Author Archives: bookdwarf

Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor by Anthony Everitt

Anyone attempting to write a biography of Augustus faces a monumentous task. Not only are sources limited during the era, but the information that is available is often biased. Not to mention the fact that so many important events occurred during such a short period of time. Everitt manages to take all this in stride and presents a readable and interesting portrait of a man who transformed a crumbling republic into the world’s largest empire with his new book. Beginning with Augustus’s rise through Roman society including his adoption by Julius Caesar to his power struggle with Mark Antony to his becoming the head of state, the author makes all of this fairly easy to follow. Names and dates can be a little confusing. Some diagrams and family trees interspersed throughout the book might have helped. Instead they were unhelpfully placed at the beginning with no information that would tell you what part of the book they were relevant to. Everitt paints a thorough picture of a man who worked hard to create an image of power, simplicity, and above all else a near mythic aura. His novelistic reconstruction of Augustus’s last days offers a bold new interpretation, which he carefully backs up with historical research. Written to reach a wider audience than Classicists, Everitt even attempts to make some comparisons to today’s world events. Overall, I found the book a fresh recounting of historical events.

Too Many Books

There seems to be a glut of books by big named authors this Fall. Wait, haven’t we already read this before? Right, the Los Angeles Times put out an article several weeks ago and now the New York Times has a similar one. The same authors are mentioned again: Thomas Pynchon, Michael Connelly, John le Carré, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier, Alice Munro, etc. Do you think the NYT cribbed from the previous article? I shouldn’t complain I suppose, since they are covering books, but it still seems sloppy to me.

The Echo Maker Round Table

Ed has posted the first of five installments of a round table discussion of Richard Power’s new book The Echo Maker, which was just nominated for the National Book Award. I can’t speak for the other books, not having read them, but this book by Powers is definitely deserving of the award. It’s one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read this year. His previous book The Time of Our Singing is one of my favorites. I didn’t think he could surpass that one, but he’s managed it with this new one.

Random Assortment of Information

  • This is pretty cool. It’s the translator’s notes on translating The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier.
  • Is Hollywood going to ruin one of the books I loved this year?
  • This list of dos and don’ts from the Events coordinator of Powells is both hilarious and true. Seriously people. Listen to the advice.
  • I’m not sure what to say about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I finished earlier this week. It’s as good as the reviews say. I hate to use the word haunting because that seems so obvious, but it is haunting. I’m still thinking about how McCarthy takes this really horrible landscape and makes it almost beautiful at times:

    He thought of his life. So long ago. A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned. On the table books and papers. It had begun to rain and a cat at the corner turned and crossed the sidewalk and sat beneath the cafe awning. There was a woman at the table there with her head in her hands. Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the gray cold light.

Around the Water Cooler

  • Pinky’s Paperhaus has a nice-looking new home.
  • And Beatrice has some new roommates. Ron’s asked Scott of Slushpile, Dibs, Dj from Bookburger, and Rod Lott from Bookgasm to post on his site.
  • Alex Beam shares his secrets of un-reading with Globe readers. “Books are expensive, and most of them are not very well written anyway. I have not read dozens of books in just the past few months. I am prepared to share my secrets of un-reading with you.” Don’t bother reading the new Bob Woodward he says. The contents have been all over the news for the past few months and Woodward has been everywhere in the media for the past few weeks. Woodward’s “scoop” is that the Bush administration has mishandled the war in Iraq. Wow. Really? The best line of the article has to be: “I read a book about Fiorina a few years ago, in which she was trying to convince Hewlett-Packard to pay for shipping her yacht from the East Coast to the West Coast. Tough choices indeed.”
  • The Globe also ran an interesting article this Sunday on “new wave literary fabulists”, including one of my favorite writers Kelly Link.
  • It’s book week at Slate.
  • The Rake is full of rage again. This time, he directs his anger toward Nick Hornby. Deserving target? Quite possibly. I personally find Hornby irritating, but I know lots of people love him.
  • Bud Parr has posted a nice Q&A with Laird Hunt, author of The Exquisite

Color Me Surprised!

The National Book Award Finalists have been announced.

Fiction

  • Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (Pantheon)
  • Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins)
  • Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  • Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
  • Jess Walter, The Zero (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins)

Non-Fiction

  • Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)
  • Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)
  • Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)
  • Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (HarperCollins)
  • Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry

  • Louise Glück, Averno (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  • H.L. Hix, Chromatic (Etruscan Press)
  • Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press)
  • Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (New Directions)
  • James McMichael, Capacity (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Young People’s Literature

  • M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)
  • Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death (Front Street Books/Boyds Mills Press)
  • Patricia McCormick, Sold (Hyperion Books for Children)
  • Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial/Penguin)
  • Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (First Second/Roaring Brook Press/Holtzbrinck)