TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT2567> <title> Jan. 04, 1993: The Best of 1992:Books </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Jan. 04, 1993 Man of the Year:Bill Clinton </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> BOOKS, Page 64 THE BEST OF 1992 </hdr> <body> 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. </body> </article> </text>