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  • A Book That Will Make You Terrified of Your Own House A Book That Will Make You Terrified of Your Own House

    Posted on by voroly Admin

    By Robin Marantz Henig

    NEVER HOME ALONE
    From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live
    By Rob Dunn
    Illustrated. 323 pp. Basic Books. $30.

    A young man I know used to say that humans have no need to bathe, since our hair and bodies are designed to self-cleanse. I would fight him on it, being of the opinion that washing up occasionally was good for us — and for the people with whom we lived. But now, after reading the entomologist Rob Dunn’s description of the myriad microbial life-forms that take up residence in a typical American showerhead, I’m starting to think maybe that young man was onto something.

    With an army of collaborators, Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, took samples of the gunk inside hundreds of showerheads, and found a profusion of microbial fauna. Tap water itself, he writes in the chatty, informative “Never Home Alone,” teems with amoebas, bacteria, nematodes and crustaceans. As the water passes through the showerhead, these microbes lay down a kind of scaffolding known as biofilm to protect themselves from getting washed away with every ablution. They make the biofilm “out of their own excretions,” Dunn writes bluntly. “In essence, by working together, the bacteria poop a little indestructible condominium in your pipes.”

    It gets worse. Filtered through that poop-biofilm, the water that washes over you, as you supposedly scrub yourself clean, might contain not only all those harmless amoebas and nematodes but a few bacteria that can be dangerous — in particular some species of Mycobacterium, cousins of the Mycobacterium that causes tuberculosis. And the pathogens are there because we provided the perfect breeding ground for them, when we tried to purify our tap water in the first place. Municipal water treatment plants use chlorine and other chemicals that kill off the bacterium’s natural predators, allowing Mycobacterium to thrive. Tap water that comes from a well, in contrast, has never gone through a treatment plant and has a rich microbial life. It might look more dangerous, but it’s actually safer, Dunn explains. All those organisms in well water are themselves harmless, and they tend to fight off the potentially dangerous ones like Mycobacterium — that’s how biodiversity works.

    News from the showerhead biome is just one part of this fact-filled, occasionally disgusting, slightly alarming book. Dunn has been involved in an obsessive quest to document the tiny inhabitants of indoor environments, a project that involves teams of professional and amateur bug-watchers to take samples not only from showerheads but from door frames, refrigerators, hot water heaters, cellars, toilets, pillowcases, all sorts of surfaces from the places we call home. These workers swab and seal, swab and seal, and send their thousands of samples to Dunn’s lab in Raleigh, or to his other lab at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, for an ongoing microbial census.

    “We expected to find a few hundred species,” Dunn writes of his first foray into indoor microbe-hunting, which involved 1,000 homes from around the world. Instead, he and his colleagues found a “floating, leaping, crawling circus of thousands of species,” perhaps as many as 200,000, many of them previously unknown to science.

    These denizens of interior spaces are our most frequent companions. In the industrialized world, we spend upward of 90 percent of our time indoors. Luckily, most of our co-habitators are either benign or actually beneficial in some way, like the house spiders that keep down indoor populations of flies or mosquitoes that can carry disease. But because we’ve become so hyper about making our surroundings as pristine as possible — sealing off our homes from the outdoors and using pesticides and antimicrobials with a vengeance — we’ve tipped the scales away from those harmless or helpful bugs, in favor of some of the bad guys.

    According to Dunn, indoor microbes are among the fastest-evolving species on the planet; they have an uncanny ability to live in ecological niches you could hardly imagine existing, like the dead skin cells we slough off every day (which is all that’s needed to survive for a class of bacteria known as detritivores). They manage to evade our assaults, and evolve their way out of just about every biocide we throw at them. We’re left to contend with the consequences of our own warfare, such as pesticide-resistant German cockroaches and bedbugs, and antibiotic-resistant MRSA bacteria. We have turned a relatively harmless indoor biome into something that can make us sick.

    That’s the take-home message of “Never Home Alone," that the richer the biodiversity in our indoor environment, the better. “The biodiversity of plants and soil can help our immune systems function properly,” Dunn writes. “The biodiversity in our water systems can help keep pathogens in the water in check. … The biodiversity of spiders, parasitoid wasps and centipedes can help control pests. The biodiversity in our houses provides the opportunity, too, for the discovery of enzymes, genes and species useful to all of us, whether to make new kinds of beers or to transform waste into energy.”

    I’m not quite as enamored of our microbial roommates as the author is. (I’m sorry, Professor Dunn, but I’m just being honest here: Those photos of the camel cricket and the American grass spider clinging to basement pipes and door thresholds — well, yuck.) It probably takes the soul of an entomologist, or maybe of a 9-year-old child, to love these bugs as much as Dunn does. Still, it’s hard not to be occasionally charmed by his prose, as when he catalogs the arthropods with whom we share our homes: “biting midges, mosquitoes, lesser house flies, phantom midges, freeloader flies and shore flies. This is not to mention fungus gnats, moth flies and flesh flies. Or crane flies, winter crane flies and minute black scavenger flies.” And it’s hard not to share, at least a little, his awe at their diversity, even in a single household. “If you see two flies in your home,” he writes, “the odds are that they are two different species. Heck, if you see 10 flies in your house, they are likely to be five different species.”

    And don’t even get him started on the aphids. He’s amazed by them, as he is by “the wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of aphids as well as the wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of the wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of aphids.”

    There’s a real sense of “gee-whiz” in this book, but it’s mostly in service of Dunn’s overarching goal: to preach the preservation of biodiversity, not only in the lush forests and streams that fit our traditional image of nature’s abundance, but in the most humble places, too, where the vast majority of us will have most of our cross-species encounters — our basements, mattresses, refrigerator drawers and showerheads.

    About those showerheads: Dunn isn’t suggesting that we give up showers. But he does say we might want to change the showerhead a little more often — and consider switching from metal to plastic, where biofilm is less likely to accumulate. Nonetheless, his bottom line for showerheads is like his bottom line for other aspects of the roiling microbial mix we live in: Don’t be afraid of letting life inside. “The water that is healthiest for bathing is that which comes from aquifers rich with underground biodiversity including crustaceans,” he writes. “The crustaceans in these aquifers are an indication not of the dirtiness of the water but of its health.”

    Robin Marantz Henig is a New York science journalist whose books include “The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel.”

    By Robin Marantz Henig

    NEVER HOME ALONE
    From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live
    By Rob Dunn
    Illustrated. 323 pp. Basic Books. $30.

    A young man I know used to say that humans have no need to bathe, since our hair and bodies are designed to self-cleanse. I would fight him on it, being of the opinion that washing up occasionally was good for us — and for the people with whom we lived. But now, after reading the entomologist Rob Dunn’s description of the myriad microbial life-forms that take up residence in a typical American showerhead, I’m starting to think maybe that young man was onto something.

