Greetings from Amazon.com Delivers Independent and University Presses FEATURED IN THIS E-MAIL: * "Gap Creek" by Robert Morgan * "Crossing the Expendable Landscape" by Bettina Drew * "Cracks" by Sheila Kohler * "The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo" by Noam Chomsky * "Wild Kingdom" by Vijay Seshadri * Amazon.com Presents the Best of the Century "Gap Creek" by Robert Morgan Publisher: Algonquin Books http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565122429/entertainmentsit Robert Morgan's "Gap Creek" opens with one wrenching death and ends with another. In between, this novel of turn-of- the-century Appalachian life works in fire, flood, swindlers, sickness, and starvation--a truly biblical assortment of plagues, all visited on the sturdy shoulders of 17-year-old Julie Harmon. Indeed, scarcely 15 pages have passed before she's forced to observe her baby brother's gruesome moonlit death, his tiny body shuddering and white worms spewing out of his mouth. "Human life don't mean a thing in this world," she concludes. "People could be born and they could suffer, and they could die, and it didn't mean a thing.... The world was exactly like it had been and would always be, going on about its business." A few months and another death later, Julie meets and marries handsome young Hank Richards. But nothing comes easy in her world, and their first year together is no exception. Some of what follows is extraordinarily painful to read, but throughout, Morgan chronicles Julie's trials in prose of great dignity and clarity, resisting the temptation to make his long-suffering characters into saints. Clearly, the author has done his research too--the descriptions of physical labor practically leap off the page. (Suffice to say, you'll learn far more about hog slaughtering than you ever dreamed of knowing before.) In novels like "The Truest Pleasure" and "The Hinterlands," Morgan proved his ability to create memorable heroines. In "Gap Creek," he writes with great feeling--but not a touch of sentimentality--about a life Julie aptly calls "both simple and hard." --Mary Park "Crossing the Expendable Landscape" by Bettina Drew Publisher: Graywolf Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1555972799/entertainmentsit "Crossing the Expendable Landscape" is a remarkable book--by turns scathing and mournful, witty and sad. The essays in this volume are much more than just a savage indictment of mass architecture in this country, they're a penetrating look at what our buildings say about Americans as a people. In our eagerness to get rid of our "built past," Bettina Drew writes, we have institutionalized a kind of historical amnesia. To remind us of how urban renewal first drained our cities of their character, she visits Stamford, Connecticut; to examine the vogue for gated communities with highly restrictive "covenants," she visits Hilton Head, North Carolina; and to judge the fruits of "New Urbanism," she visits the Disney town of Celebration, Florida. Add stops in Las Vegas, Dallas, and even Branson, Missouri, and an ugly picture begins to take shape. "I would have liked to live in a world where past effort actually mattered," Drew mourns, as she chronicles the way of life destroyed along with downtown Stamford. The popularity of gated communities like Hilton Head "speaks volumes for how willingly people have given up their democratic rights, and how acceptable autocratic rule really is to large numbers of Americans." Celebration represents progress of sorts, but the fact that community is now a "product we can purchase, rather than something we create for ourselves, suggests how deeply the values of the marketplace have penetrated our domestic lives." As a doctoral student in Yale's American Studies program, Drew writes from the perspective not of an architect or urban planner but of a passionate advocate of old-fashioned cities. Rather than concentrating on theories or even solutions, she records what it feels like to travel through the bland malls, freeways, and office parks of edge city. And it feels bad. It's impossible to read this book without feeling that our desecration of the American landscape has impoverished our inner landscapes as well. --Mary Park "Cracks" by Sheila Kohler Publisher: Zoland Books http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/158195008X/entertainmentsit Put adolescents together in a confined environment with only minimal adult supervision, and bad things will happen--a truism in literature as well as life. (Think "The Children's Hour," think "Lord of the Flies.") But in Sheila Kohler's eerie, atmospheric "Cracks," the bad things that will happen are not the ones you might expect, and the message is far more complex than just "Children are savages." (Although they certainly are.) Written in an ominously anonymous first person plural, the novel follows 12 girls on the swim team at a South African boarding school. They include the jock, the pretty one, the brain, the fat girl, and perhaps most interestingly, the shadowy Sheila Kohler, a storyteller whose tales all "came to the same dramatic finale: violent death..." A "crack," as it turns out, is a crush, and unsurprisingly, all 12 of the girls are in love with the dashing Miss G, their swim instructor. When they're not swimming or mooning over their coach, the members of the team amuse themselves by torturing new girls and taking