Powell's Bookstores Chicago Book Blog

White Jazz

powellschicago — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 17:01:27 +0000

“Dish duty – a lilt to her hands – maybe background music. Smiling – a face almost mine, but gentle. I hit the horn-” James Ellroy, White Jazz

James Ellroy’s White Jazz may be one of the most difficult books that I’ve ever read, but by the last pages, it was also one of the most rewarding. The book follows Dave Klein, a true thug sheltered in the LAPD at the tail-end of 1950’s corruption. You follow his brutal story, as he slowly becomes entangled in a murky conspiracy that involves the most powerful in LA with the most wretched remnants of prohibition-era America. And somehow, eventually, you’ll care about that awful Dave Klein, as Ellroy takes you on his road down something close to redemption.

Now, here’s why I think this book is difficult, but still worth your time. For one thing, I didn’t read all three of the books preceding this one, which serves, really, as the climax of his L.A. Quartet, which includes: Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere (which I read and did love), and L.A. Confidential. The good thing is that Dave Klein is a new character and just as in the dark as you will be about some of these happenings if you haven’t read the previous books. The bad thing is that some of the characters and moments probably would have been more satisfying if I had read the whole series.

But if you can get past that hurdle, you might find the prose itself cumbersome and, for some, unreadable. White Jazz is told from Dave Klein’s point of view, some would call it stream-of-consciousness. But I would describe it, I feel more accurately, as a torrential downpour-of-brutal staccato bursts-consciousness (I’m copyrighting that). The prose here is terse and cut in tight short sentences. The legend is that the book was originally 900 pages long and that the publisher complained. In response (as the story goes) Ellroy cut adjectives, verbs, articles, etc. until he had the present version at just over 300 pages. And the book does feel like it’s been cut, a narrative told in shreds.

When beginning the book, I thought that I couldn’t get through it, that the minimal prose was just too much (ha). But then something happened. The story became too interesting for me to stop. The hard-boiled elements just got harder. And then I began to realize what type of portrait I was really getting of the conflicted soul of Dave Klein, and how the sliced-narrative was really the only way his story could be told, one marked with quick aggression and constant doubt and simple, but beautiful, humanity. White Jazz is a difficult book but well worth the trouble, friends.

Ellroy, James. White Jazz. Vintage. Paperback, octavo. List price: $14.95. Our in-store price: $5.95.

Timothy works proudly at our University Village store. He teaches, writes, edits, and is cute too, some say.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

powellschicago — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 17:01:18 +0000

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In his introduction to Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, political commentator Thomas Frank states that “there is nothing really novel about the idea that free markets are the very essence of freedom. What is new is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when free-market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.”

Frank is referring, of course, to the rise of the regulation-decrying Tea Party and the Obama-described “shellacking” of the Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections; both of which occurred on the heels of the 2008 financial collapse. The fact that said collapse was due in large part to the misdeeds of loosely-regulated, multi-billion dollar financial institutions makes the timing of this latest revolt against any and all perceived foes of the free market strange. The fact that said financial institutions were then bailed out by taxpayers–without being punished or even threatened with future punishment should they misbehave again– is what makes the timing absolutely stupefying. It’s the mystery that Frank sets out to uncover over the course of the book.

To provide a frame of reference, he contrasts the public reaction of our current economic crisis (the worst since the Depression) with that of the Depression itself. Frank argues that the events of 2008 should have led to a 1930’s-style populist movement in which the public became more keenly aware of the haves and the have-nots, as well as the often unfair economic conditions that led to and maintained the distinction between the two. He argues that it should have led to a groundswell of support for public works projects and a demand for tougher regulatory laws to ensure that those responsible never had a chance to gamble away the public’s money again. Instead, 2009 brought rallies warning against encroaching tyranny at the hands of Socialism. Government involvement at virtually any level was declared to be overly intrusive and interfering with the natural order of the free market. The “resurgent Right”, in Frank’s words, “doubled down” on their commitment to eliminating what little regulation remained, claiming that it alone was responsible for mucking up the process of separating the rightful economic winners from the deserving losers.

