TEN BEST BOOKS

Readers who celebrate Hanukkah have already distributed  their bounty among  family and friends. For those who celebrate  Christmas,  there are few days left in which to shop. But it is never  too late to buy books. The holidays provide us with  excellent reasons to share the our favorite  writers' work with those we love. These are the books I reccommend as this season's  best gifts,

INNOCENT, by Scott Turow--Looking for the perfect gift for the reader who  require more than popcorn for the mind? Consider  this intricate story written in clear, sparkling language. In this novel, Turow revisits the territory of Rust Sabich, the protagonist of  PRESUMED INNOCENT. Once again, he  plunges Sabich into a love affair that brings with it cataclysmic changes.  But there is nothing repetitive here. Those who enjoyed  his previous work will find that Turow only  gets better. INNOCENT is cleverly plotted and beautifully realized.


DARLING JIM, by Christian Moerk--As dark and complex as the best chocolate, this is a book that showcases the  writer's pitch perfect voice and uncanny sense of place. Noir readers will enjoy the grittiness of this Irish tale crafted by a Dane who bends the English language to his will with amazing grace.

THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR, by Daniel Silva--Another thrilling adventure featuring  Israeli spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon and his unforgettable team of Mossadniks. Now married to his Florentine sweetheart Chiara, Allon basks in domestic bliss until his London associate Julian Isherwood calls help after he comes across a Rembrandt painting of Hendrickje Stoffels. There ensue the murder of  Gabriel’s fellow student and art restorer in quaint Glastonbury,  investigation of one of the  corrupt Swiss bankers who profited enormously from the Shoah. The investigation takes Gabriel and Chiara to Argentina, England Holland,  France,  Switzerland the United States. Along the way,   new  characters join the Allon team—a memory militant, an alluring reporter,  an engaging art thief. British and American intelligence agencies joinAllon’s team when it becomes clear that the corrupt banker has ties with Iran. Throughout, Allon leads his team with same adroitness he  demonstrated in Silva’s previous novels. As usual, the plot is taut, the dialogue is skilfully crafted, the research on cutting edge electronic aids to espionage impeccable,  the historic facts accurate and the socioeconomic and political analysis spot on. What is more, this time around Silva replaces guns with Krav Maga. I can’t wait for the movie with Lior Ashnekenazi as Gabriel.
THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES, by Edmund de Waal--In this intriguing book internationally known ceramicist de Waal's departure point is Japan where he first came across all that remained of his family's considerable fortune. The creme de la creme of Parisian   financiers,  de Waal's ancestors, the Ephrussis were  patrons of the arts whose social circle included Renoir and  Manet. Charles Ephrussi, who appears in Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating party--he is the nattily dressed guy in the top hat--started a netsuke collection that was the only tangible legacy left to the Ephrussi's after their despoliation by the Nazis. The collection ended up in Japan with de Waal's  American uncle where de Waal spent time as a student. In his books, he follows the trail of the netsuke, adding unforgettable portraits of family members, historical tidbits, and a somber reminder of the consequences of anti-Semitism. Elegaic and elegant, this is the best nonfiction book I read this year. 
CITY OF VEILS, by Zoe Ferraris--This novel, set in Saudi Arabia,  transcends crime fiction. It reveals the ugly inner workings of a theocracy where oppression is felt is the minutest aspects of daily life. Lab tech Katya's murder investigation is a dangerous experience. As so many professional women who try to be productive in a regime that has no room for dissidents,  she walks the tightrope between conformism and rebellion. Ferraris makes no overt judgement on Islamic. She does not have to. Her story speaks for itself.   


THE BRUTAL TELLING, by Louise Penny--Once again the Canadian novelist entices her readers into cozy Three Pines, a little town where the occasional murder jolts the residents out of their complacency. Penny balances her mastery of cozy with deft plots her hero Inspector Gamache unravels with intelligence, charm and human warmth. Any of Penny's books would make a great gift. Her entire Gamache series would satisfy the finickiest reader.


