The BookReport

Jeremy is Reading: The Swerve

I just finished reading The Swerve by the eminent Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt (whose wonderful Will in the World I enjoyed so much a few years ago). The new book describes an intellectual and historical adventure, which has nothing directly to do with Shakespeare; its subtitle is "How the World Became Modern." Greenblatt examines the time when the iron grip held by the Church over intellectual inquiry began to be eroded not only by new ideas but by the rediscovery of old ones.

The heroes of his story are the ancient philosopher Lucretius (a follower of the still-earlier Epicurus) — about whom almost nothing is known — and a man named Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian of the 15th Century and an avid bibliophile who managed to discover in a monastery a copy of Lucretius' masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, which had not been seen or heard of for more than a thousand years. The discovery was one of the seminal moments of the Renaissance and established a connection with the glories of Greek and Roman antiquity, so many traces of which had simply vanished over time.

Ann Patchett at BookHampton

Let's call it as it was: Ann Patchett held BookHampton captive this past Saturday! She set the course for what was undoubtedly one of the best readings we've ever had. The author of the best-selling State of Wonder and the internationally acclaimed Bel Canto took charge. Even standing room was over-subscribed.

View Album • Photographs © Jeremy Nussbaum

Charming and startlingly outspoken (what did we expect, she's from Nashville) she began the afternoon event by admonishing every reader in the house: "You must not walk through this bookshop writing down book titles and then go home and order from Amazon! If you want to have this bookstore in your town — and a bookstore is the most cherished store in most communities fortunate to still have them — then you must  buy your books at the book shop. It's a store. It's a book store.” We couldn't have said it better ourselves, but to hear it from Ann Patchett? We all took note!

State of Wonder was BookHampton's first Common Reader selection, the book that we handed to people all summer and said “Read this. You won't be able to put it down!” Little did we realize how this great story would be made even better by hearing the author read from it herself. Patchett read the section about the boy Easter, the boat and the anaconda. What? You haven't read it yet? How's that possible? Well then, I won't spoil it. Suffice it to say that no one moved; we all held our breath. She is a spellbinding reader as well as a great author.

Greg is Reading: Ghost on the Throne

The story of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the known world has been told countless times, but the subsequent war for his empire after his death is less well known.  Ghost on the Throne (Knopf) by James Romm, editor of the Landmark Classics series, is a lively and readable account of the years immediately following Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323 BC.

Romm follows several well known and other less known characters from all sides of the conflict. We follow Aristotle, the Greek who threw in his lot with the Macedonians and now has to pay the price.  Alexander’s generals Perdiccas and Ptolemy strive for supremacy while at the same time Alexander’s son by a barbarian princess tries to survive in a harsh world of politics and poisoning.

We also meet Eumenes of Cardia; a Greek who followed Alexander on his journey from Europe to India and rose from the ranks to become one of his highest and most trusted commanders.  This man becomes perhaps the most important figure in the post-Alexander world as he at first tries to hold the empire together while at the same time running for his life. He constantly outsmarts his Macedonian overlords and wins battle after battle, and eventually is brought low by treachery. 

The break-up of Alexander’s empire by his former generals is an amazing story and begs to be read.  Romm brings ancient history to life as we see the hijacking of Alexander’s corpse on his way home to Macedonia; we follow the Hellenic War in Greece with Demosthenes, and follow Antigonus One-Eye, Cassander, and Antipater in elephant charges, epic battles and massacres as Alexander’s empire is taken apart piece by piece.

— Greg, BookHampton Sag Harbor

Jeremy is Reading: Cain

Being in and around BookHampton so much of the time I naturally look up forthcoming releases, especially watching for new books by favorite authors of mine. I was therefore amazed to discover on the shelves this week a new book by José Saramago called Cain, of which I had been totally unaware; indeed I was sure that The Elephant’s Journey (which I wrote about last year) was said to be the last book Saramago completed before his death in 2010. But there it was, and needless to say I read it instantly.

Cain centers on the biblical figure, the elder son of Adam and Eve, the one who killed his brother Abel. It begins with his parents in the Garden of Eden (and their eventual removal from it) and describes the murder, but then continues with Cain's ceaseless wandering backwards and forwards through the biblical world and, still more to the point, his ceaseless arguments with God.