So what’s Frank’s explanation for this? As he did in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Frank observes that the Right has largely been responsible for defining the debate. They were quick to tap into the public outrage at the bailouts and ensure that the blame fell where they wanted it to (on the government, of course, but not for failing to prevent the collapse. Rather, Big Brother was blamed for being TOO INVOLVED while Wall Street pretty much did whatever it wanted). This redirecting of rage involved passionate, muddled arguments that required people to simultaneously feel anger and sympathy for big business as the line was blurred between the small business owner and the hedge fund manager. Glenn Beck is a repeated target of Frank’s, not simply because Frank enjoys going after low-hanging fruit, but because Beck represents such a perfect example of the willful misleading of the public as to whom was responsible for their troubles. All the while, the Democrats allowed it to happen by not taking their ideology to the people in the way that their opponents did. As misguided as Frank finds the utopian ideal of the free market, he admits that its appeal is “better than nothing.”

If you’ve read Thomas Frank before, you’ll know that his appeal lies in his ability to succinctly call bullshit (some critics claim that he oversimplifies, something that I’m certainly guilty of in this limited space). His writing is often genuinely funny and I find myself enjoying his style most when he lets his anger and frustration seep to the surface. There’s a somewhat lengthy passage involving the resurgence of Ayn Rand, throughout which he can barely contain his contempt. Left or right leaning political commentaries don’t change opponents’ opinions often and Frank is well aware that his books are no different (he stated in an interview that writing books is a waste of time–with tongue in cheek, of course). Most potential readers know ahead of time whether they’ll agree with a book and love it, or dismiss it without cracking the cover. I can at least say that I thoroughly enjoyed agreeing with Thomas Frank again.

Frank, Thomas. Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right. Metropolitan Books. Paperback, octavo. List price: $25.00. Our in-store price: $6.95.

Chris S. works at Powell’s Hyde Park, but be on the lookout for his Mazda minivan as he cruises around the greater Chicagoland area helping people prune or jettison their libraries.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

Monsieur Pain

powellschicago — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 17:00:42 +0000

“Never have I felt so proud and so wretched to be a writer. There’s not a lot more I can say about Monsieur Pain.”
—ROBERTO BOLANO, from the Preliminary Note to Monsieur Pain

In the years since his death, Roberto Bolano has erupted out of obscurity, becoming one of the most auspicious voices in a new American canon. A Latin American poet best known for his novels, Bolano’s works have been hailed as the most groundbreaking of his generation, and are an absolute necessity for lovers of emerging literature.

The story is narrated by its namesake, Pierre Pain, a mesmerist in 1930’s Paris. When he is asked to help cure a mysterious long-term case of hiccups afflicting the poet Cesar Vallejo, the unwitting protagonist finds himself engulfed in a world of conspiracy. In Monseuir Pain, Bolano carries through his own imagining of Vallejo’s Paris with the same vivid fervor and suspense one would expect to find in the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe or the films of David Lynch.

While his more famous works, 2666 or The Savage Detectives, may be considered his most masterful, Monsieur Pain is an award winning novella which captures all of the themes which distinguish Bolano from his contemporaries, encompassing both his fascination with crime fiction and his vested delineations of the life of the literati, both real and imagined. Despite its tendency toward the surreal, Monsieur Pain is both accessible to novice readers and necessary for the hardcore Bolano fan.

Bolano, Roberto. Monsieur Pain. Picador. Paperback, octavo. List price: $14.00. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Stephanie S. is a part-time bookseller at our University Village store. She also teaches poetry in the Chicago Public Schools.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

Gulliver’s Travels

powellschicago — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 17:01:39 +0000

“…by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” – Gulliver’s Travels

When we think about Jonathan Swift’s brilliant Gulliver’s Travels, we, or at least, I, first usually recall short little soldiers tying down an absurdly giant man. Those more familiar with the book (again: I!) will also remember the classic book as a satiric gem that gives a bitter look at humankind. There is no doubt that Jonathan Swift was misanthrope. He found people petty, mean, and truly disgusting (like smelly and ugly even). But what I found most interesting about “Gulliver’s Travels” in subsequent readings was that, despite its underlying hatred for humanity, behind all of that, at its very core, is a very humanistic book.

