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| Laurie Grodstein's 'Family' is full of relatable parental angst Dr. Pete Dizinoff is a mensch: caring internist, devoted husband, father and friend. So why is he living above his garage, estranged ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Adapting Coetzee's Disgrace, Petina Gappah and Apostolos Doxiadis With its stilted dialogue and its solipsistic world view, JM Coetzee's Booker-winning novel Disgrace should have been an unfilmable novel. Has the new film, starring John Malkovich, achieved the rare feat of transforming a great book into a good film? Xan Brooks discusses it with Sarah Crown and Claire Armitstead.As the Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah becomes the second short story writer to win the Guardian first book award, she explains why short fiction was the perfect form to tell the story of a troubled but irrepressible country.And we discuss maths with Apostolos Doxiadis, co-creater of one of the year's most unusual triumphs, Logicomix – a graphic novel which tells the story of Bertrand Russell's doomed attempt to write the ultimate rule-book for mathematics.Reading ListLogicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou (Bloomsbury)An Elegy for Easterly, by Petina Gappah (Faber)Disgrace, by JM Coetzee (Vintage) and at the ICA, London SW1Claire ArmitsteadScott CawleySarah CrownXan Brooks feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The year's best music books David Sinclair leafs through the 2009 crop of rock and pop booksThe death of Michael Jackson in June prompted a frenzy of publishing activity, and bookshops were buried under piles of at least half-a-dozen new titles long before his family actually got around to burying the erstwhile king of pop. Top of the heap was Michael Jackson 1958-2009 – Life of a Legend (Headline, ВЈ17.99) by Michael Heatley, which spent four weeks at No 1 in the Nielsen BookScan chart and has sold 35,000 copies in the UK and 150,000 copies worldwide, to date. Heatley, an author who has somehow found time to write more than 100 biographies on subjects ranging from John Peel to Rolf Harris, is not given to agonising over matters of nuance, let alone literary style. His book provides a functional, sympathetic resumГ© of Jackson's life, and reads rather like an extended obituary designed to resonate with fans of the singer. The story of Jackson's astonishing career is celebrated as much through hundreds of pictures and their accompanying captions as by the text itself, while the murkier side of his private life is afforded a cursory mention only where unavoidable.Of the other books commemorating the singer's demise, Michael Jackson – The King of Pop 1958-2009 by Chris Roberts (Carlton, ВЈ14.99) merits a mention for its fractionally more trenchant tone and mildly enquiring approach. However, in terms of genuine insight and vitality, none of them compares to Jackson's own, often overlooked account of his life, Moonwalk (William Heinemann, ВЈ16.99). Written in 1988, Moonwalk was republished in October with an added foreword by the founder of Motown, Berry Gordy, and an intriguing postscript by Shaye Areheart, one of the book's original editors. Having been cajoled and assisted by a team of dedicated professionals over four years, Jacko produced a surprisingly lucid and occasionally revealing account of what it was actually like to be him.Another deceased superstar was put under the biographical microscope in Bob Marley – The Untold Story (Harper Collins, ВЈ20) by Chris Salewicz. While Jackson is considered to be a tarnished idol by all but his most ardent supporters, Marley's premature demise at the age of 36 has conferred a saintly status on the reggae star, which Salewicz is happy to indulge. "Some will come out and say it directly: that Bob Marley is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ," he declares, before flagging up various conspiracy theories to explain the sudden onset of the cancer that was to claim his life, thereby turning the story into "a modern version of the crucifixion".Salewicz's boundless respect for his subject is a plus when it comes to his knowledge and understanding of Marley's Jamaican heritage and a detailed appreciation of his musical accomplishments, but is a bit disconcerting when it comes to matters of Marley's all-too-human failings. The author reports without comment an occasion when Marley "beat his wife [Rita] around the hotel suite" resulting in a very large bill "for repairs to assorted fixtures and fittings", and notes that, while married to her, the musician fathered 13 children by eight different women. "Who knows what emotional and psychological complications . . . were involved?" Salewicz ponders, referring to Bob of course, not Rita.Emotional and psychological complications are the engine that drives Bad Vibes – Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall (Windmill, ВЈ8.99), the outrageously indiscreet memoirs of the singer and songwriter Luke Haines. Aggressive, vainglorious, insecure and forever teetering on the brink of another meltdown, Haines strides (or hobbles) through a highly personalised account of the great Britpop wars of the 1990s, insulting virtually everyone involved. While Oasis, Blur and Suede rule the charts, Haines hangs around on the fringes in his own groups the Auteurs and, later, the Baader Meinhof Gang, too cool or too wasted to embrace success even when offered to him on a plate. Bad Vibes turns casual misanthropy into an art form, and makes a brilliant read in the process.When it comes to heroic failures, however, even Haines cannot compare with the Canadian heavy metal group Anvil, whose rags to more rags story is chronicled in merciless detail in Anvil – The Story of Anvil (Bantam Press, ВЈ20). The band for whom great things were just around the corner in the early 1980s have plodded on to the present day, finally achieving recognition of sorts thanks to a film which portrayed them as something akin to the real Spinal Tap. The book, which is basically parallel autobiographies by the guitarist Lips Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, fills in a lot of details that were glossed over in the movie, providing a step-by-step guide on precisely how to blow it in the music business. The story is funny and sad but also strangely heartwarming as this guileless pair continue to place their trust in each other and the belief that things are just about to get better in the face of sustained and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.For heavy metal buffoonery on a cosmic scale, there is not much to beat I Am Ozzy (Sphere ВЈ20), the autobiography of Ozzy Osbourne. From unpromising beginnings as a prisoner (by the age of 18) and then a slaughterhouse worker, Osbourne has somehow carved out a career as an international reality TV celebrity, having invented the heavy metal genre during his time as a founder member of Black Sabbath. He was, by his own account, out of his head at every step of the way, and owes it all to the efforts of the people around him, together with an uncanny knack for holding people's attention. What could the guys from Anvil have achieved had they been blessed with even an ounce of such dumb luck?It's not often you get to hear the drummer's side of the story, but books by two percussion pioneers appeared this year. Ginger Baker's Hellraiser (John Blake, ВЈ18.99) – modestly subtitled The Autobiography of the World's Greatest Drummer – gives a blow by blow account of a long and rather spotty career during which less than three years were spent with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce in the 60s supergroup Cream. Baker, now aged 70, is not a man to forget a grudge, and many old scores are settled – particularly with Bruce - in this cantankerous account.In contrast to Baker's rough and ready approach, Bill Bruford – The Autobiography (Jawbone, ВЈ14.95) is an unusually literate and reflective work which dissects the drummer's art, and the dilemmas faced by modern musicians in general, with an almost surgical precision. But while the former Yes and King Crimson drummer's tale is more elegantly expressed, by the end of it Bruford is just as pissed off as Baker and all the others. Pondering his decision to retire (at the age of 59) he concludes: "I know too much and can think of nothing to play. Best be silent, then."David Sinclair's Wannabe: The Spice Girls Revisited is published by Omnibus.Pop and rockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich Jenni Murray salutes a long-overdue demolition of the suggestion that positive thinking is the answer to all our problemsEvery so often a book appears that so chimes with your own thinking, yet flies so spectacularly in the face of fashionable philosophy, that it comes as a profoundly reassuring relief. After reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, I feel as if I can wallow in grief, gloom, disappointment or whatever negative emotion comes naturally without worrying that I've become that frightful stereotype, the curmudgeonly, grumpy old woman. Instead, I can be merely human: someone who doesn't have to convince herself that every rejection or disaster is a golden opportunity to "move on" in an upbeat manner.Ehrenreich came to her critique of the multi-billion-dollar positive-thinking industry – a swamp of books, DVDs, life coaches, executive coaches and motivational speakers – in similar misery-making circumstances to those I experienced. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and, like me, found herself increasingly disturbed by the martial parlance and "pink" culture that has come to surround the disease. My response when confronted with the "positive attitude will help you battle and survive this experience" brigade was to rail against the use of militaristic vocabulary and ask how miserable the optimism of the "survivor" would make the poor woman who was dying from her breast cancer. It seemed to me that an "invasion" of cancer cells was a pure lottery. No one knows the cause. As Ehrenreich says: "I had no known risk factors, there was no breast cancer in the family, I'd had my babies relatively young and nursed them both. I ate right, drank sparingly, worked out, and, besides, my breasts were so small that I figured a lump or two would improve my figure." (Mercifully, she hasn't lost her sense of humour.)I had long suspected that improved survival rates for women who had breast cancer had absolutely nothing to do with the "power" of positive thinking. For women diagnosed between 2001 and 2006, 82% were expected to survive for five years, compared with only 52% diagnosed 30 years earlier. The figures can be directly related to improved detection, better surgical techniques, a greater understanding of the different types of breast cancer and the development of targeted treatments. Ehrenreich presents the evidence of numerous studies demonstrating that positive thinking has no effect on survival rates and she provides the sad testimonies of women who have been devastated by what one researcher has called "an additional burden to an already devastated patient".Pity, for example, the woman who wrote to the mind/body medical guru Deepak Chopra: "Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps re-occurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude."As Ehrenreich goes on to explain, exhortations to think positively – to see the glass as half-full even when it lies shattered on the floor – are not restricted to the pink-ribbon culture of breast cancer. She roots America's susceptibility to the philosophy of positive thinking in the country's Calvinist past and demonstrates how, in its early days, a puritanical "demand for perpetual effort and self-examination to the point of self-loathing" terrified small children and reduced "formerly healthy adults to a condition of morbid withdrawal, usually marked by physical maladies as well as inner terror".It was only in the early 19th century that the clouds of Calvinist gloom began to break and a new movement began to grow that would take as fervent a hold as the old one had. It was the joining of two thinkers, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, in the 1860s that brought about the formalisation of a post-Calvinist world-view, known as the New Thought Movement. A new type of God was envisaged who was no longer hostile and indifferent, but an all-powerful spirit whom humans had merely to access to take control of the physical world.Middle-class women found this new style of thinking, which came to be known as the "laws of attraction", particularly beneficial. They had spent their days shut out from any role other than reclining on a chaise longue, denied any opportunity to strive in the world, but the New Thought approach and its "talking therapy" developed by Quimby opened up exciting new possibilities. Mary Baker Eddy, a beneficiary of the cure, went on to found Christian Science. Ehrenreich notes that although this new style of positive thinking did apparently help invalidism or neurasthenia, it had no effect whatsoever on diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis and cholera – just as, today, it will not cure cancer.Thus it was that positive thinking, the assumption that one only has to think a thing or desire it to make it happen, began its rapid rise to influence. Today, as Ehrenreich shows, it has a massive impact on business, religion and the world's economy. She describes visits to motivational speaker conferences where workers who have recently been made redundant and forced to join the short-term contract culture are taught that a "good team player" is by definition "a positive person" who "smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical and gratefully submits to whatever the boss demands". These are people who have less and less power to chart their own futures, but who are given, thanks to positive thinking, "a world-view – a belief system, almost a religion – that claimed they were, in fact, infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds."And none was more susceptible to the lure of this philosophy than those self-styled "masters of the universe", the Wall Street bankers. Those of us raised to believe that saving up, having a deposit and living within one's means were the way to proceed and who wondered how on earth the credit crunch and the subprime disasters could have happened need look no further than the culture that argued that positive thinking would enable anyone to realise their desires. (Or as one of