    With an army of collaborators, Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, took samples of the gunk inside hundreds of showerheads, and found a profusion of microbial fauna. Tap water itself, he writes in the chatty, informative “Never Home Alone,” teems with amoebas, bacteria, nematodes and crustaceans. As the water passes through the showerhead, these microbes lay down a kind of scaffolding known as biofilm to protect themselves from getting washed away with every ablution. They make the biofilm “out of their own excretions,” Dunn writes bluntly. “In essence, by working together, the bacteria poop a little indestructible condominium in your pipes.”

    It gets worse. Filtered through that poop-biofilm, the water that washes over you, as you supposedly scrub yourself clean, might contain not only all those harmless amoebas and nematodes but a few bacteria that can be dangerous — in particular some species of Mycobacterium, cousins of the Mycobacterium that causes tuberculosis. And the pathogens are there because we provided the perfect breeding ground for them, when we tried to purify our tap water in the first place. Municipal water treatment plants use chlorine and other chemicals that kill off the bacterium’s natural predators, allowing Mycobacterium to thrive. Tap water that comes from a well, in contrast, has never gone through a treatment plant and has a rich microbial life. It might look more dangerous, but it’s actually safer, Dunn explains. All those organisms in well water are themselves harmless, and they tend to fight off the potentially dangerous ones like Mycobacterium — that’s how biodiversity works.

    News from the showerhead biome is just one part of this fact-filled, occasionally disgusting, slightly alarming book. Dunn has been involved in an obsessive quest to document the tiny inhabitants of indoor environments, a project that involves teams of professional and amateur bug-watchers to take samples not only from showerheads but from door frames, refrigerators, hot water heaters, cellars, toilets, pillowcases, all sorts of surfaces from the places we call home. These workers swab and seal, swab and seal, and send their thousands of samples to Dunn’s lab in Raleigh, or to his other lab at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, for an ongoing microbial census.

    “We expected to find a few hundred species,” Dunn writes of his first foray into indoor microbe-hunting, which involved 1,000 homes from around the world. Instead, he and his colleagues found a “floating, leaping, crawling circus of thousands of species,” perhaps as many as 200,000, many of them previously unknown to science.

    These denizens of interior spaces are our most frequent companions. In the industrialized world, we spend upward of 90 percent of our time indoors. Luckily, most of our co-habitators are either benign or actually beneficial in some way, like the house spiders that keep down indoor populations of flies or mosquitoes that can carry disease. But because we’ve become so hyper about making our surroundings as pristine as possible — sealing off our homes from the outdoors and using pesticides and antimicrobials with a vengeance — we’ve tipped the scales away from those harmless or helpful bugs, in favor of some of the bad guys.

    According to Dunn, indoor microbes are among the fastest-evolving species on the planet; they have an uncanny ability to live in ecological niches you could hardly imagine existing, like the dead skin cells we slough off every day (which is all that’s needed to survive for a class of bacteria known as detritivores). They manage to evade our assaults, and evolve their way out of just about every biocide we throw at them. We’re left to contend with the consequences of our own warfare, such as pesticide-resistant German cockroaches and bedbugs, and antibiotic-resistant MRSA bacteria. We have turned a relatively harmless indoor biome into something that can make us sick.

    That’s the take-home message of “Never Home Alone," that the richer the biodiversity in our indoor environment, the better. “The biodiversity of plants and soil can help our immune systems function properly,” Dunn writes. “The biodiversity in our water systems can help keep pathogens in the water in check. … The biodiversity of spiders, parasitoid wasps and centipedes can help control pests. The biodiversity in our houses provides the opportunity, too, for the discovery of enzymes, genes and species useful to all of us, whether to make new kinds of beers or to transform waste into energy.”

    I’m not quite as enamored of our microbial roommates as the author is. (I’m sorry, Professor Dunn, but I’m just being honest here: Those photos of the camel cricket and the American grass spider clinging to basement pipes and door thresholds — well, yuck.) It probably takes the soul of an entomologist, or maybe of a 9-year-old child, to love these bugs as much as Dunn does. Still, it’s hard not to be occasionally charmed by his prose, as when he catalogs the arthropods with whom we share our homes: “biting midges, mosquitoes, lesser house flies, phantom midges, freeloader flies and shore flies. This is not to mention fungus gnats, moth flies and flesh flies. Or crane flies, winter crane flies and minute black scavenger flies.” And it’s hard not to share, at least a little, his awe at their diversity, even in a single household. “If you see two flies in your home,” he writes, “the odds are that they are two different species. Heck, if you see 10 flies in your house, they are likely to be five different species.”

    And don’t even get him started on the aphids. He’s amazed by them, as he is by “the wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of aphids as well as the wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of the wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of aphids.”

    There’s a real sense of “gee-whiz” in this book, but it’s mostly in service of Dunn’s overarching goal: to preach the preservation of biodiversity, not only in the lush forests and streams that fit our traditional image of nature’s abundance, but in the most humble places, too, where the vast majority of us will have most of our cross-species encounters — our basements, mattresses, refrigerator drawers and showerheads.

    About those showerheads: Dunn isn’t suggesting that we give up showers. But he does say we might want to change the showerhead a little more often — and consider switching from metal to plastic, where biofilm is less likely to accumulate. Nonetheless, his bottom line for showerheads is like his bottom line for other aspects of the roiling microbial mix we live in: Don’t be afraid of letting life inside. “The water that is healthiest for bathing is that which comes from aquifers rich with underground biodiversity including crustaceans,” he writes. “The crustaceans in these aquifers are an indication not of the dirtiness of the water but of its health.”

    Robin Marantz Henig is a New York science journalist whose books include “The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel.”

    Read more

  • 11 New Books We Recommend This Week 11 New Books We Recommend This Week

    Posted on by voroly Admin

    How better to enter the new year than with a look back? History runs through many of this week’s recommended titles, from the fall of Rome to the birth of Islam to Michelangelo in 16th-century Constantinople. If Paris in the 1960s is your bag, Patrick Modiano has you covered. If you’re interested in the Harlem Renaissance but have never read Jean Toomer’s seminal 1923 novel “Cane,” which helped catalyze that movement, you might add it to your list of resolutions. If you’re curious about the Philippine-American War and its lasting impact — inescapable in the Philippines, mostly ignored in America — then Gina Apostol’s novel “Insurrecto” offers an improbably fun, and funny, guide. (When you’re done with that, maybe pick up another satire out of Asia. Yan Lianke’s “The Day the Sun Died” or Gengoroh Tagame’s “My Brother’s Husband: Volume 2” both fit the bill.)

