Every once in a while, there’s nothing I love more than to toss out the bank statement, loosen up the purse strings, and walk into a bookstore fully intending to buy a random book I know nothing about.  That’s what I did about a week before Halloween, when I stumbled on this gem, a short story collection by Joe Hill, on the day it came out.  I’d been meaning to read Hill’s first published book, the novel Heart-Shaped Box, for a long time, but for a lot of reasons, it never happened.  What had me intrigued was not just the widely-publicized news that Hill is Stephen King’s son, but the fact that he apparently managed to hide this fact until after he’d already attained bestseller status on his own, without the benefit of his father’s famous name.  Character like that is worth supporting in the literary world.

     But like I said, it never happened: until a few weeks ago, when I walked into Borders, in the mood to buy some mainstream horror to read in the week before Halloween.  There, on the “New” table, was a collection of stories by the esteemed Joe Hill.  Without hesitation, I snapped it up, and ended up riveted by every single one of the fifteen stories contained within, from the shortest, a flash meditation on the prospect of ghost trees, to the longest, a novella about an autistic boy who builds constructs not of this world.  The collection is perfect for fans of classic Stephen King.  It’s mainstream horror at its…mainstreamest.  Some of the stories do verge on the harder edges of the genre, like “Best New Horror,” the first in the book, which finds a horror editor in the grasps of a character too horrible for any of his collections, or “The Black Phone,” about an abducted child in the basement of a monster.

     Hill’s stories are tinged, just slightly, with a streak of the literary, though, a caveat to the crowd that’s always manhandled his father.  But he manages to walk the line between “literary” and “popular” with a great deal of skill, and both the English major in me, and the kid who used to stay up till 2am reading horror novels in me both found this book immensely enjoyable.  The prose is straightforward and plain, never too descriptive or flowery, but skilled enough to feel like there is true craft in it.  The stories themselves are vastly different from one another.  In addition to those listed above, there is a genuinely touching love story involving a ghost from the 1950s, and a wonderful story about a man who runs a Museum of Silence, where he displays people’s last breaths.  Really each one is a fresh and unique though, the definition of what a good “collected stories” book (as opposed to a short story collection where all the stories were written to be read together) should be.

     I hate to talk so much about Hill’s father in reviewing this book, because of the work he’s done to establish himself as an individual.  And to an extent, he does succeed.  But still, reservations aside, King is the best comparison: the mainstream genre-writing, and the homespun, plain-folk style are hallmarks of both their styles.  If you’re looking for an emerging voice, and quality writing in genre fiction, or if you miss the old Stephen King, Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts will make a perfect start.

     Every year in the week or two before Halloween, I like to read some Poe, rewatch the Disney adaptation of Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and reminisce a little about being a kid, when stories still had the power to make you want to hide under the covers.  This year, while perusing the local bookstore, I came across the steal of the century in a bargain bin, and the perfect compliment to my Hallow’s Eve memory haunts: this collection of all three Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, in hardcover form, for only ten bucks.

     It’s likely (I hope) that these books were a significant part of your childhood; they were a huge part of mine, as my friends and I used to spend whole lunch periods in elementary school trying to make each other jump.  If you don’t remember the title, you may still recognize the cover, with Stephen Gammell’s absolutely terrifying charcoal-and-pencil, which filled each of the three books with their smoky gruesomeness.  More familiar, of course, were the stories: the escaped mental patient with a hook, the high beams running a car off the road, the girl with the ribbon around her neck, and even funny stories like the Vindow Viper.  There’s also scads of the books’ signature “Jump!” stories, where the reader, pretending to be a dead woman searching for her toe or some other character, will jump at a listener and scream “YOU have it!” 

     If these books were as big a part of your childhood as they were mine, then you’ll likely find them above reproach.  But, nostalgia or no, how do they hold up to the passing of a few decades?  I got to find out Halloween night, when a friend of mine suggested a few dozen of us get together to sit around his fireplace and tell scary stories.  I arrived armed with this book, which I’d read cover to cover to find the best stories.  I did my best, but ended up having to improvise, as series editor/writer Alvin Schwartz’s style (Never met a contraction he liked) is much better suited for the juvenile ear than the college graduate one.  But while the writing is less impressive than it would have been when I was young enough to only care about the story, Schwartz’s work as a folklorist is superior.  At the back of these books is a massive Sources section, left unread by me as a child, to show readers where all of the stories came from, as well as Notes on their origin and development over American history.  When I picked this up I was expecting a trip down memory lane, but ended up getting a very cool snapshot of American folklore as well.  Stephen Gammell’s illustrations, too, remain as creepy and gross as they were on the playground all those years ago.  I’m not sure you could get away with such adult-themed illustrations in a children’s book now, but I’m glad I grew up in a time when you could.