Ehrenreich's chapter headings has it, "God wants you to be rich".)Ehrenreich's work explains where the cult of individualism began and what a devastating impact it has had on the need for collective responsibility. We must, she says, shake off our capacity for self-absorption and take action against the threats that face us, whether climate change, conflict, feeding the hungry, funding scientific inquiry or education that fosters critical thinking. She is anxious to emphasise that she does "not write in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness… and the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking". Her book, it seems to me, is a call for the return of common sense and, I'm afraid, in what purports to be a work of criticism, I can find only positive things to say about it. Damn!Health, mind and bodyScience and natureBarbara Ehrenreichguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Christopher Reid wins Costa book prize Poet picks up ВЈ30,000 prize and huge increase in readership for A Scattering – which has sold less than 1,000 copiesAn intensely personal and moving series of poems written as a tribute to his late wife tonight won Christopher Reid one of the UK's most important literary prizes.Reid follows in the footsteps of Douglas Dunn, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney by becoming only the fourth poet to win the overall Costa book of the year award, picking up, in total, a ВЈ30,000 prize and an incalculable increase in readership.Novelist Josephine Hart, who chaired the panel of judges, said his winning book, A Scattering was "good bordering on great," and that when she said great she meant the likes of Yeats and Browning. "It is devastating piece of work and all of us on the jury felt it was a book we would wish everybody to read."Hart said the winner, decided by an 11-person jury, had been chosen by a "substantial" majority. The dissenters were happy for it to win, she said. The strong favourite had been Colm TГіibГn for Brooklyn who could be forgiven for developing a complex. He is something of a bridesmaid when it comes to major literary awards: he almost always nearly wins them.Reid, aged 60, lost his wife Lucinda Gane to cancer in 2005. A Scattering consists of four poetic sequences, the first written when his wife is alive and they are on holiday in Crete and the other three - 'Sparse breaths, then none - /and it was done' - after her death.They are poems that are often unbearably emotional as his wife dies in her hospice bed, in Reid's tightening arms. There are poems about his wife's brain tumour: 'malignant but not malign,/ it set about doing - /not evil,/simply the job tumours have always done.'There are also poems about the task of shaving her head for her - 'Revealed: a handsome/unabashed smoothness/ I couldn't stop wanting/ to fondle and kiss.'Reid is a well established poet and was poetry editor of Faber and Faber between 1991 and 1999. Previous awards include the Somerset Maugham award, the Hawthornden prize and the Signa poetry award. This win is far bigger than any of them, however, and will substantially boost sales. Poetry being poetry - as in it is never a huge seller - less than a thousand people have bought A Scattering.Reid won in what was a competitive field. Apart from Toibin the other contenders were Patrick Ness, a reviewer for the Guardian who won best children's category for The Ask and the Answer - his second book of a planned trilogy; Raphael Selbourne who won first novel for Beauty, the story of a young Bangladeshi woman who returns to Wolverhampton after escaping an abusive arranged marriage; and Graham Farmelo for his biography of the very strange but very brilliant quantum physicist Paul Dirac.The winner was decided by a diverse panel of 11 judges consisting of Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp; Actors Caroline Quentin, Neil Pearson and Dervla Kirwan; ITV political editor Tom Bradby; model Marie Helvin; biographer Robert Lacey; writer William Nicholson; author Sandra Howard; and Tom Fleming, deputy editor of the Literary Review.Alister Babb, Waterstone's poetry buyer, welcomed the win: "It is always significant when a work of poetry wins the Costa. Christopher Reid now joins giants such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney as one of the few poets to take the prize, and in doing so, bring more people to this undervalued art form."Jonathan Ruppin, of Foyles, called A Scattering, "an extraordinary tribute to his late wife bursting with love and vitality." He added: "Poetry is inevitably more of a niche market than the other categories, but this collection seems to have struck a chord: his dignity and eloquence puts into words the feelings of anyone who has lost someone dear to them."Costa book awardsPoetryAwards and prizesMark Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |