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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

Being Dead

The past few months haven't been kind to the literary world. Gone are Douglas Adams, Mordecai Richler, Eudora Welty, and Katharine Graham. We're not going to recommend every book any of them has every published but, following a little stream of consciousness, they do put us in mind of a few titles and other authors.

One Writer's Beginnings

One Writer's Beginnings
Eudora Welty
Belknap Pr; ISBN: 0674639278

As a young woman, Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration, a federal aid program that funded projects as diverse as music recording and bridge construction. She grew up in Mississippi, America's finest mill for spinning gothic yarns. As a publicist for the WPA, she traveled throughout her home state, documenting documented what she saw with some of the most affecting photographs to come out of that time. They seldom looked overtly at poverty, but her pictures captured the dignity and sense of community in people struggling together to get by. The photographs were published again in 1993, offering a record of people of Depression-era Mississippi 50 years after the fact. People weren't Welty's only subjects. America's gothic South is rightly home to some of the country's richest funerary images. Her Country Churchyards convey that gothic sense of omnipresent worlds just beyond our own.

Mathew Brady and the Image of History

Mathew Brady and the Image of History
Mary Panzer, Jeana Kae Foley, National Portrait Gallery
Smithsonian Institution Press; ISBN: 1560987936

Mathew Brady was the first battlefield photographer, the American Civil War's best known chronicler. His studio portraits, posed and rigid, still manage to convey a poignancy, though, of men doomed, dead by whatever means long before we ever glimpsed their faces for the first time. His battlefield photos, assessed now as being purposely distant from the subject, are no less affecting for the panorama of carnage that they pass down to us.

Weegee's New York Photographs 1935-1960

Weegee's New York Photographs 1935-1960
Weegee (Arthur Fellig)
Neues Publishing Company; ISBN: 3823854712

Arthur Fellig, Weegee, as he was known, was the first and arguably still the best of the tabloid photographers. Prompted by his police radio, he raced around New York City from the 1930s to the '60s, sometimes beating law officers and ambulance attendants to the scenes of accidents, murders, assaults, and suicides. The next morning, his sensational yet minimalist photos of broken corpses and gawking crowds got lurid front page treatment. While tabloid journalism today is in thrall to the cult of tawdry celebrity, his haunts were most often the tenements and mean streets of the city. This was tabloid photography at its purest - gritty, exploitive, but true. He gets the Hollywood treatment in The Public Eye, a cynical little film in which Joe Pesci plays the Weegee-inspired role. Ignore the silly romance, but watch for the use of some of Weegee's own photos. Speaking of the artist's own work appearing in film, you can also see shots lifted from F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic, Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire, last year's sly imagining of what - or whom - Murnau was prepared to sacrifice for his art. The best extra included on the DVD is an alternative soundtrack in which the director, Elias Merhige, comments through the length of the picture on the techniques and effects he used in the filming. It's chock-full of insights and mostly free of self-importance and fawning.

Untitled

Untitled
Diane Arbus, Doon Arbus, Yolanda Cuomo
Aperture; ISBN: 089381623X

Her work seldom exhibited, her name and portfolios guarded tenaciously by her daughter, Doon, Diane Arbus is an icon among American photographers. Arbus, the daughter of wealth, preceded her artistic work with a successful commercial career in fashion photography. Her art was volatile, though, and it was said of her that "giving a camera to Diane is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child". Look, for instance, at her picture of identical twins. There's no denying how unsettling it is, but defining the source of its character is an equally unsettling challenge. In time, Arbus' restlessness took her to New York's night streets, where she photographed people marginalized even in a city that celebrates outsiders. Also available only recently is the most controversial collection from her work, the series of photographs from a home for the mentally retarded. Are these the exploitive images that the PC police claim they are? Well, we've seen the inside of warehouses for children and adults such as these; they demand exposure. Arbus captured harsh images, yes, but exploitive only in the sense that they're revelatory, some of the truest, most discomfiting you can imagine. Arbus was also a teacher, 'though she never published an instructional manual as such and her work, however rarely seen, has been influential. She died in 1971, a suicide at 48.