     If you’re looking for a  book to keep you up at night, buy Joe Hill’s new short story collection, which I’ll review soon.  But if you want a sometimes-funny relic from a childhood that ended long ago, Scary Stories is your best-bet.  And I do assume I’ll eventually have children, who probably won’t find “They Eat Your Nose, They Eat Your Eyes” as laughable as I do now, so many years removed from that gripping and all-consuming fear of the unknown, when everything was possible and every story was real.

I Am America (And So Can You!) is the funniest book ever written in a false television persona’s voice by a master satirist.  It’s also the first and only book ever written in a false television persona’s voice by a master satirist, but that is (obviously) beyond the point.  Stephen Tyrone Colbert, presidential candidate and satirical superstar has rocketed to the top of the Bestseller list, with his combination memoir/manifesto/vanity project. 

     I can say, with some certainty, that there has never been a book like this one.  If you’re familiar with the Colbert Report, the format and tone of this book will be as familiar as the smarmy mug on the cover.  It’s written in the first person, and Colbert’s signature delivery and inflection are present on every page; the Report’s signature piece “The Word” also makes appearances throughout, in the form of sarcastic marginalia, which sometimes seem to represent Colbert’s voice (unlike on the show), and sometimes takes The Word’s more familiar, Colbert-hating tone. 

     The structure of the book is mostly that of a memoir, consisting of three main sections, “My American Childhood,” “My American Adolescence,” and “My American Maturity”; in each, Cobert waxes sarcastic in chapters like “Religion,” “Sex & Dating,” and “Immigrants.”  There’s even a “Note to the Future,” and instructions on how to retire the book when you put it away for the evening.  Colbert has also included cool bonuses like the full text of his famous White House Correspondent’s Dinner Speech, and an entire sheet of Newberry Award-like stickers, which read “The Stephen T. Colbert Award For the Literary Excellence,” so you can mark your favorite books with his seal of approval.

     To be honest, I expected to like this book more than I did.  I eagerly bought it on the day it came out (first time I’ve done that with a book in a while), and read it over the next few days.  It’s not that it isn’t funny, because it is, and it will absolutely provide enough laughs to cover the price of the hardcover.  It’s just that I expected it to live up to the Daily Show’s America: The Book, one of my favorite humor volumes of all time, and an important moment for the legitimization of satire in modern America.  That book appealed to an audience beyond that of the show, because it took the whole country as its subject; Colbert’s book focuses on the same thing his show does: Colbert.  Granted, I love the show, but I don’t see this as having the same crossover appeal that the Daily Show’s did.  However, if you’re a fan of the show, and you’re looking for another way to get your Colbert fix during the miserable 23 and a half hours he’s not on the air, I would highly recommend this book to you.  For better or worse, you’re getting pretty much the exact same thing you’d get from watching the tv show.

Last week I reviewed the disappointing “The World Without Us,” a nearly structureless work of non-fiction by the experienced author and journalist Alan Weisman.  I’ve recently found the book’s antithesis, in the absolutely terrific debut, “The Colony,” by author John Tayman, who has never published a book before.  The scope of “The Colony” is nearly as large as that of “World Without Us”: it’s a comprehensive history of the Leper Colony at Molokai, from the eighteenth century till modern day.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I can admit that I bought this book because the hardcover has one of the most startlingly beautiful covers I’ve ever seen.  I “almost bought it” about a dozen times, and then finally bought it at a store in Hawaii, where my wife and I were honeymooning.  Obviously, it’s not exactly romantic reading, but I figured I should try and absorb at least one piece of literary Hawaiian history while there.

     It does end up being a surprisingly far-flung book.  As it’s the history of one colony, I expected this to be a fairly focused examination, but in the course of reading it I got loads of information about Hawaiian history, the relationship between Hawaii and the United States pre and post-statehood, medical exiles throughout history, Catholic missionaries, the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jack London, AIDS, and a variety of information about leprosy itself, including historical information about how the diagnosis and treatment of the disease has developed over the last few centuries.  But despite its wandering interests and the long span of history covered by this book, it never gets too tangential.  Because it follows a chronology, it remains easy to stay involved in the story of this incredible display of human ignorance.  In a way, the book is told through a series of biographies: the men who created the colony and their motivations, a man who single-handedly held off an army because he didn’t want to be separated from his wife and child to be shipped to Molokai, Father Damien, the missionary who lived and died among the lepers, giving his life to their service.  The contemporary history of the place is told through the story of four still-living survivors of Molokai, who are among the dozen or so residents who still call the colony home.

