A Few Really Good Books

Teresa Weaver
Cox News Service

   BALZAC AND THE LITTLE
   CHINESE SEAMSTRESS
   By Dai Sijie, translated by Ina
   Rilke. Knopf
   Sometimes it’s OK to judge a book by its cover. This debut novella first attracted my attention quite simply because it is a work of art, with small words printed unobtrusively over a photograph of two tiny red shoes. Once inside, I was smitten by the story. Drawing from his experience as a teenager during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Sijie tells the tale of two doctors’ sons, 18 and 17, who are sent to a remote Chinese village for “re-education’’ by the peasants. Between such educational chores as hauling buckets of excrement up and down the mountainside, the two stumble upon a hidden stash of Western literature in Chinese translation. When they share the forbidden stories with the beautiful daughter of the village tailor, her life is transformed along with theirs.

   BORROWED FINERY: A MEMOIR
   By Paula Fox. Henry Holt
   Fox, a novelist and award-winning children’s book author, has an uncanny ability to recount in detail those excruciating moments of clarity that are only possible in childhood. “I might have forgotten the grandeur of the house and of the great winding staircase if I had not for the first time glimpsed the possibility of beauty in clothes,’’ she writes, “watching two little Delano girls hovering like butterflies about the table in white organdy dresses, slipping little cakes into their mouths.’’ After being abandoned as an infant in the 1920s, Fox was rescued from a Manhattan orphanage by a kindly minister she came to call Uncle Elwood. At age 6, she was reclaimed by her birth parents and shuttled among relatives and boarding schools for the next 12 years, from New York to Cuba to Montreal. In a casual, almost dreamlike flow of memories, Fox relates small vignettes and lets them develop gradually into something much bigger, something breathtaking.

   CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL
   By Glen David Gold. Hyperion
   In this novel set in early 20th-century San Francisco during the heyday of the great illusionists, Charles Carter — aka Carter the Great — performs a particularly grisly trick one night, using President Warren G. Harding as a volunteer. When Harding dies mysteriously shortly afterward, Carter is in trouble. Great period detail, snappy dialogue and rapid-fire pacing come naturally to Gold, an amateur magician (with a master’s in creative writing) who has written for TV and film. In a good year for interesting first fiction, this one’s a standout.

   MILKING THE MOON: A
   SOUTHERN’S STORY OF LIFE
   ON THIS PLANET
   By Eugene Walter as told to
   Katherine Clark. Crown
   Someone once described Walter as one of the most fascinating literary figures most of us had never heard of, and it may be true. Born in 1921 in Mobile, Ala., Walter spent most of his adult life in New York, Paris and Rome, before returning home in 1979. “Sooner or later all Southerners come home,’’ he said, “not to die, but to eat gumbo.’’ Walter published a prize-winning novel (“The Untidy Pilgrim’’), helped found the Paris Review, appeared in 60-plus Fellini films, and threw lavish parties with guest lists that included T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote and Judy Garland.  When Katherine Clark first began tape-recording Walter’s stories in 1991, she was repeatedly asked by others whether they were true. “Invariably,’’ she writes, “my reply was: `I certainly hope not.’ ‘’ With that in mind, this is an exceptionally fun read.

   SAVAGE BEAUTY: The Life of
   Edna St. Vincent Millay
   By Nancy Milford. Random House
   To write the biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Milford persuaded the poet’s younger sister and sole heir, Norma, to give her access to hundreds of personal papers, letters and notebooks. The result is an intimate look at a passionate, complicated writer who competed with her two sisters in love and in poetry as their fiercely controlling mother kept close watch. “Theirs was a story of triumph over adversity,’’ Milford writes, “one of the best women’s stories there is in America - hopeful, enduring, centered in family, and fraudulent.’’

   SEABISCUIT: AN AMERICAN LEGEND
   By Laura Hillenbrand. Random House.
   In 1938, an “undersized, crooked-legged’’ racehorse named Seabiscuit was talked about and written about in newspapers more than Roosevelt or Hitler. And yet, Seabiscuit had virtually disappeared from pop culture consciousness in the years since. This sometimes breathless biography — of horse, owner, trainer and jockey — surprised almost everyone with its compelling plot and eccentric characters. My favorite: Seabiscuit’s perpetually cranky trainer, Tom Smith. “Once, when asked to describe Seabiscuit at length,’’ Hillenbrand writes, “(Smith) replied, ‘He’s a horse,’ and walked away. It was typical of Smith to stroll off in silence while reporters were in mid-question. At other times he would respond to a question by staring straight at a reporter with a blank expression for as long as three minutes, saying nothing.’’

   THEODORE REX
   By Edmund Morris. Random House
   Fresh off the debacle of “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan’’ – which was really a historical novel – the acclaimed biographer offers a hale and hearty account of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential years (1901-1909). The second entry in a projected three-volume Roosevelt biography (the first won a Pulitzer in 1980), “Theodore Rex’’ is as big and brawny as Teddy himself. Roosevelt is a biographer’s dream — a prolific and enthusiastic letter writer, and an energetic, controversial, larger-than-life character. “Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States without knowing it,’’ Morris begins this book, “at 2:15 in the morning of 14 September 1901. He was bouncing in a buckboard down the rainswept slopes of Mount Marcy, in the Adirondacks.’’