Swift spends a lot of time describing these strange new worlds, each more bizarre than the last. Even more strange (but familiar) is the 18th century society that Swift savagely picks apart. What’s interesting is that Swift is not coming from a place of cynicism, or even hopelessness. What’s evident is that the book is coming from an almost primal indignation. Swift, hater of humanity, questions our utter inhumanity. He not only questions it, he demands that we do too. He wants us to be better.

Gulliver’s Travels is fun, ridiculous, and powerful. It will make you question our own modern evils and wish that Swift was around today, to ask the right questions, and to give voice to the rage we should be feeling in our own hearts.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Penguin. Paperback, octavo. List price: $14.00. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Timothy works proudly at our University Village store. He writes, edits, and is cute too, some say.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

powellschicago — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 01:10:40 +0000

John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman goes far beyond the normal period novel’s dalliances in romance and the upper class and delves into the then rapidly advancing intellectual culture of Victorian Britain. Sarah Woodruff, the novel’s protagonist, invokes the spirit of the “fallen women” marked irrevocably by society for her unconventional love affair with a French seaman. However, the heroine, much like the novel she’s encapsulated in, tenaciously and creatively seeks liberation from society’s formal expectations. Through the eyes of the male narrator, Fowles examines not only the fate of a progressive Hester Prynne, but also the major thinkers and artists that influenced the Victorian Era and Gilded Age like Charles Darwin, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson and young Sigmund Freud. The novel’s famously unorthodox “choose-your-own-adventure” ending itself is the literary equivalent of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, echoing the evolution of both the novel’s heroine and an entire society at large.

Great for the casual and serious reader alike, The French Lieutenant’s Woman blows the myth of Victorian prudish sexuality wide open.

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Back Bay. Paperback, octavo. List price: $15.95. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Mandy wears her heart on her sleeve at Powell’s Lakeview and Powell’s University Village.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica, & the Masterpiece that Changed the World

powellschicago — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:01:44 +0000

Even though the Picasso exhibit has come to a close at the Art Institute of Chicago, you can still find many books filled with the history, stories and imagery of the multi-talented artist. One of my favorites, Picasso’s War- The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece that Changed the World, isn’t filled with beautiful plates, but instead describes the politics and drive behind one of Picasso’s most famous and controversial works “Guernica.”

Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, but many of his artistically productive years were spent in Paris amid a golden age of creativity and talented Parisians and expatriates. The Parisian atmosphere in the early 1900’s was full of innovation, discussion, passion, and artistic community. The artists of the time were primed for the opportunity to utilize their art to comment on current affairs. When Hitler bombed the Basque village of Guernica in 1937 in support of Franco, Picasso felt it imperative to make a statement. Picasso had earlier in life made his feelings about Franco clear, and the bombing of Guernica by the German forces only fueled the artist’s passion to speak out against the devastation of the town and the emotional impact on the people. The result was the mural sized painting of Guernica, with its ghost like figures, pain-filled eyes, mouths, and deconstructed forms that create a sense of crumbling, tumbling, and collapse of a moment.

Martin’s “Guernica” is about a 100 year old war but remains pertinent today. The piece itself is an illustration against inhumane acts, but also functions as a motivation for artists, not only as a beautiful and innovative work, but as a work of art filled with purpose.