     “The Colony” is a great example of how much stranger truth can be than fiction.  Almost every chapter contains a heartbreaking (scores of the originally exiled patients actually weren’t leprous, but still forced to endure starvation and the harshest living conditions) or inspiring (Father Damien and Mother Marianne’s life-long sacrifices) stories, most of which are so fascinating as to have already had several volumes just written about them.  Tayman’s source material is terrifically rich and varied, and he mines it with deftness and aplomb, painting a picture that’s diverse of subject enough to keep the interest of any reader, but focused enough to hang together as a single narrative.  I recommend this book highly to anyone who likes non-fiction, and I suggest it humbly to anyone (like myself) whose preferences usually discriminate against it.  Few novels could be as fantastic as the story of Molokai.

     I wanted to like this book so bad it hurt.  Having been fascinated by the more unexplored pieces of our world in the “Planet Earth” documentary, I’d been thinking for a few months: if we did our worst, if we really made the world uninhabitable for ourselves, would it be so bad?  Wouldn’t the world recover, with life from the depths and the heavens, and eventually erase our memory, and heal its wounds?  Suddenly, I saw a book called “The World Without Us,” which seemed to be a book-length exploration of just that question.

     The information in this book is, truly, incredibly interesting, but author Alan Weisman lacks the ability that great science writers possess (I’m specifically thinking of Matt Ridley and David Quammen here) to arrange not just a series of digestible scientific facts, but to form them into a narrative as well.  At the end of the book, I didn’t feel like I’d read a book: I felt like I’d read a very disorganized outline.  The most sensible part of the book is the “Post-Human Extinction Timeline” on the dust jacket; that puts things in chronological order.  The book itself though, jumps from too general to too specific.  I would have appreciated Weisman err towards the overly vague: for example, a chapter titled “What Will Remain” primarily focuses on the post-human fate of one building, leaving the reader to extrapolate the rest of our infrastructure’s fate from there.  I wish this chapter would have given a wider view, even if only slightly wider, of what would remain, instead of just discussing one building in Istanbul.  Perhaps that would have been an impossible task, I don’t know.

     There were things I enjoyed about the book.  Weisman was talented enough to keep me from getting completely lost, and his brass tacks writing ability is fine: in other words, sentences and paragraphs weren’t malformed.  It was the shape of the whole book that gave me trouble; rather than forming a narrative line, the chapters are often completely unrelated to each other, as is information contained therein, and it feels like the whole book traces a wide, lumpy circle around a fascinating central idea, instead of taking us on a straight line through it, with a defined starting point and a clear destination.

     I appreciate the questions this book asks, and I love the way it asks them: it doesn’t presuppose a reason for its potential mass extinction of humanity, and Weisman encourages the reader to imagine it’s the rapture if they want, or global warming if that works better.  There’s great facts in it too, like the fact that domesticated house cats would be some of the most successful creatures on the planet if we were to die, or the startling image of cattle farms left unattended, with barely mobile steaks just sitting there waiting for the coyotes to eat them.  But the fact is this book would have done better with a more rigorous editor, or a more experienced writer.  It’s worth flipping through, but I wouldn’t recommend taking the whole plunge, unless you’re that desperate for answers.  If not, wait for someone to do a better job answering the question of what our world would be like, without us.

Destined for Destiny is a deceptively funny book; I say deceptively because, if you judge the book by its cover, it looks like a cookie cutter spoof of the fact that the president is stupid.  Looking at it, you get the impression that there might be a few jokes in it that would make you laugh, but that it would overall be kind of a waste of time.  In fact, when I first picked it up out of our review cabinet, I was hesitant.  Then I noticed the fine print on the fake ribbon prize on the cover: “As seen on TheOnion.com”.  That’s right: this potentially bland book was written in part by Scott Dikkers, the editor-in-chief of The Onion.