    We round things out with a debut novel about London and two books by notable critics: a memoir of love and reading late in life by the literary critic Susan Gubar, and a collection of film writing by the movie critic A. S. Hamrah.

    Happy 2019, everyone.

    Gregory Cowles
    Senior Editor, Books

    CANE, by Jean Toomer. (Penguin Classics, $15.) In 1923, Toomer published “Cane,” the single, slender novel upon which his reputation rests. In bursts of poetry and prose, it tells of black life in the lethal rural South and in the loveless cities of the North. “Cane” sold modestly but exerted a powerful influence over the Harlem Renaissance. “It is oracular, delirious and American,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, “rich with the intensities of Melville, the expansiveness of Whitman and Toomer’s own bedeviling preoccupation with color.”

    THE EARTH DIES STREAMING: Film Writing, 2002-2018, by A. S. Hamrah. (n+1, $20.) As the resident movie critic of the literary and political journal n+1, Hamrah writes about his idiosyncratic favorites with a political awareness that never succumbs to leaden moralizing. Hamrah is “committed to his ambivalence,” our critic Jennifer Szalai says, “conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed).”

    MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, by Edward J. Watts. (Basic, $32.) By the second century B.C., the proud Roman Republic had been brought low by inequity, corruption and populist politicians. Since America’s founders modeled it on the Roman example, Watts, a historian, warns that it behooves us to understand what went wrong over 2,000 years ago. “The bad news is that the coming decades are unlikely to afford us many moments of calm and tranquillity,” our reviewer, Yascha Mounk, writes. “If the central analogy that animates ‘Mortal Republic’ is correct, the current challenge to America’s political system is likely to persist long after its present occupant has left the White House.”

    MUHAMMAD: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by Juan Cole. (Nation, $28.) Cole offers an ambitiously revisionist picture of the father of Islam, replacing the idea of a militant leader with one of a peacemaker who wanted only to preach his monotheism freely and even sought “multicultural” harmony. Writing in the Book Review, Mustafa Akyol calls it “eruditely informative” and says Cole is “demonstrably right in concluding that Islamic orthodoxy deviated from its foundations by ‘abrogating’ the peaceful and tolerant verses of the Quran.”

    INSURRECTO, by Gina Apostol. (Soho, $26.) Set in the Philippines, this novel raises provocative questions about history and hypocrisy as it follows two women with dueling modern-day film scripts about a colonial-era massacre. “Apostol has not only shredded the map and cast it out the window,” Jen McDonald writes in her review, “she has taken a grenade to the road and charted in its place a mind-bending, blazingly satirical course into a Philippines traumatized and forever altered by American arrogance and aggression.”

    MY BROTHER’S HUSBAND: Volume 2, by Gengoroh Tagame. Translated by Anne Ishii. (Pantheon, $25.95.) A sweet satire of Japan’s taboo against gay marriage, this manga-style graphic novel is a sophisticated investigation into the nature of love, marriage, divorce, bereavement and nontraditional child-rearing. “Small hints of the erotic edge onto the pages, particularly in Tagame’s detailed drawings of men’s (mostly clothed) bodies,” Hillary Chute writes in her latest graphics column, “but this careful, good-natured, family-friendly story offers something for everybody — kids and adults alike — even as it introduces real complexity around sex and gender expectations.”

    IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY, by Guy Gunaratne. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) This striking, Booker-longlisted debut unfolds over a few restless days in a working-class Northwest London suburb after a murder in the name of Islamic extremism (based on a true-life killing). Despite the rush of drama indicated by Gunaratne’s title, “his strengths are in the quieter details — of personal stories, nuanced characterizations and especially in his multivocal breadth of register,” our reviewer, Jon McGregor, writes. “Gunaratne has a gift for inhabiting the lives of his characters, and has used that gift here to give voice to Londoners who are not often seen in contemporary fiction.”

    THE DAY THE SUN DIED, by Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. (Grove, $26.) This brutal satirical novel takes place on a single night, when a plague of somnambulism unleashes a host of suppressed emotions among the inhabitants of a Chinese village. The ensuing chaos is promptly struck from the official record. Reviewing it, Julian Gewirtz calls it a “gripping novel” that “forces readers to reflect on the side of the world that is ‘too absurd, too cruel and too unpleasant.’ … Yan’s subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving today’s global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision.”

    TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS, AND ELEPHANTS, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. (New Directions, paper, $19.95.) In this intoxicating novel, set in 1506, Michelangelo sets up shop in Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. Elisabeth Zerofsky, reviewing it alongside two other French novels, says that reading it “feels somehow radical in 2018, provoking a kind of wistfulness at the wonder and uncertainty that Michelangelo experiences in his confrontation with foreignness.”

    SLEEP OF MEMORY, by Patrick Modiano. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. (Yale, $24.) The Nobel laureate’s dreamlike novels summon elusive, half-forgotten episodes. Here, that means Paris in the ’60s, love affairs, a flirtation with the occult and a shocking crime. “Modiano owes much to Proust,” Elisabeth Zerofsky writes in her review, “though his postmodern drifting is far easier to read; there is warmth to be drawn from those unbidden memories, reminiscences of attending a strange party on a cold winter night many years ago conjuring not so much regret as simple pleasure.”

    Correction: 

    An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the terminal points of a bridge in the novel “Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants,” by Mathias Énard. Michelangelo designs the bridge to cross the Golden Horn in Constantinople; it is not “a bridge connecting Europe and Asia.” The same item misspelled the surname of the book’s translator; she is Charlotte Mandell, not Mandel.

     

    How better to enter the new year than with a look back? History runs through many of this week’s recommended titles, from the fall of Rome to the birth of Islam to Michelangelo in 16th-century Constantinople. If Paris in the 1960s is your bag, Patrick Modiano has you covered. If you’re interested in the Harlem Renaissance but have never read Jean Toomer’s seminal 1923 novel “Cane,” which helped catalyze that movement, you might add it to your list of resolutions. If you’re curious about the Philippine-American War and its lasting impact — inescapable in the Philippines, mostly ignored in America — then Gina Apostol’s novel “Insurrecto” offers an improbably fun, and funny, guide. (When you’re done with that, maybe pick up another satire out of Asia. Yan Lianke’s “The Day the Sun Died” or Gengoroh Tagame’s “My Brother’s Husband: Volume 2” both fit the bill.)

    We round things out with a debut novel about London and two books by notable critics: a memoir of love and reading late in life by the literary critic Susan Gubar, and a collection of film writing by the movie critic A. S. Hamrah.

    Happy 2019, everyone.