Martin, Russell. Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica, & the Masterpiece that Changed the World. Plume. Paperback, octavo. List price: $15.95. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Kyra is our “artist-in-residence” at Powell’s University Village where she takes special care of our art and art history sections and helps add the quirky touches to our newest store.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience

powellschicago — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:01:21 +0000

We’ve all heard of the Salem witch trials that lasted from 1692-1693, but the focus is never on the nine judges who helped send over 20 innocent people to their deaths. Richard Francis gives us a detailed picture of one of those judges, namely, Samuel Sewall, a very religious, law-abiding Puritan citizen, but a very conscientious man who reflected upon his actions and found himself to have been woefully misguided in his pursuit of the devil.

No doubt the Puritans were zealots, as are many people throughout the religious world today, and it was this zealotry that took hold of their fears and subdued any traces of rational thought. They saw things in black and white, good and evil, and they believed any manifestation of strange behavior as “the devil made me do it.” They applied this attitude to the bratty ranting of little girls and with no hesitation, unequivocally accused of sorcery those random victims the girls pointed to. When some upstanding citizens were accused, it took public protests to bring down the court.

Judge Sewall, contrite and resolute, publicly apologized five years after the trials, thus taking personal responsibility for his role in this mass hysteria. The author believes this moment of apology made Sewall a modern man and altered the status quo. The Mather family, as in Cotton and Increase, were not happy with Sewall’s apology. Saying it irked them to no end is putting it mildly.

Sewall’s struggle to do what his conscience said was right changed him dramatically. After his apology, Sewall became an early abolitionist, supporter of Native Americans, a utopian theorist and a man sensitive to the rights of women. He was a devoted husband and father (he and his wife had 14 children). On a lighter note, we are introduced to Sewall’s abhorrence of periwigs. If there was one way to make a bad impression on Sewall, all you had to do was wear a wig in his presence.

Because the author draws heavily from Sewall’s diaries, we get a genuine view of Puritan life and insight into the mindset of the Puritans in a new and often hostile environment, with stresses and discomforts we have no inkling of. Although I found myself thinking they were a bunch of loony tunes stuck on a warped plane of religious self-righteousness, I also see a correlation to our own current time, where political figures often make empty apologies for all sundry of behaviors, most likely because they just get “caught,” not because they gave their actions in-depth reflection and found themselves to be lacking. And if you think hysteria is a past fad, look up the NY Times Magazine article about Le Roy, New York.

Francis, Richard. Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience. Harper Perennial. Paperback, octavo. List price: $15.95. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Denise works tirelessly in customer service for Powell’s Books Wholesale where she mutters under her breath a lot and often reads on the sly.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

Just Kids

powellschicago — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:01:19 +0000

“I came home and there were cutouts of statues, the torsos and the buttocks of the Greeks, the Slaves of Michaelangelo, images of sailors, tattoos, and stars. To keep up with him, I read Robert passages from Miracle of the Rose, but he was always a step ahead. While I was reading Genet, he was becoming Genet.” —PATTI SMITH, JUST KIDS

Just Kids is an igniting memoir which chronicles one of the 21st century’s most poetic relationships. Rock icon Patti Smith tells of her uninhibited relationship with the late photographer Robert Maplethorpe, beginning with their chance meeting on a street in Manhattan in the 1960’s and ending with Maplethorpe’s tragic death at the hands of HIV/AIDS. Smith’s reflection of their relationship—first as a lovers, then as a collaborators, but ultimately as fateful kin—provides heartbreakingly profound insights that move beyond the classic trope of rags to riches and speaks, instead, of what it truly means to love and to be loved.
With a the same lush language and radically honest voice that contributed to her rise in the world of punk rock, Patti Smith is perhaps the most qualified person to tell this story that is as much about the transmutation of her relationship with Maplethorpe as it is about the subtle transformation of the American artistic landscape over the past fifty years.

Smith, Patti. Just Kids. Ecco. Paperback, octavo. List price: $14.95. Our in-store price: $5.95.