Aside from the fact that the cover should have made the quality of this book more obvious, attempts at realism aside, there is little to nothing wrong with Destined for Destiny.  The book follows George W. Bush as he struggles through his “strugglesome youth,” managing to overcome a healthy helping of idiocy to…well, you probably know by now that he’s president.  You will rise and fall with Bush, and relive what he calls the “finest hour” of his presidency: September 11, 2001.  You’ll also learn plenty about the love of Bush’s life: Jesus (and there’s some really funny stuff about “the clown-faced zombie” that he’s married to).

This book is worth any price you could pay for it; it’s up there with The Daily Show’s America: The Book, and John Hodgman’s Areas of My Expertise as one of the funniest books to come out in recent memory.  But if reading’s not your thing, first let me congratulate on getting this far, and second, let me direct your attention to the audiobook version of this book, which the people at Scribner were kind enough to send along as well.  The Bush impersonator, the same guy who does his voice on WeeklyRadioAddress.com, is absolutely hilarious, and a joy to listen to even if you’ve already read the book.

Pride of Baghdad is an allegorical talking animal book that starts and ends in reality, with one of the best one sentence plots I’ve ever seen: American bombings in Iraq freed a number of animals from the Baghdad Zoo, including four lions that wandered away into the desert…Pride of Baghdad is the fictional story of those lions, as they wander through their once beautiful, now war-torn country, trying to find peace.

The easy comparison for this book is Animal Farm, since it’s a political allegory with an animal cast.  The allegory in this book isn’t so straightforward, though; when we read Animal Farm in ninth grade, my teacher made us a chart telling us who each animal represented.  One of the only pitfalls of Pride is the danger of overthinking the allegory on your first read, as I did.

Focusing on the book instead of its real world parallels, I found one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read.  Brian K. Vaughan, the book’s writer, has always had the talent/luck of pairing with perfect artists for his stories. I was a little nervous about Niko Henrichon, the artist of Pride, since I’d only seen his work in a book called Barnum, which was interesting, but I thought not all that original.  Ten pages into Pride, it was apparent that no one else could have drawn it better than Henrichon; the pencils and colors in this book are as unique and original as they are stunningly beautiful. 

There has of course been plenty of debate about the book’s politics.  Given its story, I was expecting Vaughan’s personal views to come through a bit more, but he stayed firmly in the background; Pride is no anti-war polemic.  Instead, it’s a multi-layered allegory that examines Iraq itself, and the nature of freedom, as well as the costs of war, just or not.

Of course, bigger implications aside, the story wouldn’t work if its characters were uninteresting.  But the lions, whose lack of humanity I saw as a potential stumbling block, ended up being one of my favorite things about it.  Almost immediately Vaughan crafts four believable characters in Zill, Ali, Safa, and Noor.  They allow Pride to toy with the conventions of a Disney talking animal movie––this set me up for some really emotional moments throughout the story, as Vaughan jumps his pride in and out of Disney-land.

I can’t recommend this book enough: the whole thing crackles with that synergy that makes comics great, the magic that happens when an artist and a writer work perfectly together, and the product seems to come from one shared mind. 

Vaughan has said that no matter what he does in his career, this is the work he’ll be proudest of––tall words from an acclaimed Eisner winner.  After reading Pride, I totally understand––it’s the first book I’ve read recently that made me jealous as a writer.  Vaughan’s work until this point has all been good, some of it excellent, but this is the first work he’s produced that may prove transcendent; the first work that seems to have been delivered through Vaughan from a higher place that writers rarely tap into, if ever.

I’ve been thinking about Pride since the moment I finished it, and while everyone who reads it seems to come away with something different, the thought that stayed with me was this: Why is it that the story of four fictional lions, as well-written and drawn as they are, moves me and grabs my attention infinitely more than the daily tragedies and triumphs of the members of my own pride, American and otherwise, in Iraq?  I don’t know the answer to it, but I think Vaughan’s done a damn good job raising the question.  

Game of Shadows is that rare piece of journalism that manages to get itself talked about everywhere from bars, to classrooms, to corporate meetings.  Ten years from now, we may very well look back on it as the book that woke us up, the book that pulled the curtains back and forced us to look at the hypocrisy and scandal that are rotting our pastime from the inside.  Or, it could be remembered as a petty, mean-spirited, and unsuccessful attack on a man who may go on to be considered the best baseball player of all time.

The press around the book places it somewhere in between the two––after reading it, though, it would be hard to see it as anything but the former.  Game of Shadows is the most well-researched, interesting book of its kind that I have ever read.  I was incredibly wary going into it, fearing that I would be reading a 300-page diatribe against Barry Bonds.  I am one of the millions of Americans who read the Sports Illustrated exerpts from the book, and they did little to allay that fear.  But what I found instead was an intelligent, well-thought out, and for the most part objective survey of the pervasiveness of steroids in sports.

