About Netsurfer Books

Netsurfer Books is a bi-monthly e-zine offering short reviews of books and related items. We include listings based on recommendations from our staff and reviews from other individuals. Are we bribed to include any of these items? No. Do we receive a commission if you purchase an item through one of the links included here? Yes. Are we waiting to hear from you about what you'd like to see reviewed? Definitely.

EDITOR'S CHOICE

Robert Kennedy: His Life

Robert Kennedy: His Life
Evan Thomas
Simon & Schuster; ISBN: 0684834804

Evan Thomas describes the scene at the Ambassador Hotel on June 6, 1968: Rafer Johnson finally peeled Sirhan's fingers off the shiny black revolver, as if he was peeling a grapefruit. Ethel, who had been yanked back to safety in the melle, emerged from the crowd and knelt beside her husband. "Oh my God," she whispered. She lightly stroked his face and chest. He seemed to turn his head slightly to look at her. "Is everybody else all right?" he whispered. The emergency crew arrived and lifted Kennedy onto a stretcher. "Gently, gently," said Ethel. Kennedy was heard to cry, "Oh, no, no, don't...." Then he passed out, never to awaken. Back in the ballroom, "an awful sound" rolled "like a moan," recalled Jack Newfield. A woman in a bright red party dress, sobbing uncontrollably, came by him, screaming, "No, God, no. It's happened again." The moan became a wail; it sounded as if, Newfield wrote, a hospital had been bombed: "the sound was somehow the sound of the twice wounded." Inside the corridor where Kennedy had been shot, someone had laid a rose on the bloody floor. A sign reading "The Once and Future King" hung on the wall. It had apparently been left there from some earlier function, but as the death watch began, so did the mythologizing.

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass
Philip Pullman
Knopf; ISBN: 0679879269

Fans of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy know very well that his children's allegory is only for children just as much as The Lord of the Rings is only for hobbits. Children may well be accorded some special status in his stories, but the mutability of their companion daemons can be best appreciated by adult readers who, in Pullman's universes, must live with their own hidebound daemons. Each of the novels offers its own version of Tolkien's ring, the maguffin that propels the action. Actually, calling the titular Dark Material object the maguffin is saying too little of each of them. Each has a purpose that puts real power into the children's hands in new ways, from the compass that, instead of orienting to the poles, points to spirit. The knife's edge of the second installment is so keen that it cuts between worlds. And, in the final book, the spyglass sees Dust, the elements of consciousness. The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass are uncommonly rich stories in the tradition of Tolkien. Parents should understand, though, that like Tolkien's Middle Earth, Pullman's universes are populated by characters that you wouldn't want your youngsters meeting in their dreams. Mature children might not quite appreciate the fullness of the books, but they and adults who haven't relinquished their companion daemons just yet will find the Dark Materials trilogy deeply rewarding.

The Marriage of Sticks

The Marriage of Sticks
Jonathan Carroll
Tor Books; ISBN: 0312871937

Don't expect this graceful story to grab you by the throat on the first page. It's a moody tale that weaves its story from the everyday - that is, until ghosts make an appearance and reincarnation reveals the essential true nature of the central character's life. The tale begins conventionally enough, with Miranda Romanac's preparations for her high school reunion. An emotional blow delivered there seems to be one thing, but in the end resonates as much more. There's illicit romance, love, death, and even vampires. If the supernatural seems to lack some focus in this description, don't let that put you off this poetic novel. Each new experience is woven seamlessly into the whole.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Tornado Alley: Monster Storms of the Great Plains

Tornado Alley: Monster Storms of the Great Plains
Howard B. Bluestein
Oxford Univ Pr (Trade); ISBN: 0195105524

Part of the fascination of phenomena like tornadoes and hurricanes is the juxtaposition of their undeniable beauty and their unquestionable destruction. Scientific texts generally concentrate on Doppler analysis or pressure measurements as a function of time. Bluestein, whose exploits rank among the inspirations for the film 'Twister', doesn't ignore the science, but manages to convey the irresistible force that has kept him in thrall of such radical events for the past two decades. It's not surprising that he can draw us in, too. He believes, he says, that "to study a meteorological phenomenon properly, you must actually experience it and appreciate it aesthetically". Accordingly, his own introduction to the book suggests that laypersons skip through the mathematics in favor of his descriptive text to which laypeople can more readily relate. Still, he doesn't give short shrift to science. Bluestein is particularly intrigued by cloud photography and it shows in the many color plates of spectacular formations. He also engages with his personal anecdotes. This is a fine book on the subject, regardless of your level of expertise.

