HERE AT UGLY ACCENT, we are constantly compiling our favorite reviews of the best lesser known authors presently writing today. Most likely these books will not be found on the New York Times Bestseller List, although sometimes, if a book really is that good and we've just got to share it, we'll include it on the list.
We have a lot of expert book worms here at UGLY ACCENT , including but not limited to veteran booksellers, librarians-in-training, perpetual students, striving politicians, and public radio enthusiasts. We trust you will enjoy what you see, as we try to put a little bit for every reading type. Have a book recommendation you want to share? Send it our way and maybe we'll post it in our archives.
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SLOW FOOD NATION by Carlo Petrini
Reviewed by Juli Obudzinski
NEW YORK IN THE 50'S by Dan Wakefield
Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling
TWO KINDS OF ARSON by Brandi Homan
Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling
MARCH by Geraldine Brooks
Reviewed by Emily Kane-Lee
THE WPA GUIDE TO WISCONSIN by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration
Reviewed by Joseph Fronczak
HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson
Reviewed by Juli Obudzinski
PAX ATOMICA: POEMS by Campbell McGrath
Reviewed by Gabe Gossett
FRAUD by David Rakoff
Reviewed by Matt Friauf
DIARY OF A MADMAN by Lu Xun
Reviewed by Matt Friauf
BETTING ON THE MUSE by Charles Bukowski
Reviewed by Gabe Gossett
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SLOW FOOD NATION by Carol Petrini
Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2007
Reviewed by Juli Obudzinski
SLOW FOOD NATION begins with the full disclosure of its aim to “develop ideas, raise awareness and arouse passion” concerning the remodeling of the world’s food systems to better reflect the values of and allegiance to cultural food traditions. The book ends with a brief list of 10 things every American can do to strengthen their own food communities, including starting a kitchen garden and learning local food history. This clever framework allows for the success of the author’s mission: to change the way his reader thinks about food. The rallied passions and lusty arguments laden throughout the book perhaps only begin to resonate with the reader because they are strategically paired with practical solutions that are identifiable, doable and organized in a handy top ten list.
Slow Food Nation is not another whiney rant impugning modern culture to be the end all to the enjoyment of simple pleasures that once constituted the fabric of life in bygone eras. Nor is it plucked from the repertoire of straight-faced journalism, delivering the facts without actually providing the necessary passion to posit answers to the many questions raised in its delivery. Slow Food Nation stands alone as an iconoclastic attack on our modern food systems that since the industrial revolution, which has left us ignorant and unable to taste according to the book’s author, have been the leaders in herding society towards a uniformly toxic and entirely unsustainable food culture. This book is not only a wake up call to complacent consumers and disenfranchised farmers; it is a down right warranted slap in the face, put your foot down, hit the road jack call to action against the desensitized, profit-driven agricultural industry that has co-opted our once discerning palettes.
What has commonly become known as “sustainable agriculture” in more mainstream literature, morphs into something completely new, yet utterly tangible in this innovative analysis of what we should demand of our food. Carlo Petrini, the book’s author and founder of Slow Food International, argues that food should posses three important qualities in order to be acceptable to society: it must be good, clean and fair.
In order to be good, the natural history and local traditions of a specific food must be taken into consideration. Food that is grown locally, in an environment that is conducive to the cultivation of that specific variety, will be inherently good, as it has traveled a minimal distance from farm to table so not to compromise taste, as well as having preserved the historic traditions passed down from generation to generation.
To satisfy the element of being clean, food must be grown organically without the use of toxic pesticides or chemical fertilizers. In doing so, a plant’s natural defense mechanisms will be utilized and appreciated, resulting in minimal impact on the environment and consumer alike.
Food that is grown by laborers, who receive a livable wage and fair compensation for their goods, will be considered fair and will help sustain the global community of small-scale farmers, whose history and longstanding traditions date back to the origins of farming itself.
It is Mr. Petrini’s intent to convince his readers to believe and forcibly enact this set of criteria themselves, so that we can work together as a “network of gastronomes” towards the harmonious relationship with our food, communities and the environment. His agenda for progress in restoring food to its central place includes implementing school gardens to reconnect the next generation with where their food comes from, establishing accredited Gastronomy programs at the university level, and demanding transparency from distributors and food processors related to the environmental impact made by their products. The key solutions offered in this book revolve around the themes of food culture and nutrition education at all levels, redefining the powerless consumer as an engaged co-producer, and extending a dialogue between networks of food communities worldwide.
