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1993-04-08
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BOOKS, Page 64THE BEST OF 1992
FICTION
1. The English Patient
By Michael Ondaatje. Rare is the fiction that dictates its
own challenging terms on the first page and by the last has
readers convinced that their perceptions of life, love and
history were sophisticated all along. Ondaatje's characters --
a dying burn victim, a young nurse, a morphine thief and a Sikh
defuser of unexploded Luftwaffe bombs -- are spun of dreams and
verbal magic. The quartet intersect at a critical moment: the
last year of World War II, the beginning of the end of the
British Empire and the start of the postimperial age.
2. Clockers
By Richard Price. Like a rock in a sock, this novel of
drug deals and double-deals in a gritty New Jersey industrial
town squeezed between Newark and Jersey City packs a shattering
wallop. Price spent time on the streets listening to the stories
of pushers and police and getting the details and dialogue
right. There's a killing, a twisty plot and enough realism to
satisfy the audience for conventional thrillers. But Price, also
a film scriptwriter, puts his lowlifes on a higher literary
plane.
3. All the Pretty Horses
By Cormac McCarthy. The first of a planned trilogy about
life in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico in 1949 clip-clops
along for a while before breaking into a graceful canter that
carries the reader nostalgically into the sunset. The story
evokes the coming of age of a young horseman who, with a
sidekick, rides into Mexico in search of seasoning and
adventure. He finds it taming horses on a rich man's ranch,
wrapped in the arms of a spirited young woman and caught in the
snares of a corrupt policeman. In prose that echoes early
Hemingway, McCarthy recalls a Southwest in the twilight of its
legendary wildness.
4. Outerbridge Reach
By Robert Stone. Like characters in his previous novels,
those in this tale about the dangers of the sea and the
treacheries of media exposure live at the extremes. Stone's
handsome couple risk comfort, security and their good marriage
when the head of the house decides to sail in an
around-the-world race. Worse yet, he allows an untrustworthy
documentary filmmaker to remain ashore and publicize the
expensive exploit. There are storms at sea and emotional
whirlpools at home. Before the end, skipper, wife and boat
reveal their flaws, and Stone once again demonstrates his skills
as a poet of doom.
5. Dreaming in Cuban
By Cristina Garcia. This first novel by a Cuban American
tells the poignant, often funny story of three generations of
Cuban women and their varying responses to Fidel's revolution.
Pro- and anti-Castro factions clash. The children are
scattered, one to the East bloc, another to Brooklyn to
establish the Yankee Doodle Bakery and harbor the memory of her
rape by revolutionaries. Garcia's imagination ranges over the
country's past, its heritage and, through the longings of a
young American girl to reunite with her revolutionary
grandmother in Havana, its future.
. . . AND THE WORST
The Immortals
By Michael Korda. Secure in the knowledge that the dead
cannot be libeled, the publishing executive and writer of best
sellers concocts a plot that takes the stories of the Jack
Kennedy-Marilyn Monroe sexual summits to new lows of speculation
and ghoulish dialogue.
NON-FICTION
1. What It Takes
By Richard Ben Cramer. In an election year supersaturated
with tasteless sound bites and redundant punditry, who would
pay $28 for 1,000 pages about the 1988 race for the White
House? Enough readers to put this on 1992 best-seller lists.
Cramer does for politics what Tom Wolfe did for the space
program: get behind the cliches, public relations and media hype
to reveal the ambitions, strengths and weaknesses of the
candidates.
2. Up in the Old Hotel
By Joseph Mitchell. This would be among the best books of
any year. In fact it (they) was. The volume contains four
previously published books by Mitchell, 84, the legendary
reporter for the New Yorker. Out of print for decades,
McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the
Harbor and Joe Gould's Secret are crammed with Mitchell's
favorite subjects: visionaries, obsessives, impostors, fanatics,
lost souls, street preachers and Gypsy kings and queens. Before
the days of the tape-recorded interview, Mitchell caught their
cadences and quirks and turned them into matchless American
prose.
3. Kissinger: A Biography
By Walter Isaacson. What made Henry Kissinger run, says
the author, was his "gnawing insecurity" and arrogance, "the
legacy of a childhood spent feeling both smarter and more
beleaguered than those around him." Both admiring and critical
of the former Secretary of State, this account by an assistant
managing editor of TIME concludes that, despite his brilliance,
Kissinger did not fully appreciate "the moral values that are
the true sources of [America's] global influence."
4. Truman
By David McCullough. Behind his image as the uncommon
common man, Harry Truman was an old-fashioned back-room
politician in Kansas City, Missouri, the headquarters of boss
Tom Pendergast. It was he who sent Truman to the U.S. Senate,
where he quickly impressed his peers. McCullough's hefty tome
reminds readers that the old machine worked pretty well if it
could start a man who was an unsuccessful farmer and failed
haberdasher on the road to the White House, where he is
remembered as the decisive President who directed the end of
World War II and the beginning of the cold war.
5. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
By James Gleick. The public got a glimpse of Richard
Feynman's ability to go to the heart of a problem when he
appeared on television to dip a bit of rubber into a glass of
ice water, thus demonstrating how a drop in temperature damaged
the O rings that caused the Challenger to explode shortly after
lift-off. Behind this show-and-tell was a Nobel prizewinner who
astonished his peers with penetrating intuition and shocked many
with his skirt chasing and bongo playing. Gleick explains the
paradoxes of Feynman's science and the irrepressible life-force
of a man who talked like a Brooklyn cab driver and thought like
a god.
. . . AND THE WORST
Making Love
by Richard Rhodes. The distinguished author of The Making
of the Atomic Bomb vainly attempts to make the earth move with
an embarrassingly solemn account of his sweaty sexual history. A
description of his orgasm should start a chain reaction of
giggles.