Just the Tips, Man for Microsoft Word 2000

Just the Tips, Man for Microsoft Word 2000
Bob Flisser and Wendy Richardson
Nerdy Books; ISBN: 1930041012

Do you recall those templates that used to fit around the function keys of your computer, the ones that reminded you which three (or was it four?) keys to depress simultaneously to order bold print for the blocked text on your blue screen? If you do remember them, like us, you're older than a 286 - and probably at least as unstable. Still, it was a simpler time, when there seemed to be only 48 things that you could do with your text processor. Not so now. Que and Sybex, for instance, our computing publishers of choice, offer a combined 2600 pages (in Special Edition Using Microsoft Word 2000 and Mastering Word 2000 Premium Edition, respectively) to help users wrestle that single behemoth package into submission. You can go that route if you want ready reference to all the questions, frequent or otherwise, that are likely to be asked. Or, you can go the Nerdy Books route. Here's a truly handy little reference guide, compact (not much bigger than a file card and ready to slip into the pocket of your Targus bag), spiral bound, with a built-in easel, that offers 231 of the most useful Word secrets you or anyone else is likely to need. (Actually, there are additional little tips with each numbered tip that bring the count of useful bits of advice up to about 500.) We were surprised by the neat little shortcuts for line drawing (#53), grateful for the route to the drag-and-drop shortcut menu (#92), and positively tickled to discover that we can select a vertical block of text (#29), a tip that will definitely speed some of our work. This isn't an arcane text for people who insist on understanding what's happening behind their screens. It's one of the most practical and informative little software aids we've seen. By the way, every one of the two dozen or so tips that we tested in Word 98 worked just fine, too. This recommendation, by the by, is not to disparage any Sybex or Que publication. In our opinion, they're the most clearly written, smartly organized, intuitive manuals on the market.

BUSINESS AND FINANCE

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell
Little Brown & Company; ISBN: 0316316962

The tipping point was originally a term from the vernacular of epidemiology, referring to the notion that small changes have little or no effect on a system until a critical mass is reached. Then, a further small change tips the system, triggering a large effect - such as an epidemic. Gladwell, a writer for The New Yorker, borrows the term to define the moment at which an idea catches on and spreads. He borrows more than just the name, though. He considers, for instance, a Baltimore public health issue from three different perspectives, looking at what tipped a long-standing and constant rate of syphilis infection over into a much wider epidemic in only a matter of months. "There is more than one way to tip an epidemic, in other words. Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating. And when an epidemic tips, when it is jolted out of equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of those areas. These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context." He goes on to confirm and demonstrate his theory with examples as diverse as teen smoking, the Bernie Goetz NYC subway shooting, and the American Revolution. He suggests that it would be possible to manipulate a tipping point by using the agents purposefully. Gladwell's theory of the tipping point should interest marketers, political operators, public policy analysts, fund raisers, human resource officers - anyone who has an idea to sell.

BIOGRAPHY, SOCIETY, AND HISTORY

A Glimpse of Hell: The Explosion Aboard the USS Iowa and Its Aftermath

A Glimpse of Hell: The Explosion Aboard the USS Iowa and Its Aftermath
Charles C. Thompson
W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393047148

You may recall the 1989 explosion in the gun turret of the USS Iowa, in which 47 sailors died in an inferno fueled by the onboard munitions. Information leaked to media in the aftermath laid the blame at the door of a gay sailor settling a score with another man who'd spurned him. As we recall it, even those of us not given to conspiracy theories found the report's nasty conclusions odd, seeming to bring the investigation to an abrupt end, looking no further toward how to prevent another such tragedy even if the results had been true. Two years after accusing the dead sailor of wanton mass murder, of course, the Navy had to allow as how it really didn't have any supportable reason for the theory that it had put forward. Charles Thompson - former Navy man, experienced "60 Minutes" journalist, and investigative author (The Death of Elvis: What Really Happened) - hadn't bought the first reports and didn't buy the follow-up, either. (Eleven years later no one has yet been disciplined. Indeed, some of those most responsible seem to have flourished.) Thompson cut through the duplicity to reveal a military more prepared to sacrifice the welfare of its men and women than jeopardize the comfort of Congress. You can't read a single paragraph documenting the mechanical and moral failures, deliberately hobbled safety practices, big-P and small-p political manipulations, and ego-serving decisions that led up to the disaster without recognizing the inevitability of the accident. The accused sailor's family has launched only one of the many lawsuits against the government. No one anywhere in the chain of command - or in the cynical investigative team that ran a staggeringly botched inquiry - has ever had to bear responsibility. If you're in the American military, don't expect to find this book in your base PX. The Navy has blocked the usual processes associated with distributing and promoting a book, trying to put it out of the reach of the men and women who should and would be its most vested audience.

Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages

Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages
Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine
Oxford Univ Pr (Trade); ISBN: 0195136241

As much as the world's map has changed over the past century, the inventory of nations always hovers in the very low hundreds. However much the number fluctuates and the shape of the map changes, the inventory of the languages spoken in those nations - quite apart from dialects and regional variations - has numbered about 5000. If you've read Netsurfer Science, you've seen more than one site that speaks to disappearing cultures and languages. The decline now is so persistent, in fact, that it will be mere decades before half those tongues join the ranks of history's dead languages, erasing regional distinctions and assimilating indigenous peoples. It's no slight to the world's major languages that English is the lingua franca of global business - even of air control. But, there are many reasons to lament this reliance on a dwindling number of languages. We do believe that the subtleties of some languages, on the lips of fluent speakers, capture the subtleties of culture. Nettle and Romaine chronicle the sad stories of singular people who live out their last years knowing that they will take a culture and language to the grave with them. Less successfully, the authors link the death of languages to the global decline in environmental quality. We're among the many skeptics who think their case fails, but it doesn't diminish the tragedy of the loss on either front.

Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart

Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart
Jim Dawson
Ten Speed Pr; ISBN: 1580080111

No matter how old we get, there are just some things that can still reduce us to childishness. The surest vehicle for this regressive time travel: A fart. In a time of shameless voyeurism, these natural emissions are still unwelcome in polite circles. Too bad, because the fibrous diets recommended of late - heavy with broccoli, lentils, and apples - invite wholesale flatulence. We have a long history of mining humor from squeaky cheeks. There are records of it in classical Greek times. Chaucer didn't shrink from it. And, Benjamin Franklin urged us all to Fart Proudly. In 19th-century Paris, a performer named Le Petomane, became rich by extinguishing candles and imitating human voices from his backside. Something you didn't see in Disney's version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was a scene with Victor Hugo's farting prostitutes. Popular entertainment didn't rise to such heights again until well, do we really need to prompt you to recall the most famous scene in Blazing Saddles? Dawson's book is, in fact, a scholarly look at the subject, but our attitudes to flatulence through the ages still yield a wealth of humor. Here's a book for your porcelain reading room.

Elysium: A Gathering of Souls: New Orleans Cemeteries

Elysium: A Gathering of Souls: New Orleans Cemeteries
Sandra Russell Clark and Patricia Brady
Louisiana State Univ Pr; ISBN: 0807122289

New Orleans' singular geology has shaped its extraordinary relationship with its dead; it just isn't practicable to bury people below sea level in a coastal area. And so, the sedate, concealed, wooden underground cities of the dead found 'most everywhere else in the United States rise gloriously above ground in New Orleans in marble and stone. In the Delta, it's the dead that are always with us - and spectacularly so. Sandra Russell Clark is known for her unsettling photography; through her lens, topiary has a presence that threatens to look back at us. In this collection, she turns her camera on the mournful guardians and bread oven crypts of Anne Rice's home town. While many of us fawn over kitschy, chubby cherubim, New Orleans revels in darkly realized angels that guard graves with all the serene ferocity befitting a mummy's curse. There's little explanation of the arresting photographs in Clark's book, so you should know that the Xs and crosses chalked on the crypts are not the work of vandals. They're the marks of the supplication of people asking the deceased to watch over them or grant a favor.

NONFICTION

The Ethics of Star Trek

The Ethics of Star Trek
Judy Barad and Ed Robertson
Harpercollins; ISBN: 0060195304

Despite the populist vehicle they've chosen in the four Star Trek series, Barad and Robertson really do concern themselves more with large issues in ethics than with the hypothetical minutiae that might fuel a Trekkies' convention seminar. Lwaxana Troi is there only to set the problems up. Barad and Roberston are there to clarify them. Along the way, they visit such subjects as cultural relativism, and the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements. This isn't a book for the hardcore Star Trek canon. It's for the vast majority of us - people who are intimately familiar with Star Trek just because it's so darned pervasive culturally. In fact, there's some benefit to being merely familiar with the Trek universe; we can focus on the ethics rather than on the Trekian universe.