turns fainting in chapel--until Fiamma Coronna throws everything off balance. A breathtaking Italian princess, a first-class swimmer, Fiamma quickly earns the girls' enmity by becoming Miss G's favorite. Worse still, she shows no interest in her teammates at all, and the usual hazing soon escalates to something far more serious. Heat, dust, frangipani, adolescent sexuality simmering just under the surface: this could all have gone terribly, terribly wrong. It doesn't, and Kohler's elegant prose is the main reason why. The girls may be overheated, but the author's language never is. --Chloe Byrne "The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo" by Noam Chomsky Publisher: Common Courage Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567511767/entertainmentsit Scarcely had the dust settled on NATO's 1999 bombing of Serbia when prolific political commentator Noam Chomsky brought out "The New Military Humanism," which raises incisive, unsettling questions about the motives of the United States and England--the two most vocal proponents of Operation Allied Forces--and the efficacy of their handiwork. Chomsky pulls together much damning evidence, including testimony from the military commander who led the attack, to demonstrate that the assault was not intended to bring an end to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" of the disputed territory in Kosovo; it seems very likely, in fact, that President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair knew full well that their actions would ultimately exacerbate the situation. Chomsky also points out that if the United States was genuinely concerned with ending the horrors of genocide, its continued financial and military support of repressive regimes in countries like Turkey and Indonesia is at the very least extremely puzzling. ("The New Military Humanism" was written and published before the international community decided in September 1999 to intervene in East Timor, which had been subject to Indonesian occupation for over 20 years.) Ultimately, Chomsky suggests, such contradictions exist because what the United States claims to be a "humanitarian" mission is--no matter how glowingly the mass media portrays it--nothing more than American muscle flexing. "The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order," he concludes, "has become so extreme that there is little left to discuss." --Ron Hogan "Wild Kingdom" by Vijay Seshadri Publisher: Graywolf Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1555972365/entertainmentsit Vijay Seshadri is a poet of street scenes and seascapes, twisted alder stumps and spawning salmon, as well as drive-by shootings and thumping reggae bass. In "Wild Kingdom" he goes in search of the primordial face behind the civilized mask, the place where "wolfpacks of nothingness stalk / the signature stinks and blood trails of man." He doesn't have far to travel. Whether his subject is the "ancient terror" of marriage, in "Prothalamion," or a northwester "glittering with malice" in "The Lump," Seshadri seems peculiarly subject to powers both old and inexorable. "All this was the brainchild of water," as the lost hiker of "Lifeline" realizes, and throughout "Wild Kingdom" groundwater rises in crevices, polar icecaps melt, and rain wears its passage through rock. Nature here is as pervasive as myth, and just as annihilating. Yet not all is Sturm und Drang: witness the joyous "Big Mama!" that ends a stanza of the prehistoric love poem "My Esmeralda," or the ebullient voice of God in "An Oral History of Migration": "You be that thing, He said." Making use of long, conversational lines as well as meticulous rhymes, Seshadri's voice is elegant, energetic, and startlingly original--who else would say of a refugee that he is "pinned like a flower on the genocidal past"? "I can see by your faces that / your hearts are good, and like to think / mine is, too," he writes in "The Testimonies of Ramon Fernandez." As the rest of the poem tells us, we should believe him, stand back, and let him work. --Mary Park AMAZON.COM PRESENTS THE BEST OF THE CENTURY ******************************************* As the century comes to a close, Amazon.com takes a look at the landmarks in books, music, and video of the past 100 years. Selected by our editors, our lists take you decade by decade from the turn of the century all the way to the end of the millennium. But don't just take our word for it; cast your vote for the best book, video, and CD in our best-of-the-millennium poll for your chance to win our customers' 300 favorite music, book, and video titles. Books of the century ****** Give the Perfect Gift -- Get the Perfect Gift Does Aunt Ida send polka CDs when you'd prefer pop? Create an Amazon.com Wish List and save everyone the agony of the unwanted gift. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=entertainmentsit&path=subst/wishlist/wishlist-portal.html Clueless as to what to get your Kentucky cousin for Christmas? Send him an e-card and tell him to set up an Amazon.com Wish List so you can easily find and send him his heart's desire. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=entertainmentsit&path=tg/cards/browse-cards/-/228225/1 ****** You'll find more great books, articles, excerpts, and interviews in Amazon.com's Literature & Fiction section at Literature & Fiction
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