Looking for Books #3: Summer Reading, Nonfiction Style

Many of you are undoubtedly planning some sort of summer getaway, whether it be to the beach, the city, or the country. Having a literary traveling companion is a must for me, especially if I'm flying somewhere. If you're of a like mind, here are a few engaging nonfiction reads that won't put a lot of stress on your brain cells:

• 40 Watts from Nowhere - Sue Carpenter. Carpenter runs a pirate radio station out of her LA apartment. That station, KBLT, garners a cult following and soon attracts celebrity guest DJ's until the FCC catches up with Carpenter. A picture of what life would be like in a world without Clear Channel.
  
• Electroboy - Andy Behrman. Behrman's memoir recounts his fight against bipolar disorder. He offers a probing look at the disorder's effects on his life, particularly at the wildly compulsive (and sometimes shocking) acts the disease pushed him to commit.
• The Miracle of Castel di Sangro - Joe McGinniss. Crime novelist McGinniss, having fallen in love with soccer during the 1994 World Cup, spends a season with a rural Italian soccer team. A story of "the little soccer team that could," mixed with intrigue worthy of one of McGinniss's crime novels.

Looking for Books: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon - UPDATED

You'll find Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, on many recommended reading lists. It is certainly one of the best books that I've read in the past decade. Kavalier and Clay has compelling, page-turning ingredients--engaging characters (two boys who make good on their dream to become comic book authors); a common but winning theme (justice for the weak); dashes of fantasy (the Golem of Prague); and enough melancholy to imbed Chabon's tale in your head and heart long after you finish reading it.

Chabon may have one-upped his own masterpiece with his newest book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. In this new novel, Chabon makes a foray into history--alternative history, to be precise. As the L.A. Times describes the premise for the book,

What if, as Franklin Roosevelt once suggested, a safe zone had been established in Alaska under the protection of the United States for European Jews escaping Hitler? What if this "Federal District of Sitka" had grown and developed until its population was in the millions, a country within a country, as it were? What if Israel had collapsed in 1948, mere months after independence, leaving many Jews with nowhere else to turn?

And what if, 60 years later, Sitka was about to face a process called "reversion," in which its territories would be returned and its Jews cast back into the Diaspora, a Diaspora in which the desirability of their presence was not entirely assured?

If this isn't enough to pique your interest, consider that the primary storyline is a noirish detective tale in which a Sitka police detective, under the supervision of his ex-wife (his superior officer), investigates the murder of the junkie son of a prominent rabbi.

I can't wait to get my hands on this book.

More on the book from the New York Times Book Review.

Read the rest of the L.A. Times review.

UPDATE: Michael Chabon discusses the book with Jewish culture website Nextbook [mp3 file].

Looking for Books

Here is the first edition of Looking for Books, a new semi-regular feature of HWAW intended to help you sift through new reading options.

For this edition, the selections focus on the Muslim world.

Hardback: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid

This is a book that pivots on a smile. A third of the way through Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” the narrator, a young Pakistani man named Changez, tells an American how he first learned of the destruction of the World Trade Center. While on a business trip to Manila, he turned on the television in his hotel room and saw the towers fall. “I stared as one — and then the other — of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.”

The novel begins a few years after 9/11. Changez happens upon the American in Lahore, invites him to tea and tells him the story of his life in the months just before and after the attacks. That monologue is the substance of Hamid’s elegant and chilling little novel

Read on for a full review.

Paperback: The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

This powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.

But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ''The Kite Runner,'' are only a part of this story. A more personal plot, arising from Amir's close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear.

Read on for a full review.