Sticks & Stones: The Art of Grilling on Plank, Vine and Stone

Sticks & Stones: The Art of Grilling on Plank, Vine and Stone
Ted Reader, Kathleen Sloan
Willow Creek Press; ISBN: 1572232218

We've been known to throw steaks directly onto the coals in pursuit of the delicious caramelization that it creates on the meat. And, we have a small store of cedar planks already, awaiting our next salmon feast. So, it didn't take any time at all to sell us on the notion of grilling with natural materials. The photographs are so deliciously lush. (Just look at that cover!) The recipes are first rate, capturing the methods for infusing foods with flavors that just can't be had in a bottle. Very much recommended.

FICTION

The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood
Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd); ISBN: 0385475721

Always a challenge, Atwood has outdone herself in this structurally and thematically complex Booker Award winner. Even before we consider her themes, The Blind Assassin dares us with its structure: a series of supernatural stories, retold in a novel, inlaid into yet another novel. Atwood's book is the story of two sisters, one of them a novelist whose death we witness early, and the other, Iris, who has survived her sibling by a half century and now tries to make sense of her own directionless life. It's not easy. She's only one of the people throughout her life who've been deluding themselves for decades, failing in their responsibility to themselves and everyone else. From the safety of our chairs, we understand Iris' life long before she does - and Atwood takes full but subtle advantage of that irony.

The Man

The Man
Irving Wallace
Ibooks; ISBN: 067103894X

It's taken almost forty years for Irving Wallace's work to seem like something other than purely speculative fiction. The Man centers on Senator Douglass Dilman, newly named President of the United States after an accident leaves him highest in the constitutional line of succession to the Oval Office. Problem: Dilman doesn't really want the job. Problem: His personal life isn't the tidiest inside the Beltway. Problem: Dilman is Black. When Wallace wrote this tale, first published in the same year that JFK was assassinated, the story of a Black President, immersed in scandal, facing impeachment, seemed almost allegorical. Now, Wallace's vision is intriguing for its near-prophecies. If the gigantic hooks on which he hangs his novel aren't enough, there are also the small, refined ones that we can appreciate even more now. Principal among those small hooks is the gauntlet thrown down by a newspaper editorial that seems to have been penned yesterday, issuing a challenge that Dilman's presidency is not a test of the man but of the nation. Decades after we first read this book, we still remember its power.

The North China Lover

The North China Lover
Marguerite Duras, Leigh Hafrey (translator)
New Press; ISBN: 1565840437

In 1920s French-colonial Viet Nam, a teenaged Caucasian girl attends a Saigon boarding school. However poorly she might fit in, she's still better off there than she is at home where a dissolute mother and weak younger brother are bullied and manipulated by a self-absorbed, self-pitying, drug-addicted older brother. There's also a hint of incest hanging in the humid air. One day, on the ferry to Saigon, the girl meets a wealthy and refined Chinese man. Both detached, both straining under lives they'd rather not lead, both unhappy at the most essential level, they become lovers. In this very much autobiographical novel, Duras recounts their strikingly remote relationship, looking back on it six decades later. Most reviews focus on the eroticism of the story; it would be tough not to. But, equally fascinating is the background of colonial southeast Asia, the genteel racism and politely observed caste system. Duras' style is also intriguing. Characters are unnamed. Descriptive passages read like stage directions, played out in her mind's eye. The book was lushly and graphically filmed in 1990 as The Lover, earning an R rating. Just so there's no misunderstanding: In a properly administered rating system, blind to box office, one scene in particular should probably have earned it an NC-17.

MUSIC TO READ BY

Miss Perfumado

Miss Perfumado
Cesaria Evora
WEA/Atlantic/Nonesuch; ASIN: B000006R55

As moody in her own way as Billie Holiday or Edith Piaf, Cesaria Evora's rich, lived-in voice is both soothing and disturbing, the undeniable fruit of hard-won experience. She sings in the Portuguese creole of her native Cabo Verde, but her mature phrasings speak unmistakably of longing and loss; you can't miss her meaning, whether or not you understand her words. No listener can ever accuse Evora of hiding behind instrumentation. Orchestration is sparse, but her music is a complex marriage of voice and instruments, co-dependent in their melancholy. The rhythms are concentric and exotic, overlaying African influences on dominant Iberian strains and cadences. Evora's popularity in France is in evidence in the libretto that accompanies this CD; most of the lyrics appear in both the Cabo Verde creole and in French. If you're planning to listen to samples at Amazon.com, we hope your speakers are up to the task. Evora's honeyed tones need to come through in all their smoky silkiness.