Biography.

NONFICTION

[excellent]

The Man Who Loved China

The Fantastic Story of the Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

By Simon Winchester 

In the best-selling The Professor and the Madman (1998), Simon Winchester related the bizarre story of the Oxford English Dictionary; he has also hit the best seller list with The Map ffat Changed the World (the birth of modern geology), Krakatoa (the Indonesian volcano, [excellent] July/Aug 2003), and A Crack in the Edge of the World (the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, [good] Jan/Feb 2006).

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THE TOPIC: Decades before Richard Nixon traveled to China to open relations between East and West, Cambridge don and eccentric biochemist Joseph Needham (1900-1995) made inroads into China's secrets. An open-minded intellectual, nudist, accordion player, and highly regarded scientist, Needham became a Sinophile in the late 1930s at the urging of his Chinese mistress, who had come to Cambridge to study. In an effort to corroborate his notion that the Chinese were responsible for some of the most important technological innovations--including printing, the compass, and explosives--Needham traveled to China and embarked on adventures that no Westerner had ever attempted. What he brought back was an even greater appreciation for China's culture, people, and inventiveness, as reflected in his 18-volume love letter to China, Science and Civilisation in China.

HarperCollins. 316 pages. $27.95. ISBN: 0060884592

Boston Globe [excellent]

"Winchester deftly captures [Needham's] complex personality, a romantic adventurer propelled by intellectual curiosity--and his leftist political leanings that introduced him into the circle around Zhou Enlai, whose Communist army was headquartered in the wartime capital of Chongqing." MICHAEL KENNEY

Los Angeles Times [excellent]

"The Man Who Loved China is a charming literary and cultural adventure that captures the unadorned brilliance and infectious enthusiasm of this remarkable man, with his outsized intellectual ambition and his endearing zest for life." SETH FAISON

Philadelphia Inquirer [excellent]

"This is a wonderfully entertaining book. While specialists may find its finer technical points a bit thin in places, and American readers might puzzle over its occasional 'Britishisms,' Winchester deftly probes the nexus of the public and private facets of one of scholarship's most profound minds and eccentric personalities." CHARLES DESNOYERS

Rocky Mountain News [excellent]

"[A]nother fascinating read, filled with expeditions across war-ravaged China, harrowing escapes from the Japanese army, more than a few amorous adventures, and path-breaking scholarship undertaken within the ancient rooms of Cambridge University." STEVE RUSKIN

Miami Herald [excellent]

"Winchester, so skilled at making the triumphs, tragedies and details of real life read like an engaging novel, portrays a Needham who lives up to the eccentric billing of the title. ... Needham's diary entries often merely report appointments and inadequate transportation, not what you'd expect or desire from a philandering daredevil." AMY CANFIELD

NY Times Book Review [excellent]

"Simon Winchester's biography, The Man Who Loved China, presents a lowkey, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities--or, for a time, his own countrymen. ... Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it's not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham's first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar." ALIDA BECKER

Oregonian [excellent]

"Needham's experiences in China, bringing laboratory equipment and journals to scientific colleagues and gathering materials for his research, were, alas, not all that dramatic. ... So Winchester peppers the narrative with delicious digressions." GLENN C. ALTSCHULER

Washington Post [excellent]

"The importance of Needham's work lies not only in the mega-projects for which China is most famous but also in the small-scale technologies that he lovingly detailed." JUDITH SHAPIRO

CRITICAL SUMMARY

With The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester turns out another compelling, readable, and relevant tale. Any good storyteller will embellish his subject, and Winchester effortlessly keeps readers interested in Needham's adventures--even when they flag a bit. For the most part, though, Needham's life is one that relatively few readers will know--and one that Winchester brings to life with a passel of research and an ever-present sense of wonder for his unique subject. Despite some errors and repetition, the book is also a good starting point for any reader who seeks another path to understanding the roots of Chinese civilization.

[good]

Books

A Memoir

By Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry, antiquarian book dealer and one of the most prolific and well-respected writers working today (Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, and the Pulitzer Prize--winning modern classic Lonesome Dove), goes back to his roots.

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THE TOPIC: Larry McMurtry is best known as a novelist, though his first--and abiding--love is book collecting. Having grown up "bookless" in Texas, McMurtry quickly became passionate about discovering, admiring, buying, and selling books, as he tracked their "silent migration" from owner to owner. From the original incarnation of his famous Booked Up in a Washington, DC, storefront in 1971 to that store's improbable multibuilding, 300,000-volume resurrection in McMurtry's hometown of Archer City, Texas, the author has absorbed impressive knowledge about the rare-book trade. Now 72, McMurtry arranges those experiences in 109 chapters, many briefer than a page. Each gives readers insight into the quirky characters and the one-of-a-kind finds that resonate after half a century in the book trade.

