Best of the Month: February 2009

*Spotlight Title: The Gamble* by Thomas E. Ricks**
Anyone who read Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks's superb, bestselling account of the Iraq War through 2005, and has followed the war since has likely noticed that many of the heroes of that devastating book, the officers and analysts who seemed to understand what was going wrong in the war when the rest of the political and military leadership didn't, have since been put in charge, starting with General David Petraeus, the cerebral officer who took command in Iraq and led what became known as "the surge." Ricks, the senior Pentagon correspondent at the Washington Post, has stayed on the story, and he returns with his second book on the war, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. As good (and influential) as Fiasco was, The Gamble may be even better, telling the remarkable story of how a few people inside and outside the Pentagon pushed the new strategy through against opposition across the political spectrum and throughout the military top brass, and then, even more remarkably, how soldiers put the difficult plan into action on the ground and managed to sharply reduce the chaotic violence in Iraq. But the story doesn't end there, and Ricks's bracing conclusion--that the American military, like it or not, will still have a necessary role in Iraq for years to come--makes it likely that this may not be the last book we have from him on the subject. --Tom Nissley
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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley		Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Flavia de Luce is a new breed of detective heroine, a pigtailed eleven-year-old with a penchant for poison. Great literary crime detectives aren't always born; they're sometimes discovered, blindfolded, tied up in a dark closet by their nasty older sisters. Flavia's bitter home life and vicious sibling rivalry inspire her solitary diversions and "strange talents," whether it's concocting poisons in the laboratory of their inherited Victorian house, plotting vengeance on her sisters, or delving into the forbidden past of her widowed father, Colonel de Luce. Things get interesting the day she finds a dead body in the cucumber patch. Fearless and darkly imaginative, Flavia hurries to solve the murder and free her father of suspicion. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is entirely inventive, fast-paced, and quick-witted, with tongue-in-cheek humour that transcends the macabre seriousness of its subject.		The publishers of Chris Cleave's new novel, Little Bee, "don't want to spoil" the story by revealing too much about it, and there's good reason not to tell too much about the plot's pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple--journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday--who should have stayed behind their resort's walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through the razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state.
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Welcome to the Departure Lounge by Meg Federico		The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
Meg Federico showcases her keen eye for the absurd in this poignant and hilarious memoir of caring for her aging parents. When her eighty-year-old mother and new stepfather are forced to accept full-time home care, Meg imagines them settling into a Norman-Rockwellian life of docile dependency. With a family and a full-time career in Nova Scotia--a thousand miles away from her parents--Federico watches in horror as her parents turn into terrible teens. Fighting off onslaughts of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, Addie and Walter--forbidden by doctors to drink--conspire to order cases of scotch by phone. Addie's attendant accuses the evening staff of midnight voodoo. Walter's inhibitions decline, and mail-order sex aides arrive. The list of absurdities goes on, as Federico tries to take some control over her parents' lives--and her own. Welcome to the Departure Lounge will resonate powerfully with the huge generation now caring for their parents.		During the Cultural Revolution countless unspeakable acts went down in the otherwise unremarkable industrial town of Muddy River. Lovers betrayed lovers, children denounced their parents, and neighbors became sworn enemies. A few years later, the townspeople have convened at the public stadium to witness the execution of Gu Shan. A Red Guard leader in her youth, she has received the death penalty for her counterrevolutionary writings and unrepentant attitude. In Yiyun Li's startling debut novel, The Vagrants, we are introduced to Gu's parents, neighbours, and a handful of Muddy River's social outcasts whose lives have been irrevocably affected by her life and death. Yiyun Li's unblinking and unpredictable fictional narrative demonstrates how corruption and cruelty, fear, and moral ambiguity at the level of the individual reflect the dehumanization of an entire society, and The Vagrants establishes her as an important new voice in American fiction.
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American Rust by Philipp Meyer		Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton
Buell, Pennsylvania lies in ruins, a dying--if not already dead--steel town, where even the lush surrounding country seethes with concealed industrial toxins. When Isaac English and Billy Poe--a pair of high-school friends straight out of Steinbeck--embark on a starry-eyed cross-country escape to California, a violent encounter with a trio of transients leaves one dead, prying the lid off a rusted can of failed hope and small-town secrets. American Rust is Philipp Meyer's first novel, and his taut, direct prose strikes the perfect tone for this kaleidoscope of fractured dreams, elevating a book that otherwise might be relentlessly dour to the level of honest and unflinching storytelling. (Interestingly, Meyer has a fan in Patricia Cornwell, who name-checked American Rust in her latest novel, Scarpetta, even though Meyer's book hadn't been released yet.)		What is love? Artist Leanne Shapton may be the first person to answer this age-old question so persuasively, if not damn-near definitively. Her vision of love--that famously immaterial virtue--finds its best expression in the stuff of our daily lives. Which, of course, may not be as filled with the serendipitous charm that marks the courtship of her fictional lovers, but that doesn't make Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry feel any less universal. We meet Lenore and Hal after their relationship has ended; that the relics of their life--spent in fits and starts of togetherness--are presented in a Valentine's Day auction catalog has the potential to strike a bitter chord. What comes across instead is that these items, ranging widely from gifts, postcards, and photos to conspiratorial notes and precious evidence of daily rituals, deserve to be cherished for the love they still so clearly honour.
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