Stephanie S. is a part-time bookseller at our University Village store. She also teaches poetry in the Chicago Public Schools.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

The House That Trane Built

powellschicago — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:34:55 +0000

“The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted…”

This apt observation from ancient China via Hermann Hesse kicks off Ashley Kahn’s “The House that Trane Built,” an exhaustive history of Impulse!, one of jazz music’s premier record labels. The story is a curious one and it will no doubt surprise some readers to find that it includes not only artworks such as John Coltrane’s 1965 masterpiece “A Love Supreme” or Ray Charles’ hit single “One Mint Julep” (“just a little but of soul, yeah!”) but also the Mickey Mouse Club and Buddy Holly. Offered here is a classic tale of party-hard producers, innovative graphic artists, ever-clueless “bottom liners,” straight-shooting engineers and, of course, the stories of some of jazz music’s most important artists. Alongside Kahn’s fast-paced prose are numerous photographs which illustrate everything from the label’s iconic designs, behind the scenes views of live gigs and recording sessions, and even a note scribbled by Coltrane on Impulse! stationary to remind himself of an appointment with a competing label. Ashley Kahn leaves no stone unturned here (you’ll even read of the gatefold’s merits as “a deluxe rolling tray to manicure your marijuana”), and throughout the reader is continuously surprised and fortified by the cutting-edge achievements and far-reaching influence of this label. Indeed, after reading this book it is hard not to conclude that the real Jazz Age took place during the Impulse! years.

Kahn, Asheley. The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records. Norton. Cloth, octavo. List price: $29.95. Our in-store price: $6.95.

Derek works at Powell’s Lakeview and Powells University Village where he only plays the very best music for your browsing experience.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

The Jaguar’s Shadow

powellschicago — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:00:10 +0000

The jaguar’s shadow, it turns out, is cast from as far south as Argentina to as far north as Arizona. Aside from its breadth, however, the shadow’s inky depths contain Mayan shaman, Brooklynite biologists ensconced deep in the jungles of Belize, American cowboys, Homeland Security, and ayahuasca rituals which are “often used as a tool for jaguar transformation”. The transformation of humans into jaguars, that is.

All of this, though, is secondary to the actual jaguar. The creature paws stealthily through the text, evading several cultures obsessed with it, not to mention Mahler himself. The author begins the book by showing us how little we know about the big cat and then quickly lets us in on the fact that nobody, really, knows much about the jaguar ( “…no one has ever filmed or videotaped au naturel a wild female with her cubs” is just one of many mystifying facts that consistently pepper the book).

And it’s difficult to separate this mystery from the animal. The jaguar earns a peerless respect among both ancient civilizations and modern scientists (not to mention legal and illegal hunters of game) because of it’s almost supernatural elusiveness and, yet, that elusiveness makes it extremely difficult for those who work so hard to protect it. Which makes those wanting to save it (and those wanting to kill it) all the more obsessed. And in the middle of that vicious circle rests the jaguar– eyeing you with the calm stare of an animal with “…the biggest brain-to-body mass of all the big cats”

Without a doubt, this book’s gripping power stems from the subject itself. However, Mahler’s ability to collect and then coalesce a huge amount of information and myriad perspectives on the jaguar into a relatively slim volume– and to do so in clear and readable prose– is a feat worthy of that subject. The fact that Mahler is a freelance journalist (as opposed to an activist, conservationist or scientist) is likely what enables him to bring so many views on, and aspects of, the animal into such a tight space. Also impressive is his ability to consistently keep the jaguar itself as the protagonist of the story, without turning the book into a story about some bad-ass writer, hot in pursuit of the world’s most elusive jungle cat.

Which, of course, only makes him look even more like a bad-ass writer, hot in pursuit of the world’s most elusive jungle cat. He’s not so divorced from the story, however, that he doesn’t let some personal information leak into the narrative; including the fact that his relentless search for panthera onca involved burning through a large amount of his personal finances.

It may be easy for me to say, but after finishing The Jaguar’s Shadow, it certainly seems like money well spent.

Mahler, Richard. Jaguar’s Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat. Yale. Cloth, octavo. List price: $27.00. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Marcus works in Sales for Powell’s Books Wholesale and, like any good rep, never shies away from using three words when only one may be necessary.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!