Those who know anything of Saramago's career will know that about twenty years ago he published a novel entitled The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a retelling of the life of Jesus from a very human perspective. Although it is certainly one of the author's greatest works it was — to put it mildly — received very poorly by both the church and the state in Portugal; indeed the church authorities intervened to prevent him from receiving a major literary award for the book and, in response, he moved to a Spanish island and lived there for the rest of his life. When Saramago won the Nobel Prize a few years later the response in Portugal (none of whose authors had ever won the prize before) was very — how shall I put it? — muted. In his personal life Saramago was both an atheist and a communist, which certainly did not improve his standing with the powers that be, at least in his own country.

Jeremy is Reading: The Fiery Trial

As promised in my last post, I have returned to reading history, specifically to the book by Eric Foner entitled The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (Norton), which won the Pulitzer Prize for history this year. Although the topic obviously comes up in much of the literature on Lincoln, this is apparently the first study devoted exclusively to Lincoln's attitude to slavery.

One learns in reading the book that in the years before his Presidency Lincoln was by no means a "Radical" or an "Abolitionist". Although he seems always to have regarded slavery as a great evil, he was profoundly committed to the preservation of the United States as a union and therefore felt that he had to acknowledge and accept the nasty compromise, enshrined in the Constitution, that permitted its continuance in the Southern states. The issue in those days was not so much abolition of slavery where it stood as whether it should be extended to new territories which were then becoming part of the country.

Ashley is Reading: The Night Circus

The first in an occasional series of reviews by BookHampton's amazing booksellers.

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus is one of the best books I’ve read…ever. The quality of writing demonstrated throughout the entire work, the imaginative story itself and Morgenstern’s ability to juggle a variety of leading characters, scenarios and time periods without losing or confusing the reader are all reasons why Morgenstern will be a writer to watch for years to come.

The story revolves around two magicians, Marco and Celia, who as children were bound by their instructors to play against each other in a game in which they were given no rules. With no rules and with no idea who their competitor is, the book follows Marco and Celia from childhood into their adult lives as they train to become master magicians, each eventually becoming employees of Chandresh, an imaginative man who becomes the proprietor of Les Cirque des Reves.

Les Cirque des Reves is a circus like no other, open only from dusk til dawn, filled with contortionists, tarot card readers, cloud mazes, ice gardens and of course magicians. Celia works as the illusionist in the circus while Marco works as an assistant to Chandresh. Through their work, the two magicians are able to control the circus, what becomes the venue for their duel.

What their instructors could not imagine was that Celia and Marco would not only discover who their competitor was but that they would also fall in love with one another. Their love for not only each other but also the circus and everyone else involved with it, becomes especially difficult when they learn the rules of the game - only one of the magicians can survive the duel and when one dies, the circus will most likely die too.

Morgenstern creates a world in The Night Circus that is unlike anything else ever created in literature. Her attention to detail is so precise that it is easy for the reader to become enveloped in this world, never questioning the plausibility of such an existence. What is even more interesting is that despite creating remarkable principle characters in Celia and Marco, the subplots in the novel are so well executed that the reader can’t help but become invested in each of them as well.

Erin Morgenstern’s debut is a truly wonderful, innovative work that is not to be missed.

— Ashley Pinciaro
BookHampton in Southampton

Jeremy is Reading: Sacred Hunger

I have again taken a detour from my readings of history, but this time there is a very good excuse and a strong thematic connection so I don't think I need to feel guilty about the diversion. The book I was (and am) reading is Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history this year, and which I will be writing about as soon as I finish.

However I happened to notice that in January there will be a new book by the wonderful British writer of historical fiction Barry Unsworth, called The Quality of Mercy, which is announced as a sequel to his Booker-Prize winning novel of twenty years ago, Sacred Hunger, the subject matter of which is the British slave trade in the middle of the eighteenth century.

I first came to know Unsworth's work with the book Songs of the Kings, which was published in March, 2003, just as the Iraq war was beginning; since it was obviously written well before that I can only account for its relevance to then-current world events as a kind of uncanny prescience on the author's part. For here was a story of the Trojan War, depicting the Greeks as a band of rather grubby marauders out to obtain booty from an eastern kingdom, based on the flimsiest of pretexts; Homer is with them but as he is blind he is fed only such information as the powers that be believe will be helpful to put a positive spin on their endeavors.