UPDATE: It appears Diebold furnished the machine for my first diary on this and no matter how you wanted to vote it gave you only one choice. Let’s try this again with the new improved Blue Voting Machine.

We have a tie between two wonderful books for our next BooBooks selection.

If you’re unfamiliar with BooBooks. . .

We’re meeting once a month (more or less–our next gathering will be the first Saturday in December)to discuss books that further our understanding of current events. Whenever possible, we’re purchasing our books from Powells Bookstore, from the links on this site, as a contribution to BooMan Tribune. Everyone is welcome, so jump right in the frog pond. Just be careful to hold your book above water.

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OH PURE AND RADIANT HEART by Lydia Millet

    Summary

    A masterfully crafted literary and philosophical tour-de-force that moves from the poetic to the hilarious to the dreamily apocalyptic, this novel from the 2003 PENUSA Award winner imagines the small foibles and grand moral negotiations of the “genius” A-bomb scientists. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

    Review

    What if Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, the primary physicists from the Manhattan Project, returned to contemporary America to survey their atomic legacy? That question forms the heart of Millet’s excellent fourth novel, in which the souls of the three take earthly form in the present-day Southwest. Ann, a New Mexico librarian, spots the reincarnated Oppenheimer and Fermi at a restaurant near her home; Szilard soon joins them; Ann persuades her garden-designer husband, Ben, to take them all in. Subsequent trips to Los Alamos and (with the help of a rich UFOlogist) Japan to view the monuments at Hiroshima persuade the three to work for disarmament. Army surveillance ensues; at one rally, shots are fired; and Christian Fundamentalists try to take things in a more rapturous direction. It takes considerable talent to pull off a conceit like this, and for the most part Millet makes it look easy, drawing full-blown, dead-on portraits of the three scientists that don’t diminish their characters or their work. Her threads on weapons buildup, the topsy-turvy mosaic of contemporary American political culture and the difficulties of marriage feel realistically motivated and nicely argued. Millet gives a whimsical conceit real depth, and the result, if a bit pious in spots, is a superb, memorable novel. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. Appeared in: Publishers Weekly, May 16, 2005 (c) Copyright 2005, Cahners Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

    Millet, whose three previous novels include the PEN-USA Award winner My Happy Life (2002), boldly fuses lyrical realism with precisely rendered far-outness to achieve a unique energy and perspicacity, the ideal approach to the most confounding reality of our era: the atomic bomb. This trippy yet revelatory epic begins in present-day Santa Fe, where librarian Ann and her gardener-husband Ben end up giving sanctuary to three renowned atomic physicists bewildered at finding themselves in the twenty-first century when the last thing they remember is the Trinity test in July 1945. There’s elegant and chain-smoking Robert Oppenheimer; depressed Enrico Fermi; and Leo Szilard, who, when he isn’t stuffing his face, is busy launching a global disarmament movement. Ann and Ben take this unholy trinity of unwitting time travelers on a pilgrimage to Hiroshima, after which a megawealthy Tokyo pothead offers to bankroll Szilard’s mission. Things soon take on an End Times intensity as the physicists travel cross-country in an ever-growing caravan (picture Grateful Dead followers), which is soon hijacked by a militaristic Christian group who worships Oppenheimer as the Second Coming. As nonfiction books about the nuclear threat proliferate, Millet’s brilliant, madcap, poetic, fact-spiked, and penetrating novel (think Twain, Vonnegut, Murakami, and DeLillo) illuminates the personal dimension of our most daunting dilemma. DonnaSeaman. Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission. Appeared in: From BookList, April 1, 2005 Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

THE CONSTANT GARDENER by John Le Carre

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré’s new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya’s Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa’s much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.

A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carré portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism. His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife’s cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love.

The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.

Review:

“[T]he most intimate of le Carré’s thrillers since the salad days of George Smiley….Under all the sumptuous detail, sensitive psychology, and incisive condemnation of industrial cartels, this is still at its core the old, familiar story of a decent man driven to avenge the wife he never really knew.” Kirkus Reviews

Review:

“[Le Carré’s] most passionately angry novel yet….[A] wholehearted assault on the way the world works, by a man who knows much better than most novelists writing today how it works….[T]he result is heart-wrenching.” Publishers Weekly

Reviews:

“Tough-minded, fast-moving, and uncompromising. The Constant Gardener is a tale of personal transformation…eloquent…civilized and forceful.” Boston Sunday Globe

Review:

“The Constant Gardener reveals a new and far more Dickensian le Carré….Taking sides with the angels, his novel unabashedly wears its heart on its sleeve.” Rand Richards Cooper, The New York Times Book Review

Review:

“With The Constant Gardener, le Carré proves once more that the themes of deception and betrayal that run through his work need nothing as dramatic as the Cold War for their expression; unbridled capitalism works just as well in exposing the flaws of human morality.” The Chicago Tribune

Review:

“Richly detailed, full of righteous fire to offset its desperate prognosis, The Constant Gardener is a very impressive piece of work. It is certainly on of John le Carré’s best.” Sean O’Brien, Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)

Review:

“Le Carré is…a thoroughgoing literary artist….He deserves to be considered a major writer….The Constant Gardener is a worthy addition to his large and consistently impressive oeuvre.” San Francisco Chronicle