    Gregory Cowles
    Senior Editor, Books

    CANE, by Jean Toomer. (Penguin Classics, $15.) In 1923, Toomer published “Cane,” the single, slender novel upon which his reputation rests. In bursts of poetry and prose, it tells of black life in the lethal rural South and in the loveless cities of the North. “Cane” sold modestly but exerted a powerful influence over the Harlem Renaissance. “It is oracular, delirious and American,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, “rich with the intensities of Melville, the expansiveness of Whitman and Toomer’s own bedeviling preoccupation with color.”

    THE EARTH DIES STREAMING: Film Writing, 2002-2018, by A. S. Hamrah. (n+1, $20.) As the resident movie critic of the literary and political journal n+1, Hamrah writes about his idiosyncratic favorites with a political awareness that never succumbs to leaden moralizing. Hamrah is “committed to his ambivalence,” our critic Jennifer Szalai says, “conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed).”

    MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, by Edward J. Watts. (Basic, $32.) By the second century B.C., the proud Roman Republic had been brought low by inequity, corruption and populist politicians. Since America’s founders modeled it on the Roman example, Watts, a historian, warns that it behooves us to understand what went wrong over 2,000 years ago. “The bad news is that the coming decades are unlikely to afford us many moments of calm and tranquillity,” our reviewer, Yascha Mounk, writes. “If the central analogy that animates ‘Mortal Republic’ is correct, the current challenge to America’s political system is likely to persist long after its present occupant has left the White House.”

    MUHAMMAD: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by Juan Cole. (Nation, $28.) Cole offers an ambitiously revisionist picture of the father of Islam, replacing the idea of a militant leader with one of a peacemaker who wanted only to preach his monotheism freely and even sought “multicultural” harmony. Writing in the Book Review, Mustafa Akyol calls it “eruditely informative” and says Cole is “demonstrably right in concluding that Islamic orthodoxy deviated from its foundations by ‘abrogating’ the peaceful and tolerant verses of the Quran.”

    INSURRECTO, by Gina Apostol. (Soho, $26.) Set in the Philippines, this novel raises provocative questions about history and hypocrisy as it follows two women with dueling modern-day film scripts about a colonial-era massacre. “Apostol has not only shredded the map and cast it out the window,” Jen McDonald writes in her review, “she has taken a grenade to the road and charted in its place a mind-bending, blazingly satirical course into a Philippines traumatized and forever altered by American arrogance and aggression.”

    MY BROTHER’S HUSBAND: Volume 2, by Gengoroh Tagame. Translated by Anne Ishii. (Pantheon, $25.95.) A sweet satire of Japan’s taboo against gay marriage, this manga-style graphic novel is a sophisticated investigation into the nature of love, marriage, divorce, bereavement and nontraditional child-rearing. “Small hints of the erotic edge onto the pages, particularly in Tagame’s detailed drawings of men’s (mostly clothed) bodies,” Hillary Chute writes in her latest graphics column, “but this careful, good-natured, family-friendly story offers something for everybody — kids and adults alike — even as it introduces real complexity around sex and gender expectations.”

    IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY, by Guy Gunaratne. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) This striking, Booker-longlisted debut unfolds over a few restless days in a working-class Northwest London suburb after a murder in the name of Islamic extremism (based on a true-life killing). Despite the rush of drama indicated by Gunaratne’s title, “his strengths are in the quieter details — of personal stories, nuanced characterizations and especially in his multivocal breadth of register,” our reviewer, Jon McGregor, writes. “Gunaratne has a gift for inhabiting the lives of his characters, and has used that gift here to give voice to Londoners who are not often seen in contemporary fiction.”

    THE DAY THE SUN DIED, by Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. (Grove, $26.) This brutal satirical novel takes place on a single night, when a plague of somnambulism unleashes a host of suppressed emotions among the inhabitants of a Chinese village. The ensuing chaos is promptly struck from the official record. Reviewing it, Julian Gewirtz calls it a “gripping novel” that “forces readers to reflect on the side of the world that is ‘too absurd, too cruel and too unpleasant.’ … Yan’s subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving today’s global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision.”

    TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS, AND ELEPHANTS, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. (New Directions, paper, $19.95.) In this intoxicating novel, set in 1506, Michelangelo sets up shop in Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. Elisabeth Zerofsky, reviewing it alongside two other French novels, says that reading it “feels somehow radical in 2018, provoking a kind of wistfulness at the wonder and uncertainty that Michelangelo experiences in his confrontation with foreignness.”

    SLEEP OF MEMORY, by Patrick Modiano. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. (Yale, $24.) The Nobel laureate’s dreamlike novels summon elusive, half-forgotten episodes. Here, that means Paris in the ’60s, love affairs, a flirtation with the occult and a shocking crime. “Modiano owes much to Proust,” Elisabeth Zerofsky writes in her review, “though his postmodern drifting is far easier to read; there is warmth to be drawn from those unbidden memories, reminiscences of attending a strange party on a cold winter night many years ago conjuring not so much regret as simple pleasure.”

    Correction: 

    An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the terminal points of a bridge in the novel “Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants,” by Mathias Énard. Michelangelo designs the bridge to cross the Golden Horn in Constantinople; it is not “a bridge connecting Europe and Asia.” The same item misspelled the surname of the book’s translator; she is Charlotte Mandell, not Mandel.

     

    Read more

  • THE INNOCENT MAN THE INNOCENT MAN

    Posted on by voroly Admin

    By EDWARD LEWINE

    Some say Capote did this by making stuff up. If so, that’s a terrible strategy for the author of a book purporting to be nonfiction. Still, after reading “The Innocent Man,” you do wish Grisham had used some of his novelist’s technique to marshal the facts at his disposal.

    Instead, he never gets the plot up to a decent boil. Rather than focusing tightly on Williamson, he meanders through Fritz’s trial and yet a third murder case, whose details are instructive but not enough to merit the damage all this digressing does to the book’s forward motion. With so many crimes and trials, the cast swells to an unhealthy number, and few of these characters emerge as fully drawn people.

    It’s true in some cosmic sense that the story of every life has value, but not to the writer of nonfiction. Writers of nonfiction narratives learn to pick their subjects with care, because some true stories are much, much more interesting than others. In this case, John Grisham could have conjured up a better story on his own.

    Edward Lewine is the author of “Death and the Sun: A Matador’s Season in the Heart of Spain.”

    By EDWARD LEWINE

    Some say Capote did this by making stuff up. If so, that’s a terrible strategy for the author of a book purporting to be nonfiction. Still, after reading “The Innocent Man,” you do wish Grisham had used some of his novelist’s technique to marshal the facts at his disposal.