It is this universal hunger for change which is the foundation of Slow Food Nation, one which the author, perhaps rightfully so, declares will spur the passion necessary to take back our food from the corporate hands that have held it captive for too long now. As Mr. Petrini declares, the future will belong to the new gastronome.
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NEW YORK IN THE 50'S by Dan Wakefield
PIF Press/Greenpoint Press, 2007
Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling
Dan Wakefield’s New York in the Fifties, originally published by St. Martin's Griffin in 1992, has recently been reissued by PIF Press and Greenpoint Press, making a unique work of nonfiction available to new readers. Depicting the writers, journalists, social reformers, and musicians who lived in New York City during what most remember as an uneventful period in American artistic culture, Wakefield’s book is a compelling recreation of a time and place that shaped the nation’s intellectual tradition. Describing his own experience as an undergraduate at Columbia University alongside that of other literary luminaries who comprised the supposedly “Silent Generation,” such as John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion, Jack Kerouac, Mark Van Doren, and C. Wright Mills, Wakefield’s book gracefully presents a range of voices while maintaining its own sense of stylistic unity throughout.
One of the most impressive aspects of Wakefield’s memoir is the way the author’s life experience becomes a window through which the reader observes larger trends in literary and cultural history. The end result being a narrative that is at once diverse and anchored in its protagonist’s story, this trend in New York in the Fifties is exemplified by the descriptions of traveling to New York by train. For example, Dan Wakefield writes when describing the journey from his Indianapolis home to “the nation’s greatest city”:
The train stations of American’s cities were not simply points of arrival and departure, loading docks for people and baggage, but awesome, vast cathedrals for the continent crossing railways that first connected us into one country…When I went away to college at Columbia, my mother and father saw me off at Union Station with hugs and tears and promises to write, as if I were a soldier going to the front. (20-21)
Using his experience as a starting point when depicting the sudden mobilization of Americans by railroads, Wakefield’s description examines not only the societal impact of this transformation, but also portrays its having been romanticized in artistic culture on a national scale. His trip to college, then, becomes a manifestation of both technological changes and their representation in the arts, all of which are unified by the finely crafted and engaging narrative of Dan Wakefield’s experience as a young traveler.
Similarly, an incisive commentary on literary fact and fiction pervades New York in the Fifties, addressing the supposedly uneventful nature of this key decade, the believed impact of the beat generation, and many other topics as readers follow Wakefield through first jobs and freelance assignments. This aspect of the book is particularly apparent in the discussions of Jack Kerouac’s performance at the Vanguard, in which he writes:
Perhaps others felt as I did, that Kerouac was not only giving our generation a bad name (“beat”), but by his antics he was also – a worse crime – giving writers and writing in general a bad name, making them look like the foolish clowns that the worst of our parochial hometown critics took us to be. (176)
While narrating his experience seeing Kerouac perform, Wakefield suggests that, in their creating “the myth of a generation,” beat writers not only overshadowed those who adhered to tradition, but presented a romanticized vision of literary life in which rebellion matters more than craft (203). Forthright and insightful throughout, this assessment of how writers and their writing are perceived in retrospect is woven throughout New York in the Fifties, the end result being a memoir that situates personal experience in a broader historical context, remaining engaging and enjoyable all the while.
New York in the Fifties is a dazzling, intelligent read. Five stars.
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TWO KINDS OF ARSON by Brandi Homan
Dancing Girl Press, 2007
Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling
IN BRANDI HOMAN'S Two Kinds of Arson, the traditional love lyric collides head on with prom kings, red dresses, and plagues of locusts, setting the stage for witty, hip collection of poetry. Often taking the form of couplets and quatrains, Homan’s poems are thoroughly modern in their subversive use of feminine imagery like valentines, jewelry, and flowers, all of which the poems demand rather than wait for. By presenting first dates and crushes in an edgy way, at times juxtaposed with gasoline fumes and tattoos, Homan gives the speakers of these love poems not only agency but sassiness, rounding out an engaging and enjoyable selection of poems.
The stylistic devices that Homan uses often interact with her delightfully brazen subject matter in interesting ways. Employing a jocular tone as well as unusual diction and images, these formal aspects of Two Kinds of Arson create incongruities that become the source of both humor and irony. For example, Homan writes in her poem “Echolocation,” which narrates the speaker’s sending out signals for the perfect man: “I’ll soak his scars/ in coconut milk, heal him/ with heliotrope. I’ll grow/ sanguinaria in my navel,/ throw clover from the roof” (21). Stated after the speaker expounds on the qualifications for a man who will respond to this echolocation, these lines parody lists of this type through their wonderfully bizarre imagery and boisterous tone. The man described being just as impossible as being healed “with heliotrope” and throwing “clover from the roof,” the poem’s tone hints at the speaker’s obliviousness to this impossibility as she keeps “writing love songs/ that vanish in thin air” (22). Two Kinds of Arson is full of poems like this, which sizzle and shimmer while telling off crushes and daring young girls to take up arms against dependence.