Simon & Schuster. 272 pages. $24. ISBN: 1416583343

Christian Science Monitor [excellent]

"The moral among antiquarian booksellers ... is that you can't know everything. ... The book trade has long been his central passion and his own library now contains 28,000 volumes of books he's still reading." ELIZABETH BROWN

San Antonio Exp-News [excellent]

"Books comprises rambling anecdotes about McMurtry's reading life, his book-scouting activities and the personalities he has met across the decades, some famous, most of them not. ... Although a few passages slip into antiquarian bookseller insider information, the pages stay entertaining because of McMurtry's easygoing, humorous narrative style." DAVID HENDRICKS

Chicago Sun-Times [excellent]

"While this volume may not be the straight, literary autobiography you're wishing for, it still provides many fascinating glances at McMurtry's life, world and thoughts. ... Those who want to read books, own them and collect them will understand McMurtry's obsession and his engaging tales of great finds and great eccentrics." JOHN BARRON

Los Angeles Times [good]

"Taken as a whole, the McMurtry corpus brings us inside the complicated world of human emotions more successfully than any other modern American writer. ... The accounts of first-edition hunting and encounters with literary eccentrics he offers in this book entertain, but it seems more like a finger exercise than a sonata." PAUL WILNER

Houston Chronicle [good]

"I'm not sure who will want to read this book besides habitues of antiquarian bookstores, a spectral tribe that appears to be dying out. As it happens, I'm of that tribe, so I enjoyed it, although it's a thin, anemic thing, a very minor addition to Larry McMurtry's oeuvre." FRITZ LANHAM

New York Times [good]

"Mr. McMurtry does not try to teach the love of books. But the fetish is surely universal, at least among readers, and the occasional goodie pops up as an unexpected payoff for sticking around." JOHN LELAND

Denver Post [fair]

"McMurtry is uncomfortably anti-introspective when it comes to delving into the deeper aspects of his own psyche or anyone else's. ... In this book, the collector's impulse that has now overtaken McMurtry seems to have slaughtered the artistry within him that is required to write a moving memoir of any sort." ELAINE MARGOLIN

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Despite McMurtry's well-deserved reputation as a writer, including a Pulitzer Prize and more than a handful of best sellers, critics are unsure about his latest effort. "They cite it as an uneven volume that glosses over some important characters and anecdotes (or, conversely, delves a bit too much into the details of book collecting) and doesn't advance its purported mission of offering a "memoir" of the reticent author's life in books. Some of the vignettes seem to have been dashed off almost as an afterthought, though Mc-Murtry's style can be an acquired taste. Still, even if Books doesn't transcend its limited subject matter and won't win over many readers not already familiar with McMurtry's story, devotees will enjoy digging alongside the bookman, thrilling to the next great discovery.

RELATED ARTICLE: BOOKMARKS SELECTION

[excellent]

The Eaves of Heaven

A Life in Three Wars

By Andrew X. Pham 

Andrew X. Pham's first book, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, told the story of his life. Now, Pham turns to his father's story.

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THE TOPIC: In his childhood, Thong Van Pham (the author's father) was set to inherit his family's substantial holdings in northern Vietnam. But the three wars of this book's title--the Vietminh resistance to the French colonial occupation of Vietnam, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the series of conflicts Americans know as the Vietnam War--forced him to carve a new life out of the pieces of the old. Pham illustrates Thong's diocult transformation by interspersing Thong's bucolic childhood stories with his bitter memories of war. Pham's book provides a personal guide to the complex history of Vietnam in the 20th century, while also reminding readers that most of life's essence won't be found in the outlines of battles won and lost.

Harmony. 302 pages. $24.95. ISBN: 030738120X

Los Angeles Times [excellent]

"The Eaves of Heaven is a work of radiance. In some ways, it resembles that supreme recollection of a world lost to history's depredations, Speak, Memory, in which Vladimir Nabokov summoned up his pre-revolutionary Russian boyhood." RICHARD EDER

NY Times Book Review [excellent]

"Do we really need yet another Vietnam memoir? Yes, as it turns out. ... Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective." MATT STEINGLASS

Oregonian [excellent]

"[Pham] understands a memoir is not really about oneself but about a period, a time, a people. ... As a memoir, The Eaves of Heaven accomplishes what few polemics do--it is a sweeping personal indictment of war, a reassuring and yet merciless a-rmation of the human spirit." RENE DENFELD

Washington Post [excellent]

"[T]his is not ultimately a story of loss and upheaval, nor is it simply a retelling of Vietnam's war-torn history from a Vietnamese point of view. ... The Eaves of Heaven is something entirely new: an effort to recapture the moments of beauty and transcendence that emerged from these events." MARTHA SHERRILL

Seattle Times [excellent]