    Instead, he never gets the plot up to a decent boil. Rather than focusing tightly on Williamson, he meanders through Fritz’s trial and yet a third murder case, whose details are instructive but not enough to merit the damage all this digressing does to the book’s forward motion. With so many crimes and trials, the cast swells to an unhealthy number, and few of these characters emerge as fully drawn people.

    It’s true in some cosmic sense that the story of every life has value, but not to the writer of nonfiction. Writers of nonfiction narratives learn to pick their subjects with care, because some true stories are much, much more interesting than others. In this case, John Grisham could have conjured up a better story on his own.

    Edward Lewine is the author of “Death and the Sun: A Matador’s Season in the Heart of Spain.”

    Read more

  • 8 New Books We Recommend This Week 8 New Books We Recommend This Week

    Posted on by voroly Admin

    Pay attention. That might be the theme to this week’s recommended titles, if we had to pick one. (We don’t, really. But we enjoy the challenge, so what the heck: The value of sustained attention it is.) Attention is expressly the subject of Uwe Johnson’s vast diaristic novel “Anniversaries,” as Parul Sehgal notes in her impressed and impressive review. I haven’t read Johnson’s book yet; I’m still stalled out in the Nighttown section of “Ulysses,” so in my side reading lately I tend to favor digestible chunks of essays or stories. But I’ve heard good things about it for months, and Parul’s review convinces me I should add it to my list. You should, too. You can start right away, if you’re not reading “Ulysses.”

    Sustained attention is also at the core of three essay collections this week, at least implicitly: Elisa Gabbert’s “The Word Pretty,” Ingrid Sischy’s “Nothing Is Lost” and John McPhee’s “The Patch,” all of which highlight their authors’ knack for observation and reflection. Helen Schulman’s novel “Come With Me” is a bright techno-dystopian family story about the seductions of virtual reality, with an inherent warning to stop taking nonvirtual reality for granted. And Richard Beard’s memoir, “The Day That Went Missing,” becomes an extended homage to the act of attention, as he tries to uncover the details of his younger brother’s death on a family vacation years before. Finally, there’s a biography of the architect Philip Johnson and a horror-thriller hybrid from the suspense writer M. R. Carey. Thank you for your attention.

    Gregory Cowles
    Senior Editor, Books

    ANNIVERSARIES: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl: Volumes 1 and 2, by Uwe Johnson. Translated by Damion Searls. (New York Review Books, $39.95.) Johnson’s nearly 1,700-page masterpiece was originally published in Germany, in four volumes between 1970 and 1983. It has now been translated into English in full, for the first time. The novel takes the form of a yearlong diary, covering parts of 1967 and 1968, by the enigmatic, rather brilliant Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year Hitler came to power. She lives in New York City with her small daughter, Marie. Gesine is haunted — by her family’s embrace of Nazism, her mother’s suicide, the death of her daughter’s father. “‘Anniversaries’ is not difficult reading, but it is painstaking,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “The story is tangled, the characters traumatized and suspicious of language. It requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full attention — for attention is its great subject.”

    THE WORD PRETTY, by Elisa Gabbert. (Black Ocean, $18.95.) In this collection of brief essays, Gabbert, who is also a poet, draws inspiration for her musings from subjects like group selfies and the psychology of dreams and YouTube videos “designed specifically to make people cry.” But more than half of the book is explicitly devoted to books themselves; to life as both a purposeful and a serendipitous reader. “The casualness of this collection is one of its attractions,” our reviewer John Williams writes. “It doesn’t strain after anything. It doesn’t have airs; and if it could speak, it would likely charmingly admit to its own imperfections. A mixture of depth and diversion, it makes you wish that, like a reliable band, Gabbert might publish a similar slender volume every year or two.”

    COME WITH ME, by Helen Schulman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) In Schulman’s latest novel, a Silicon Valley family’s bonds are frayed by infidelities both virtual and actual, thanks to a start-up technology that allows “visits” to the lives that might have been. In her review, Sarah Lyall calls the book “smart, timely and highly entertaining.”

    THE MAN IN THE GLASS HOUSE: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century, by Mark Lamster. (Little, Brown, $35.) Lamster suggests Johnson’s real mark on 20th-century architecture came less as a practitioner than as a mentor. He also recounts darker episodes like Johnson’s infatuation with the Nazis in the 1930s. “The most interesting thing about him was not the buildings he designed,” Paul Goldberger writes, reviewing the biography. “The qualities that make him, and this book, fascinating are his nimble intelligence, his restlessness, his energy, his anxieties, his ambitions and his passions, all of which were channeled into the making of a few pieces of architecture that will stand the test of time, and many others that will not.”

    THE PATCH, by John McPhee. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) McPhee’s seventh collection of essays probes landscapes from New Jersey to Alaska and profiles a vast cast of characters, from Joan Baez to Thomas Wolfe. It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing memoir of his irresistible compulsions. McPhee writes sentences “so energetic and structurally sound,” Craig Taylor writes in his review, “that he can introduce apparently unappealing subjects, even ones that look to be encased in a cruddy veneer of boringness, and persuade us to care about them. … McPhee finds surprising poetry in the material at hand.”

    NOTHING IS LOST: Selected Essays, by Ingrid Sischy. Edited by Sandra Brant. (Knopf, $40.) Sischy, who died of cancer in 2015 at the age of 63, had a dazzling career as the editor of Artforum and Interview and as a contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. This collection gathers her cutting-edge reports on the art and artifice of American life. “She shows us the glitz of that epoch of celebrity culture as well as the serious, thoughtful concerns of its cutting-edge painters and designers; at her best, she enters both domains through her stylish meditations on such figures as Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe and John Galliano,” our reviewer, Edmund White, writes. “Sischy’s genius was that she took philosophy lightly and fashion seriously.”

    THE DAY THAT WENT MISSING, by Richard Beard. (Little, Brown, $27.) Beard, a British novelist, here launches an inquest into his own past, trying to remember what happened decades ago when his little brother, Nicky, drowned beside him on a Cornish holiday, only to vanish eerily from the family story. “This is a story of a man trying to feel and succeeding, we hope, in the end,” Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes in her review. “If the beginning is dense with theory and fact gathering, the later part of the book swells with meaning and revelation. Beard cops to his own guilt and sadness and the memories themselves, after much research and focus, become lush and full.”

    At once engaging and cleverly creative, Ricardo Alexanders' Bollywood Invasion enrapts readers with a fun and fantastical coming of age story, set in a well posed merging of reality and fiction which surpasses the reaches of time and continents.