The book has been presented (including by its own cover) as a book about Barry Bonds––most likely because no matter how noble the intentions, a book has to sell a lot of copies to justify its existence, and Barry Bonds is the most famous person implicated in Game of Shadows.  But, as Sports Illustrated noted in a much smaller article that got no coverage or mention anywhere else, is that the book is much more damning to the world of American Track and Field than it is to the narrow world of Barry Bonds.  I was pleasantly surprised by this, and shocked by how sick with steroids the Track and Field world is.

In addition to Bonds, the other major personality in Game of Shadows is Victor Conte, the man running the infamous Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, more commonly reviled as BALCO.  Conte and BALCO distributed steroids to dozens of athletes, with names ranging from Bill Romanowski to Barry Bonds.  Game of Shadows delves extensively into the psychology of Conte, exploring his past and his motivations for becoming the most famous steroid dealer in the world.

The book was also an easier read than I expected––I am a big sports fan, but I know little to nothing about steroids.  At least, I knew little to nothing about them before reading this book.  Game of Shadows, without at any point feeling like a textbook, very clearly and simply lays out the effects, both negative and positive, of different kinds of steroids, making it clear why they are so popular. 

If you read this book, you will find a number of things––an unbelievably detailed investigation into steroid use in professional sports is one of them.  A mostly unbiased look at the problems that causes is another––the only times the authors step outside of their objectivity is when they adopt a hurt, “Say it ain’t so” attitude, or the outraged and offended tone that will resonate with most sports fans, and certainly did with this one.

     Charles Barkley played basketball––he made a lot of money, and he said some things that some people (myself included) thought were funny, and others found offensive.  But, at the end of the day, Sir Charles played a game, and he got rich doing it.  Now, he’s gotten it into his head that he should take the fame and money he got from basketball, and try to do something positive for society with it.  Namely, he wants to try and make some progress defeating what he calls “the biggest cancer” of his lifetime: racism.  Having read his approach to trying to address the problem, I was intrigued: the idea was for Barkley to sit down with some of the nation’s most famous actors, athletes, politicians, and social workers, and simply talk about race.  And though the subject seems so taboo in so many arenas, Barkley said that people were incredibly receptive, and even eager to talk about it.

     The book consists of thirteen chapters, each one a hybrid interview/conversation with a different personality (including such huge names as Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, Ice Cube, Marian Edelman, Morgan Freeman, and Samuel L. Jackson), with Barkley’s observations and comments interspersed throughout.  Surprisingly, Barkley may be the most interesting voice among the crowd, as he balances and highlights different arguments made by each of the interviewees––his desire to help heal the nation is both refreshing and obvious. 

     The tone of the book is, in my opinion, exactly the frame that’s needed for a discussion of race, and particularly of the problems surrounding race in today’s society.  There is very little anger in the actual dialogues, though anger is one of many mitigating emotions that brings people to the table to talk about the subject.  Once the conversations begin, the goal is entirely towards improvement, healing; rather than a “this is what I hate about the way things are,” the interviewees take a “this is how I think we can make things better” tone.  Some of the highlights include Tiger Woods opening up about his place in the country as a mixed-race celebrity, Bill Clinton explaining how to turn public education around, and Barack Obama discussing the dangers of anti-intellectualism in the black community.

     Education is of course one of the subjects that comes up most frequently in the book, since historically it’s been the most obviously successful way for the disadvantaged to gain security.  Along with Bill Cosby and his recent message to the black community, the other topic that appears almost in every chapter is that of economics.  In his introduction to the paperback edition, Barkley discusses how frustrated he was by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, not because of the mistreatment of black people, but by the mistreatment and abandonment of poor people in general, white and black.  Many others, including note that the problems in America between people seem to be much more class and economically driven than purely race-driven, though obviously these are difficult issues to disentangle.

     Barkley’s goal with this book was to get people talking, to make his readers realize that most people want things to be better, but that we can’t make them any better if we continue to ignore it.  I found the book to be an incredibly intelligent, multi-faceted view of what may be the most controversial single subject in the country today.  I urge anyone and everyone who is interested in such a discussion to pick this book up––it is at turns thought-provoking, hilarious, and inspiring, and well worth a read.  I end this review with the words Barkley ends his book with: “Dialogue is the best place to start.  Hell, it’s the only place to start.”