These stylistic elements work well with the repeated themes and motifs in the text, which often evoke both femininity and aggression, casting a dark light on the valentines and first dates of the chapbook. Homan writes in her poem “Cohabitation,” for example: “How smoothly we slip/ through this field of poppies/ where plagues go to die,/ crawling on elbows/ through the long, crisp stems” (9). Juxtaposing the frivolousness of flowers and poppies with the gravity of biblical plagues, “Cohabitation” is one of many poems in the book that conflate the girly with the destructive, bringing conventional definitions of femininity and womanhood into question. Often highlighted and complicated by the stylistic devices of the book, these themes form a wonderfully complex vision of love that pervades the collection.
Overall, Two Kinds of Arson is a daring, intelligent read. Anyone who enjoys feminist poetry that is still fun and lyrical throughout will enjoy Brandi Homan’s new chapbook.
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MARCH by Geraldine Brooks
Viking, 2005
Reviewed by Emily Kane-Lee
I DECIDED TO READ March because I had read Geraldine Brooks’s other two books: Nine Parts of Desire and Year of Wonders. These two works were drastically different; the former a critique of women in Islam, and the latter a fictional tale set in England during the plague. Brooks has once again explored a unique story for the subject matter of her latest novel. March is a fictional autobiography of the father of the March girls of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. This account of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy’s father’s year in the Civil War gives us insight into the life of an army chaplain.
Despite being a member of Lincoln’s army, Mr. March finds he is alone in his abolitionist convictions. As we watch Mr. March make life-altering decisions, we see his humanity exposed through his inner-conflict:
“Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man’s character, the other its nadir. And yet, to me, the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of are.”
Throughout the book, we are thrown, sometimes without warning, into the memories that haunt Mr. March, as well as have the unique opportunity to meet other abolitionists and progressive thinkers, such as Emerson and Thoreau. Through these memories, Brooks explores the cowardice of Mr. March which hides under the façade of his courage. Not only is March a different perspective on an adored classic, but the greater understanding of this family will likely make the reader fall in love with them all over again. Brooks finds the voice Alcott would have used had she investigated the paternal (and maternal, to some extent) influence on the March girls. Having read Little Women is not a prerequisite for understanding March; however, an intrigue to learn more about these pre-first wave feminists may arise.
While Brooks’s writing is beautiful and full of intriguing ideas, there were substantial parts of chapters during which I found myself asking, “Where is she going with this story?” Regardless of Brooks’s, at times, lack of direction, March is a read that will remain with the reader long after the last page has been turned.
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THE WPA GUIDE TO WISCONSIN by The Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration
Wisconsin Library Association, 1941
Minnesota Historical Society, 2006 (reissue)
Reviewed by Joseph Fronczak
WE'VE BEEN DUPED. For those of us who grew up in Wisconsin, it happened in fourth grade, between lessons on recycling and remainders. That’s when a well-meaning and well-mannered teacher taught us a version of our state history more domesticated than a Holstein cow: Marquette and Jolliet hopped in a boat (the priest got a school named for him, the fur trader a prison), Black Hawk was very brave, and then Wisconsin became a state in 1848; “Badgers” was a derogatory term for miners so dirt-poor they dug homes in hillsides, and this was bad. (That people used mean names, not that people lived in holes: nobody, apparently, was to blame for this.) And then there were cows.
The lesson learned was clear: Wisconsin’s history is rather irrelevant and even more boring, so we went on to the fifth grade and beyond without giving the state’s past a second thought. But if you pick up a copy of The WPA Guide to Wisconsin, just reissued by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, you’ll finally think again.
The WPA Guide unveils a forgotten history of the state so rich with strangeness and drama that it makes a lie of the cardboard narrative we rely upon. It breathes life into long-buried stories of the farmers’ cooperative movement, railroad barons and lumbermen, immigrants displaced by the failure of the European revolutions of 1848, literary wives of Indian agents, armed missionaries, and singing lumberjacks. The WPA Guide also finds Native Americans not only in the lost past of Black Hawk, but in the authors’ Great-Depression present, still facing the same old dilemmas. And this perhaps is the book’s highest achievement—even as it revels in the oddity, the literal foreignness of the state’s history, the guide’s writers continually tie the past to modern Wisconsin, illuminating just how evidently the world we inhabit was raised on the mudsill of our history.
First published in 1941, The WPA Guide was a collective effort, cobbled together by the workers of Madison’s branch of the Federal Writers’ Project, the artistic arm of the New Deal Works Progress Administration. The FWP incubated some of the nation’s greatest literary talents (Bellow, Wright, Ellison, Cheever, Hurston . . . ) and the Madison branch was no different—the legendary marsh poet Lorine Niedecker was The WPA Guide’s research editor; Aldo Leopold, who later authored the classic A Sand County Almanac, nurtured the sections on Wisconsin’s natural history.
Yet the book was almost never even published. A cowboy politician from Texas denounced the FWP as treasonous because the project refused to censor its writers. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the newly-elected Republican governor promptly directed the state legislature to cut the guide’s entire publishing budget because of the nasty (true) things the book said of his party. The situation was absurd: legislators (a profession not known for literary talent) panning the book of Niedecker and Leopold as poorly written—politicians denouncing it as politically biased. But Wisconsin’s librarians came to the guide’s rescue, as the Wisconsin Library Association picked up the publishing bill.
Which brings us to today, when I suppose we should simply grit our teeth and thank our neighbors at the Minnesota Historical Society for reissuing the long-out-of-print Guide to Wisconsin. With our own historical society besieged by state-imposed budget cuts—left to unscrew every other light bulb, as one University of Wisconsin historian has put it—we find ourselves in a situation similar to that of 1941, with the state government ruining our ability to explore our past. It nonetheless hurts the old state pride to rely on Minnesota to restore Wisconsin’s strange history. Oh well, as I learned in fourth grade, at least Wisconsin has even more lakes than the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.”
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HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981
Reviewed by Juli Obudzinski
WRITTEN TWENTY YEARS prior to her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead, Housekeeping outperforms any debut I've managed to come across. Composed at the age of thirty-seven, it feels Robinson has been storing up this novel her whole life, only to wait until the characters fully reveal themselves and the story unweaves completely before contemplating its production.
Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, thrown a mileu of guardians over a period of a few years. First, their mother, who keeps a less than tidy urban residence in Seattle. She then drives them to their grandmother's in the tiny village of Fingerbone, where she proceeds to drive her car into the same lake where her father drowned years prior. The girls' housekeepers then switch hands again once their grandmother passes away, to a pair of whispering fidgety great aunts. Finally, Sylvie, their estranged aunt, becomes their fourth and final housekeeper for the duration of the novel. What happens in the next two-hundred pages or so is not quite the typical coming of age story, although does preserve the most precious elements of such.
The two sisters seem to posses the same body during the first half of the novel, maintaining the consistent "we" this and "we" that. This is so carefully done that its presence is mildly unnoticed until a disruption in its pattern occurs, marked by the sisters' drifting.
Robinson's mastery of language reveals itself in the scenes unfolded across the pages of this textually rich excursion, as she paints backdrops in which to vividly place her characters.
“The town itself seemed a negligible thing from such a distance. Were it not for the clutter on the shore, the flames and the tremulous pillars of heat that stood above the barrels, and of course the skaters who swooped and sailed and made bright, brave sounds, it would have been possible not to notice the town at all. The mountains that stood up behind it were covered with snow and hidden in the white sky, and the lake was sealed and hidden, yet their eclipse had not made the town more prominent. Indeed, where we were we could feel the reach of the lake far behind us, and far beyond us on either side, in a spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass."
One note of caution to the indolent reader: this book will make you work. I advise keeping a dictionary handy alongside this novel. I filled up three notecards (front and back) with words like "unifery", "simulacra" and "obstreperous". Once the formidable text is moiled through however, the reader will become infinitely rewarded by the tranquil melody that carries them through the novel, depositing them at a conclusion well merited and ultimately, completely satiating.
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BETTING ON THE MUSE by Charles Bukowski
Black Sparrow Books, 1996
Reviewed by Gabe Gossett
I ADMIRE THE poetry of Charles Bukowski for its blunt and direct delivery. I would also like to point out that he has written a lot of crappy poetry that people in the cult of Bukowski revere anyhow just because his name is on it. When I think of his work I am reminded of what a critic said about Picasso’s paintings, “While no one has made as many good paintings as Picasso, nobody has made as many bad ones either.” And though I won’t pretend that Bukowski has written more good poems than anyone else I still think the comparison apt. In the many good poems he has written it is Bukowski’s straightforward and unpretending style that is a welcome diversion from the flock that imitates for attention.