    Instantly the story draws you in, as initially, we meet John Palmieri living in modern times in Brooklyn; he's a nerd and Beatles lover in high school and unsatisfied with his lower middle class existence. Things start with him in the throes of a dream, once again being bested by his arch-enemy Frank Castellano. He loathes Frank, who seems to have so much more than John; smarter mouth, bigger house, more friends, better stuff, including, the attention of the girl he secretly loves -Samantha.

    The real adventure begins when fate crashes into his life, via an accident, knocking John unconscious. When John awakes, he finds himself in a parallel existence, where he has been transported back in time to late 1950's, India. He wakes up as eighteen year old Raj Scindia, a prince in the Indian royal family. Naturally, he's initially confused by his sudden transportation to a completely foreign life and culture with many humorous moments ensuing as he tries to wrap his head around what has happened to him.

    Meanwhile, as John acclimates to his new life, he realizes he suddenly has the life he has always dreamed of, a life which now includes money, wealth, eager women and extensive privileges. However, as well as being rich and privileged, the prince whose life John has taken over, also includes several unexpected issues such as being engaged to a young lady through pre-arranged marriage, having the reputation of being a spoiled, adulterous scamp, as well as being a second year student in a mechanical engineering college. Ultimately, deciding to make the best of his new circumstances, John plays his privileged new life to the hilt; he fakes being psychic and parties not really taking his new life too seriously until he meets the best friend of his promised fiance, Ankita and falls instantly head over heels for her which within his new culture gives rise to many issues. While looking for ways to win her over, John forays into the world of music by joining a local band and uses his extensive knowledge of Beatles songs to propel his group "The Beetos" to "Beatles" status making him and his group rock stars, thusly creating a parallel universe with the Bollywood version of the Beatles. Consequently, their new found fame comes with unexpected repercussions, as the story progresses with scenarios that parallel events that really happened with the famed Beatles.

    Definitively, Bollywood Invasion proffers readers a compelling read that entertains the imagination with a unforgettable journey into adulthood. This was a winning combination with its twisted melding of Beatlemania, romance, drama, humor, fantasy elements, and intriguing characters, especially Raj/John who seems to a loosely posed reincarnation of John Lennon. This would make a worthwhile read for fans of fantasy or YA reads.



    Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9995369

    At once engaging and cleverly creative, Ricardo Alexanders' Bollywood Invasion enrapts readers with a fun and fantastical coming of age story, set in a well posed merging of reality and fiction which surpasses the reaches of time and continents.

    Instantly the story draws you in, as initially, we meet John Palmieri living in modern times in Brooklyn; he's a nerd and Beatles lover in high school and unsatisfied with his lower middle class existence. Things start with him in the throes of a dream, once again being bested by his arch-enemy Frank Castellano. He loathes Frank, who seems to have so much more than John; smarter mouth, bigger house, more friends, better stuff, including, the attention of the girl he secretly loves -Samantha.

    The real adventure begins when fate crashes into his life, via an accident, knocking John unconscious. When John awakes, he finds himself in a parallel existence, where he has been transported back in time to late 1950's, India. He wakes up as eighteen year old Raj Scindia, a prince in the Indian royal family. Naturally, he's initially confused by his sudden transportation to a completely foreign life and culture with many humorous moments ensuing as he tries to wrap his head around what has happened to him.

    Meanwhile, as John acclimates to his new life, he realizes he suddenly has the life he has always dreamed of, a life which now includes money, wealth, eager women and extensive privileges. However, as well as being rich and privileged, the prince whose life John has taken over, also includes several unexpected issues such as being engaged to a young lady through pre-arranged marriage, having the reputation of being a spoiled, adulterous scamp, as well as being a second year student in a mechanical engineering college. Ultimately, deciding to make the best of his new circumstances, John plays his privileged new life to the hilt; he fakes being psychic and parties not really taking his new life too seriously until he meets the best friend of his promised fiance, Ankita and falls instantly head over heels for her which within his new culture gives rise to many issues. While looking for ways to win her over, John forays into the world of music by joining a local band and uses his extensive knowledge of Beatles songs to propel his group "The Beetos" to "Beatles" status making him and his group rock stars, thusly creating a parallel universe with the Bollywood version of the Beatles. Consequently, their new found fame comes with unexpected repercussions, as the story progresses with scenarios that parallel events that really happened with the famed Beatles.

    Definitively, Bollywood Invasion proffers readers a compelling read that entertains the imagination with a unforgettable journey into adulthood. This was a winning combination with its twisted melding of Beatlemania, romance, drama, humor, fantasy elements, and intriguing characters, especially Raj/John who seems to a loosely posed reincarnation of John Lennon. This would make a worthwhile read for fans of fantasy or YA reads.



    Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9995369

    At once engaging and cleverly creative, Ricardo Alexanders' Bollywood Invasion enrapts readers with a fun and fantastical coming of age story, set in a well posed merging of reality and fiction which surpasses the reaches of time and continents.

    Instantly the story draws you in, as initially, we meet John Palmieri living in modern times in Brooklyn; he's a nerd and Beatles lover in high school and unsatisfied with his lower middle class existence. Things start with him in the throes of a dream, once again being bested by his arch-enemy Frank Castellano. He loathes Frank, who seems to have so much more than John; smarter mouth, bigger house, more friends, better stuff, including, the attention of the girl he secretly loves -Samantha.

    The real adventure begins when fate crashes into his life, via an accident, knocking John unconscious. When John awakes, he finds himself in a parallel existence, where he has been transported back in time to late 1950's, India. He wakes up as eighteen year old Raj Scindia, a prince in the Indian royal family. Naturally, he's initially confused by his sudden transportation to a completely foreign life and culture with many humorous moments ensuing as he tries to wrap his head around what has happened to him.

    Meanwhile, as John acclimates to his new life, he realizes he suddenly has the life he has always dreamed of, a life which now includes money, wealth, eager women and extensive privileges. However, as well as being rich and privileged, the prince whose life John has taken over, also includes several unexpected issues such as being engaged to a young lady through pre-arranged marriage, having the reputation of being a spoiled, adulterous scamp, as well as being a second year student in a mechanical engineering college. Ultimately, deciding to make the best of his new circumstances, John plays his privileged new life to the hilt; he fakes being psychic and parties not really taking his new life too seriously until he meets the best friend of his promised fiance, Ankita and falls instantly head over heels for her which within his new culture gives rise to many issues. While looking for ways to win her over, John forays into the world of music by joining a local band and uses his extensive knowledge of Beatles songs to propel his group "The Beetos" to "Beatles" status making him and his group rock stars, thusly creating a parallel universe with the Bollywood version of the Beatles. Consequently, their new found fame comes with unexpected repercussions, as the story progresses with scenarios that parallel events that really happened with the famed Beatles.

