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- <text id=93TT2545>
- <title>
- Jan. 03, 1994: The Best Books Of 1993
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Jan. 03, 1994 Men of The Year:The Peacemakers
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE BEST OF 1993, Page 79
- The Best Books Of 1993
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>NON-FICTION
- </p>
- <p> 1
- </p>
- <p> President Kennedy by Richard Reeves. We knew he was no saint.
- Now we have 800 carefully researched pages to tell us that J.F.K.
- was more Hollywood than Harvard, a gifted politician who relied
- on his charm rather than deep understanding and conviction.
- He was often "careless and dangerously disorganized." The image
- of vigor was also an illusion: hormone shots compensated for
- failing adrenal glands and amphetamines perked him up. Reeves'
- dose of reality is a needed antidote to the cloying hagiographies
- that have marked the 30th anniversary of J.F.K.'s death.
- </p>
- <p> 2
- </p>
- <p> Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick.
- What do good journalists do when they find themselves in the
- middle of the story of a lifetime? Dig till they drop and type
- like hell. Remnick covered thousands of miles for hundreds of
- interviews to explain who did what to whom when the Kremlin
- came tumbling down. The result is history still hot from the
- crucible.
- </p>
- <p> 3
- </p>
- <p> W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race by David Levering Lewis.
- The first of a planned two parts, this volume tracks the controversial
- black intellectual from his middle-class roots in Massachusetts
- to Paris for the 1918 Pan-African Congress. Lewis reveals the
- crusading editor and author of The Souls of Black Folk to be
- an aloof thinker struggling with contradictory ideas about racial
- inclusion and separatism.
- </p>
- <p> 4
- </p>
- <p> Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir by Leni Riefenstahl. At 91, the former
- actress and filmmaker has a lot to remember. Her Late Romantic
- style won raves from Hitler and invitations to his mountain
- lair. She glorified the New Order with striking films about
- the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and the 1936 Olympic Games. Whether
- one regards her as indomitable or abominable, Riefenstahl has
- written a vivid memoir of intimacies in an amoral time.
- </p>
- <p> 5
- </p>
- <p> A History of Warfare by John Keegan. Casting a cold eye over
- 4,000 years of mortal combat convinces this British historian
- that making war is basically a bad habit. Unromantic about the
- profession of arms but nevertheless sympathetic to the warrior
- class, Keegan conveys the grim details of warmaking operations
- with a stoic clarity that blurs all flags and levels all battlefields.
- </p>
- <p> ...And the Worst
- </p>
- <p> The Last Brother by Joe McGinniss. Craven in concept and as
- suspect as late homework, this so-called biography has done
- what Ted Kennedy's handlers could never manage: turned the Senator
- into a sympathetic victim of shoddy journalism and rendered
- his life so absurdly that Kennedy's excesses and bad judgments
- seem totally unbelievable.
- </p>
- <p> FICTION
- </p>
- <p> 1
- </p>
- <p> Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Denmark's exploitation
- of Greenland's mineral resources seems an unlikely background
- for a detective thriller about the mysterious death of a six-year-old
- Inuit boy. Unlikely too is the investigator, Smilla Qaavigaaq
- Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture
- of her hunter-tracker mother and the well-appointed world of
- her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Like Ross Macdonald
- in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California, Hoeg creates
- an unfamiliar but palpable world that steadily envelops the
- reader.
- </p>
- <p> 2
- </p>
- <p> Operation Shylock by Philip Roth. The uncontested master of
- comic irony comes up with another ticklish situation: a writer
- named Philip Roth journeys to Israel to confront a Philip Roth
- imposter who is trying to persuade Jews to go back to Europe
- and re-establish Yiddish culture. This new Diaspora aims to
- avert an Arab-engineered Holocaust by returning Israelis to
- the countries of their ancestors. Seriously funny about Middle
- East madness, Roth riffs with an abandon not seen since Portnoy's
- Complaint.
- </p>
- <p> 3
- </p>
- <p> Remembering Babylon by David Malouf. A celebrated Australian
- novelist reimagines his country's pioneer past with a haunting
- tale of a white man raised by Aborigines. It is the mid-19th
- century, and the struggling Queensland settlers are homesick
- for Britain and afraid of the natives. Malouf works the themes
- of culture clash and racial fears into a seamless narrative
- that amounts to a national contraepic.
- </p>
- <p> 4
- </p>
- <p> The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. Winner of this year's
- National Book Award, Proulx's rambunctious second novel zeroes
- in on a coastal Newfoundland community coming apart economically
- and socially when the fishing and seal hunting industries fail.
- The author has a sharp ear for regional speech and a barbed
- and quirky style that can be both startling and humorous.
- </p>
- <p> 5
- </p>
- <p> The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. This collection of short
- stories about damaged men poses important questions: Is courage
- a virtue, or is it simply testosterone poisoning? Is God just
- a neurochemical event, part of the tantalizing aura that precedes
- an epileptic fit? Jones is an ex-Marine and former amateur prizefighter
- who puts a wallop in his prose.
- </p>
- <p> ...And the Worst
- </p>
- <p> The Last Brother by Joe McGinnis. Who is this character with
- a famous name and a mind marinated in platitudes? Certainly
- not pure fiction, which might have been convincing, but a lifeless
- creature born out of New Journalism and the checkout-counter
- culture. Bad novel and bad biography, The Last Brother gives
- twice as little for the money.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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