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FRAUD by David Rakoff
Broadway, 2002
Reviewed by Matt Friauf
IF YOU'VE EVER listened to David Rakoff reading in one of his many segments on NPR’s This American Life you have heard a voice like John Waters with a more leisurely gait meandering a New Yorker through decidedly non-New York experiences. Incidentally Mr. Rakoff is from Toronto. Nevertheless he betrays the big-city aversion to most things outside the city within the first paragraph of the book; “the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.”
He is of course aware of this condition and makes the most of it with subtle self-mockery typical of the wit throughout Fraud, and especially in the essay Lush Life. His essays run from his experiences at a Tibetan Buddhist retreat, featuring a surprisingly intelligent though chronically late Steven Segal, to his time at an Israel kibbutz as a teenager, where he finally admits to himself while stuffing chickens into crates, “I don’t like chickens… I like men.”
His wit always strikes dead on target, but it’s more like a well aimed slap than a cruise missile. He’s not vicious in his humor and often humanizes those he has just skewered. After telling of a down on their luck, former upper class Greek family who ran an ice cream franchise, he ends with a romanticized image of the emotionally unstable and domineering wife on an airplane relocating once again;
“Shielding her eyes against the glass, she stares out into the night, past the blinking wing lights, past the Western edge of the continent, out over the ocean, scanning the horizon for the next piece of dry land.”
Rakoff could be compared to David Sedaris for a multitude of reasons, most important of which is the quality of the writing and the enjoyment in reading them. Incidentally, if you look to the end of Rakoff’s acknowledgments you’ll find short but eloquent dedication to Sedaris.
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PAX ATOMICA: POEMS by Campbell McGrath
Ecco, 2004
Reviewed by Gabe Gossett
AMONG THE POETS still with us that I enjoy reading are Campbell McGrath for his sophisticated use of the language without being too dry. There are plenty of contemporary poets writing clever little bits that take promising words and wring every little cleverism out of them that they can. As fun as these sometimes are they often fall victim to being bony and dry. In McGrath’s case however the bones take on flesh and use a living language. A stand-out poem in this vein is his dissection of the word Zeugma, which is the poem’s namesake, from his collection Pax Atomica. McGrath’s poetry easily veers from the ultra-literary to the colloquial, a mode that does not come off successfully in much poetry that attempts it.
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DIARY OF A MADMAN & OTHER STORIES by Lu Xun University of Hawaii Press, 1990
Reviewed by Matt Friauf
WRITTEN AFTER THE overthrow of the Imperial line and during the various governments of warlords and nationalists of 1920’s and 1930’s China, Lu Xun was on the forefront of modern writing in China and certainly as good as his contemporaries in the West. He once famously compared China to an iron house. Inside this airtight house the people slept, slowly breathing away the air left inside, while he stood on the outside. His dilemma was whether he should wake the sleepers by pounding on the house, throwing them into a panic breathing faster and still unable to escape the iron walls, or let them be, to die peacefully in their sleep. This rather bleak outlook is both a metaphor for his country at the time and for his writing as he attempted to rouse China in a polemic style so subtle as to border on absent.
When he makes an argument for the future of China in this collection, it rarely come from the characters themselves. In The True Story of Ah Q, a poor man for whom the story is named, continues to find new levels of poverty in a constant repetition of theft and beatings perpetrated on and by Ah Q. Any pity the reader may feel is wiped away by Ah Q’s own contemptible behavior and misguided self-righteousness to those below him as well as his inability to reform or even conceive of reform until the last instant of his life. Stories like Ah Q describe a hierarchy in which abuse flows from the top and is passed down to the lower levels in an unending soak where people, rather than questioning their poor treatment, prefer to pass it on to those below them.
The story Diary of a Madman, which the collection takes its name from, in turn takes its name from a work by Russian author Nikolay Gogol. It is one of Lu Xun’s earliest published stories and considered by many to be China’s first modern short story. The story told by the narrator follows him as he reads the diary entries of a recently deceased friend who has apparently lost his mind and saw everyone around him as cannibals. He ends this story in perhaps his most obvious example of a plea as the diaries and story end with, “Save the children!”
Other stories focusing on social pressure have a similar tone to those of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li, displaying the oppressive constraints and sacrifice made on the behalf of community and family.
Lu Xun’s argument for change comes in the form of abject desperation of the situation and not the plight of individual characters. This brand of satire in which all are painted as complicit in the abhorrent state of the nation is at times overwhelming. It is in this fashion that Lu Xun makes his incredibly moving arguments for social change without resorting to slogans.