    Definitively, Bollywood Invasion proffers readers a compelling read that entertains the imagination with a unforgettable journey into adulthood. This was a winning combination with its twisted melding of Beatlemania, romance, drama, humor, fantasy elements, and intriguing characters, especially Raj/John who seems to a loosely posed reincarnation of John Lennon. This would make a worthwhile read for fans of fantasy or YA reads.



    Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9995369

    Pay attention. That might be the theme to this week’s recommended titles, if we had to pick one. (We don’t, really. But we enjoy the challenge, so what the heck: The value of sustained attention it is.) Attention is expressly the subject of Uwe Johnson’s vast diaristic novel “Anniversaries,” as Parul Sehgal notes in her impressed and impressive review. I haven’t read Johnson’s book yet; I’m still stalled out in the Nighttown section of “Ulysses,” so in my side reading lately I tend to favor digestible chunks of essays or stories. But I’ve heard good things about it for months, and Parul’s review convinces me I should add it to my list. You should, too. You can start right away, if you’re not reading “Ulysses.”

    Sustained attention is also at the core of three essay collections this week, at least implicitly: Elisa Gabbert’s “The Word Pretty,” Ingrid Sischy’s “Nothing Is Lost” and John McPhee’s “The Patch,” all of which highlight their authors’ knack for observation and reflection. Helen Schulman’s novel “Come With Me” is a bright techno-dystopian family story about the seductions of virtual reality, with an inherent warning to stop taking nonvirtual reality for granted. And Richard Beard’s memoir, “The Day That Went Missing,” becomes an extended homage to the act of attention, as he tries to uncover the details of his younger brother’s death on a family vacation years before. Finally, there’s a biography of the architect Philip Johnson and a horror-thriller hybrid from the suspense writer M. R. Carey. Thank you for your attention.

    Gregory Cowles
    Senior Editor, Books

    ANNIVERSARIES: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl: Volumes 1 and 2, by Uwe Johnson. Translated by Damion Searls. (New York Review Books, $39.95.) Johnson’s nearly 1,700-page masterpiece was originally published in Germany, in four volumes between 1970 and 1983. It has now been translated into English in full, for the first time. The novel takes the form of a yearlong diary, covering parts of 1967 and 1968, by the enigmatic, rather brilliant Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year Hitler came to power. She lives in New York City with her small daughter, Marie. Gesine is haunted — by her family’s embrace of Nazism, her mother’s suicide, the death of her daughter’s father. “‘Anniversaries’ is not difficult reading, but it is painstaking,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “The story is tangled, the characters traumatized and suspicious of language. It requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full attention — for attention is its great subject.”

    THE WORD PRETTY, by Elisa Gabbert. (Black Ocean, $18.95.) In this collection of brief essays, Gabbert, who is also a poet, draws inspiration for her musings from subjects like group selfies and the psychology of dreams and YouTube videos “designed specifically to make people cry.” But more than half of the book is explicitly devoted to books themselves; to life as both a purposeful and a serendipitous reader. “The casualness of this collection is one of its attractions,” our reviewer John Williams writes. “It doesn’t strain after anything. It doesn’t have airs; and if it could speak, it would likely charmingly admit to its own imperfections. A mixture of depth and diversion, it makes you wish that, like a reliable band, Gabbert might publish a similar slender volume every year or two.”

    COME WITH ME, by Helen Schulman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) In Schulman’s latest novel, a Silicon Valley family’s bonds are frayed by infidelities both virtual and actual, thanks to a start-up technology that allows “visits” to the lives that might have been. In her review, Sarah Lyall calls the book “smart, timely and highly entertaining.”

    THE MAN IN THE GLASS HOUSE: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century, by Mark Lamster. (Little, Brown, $35.) Lamster suggests Johnson’s real mark on 20th-century architecture came less as a practitioner than as a mentor. He also recounts darker episodes like Johnson’s infatuation with the Nazis in the 1930s. “The most interesting thing about him was not the buildings he designed,” Paul Goldberger writes, reviewing the biography. “The qualities that make him, and this book, fascinating are his nimble intelligence, his restlessness, his energy, his anxieties, his ambitions and his passions, all of which were channeled into the making of a few pieces of architecture that will stand the test of time, and many others that will not.”

    THE PATCH, by John McPhee. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) McPhee’s seventh collection of essays probes landscapes from New Jersey to Alaska and profiles a vast cast of characters, from Joan Baez to Thomas Wolfe. It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing memoir of his irresistible compulsions. McPhee writes sentences “so energetic and structurally sound,” Craig Taylor writes in his review, “that he can introduce apparently unappealing subjects, even ones that look to be encased in a cruddy veneer of boringness, and persuade us to care about them. … McPhee finds surprising poetry in the material at hand.”

    NOTHING IS LOST: Selected Essays, by Ingrid Sischy. Edited by Sandra Brant. (Knopf, $40.) Sischy, who died of cancer in 2015 at the age of 63, had a dazzling career as the editor of Artforum and Interview and as a contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. This collection gathers her cutting-edge reports on the art and artifice of American life. “She shows us the glitz of that epoch of celebrity culture as well as the serious, thoughtful concerns of its cutting-edge painters and designers; at her best, she enters both domains through her stylish meditations on such figures as Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe and John Galliano,” our reviewer, Edmund White, writes. “Sischy’s genius was that she took philosophy lightly and fashion seriously.”

    THE DAY THAT WENT MISSING, by Richard Beard. (Little, Brown, $27.) Beard, a British novelist, here launches an inquest into his own past, trying to remember what happened decades ago when his little brother, Nicky, drowned beside him on a Cornish holiday, only to vanish eerily from the family story. “This is a story of a man trying to feel and succeeding, we hope, in the end,” Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes in her review. “If the beginning is dense with theory and fact gathering, the later part of the book swells with meaning and revelation. Beard cops to his own guilt and sadness and the memories themselves, after much research and focus, become lush and full.”

    At once engaging and cleverly creative, Ricardo Alexanders' Bollywood Invasion enrapts readers with a fun and fantastical coming of age story, set in a well posed merging of reality and fiction which surpasses the reaches of time and continents.

    Instantly the story draws you in, as initially, we meet John Palmieri living in modern times in Brooklyn; he's a nerd and Beatles lover in high school and unsatisfied with his lower middle class existence. Things start with him in the throes of a dream, once again being bested by his arch-enemy Frank Castellano. He loathes Frank, who seems to have so much more than John; smarter mouth, bigger house, more friends, better stuff, including, the attention of the girl he secretly loves -Samantha.