"The contrapuntal composition creates a surprising and pleasing rhythm and reminds us that memory is neither linear nor sequential. ... Here is war and life through the eyes of a Vietnamese everyman: Although buffeted by many circumstances beyond his control, Thong Van Pham never loses his basic humanity or love of family." DAVID TAKAMI

CRITICAL SUMMARY

All critics agreed that The Eaves of Heaven, written in short, eloquent vignettes that move back and forth in time, is one of the best memoirs of this period in Vietnam's history written from the Vietnamese point of view. Indeed, it offers a much-needed perspective in the United States, which often thinks of "Vietnam" as a painful episode in its own history rather than another nation's. But some reviewers, impressed by Pham's ability to write in his father's voice without sentimentality, went even further. They called The Eaves of Heaven a classic among memoirs and compared it with classic texts that address the timeless themes of violence and war. The Eaves of Heaven is a book that will greatly appeal to a wide variety of readers.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

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CATFISH AND MANDALA A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (1999): [poor] KIRIYAMA PACIFIC RIM BOOK PRIZE. Here, Pham explores his Vietnamese upbringing, his family's experience during the Vietnam War and their journey to California as boat people, and his return to Vietnam two decades later as a culturally questioning young man.

RELATED ARTICLE: BOOKMARKS SELECTION

[excellent]

Apples & Oranges

My Brother and Me, Lost and Found

By Marie Brenner

Apples and Oranges is Marie Brenner's sixth book, but she's best known for her award-winning investigative journalism. A writer for Vanity Fair and contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Vogue, Brenner wrote an expose of the tobacco industry, "The Man Who Knew Too Much," which was made into the film The Insider, a 1999 Academy Award Best Picture nominee.

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THE TOPIC: Apples & Oranges details Brenner's earnest and often heartbreaking attempt to get to know (and love) her older brother, Carl, after he is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The two siblings, never close to begin with, drifted both geographically and ideologically farther and farther apart as adults. Liberal Marie moved to New York to pursue a career in journalism, while conservative, gun-toting, George W. Bush-loving Carl abruptly abandoned his career as a lawyer to raise apples in rural Washington State. But when Marie learns of Carl's diagnosis, she makes a desperate journey to her brother's farm, seeking to heal old wounds and create a rapprochement with the prickly sibling she barely knows.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 288 pages. $24. ISBN: 0374173524

NY Times Book Review [classic]

"In less capable hands, a memoir of such reconciliation might become a tired on-the-road travelogue or, worse, a bedside tear-jerker. But in Apples and Oranges, Marie Brenner has delivered a majestic little book. She deepens a tragicomic story into a meditation on family and fate." JAMES PANERO

Entertainment Weekly [excellent]

"If you've ever loathed your sibling, even momentarily, you'll be partial to Apples & Oranges ... While our innate craving to pick fights with family may endure, Brenner reminds us that it's more productive to eat apples than to throw them." VANESSA JUAREZ

New York Times [excellent]

"Ms. Brenner uses the prism of her love and grief for her brother--and her bewilderment too--to create a haunting portrait of him and their family. She has written a book that captures the nervous, emotionally strangled relationship she shared with him for the better part of their lives, a book that explores the difficult algebra of familial love and the possibility of its renewal in the face of impending loss." MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [excellent]

"Brenner ... has crafted a courageous and wrenching examination of sibling differences, as well as an important meditation on the limitations of journalism. There is much pain and poignancy here, but also hopeful truths." JOHN MARSHALL

Newsweek [excellent]

"The book isn't really about fruit, nor is it really about Carl; as in the case of all memoirs, it is mostly about the writer, which is both its greatest strength and weakness. ... 'I am a reporter,' [Brenner] announces at the outset of the book, but that doesn't mean she's a great listener, and much of her battle with Carl is really a fight with herself, to stop asking for facts and hear the truth being offered." JENNIE YABROFF

Seattle Times [good]

"There are generations of family squabbles to keep track of, abbreviated chapters and staccato language that obscure the story, and leaps through years and decades that require mental time travel to follow. But there is a story, a sad one, that provides food for thought for anyone who has ever struggled to get along with someone close to them--sibling, parent or friend." JOHN B. SAUL

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Critics generally adored Apples and Oranges. While they all noted how easily a memoir of this kind could have slipped into overly sentimental eulogizing, they gave Brenner credit for openly and honestly detailing both Carl's diocult personality and her own messy, often misguided attempts to figure him out. The only complaints? One reviewer thought some parts (all of the information on apple farming, for example) digressive, and another cited an initially confusing--but ultimately rewarding--narrative. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer nicely summarized, "Apples & Oranges is a hard-won testament to the power of love and forgiveness in families. Yet the greatest strength of Marie Brenner's profound memoir is how it asks the toughest of questions but avoids the usual facile answers."