DOCTOR ZHIVAGO--a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Not your mom's Doctor Zhivago, this is clearer and closer to the heart of Pasternak's writing. Definitely a memorable gift.


THE GOOD DAUGHTERS, by Joyce Maynard--two babies who  share a birthday move through divergent paths and each  tells her stories in alternate chapters. Always a brilliant chronicler of America's rites of passage, Maynard infuses her novels with plausibility. Hers is an an unfailingly elegant and istinctive voice.   


BABY, WE WERE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER, by Scott Simon. This compelling account of how he and his wife Caroline adopted their two daughters in China  moved me beyond words. Simon is as witty, charming and perceptive and writer as he is a public radio commentator.  If I could choose only four books to give away this season, his would be one of them.   


THE WISDOM OF THE LAST FARMER, by David Masumoto. In this paen to the vanishing art of growing heirloom peaches organically, Masumoto also tells us about the history of his family. He tells of his Japanese grandparents' dream of owning land in an America whose racist laws forbid them to do so. During World War II they were classified as enemy aliens and sent to  an internment camp even as two of their children served in the American army. After the war,  Masumoto's father bought the land where the author grows heirloom organic peaches. These are the bare bones of the  memoir and they  should be enough. But there is more to Masumoto's meditative telling of what it takes to bring great tasting fruit to American tables. 

GREAT SCOTTS

Scott Turow’s writing makes it easy for critics to gush.  Reviews of his books brim with compliments about his remarkable talent, the mastery of his storytelling, his psychologically complex, multidimensional characters, the you-are-there feel of the world of his imagination. Such praise rarely fails to generate arrogance and sense of entitlement.  It is pleasantly surprising to find out that ordinary folks who happen to rub elbows with the award winning author and practicing attorney also praise him.
“Scott’s a great guy,” says the young Ripley Center staffer when I tell him that I am there for talk between  Turow and  National Public Radio’s Scott Simon.  “Setting Thrilling Legal and Novel Precedents” centers on Turow’s newly launched INNOCENT, a sequel to PRESUMED INNOCENT, his bestselling first novel. It is part of the Smithsonian Resident Associates program. At the book signing, a former Wilmette, IL  neighbor of Turow’s parents clutches a copy of the tribute he wrote to his mother for the Mother’s Day edition of  The Washington Post magazine -- evidence that besides being a brilliant lawyer, an acclaimed writer, a rich man--his house recently sold for $5 million—is also a good son.  There is something charmingly artless in his response,
“I remember you,” he says with a smile as she  introduces herself and though he is surrounded by people waiting for him to sign books, he gives her his complete attention. It is this attention, this genuine interest in people that  that pervades his writing, just as the pro bono work he does at the Sonnenschein, Nath and  Rosenthal indicates that he is, above all, a mensch. 
Although the law is as much his mistress as medicine was Chekhov’s, it is fiction writing that made Turow’s fortune. PRESUMED INNOCENT, which followed ONE L,  Harvard Law School memoir,  is the stuff of legend. Its rights sold for a cool $3 million and even before it went to press, Sydney Pollack bought its film rights  for 1 million dollars. Alan Pakula directed the movie version starring Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, Raul Julia, and Greta Schacchi. Since then over 25 million copies of Turow’s eight books have been sold. Four of them have been made into movies.
But there is no hubris in Turow’s performance. His talk with Simon is as relaxed as if they were sitting in a suburban  living room. He comes through as an urbane, grounded guy with a self-deprecating sense of humor.  He tells the standing room only audience about the unpublished novels that he wrote while he taught Creative Writing at Stanford University.
“The great break of my literary career was when I went to law school.  It gave me a subject that I was passionate about, that, you know, I still find as interesting as I did the day I entered law school. And, you know, I think lawyers can do good things.”
The genesis of INNOCENT, he says,  was a Post-it note he wrote to himself as an aide-memoire for a mental picture possibly based on an Edward Hopper painting. The note said, “A man is sitting on a bed on which a dead woman lies.” The man, Turow determines later, was Rusty Sabich, the hapless protagonist in PRESUMED INNOCENT.
Sabich’s somber  progress towards middle age is something that fascinates the recently divorced  fifty-eight year-old  Turow. He knows that the the changes that come with middle age are not all beneficial and that the so-called golden years are not necessarily so. Relationships fail, the flesh weakens, power dwindles so why not snatch up a bit of happiness before before it is too late? Tommy Molto, Sabich’s nemesis in PRESUMED INNOCENT does not think so.  His approach is the diametrical opposite of Sabich’s passionate affair with law clerk Anna Vostic. But while love redeems him, it crucifies Sabich. Demonstrably, even in the age of relative morality,  hook-ups and friends-with-benefits,  adultery continues to be a punishable offense at least in literature. Turow throws the book at Sabich with such force I feel compelled to ask him if he meant to write a morality tale.
“No.” he says. "I don’t equate adultery with murder. The difference between Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary is that  he takes responsibility.”
When the talk is over Turow turns the spotlight on  Simon’s novels. It is the perfect touch, as beautifully worded as his blurb for Simon’s PRETTY BIRDS, “Always gripping, always tender, and often painfully funny, Pretty Birds is a marvel of technical finesse, close observation, and a perfectly pitched heart.”