    The real adventure begins when fate crashes into his life, via an accident, knocking John unconscious. When John awakes, he finds himself in a parallel existence, where he has been transported back in time to late 1950's, India. He wakes up as eighteen year old Raj Scindia, a prince in the Indian royal family. Naturally, he's initially confused by his sudden transportation to a completely foreign life and culture with many humorous moments ensuing as he tries to wrap his head around what has happened to him.

    Meanwhile, as John acclimates to his new life, he realizes he suddenly has the life he has always dreamed of, a life which now includes money, wealth, eager women and extensive privileges. However, as well as being rich and privileged, the prince whose life John has taken over, also includes several unexpected issues such as being engaged to a young lady through pre-arranged marriage, having the reputation of being a spoiled, adulterous scamp, as well as being a second year student in a mechanical engineering college. Ultimately, deciding to make the best of his new circumstances, John plays his privileged new life to the hilt; he fakes being psychic and parties not really taking his new life too seriously until he meets the best friend of his promised fiance, Ankita and falls instantly head over heels for her which within his new culture gives rise to many issues. While looking for ways to win her over, John forays into the world of music by joining a local band and uses his extensive knowledge of Beatles songs to propel his group "The Beetos" to "Beatles" status making him and his group rock stars, thusly creating a parallel universe with the Bollywood version of the Beatles. Consequently, their new found fame comes with unexpected repercussions, as the story progresses with scenarios that parallel events that really happened with the famed Beatles.

    Definitively, Bollywood Invasion proffers readers a compelling read that entertains the imagination with a unforgettable journey into adulthood. This was a winning combination with its twisted melding of Beatlemania, romance, drama, humor, fantasy elements, and intriguing characters, especially Raj/John who seems to a loosely posed reincarnation of John Lennon. This would make a worthwhile read for fans of fantasy or YA reads.



    Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9995369

    At once engaging and cleverly creative, Ricardo Alexanders' Bollywood Invasion enrapts readers with a fun and fantastical coming of age story, set in a well posed merging of reality and fiction which surpasses the reaches of time and continents.

    Instantly the story draws you in, as initially, we meet John Palmieri living in modern times in Brooklyn; he's a nerd and Beatles lover in high school and unsatisfied with his lower middle class existence. Things start with him in the throes of a dream, once again being bested by his arch-enemy Frank Castellano. He loathes Frank, who seems to have so much more than John; smarter mouth, bigger house, more friends, better stuff, including, the attention of the girl he secretly loves -Samantha.

    The real adventure begins when fate crashes into his life, via an accident, knocking John unconscious. When John awakes, he finds himself in a parallel existence, where he has been transported back in time to late 1950's, India. He wakes up as eighteen year old Raj Scindia, a prince in the Indian royal family. Naturally, he's initially confused by his sudden transportation to a completely foreign life and culture with many humorous moments ensuing as he tries to wrap his head around what has happened to him.

    Meanwhile, as John acclimates to his new life, he realizes he suddenly has the life he has always dreamed of, a life which now includes money, wealth, eager women and extensive privileges. However, as well as being rich and privileged, the prince whose life John has taken over, also includes several unexpected issues such as being engaged to a young lady through pre-arranged marriage, having the reputation of being a spoiled, adulterous scamp, as well as being a second year student in a mechanical engineering college. Ultimately, deciding to make the best of his new circumstances, John plays his privileged new life to the hilt; he fakes being psychic and parties not really taking his new life too seriously until he meets the best friend of his promised fiance, Ankita and falls instantly head over heels for her which within his new culture gives rise to many issues. While looking for ways to win her over, John forays into the world of music by joining a local band and uses his extensive knowledge of Beatles songs to propel his group "The Beetos" to "Beatles" status making him and his group rock stars, thusly creating a parallel universe with the Bollywood version of the Beatles. Consequently, their new found fame comes with unexpected repercussions, as the story progresses with scenarios that parallel events that really happened with the famed Beatles.

    Definitively, Bollywood Invasion proffers readers a compelling read that entertains the imagination with a unforgettable journey into adulthood. This was a winning combination with its twisted melding of Beatlemania, romance, drama, humor, fantasy elements, and intriguing characters, especially Raj/John who seems to a loosely posed reincarnation of John Lennon. This would make a worthwhile read for fans of fantasy or YA reads.



    Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9995369

    At once engaging and cleverly creative, Ricardo Alexanders' Bollywood Invasion enrapts readers with a fun and fantastical coming of age story, set in a well posed merging of reality and fiction which surpasses the reaches of time and continents.

    Instantly the story draws you in, as initially, we meet John Palmieri living in modern times in Brooklyn; he's a nerd and Beatles lover in high school and unsatisfied with his lower middle class existence. Things start with him in the throes of a dream, once again being bested by his arch-enemy Frank Castellano. He loathes Frank, who seems to have so much more than John; smarter mouth, bigger house, more friends, better stuff, including, the attention of the girl he secretly loves -Samantha.

    The real adventure begins when fate crashes into his life, via an accident, knocking John unconscious. When John awakes, he finds himself in a parallel existence, where he has been transported back in time to late 1950's, India. He wakes up as eighteen year old Raj Scindia, a prince in the Indian royal family. Naturally, he's initially confused by his sudden transportation to a completely foreign life and culture with many humorous moments ensuing as he tries to wrap his head around what has happened to him.

    Meanwhile, as John acclimates to his new life, he realizes he suddenly has the life he has always dreamed of, a life which now includes money, wealth, eager women and extensive privileges. However, as well as being rich and privileged, the prince whose life John has taken over, also includes several unexpected issues such as being engaged to a young lady through pre-arranged marriage, having the reputation of being a spoiled, adulterous scamp, as well as being a second year student in a mechanical engineering college. Ultimately, deciding to make the best of his new circumstances, John plays his privileged new life to the hilt; he fakes being psychic and parties not really taking his new life too seriously until he meets the best friend of his promised fiance, Ankita and falls instantly head over heels for her which within his new culture gives rise to many issues. While looking for ways to win her over, John forays into the world of music by joining a local band and uses his extensive knowledge of Beatles songs to propel his group "The Beetos" to "Beatles" status making him and his group rock stars, thusly creating a parallel universe with the Bollywood version of the Beatles. Consequently, their new found fame comes with unexpected repercussions, as the story progresses with scenarios that parallel events that really happened with the famed Beatles.

    Definitively, Bollywood Invasion proffers readers a compelling read that entertains the imagination with a unforgettable journey into adulthood. This was a winning combination with its twisted melding of Beatlemania, romance, drama, humor, fantasy elements, and intriguing characters, especially Raj/John who seems to a loosely posed reincarnation of John Lennon. This would make a worthwhile read for fans of fantasy or YA reads.



    Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9995369

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