|
Jun-July. FIRST LIGHT by Richard Preston. The story of the great Hale telescope on Mount Palomar and the American astronomers who run it: James Gunn, noted theorist, observer and instrument builder, currently at Princeton; Don Schneider, software wizard, became an astronomer because he was not good at farming; Maarten Schmidt, Dutch astronomer who discovered quasars in 1963; Gene Shoemaker, discovered the first known asteroid-impact craters on earth. Expert in asteroids and comets that may hit the earth; Carolyn Shoemaker, wife of Gene, discovered more comets than anyone else in history; Juan Carrasco, senior night assistant at Palomar. Preston followed him and the astronomers he assisted in their everyday lives. He lived with and reported on the everyday lives of these astronomers. A great book.July 25. TIS, by Frank McCourt. It's all there: the drunken Irishmen, the promises to go off the 'crather', the conflict with the mother who emigrates from Limerick, the persistent whining and complaining. Makes you want to throw up at times. On the other hand, it has several of the funniest chapters I've read in years--his time with the US army in Germany, his first encounters with American high school students and their firm intention not to learn anything new. These set pieces, especially the vocational high school scenes, are delicious. He has a genius for capturing people's voices and speech patterns--Black talk, working class New Yorkers, Irish-Americans, tough Anglos.
GROWING UP by Russell Baker. Baker's life from his childhood in a tiny Virginia village during the depression to his marriage after the war. Told mostly in terms of his mother, who was constantly asking where his 'gumption' was. I find it incredible that anyone who hated literature as much as he would become a writer. He despised every book suggested for study in school. Even after reading this book I still don't know what he likes. Now I understand why he is such an abysmal host of Masterpiece Theater, so inferior to the learned Englishman Allister Cooke, his predecessor. He obviously despises the works he introduces each week.
August. HOT ZONE by Richard Preston. What killer viruses from the area around Lake Victoria can do to the body, in all the gruesome detail you can take. Only for the unsqueamish.Aug 20. HEADLONG by Michael Frayn. An academic tries to steal an important painting (presumably by Breugel) from an impoverished English landowner. Complications arise from the landowner's wife and his own wife, but he manages to squander his own money and theirs on complicated stragegy. Crackling dialog, always on the right key.Aug 30. THE RUSSIAN INTERPRETER by Michael Frayn. Hanging around Moscow in the company of Manning, an English graduate student, Gordon Proctor-Gould, an Englishman in Cambridge blazer and suede shoes selling people-to-people exchange, Katya, an unhappy girl, and Raya, a light-fingered blonde, who moves in with Gordon and then proceeds to steal everything in sight. A thief or an informer? Not so difficult to figure out.
Sept. SPIES, by Michael Frayn. It's wartime London. German spies are everywhere, even in the middle class Close inhabited by Stephan and Keith. Keith, the boy with the mean knife-toting father is the leader of the anti-spies. Interestingly enough, the principal suspect is Keith's mother, who makes frequent unneeded visits to her sister, whose husband is an RAF hero, and via a slimy tunnel to a god forsaken field where a man hides under an iron plate. Nov. A PAINTED DOOM by Kate Ellis. An interesting murder mystery by an English author, set in a small English village full of upward mobile media people. Quite an interesting puzzle. She has written other novels: the Armada Boy, An Unhallowed Grave, the Funeral Boat, and the Bone Garden. Dec 14. THE GREAT SANTINI, by Pat Conroy. Story of a family with a fighter pilot as a father. He treats the boys in the family like his underlings in the service, calling all of them sports fans. No matter how well Ben, his eldest son, performs, either in basketball or the arts, he is fiercely critical. Good portrait of a vanishing breed. According to Pat, in an article in AARP, his father was much worse than depicted. If he had told the truth of his abuse, no one would have believed the story. The Great Santini was made into a movie, still available on tape. FONT>
|