Ansel Adams at 100

Ansel Adams at 100
John Szarkowski
Bulfinch Press; ISBN: 0821225154

Ansel Adams did for landscapes what Brady, Welty et al. did for people. He found the invisible and brought it to life. His photographs are, to our eye, the photographic equivalent of impressionism, in which light and shadow play together to yield an image true to the original, but truer still to its impact on our emotions. In his commentary on 114 of Adams' most seminal images, celebrating the centenary of the artist's birth, John Szarkowski, of New York's Museum of Modern Art, captures Adams' unique gift succinctly and poetically: "His pictures have enlarged our visceral knowledge of things that we do not understand". Adams was unique also for his gift as a teacher. His photographic manuals stand the test of time, digital possibilities notwithstanding. In Examples, he describes the technique that produced 40 of his finest images.

Heart of Spain: Robert Capa's Photographs of the Spanish Civil War

Heart of Spain: Robert Capa's Photographs of the Spanish Civil War
Robert Capa (Photographer), Juan P. Fusi Aizpurua, Richard Whelan,
Aperture; ISBN: 0893818313

Robert Capa made his name first during the Spanish Civil War, then on the fields of the European theater during World War II. His image of a Republican fighter, at the instant he is felled by a bullet to the head, remains one of the most riveting and eloquent testaments against war, even after 65 years. Caught in midstride, still seemingly prepared to step forward if only he can regain his balance, twisted slightly and still clutching his rifle, the militiaman becomes immortal. Capa died in 1954, taking battlefield photos, one of the first casualties of the conflict in southeast Asia that blossomed into the horror of Vietnam. Capa set the standard for war photography; his images came from the frontlines, right from the battlefield, and his legacy was most evident in Korea and more than a decade later in the place where he died. By comparison, CNN's images - for all their immediacy - are clinical and sterile, bowdlerized for consumption with our dinners.

Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries

Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries
Sarah Greenough (ed.), National Gallery of Art
Bulfinch Press; ISBN: 0821227289

Alfred Stieglitz is unique among our small collective. He was not only the outstanding artist that most of us know, but also an influential gallery owner who generously championed the work of new schools and talents, and exposed American audiences to European artists like Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. American Masters' The Eloquent Eye DVD traces the career and motivations of this Father of Modern Photography. Sarah Greenough, curator of photography at Washington's National Gallery of Art, edits Modern Art and America, covering his career and life from 1905 until his death in 1946, considering the man through not only his own work but the works that he exhibited and promoted. Written to accompany a 1983 show of Stieglitz own work, Photographs and Writings is a collection of photographs hand-picked by his widow, modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe. It is also a compendium of selections from his own essays on art - and particularly on photography. We'll never have the skills or the eye that Stieglitz had, but if you aspire to say more and feel more with your own photographs, this is the place to start.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Random House Value Pub; ISBN: 0517149257

A good deal less gothic than Welty's work, in the vein of Marx (Groucho, not Karl), was Douglas Adams, the man who put the galaxy on the map. Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, his trilogy in - let's see - five parts, is a classic of science fiction-political satire-cultural farce. The original stories came from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; and Life, the Universe and Everything. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless complete the wonky trio. Originally a radio series for the BBC, then a limited-run TV series, THHGTTG was the pinnacle for young Adams' career. One of the most prized possessions on our shelves is a copy of that radio script. Adams was only 26 when the Vorgons and their hyperspace bypass first demolished Earth in 1978. He wasn't much older when sole surviving Earthling Arthur Dent and fussy travel writer Ford Prefect stumbled on the answer to the Universe. Enlightenment was in short supply, though; knowing the answer only made the question more perplexing. It's a shame that the Beeb hasn't seen fit to give the series the treatment it deserves on two or even three feature-laden DVDs. For this classic, we have to settle for the unimaginatively produced VHS. Yes, the SFX were amateurish; we wouldn't have it any other way, and to be frank we were dismayed by recent reports that the series was going to get the big-budget movie treatment. No. No. No. But, if we'd been able to savor some of the book's hilarious asides that didn't make it to TV, we might have been mollified. And, for that reason, we urge - nay, beg - you to avoid all abridged written versions. Still, we'd recommend the perfect marriage of tale and format in the graphic novel (or, for those of us who call a spade a spade, the comic book) version. Adams wrote other books, each very funny in its own right, but to our mind his work never rose again to the inspired elastic vision of the Hitchhiker series. Most notably, he skewered a narrower canvas in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (unfortunately abridged on audio CD) and its sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. He was the inspiration behind Starship Titanic, a computer game that lands the craft in your living room (literally), and for good measure brings along John Cleese and Michael Palin. Unlike other computer games, Adams' version takes perverse delight in, well, not working as well as it might. Would you expect less? In a shoutout to Netsurfer Digest editor and True Believer Lawrence Nyveen, we note that Mac proselytizer Adams once wrote of the computers, "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end".