SCOTT TUROW'S INNOCENT--A WHISPER FROM THE HEART

Scott Turow signs books at the Smithsonian's Ripley Center on May 13th.,2010.

Turow and blogger at the Ripley Center.

Scott Turow  is without doubt the thinking person’s courtroom thriller  writer. He creates characters who talk about Brownian movement and who quote Kierkegaard. He does it all  unaffected and adroitly, as behooves someone who taught Creative Writing at  Stanford University before he went on to graduate from Harvard Law School.

PRESUMED INNOCENT, which Alan Pakula made into a movie starring Harrison Ford, was Turow’s fist novel.  Set in Kindle County, an imaginary place that resembles its author’s  native Chicago, it introduced attorney  Rusty Sabich,  the damaged child who says that if he were to paint his brutish  father, he “would have a gargoyle’s face  and a dragon’s scaled heart.” At thirty-nine, he juggles many selves—loving father, good citizen,  faithful husband to a woman who is as cuddly as a porcupine, brilliant lawyer,  master of "pathetic longing,” besotted lover.

Impeccably plotted and  populated by characters as believable as one’s next door neighbors,  PRESUMED INNOCENT did away with misconceptions according to which rigorously elegant writing has no mass appeal. To date, nearly four million copies have been sold in the United States alone. More importantly, this blockbuster of a novel made it clear that  the dumbing down of the English language, simplistic plots, one-dimensional characters and fuzzy logic are not essential elements of crime writing.

Turow’s new book, INNOCENT, picks up where PRESUMED INNOCENT left off.  Sabich, is now, at sixty, a judge, still married to the reclusive and prickly Barbara.   Though they share an abiding love for their son Nat, who is  a newly minted lawyer, theirs is  a joyless relationship. No wonder that, in spite of the dire consequences of his first adulterous affair, Sabich’s longing for “the unnamable piece of happiness that has eluded (him) for sixty years “ becomes “a nagging whisper from (his) heart. “

The nagging whisper compels him to go once  more a-roving and thus he places himself in a collision course with wrong sort of love.  In his misguided quest, he is much as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and  Balzac’s Emma Bovary—long on hope and short on common sense. Predictably, love rocks the foundations of his life.

If Sabich’s romantic misadventures are predictable, the plot of INNOCENT is a treasure trove of surprises. Technology, represented by  DNA analysis  and computer forensics,  work miracles,  love transforms and redeems previously unsympathetic characters, , some good people act villainously and some villains act as good people.   Turow’s writing has always been  is “as pure as music."  In INNOCENT the music gains a somber  richness from the  elegiac tone.