys to produce the material. What remains controversial is whether this virus is now causing certain rare cancers in humans. Bookchin and Schumacher have done an admirable job of pulling together a lot of historical data in order to present a history of this controversy. But in their eagerness to prove that SV40 is indeed causing cancer and, further, that the National Institutes of Health has been involved in a decades-long conspiracy to suppress this information, they veer away from journalism and start crusading. Reassuring readers was clearly not the authors’ intent, but maybe today we are getting used to the idea that all medical “miracles” come at a price, and that revisiting the science and politics of the 1960s with 21st-century hindsight does not make bad guys — or bad vaccines. — Paula Cannon

A Mind for Murder
By Alston Chase
W.W. Norton, $15.95

Anyone with any ties to UC Berkeley was doubly put out when Theodore Kaczynski was arrested in 1996. Not only was the Unabomber a former Cal professor, but the media also quickly blamed 1960s-era Berkeley for transforming the withdrawn young mathematician into a murderous Luddite. The truth, thankfully, is more complex: There have been many Berkeley math professors, and only a few of them ever sent explosives through the mail. And, in a victory for public-school graduates everywhere, Chase’s engrossing analysis of Kaczynski — subtitled “The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism” — traces the origins of his murderous psychology not to his days at UC but, instead, his undergraduate career at Harvard. Chase portrays Kaczynski as the product of a dysfunctional home in which his parents simultaneously excoriated him to study rapaciously, yet chided him for his lack of social commitments. Matriculating to Harvard at age sixteen, he was small, immature, and scorned for his working-class upbringing. What pushed him over the edge, in Chase’s opinion, was the nihilism of Harvard’s General Education courses and Kaczynski’s participation in an emotionally abusive psychology experiment undertaken by a professor receiving tons of secret cash from the CIA and sporting a personal life and political agenda that would do J. Edgar Hoover proud. Chase pens tiresome, chapter-long asides on the history of Gen Ed requirements and CIA machinations but, overall, he has crafted a chilling and thorough analysis of a thoroughly misunderstood man. — Joe Eskenazi

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

East Bay Express E-edition East Bay Express E-edition
19,045FansLike
14,611FollowersFollow
61,790FollowersFollow
spot_img