All the President's Men

All the President's Men
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Touchstone Books; ISBN: 0671894412

Katharine Graham was the daughter of a multimillionaire who elected in the 1930s to abandon his business in favor of turning around the fortunes of the languishing Washington Post. When he died in 1946, he left the thriving newspaper to Graham's husband, despite her experience at The San Francisco News. "No man" he said, "should work for his wife". She agreed. But her husband suffered from bipolar disorder and, in 1963, he committed suicide. She assumed the mantle of office, with no idea of how to wear it, and then found herself in the middle of the biggest American stories of the day. As the pitch of protest to the Vietnam war grew, it was The Washington Post that, first, published the infamous Pentagon Papers and, then pursued the story behind that comically amateur office burglary at the Watergate complex that disgraced and brought down Richard Nixon's presidency, as chronicled in Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men. She told her own story in Personal History in 1997. The Post attracted a whole range of talent. Editorial cartoonist Herblock has been a fixture since 1945. Columnist and editor Meg Greenfield did much to set its personality. Watergate erupted under the editorship of the legendary Ben Bradlee and most of the paper's nearly two dozen Pulitzer Prizes were earned during his tenure. George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Broder, and William Raspberry have bylines, and Maury Povich's father was a storied sports columnist. While we're on the subject of women in Washington, we're also going to plug Helen Thomas' entertaining autobiography Front Row at the White House. You might not recognize the name, but you surely know the face of the former doyenne of the White House media corps.

Mordecai Richler on Snooker

Mordecai Richler on Snooker
Mordecai Richler
The Lyons Press; ISBN: 1585741795

Finally, shuffling off this mortal coil recently was Montreal native Mordecai Richler. Richler has been for decades a welcome respite for Canadian high school students weary of Shakespeare. He was also a colorful man, as opinionated as he pleased to be. He was a thorn in the side of the Quebec separatist movement and a doting, if irascible, fan on the Montreal Canadiens, often passing acerbic comment on their failures of recent years. In fact, after his death, his family requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Canadian Cancer Society, the United Way, Doctors Without Borders, and "the Montreal Canadiens, a truly lost cause". Richler first came to prominence with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. He also wrote the screenplay for the film in which Richard Dreyfuss played the hustling title character. Canadians might remember his venture into the future, Cocksure, better than other readers would. He returned to more conventional venues in St. Urbain's Horseman, set in the Montreal neighborhood where Richler grew up. In St. Urbain's Horseman we see the wild Richler resolve into the sweet Richler, ending his quest for heroic immortality with an embrace. In Joshua Then and Now, he reviews the immensely successful, paralyzingly unfulfilled life of Joshua Shapiro. Richler writes in the vein of Joseph Heller, weaving a story out of complexly imagined belly laughs. You will laugh out loud as you read him, in great guffaws. The Canadian Jewish Congress voiced its own loss at his death, but some members of Montreal's large Jewish community have expressed dismay at his portraits of life in the immigrant enclave. We've never felt that way about his work. As the children and grandchildren of immigrants, it felt very, very familiar to us.

Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang

Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
Mordecai Richler
Tundra Books; ISBN: 0887764819

Displaying his truly antic side, and writing for his youngest son, Jacob, Richler concocted the stories of Jacob Two-Two, the boy who says everything twice. Richler's last two titles, both published posthumously, speak to his love of sports. Fresh from the press, Mordecai Richler on Snooker details his love of the game and reveals his affection for the odd assortment of men and women who excel at it - or not. You only have to take one glance at the cover, a picture of the Queen Mum cueing up, to know how it's going to go. Following it off the press is On Sports: A Writer's Obsession with Hockey, Baseball, Wrestling, and Other Sports. We've been unable to see anything about this book except its advance publicity, but even that hints at the smartly ironic voice and observations that marked all of Richler's work.