Librarians Recommend:

Brief and Informal Book Reviews

For the most part, the book reviews we’ve published lately have been reviews of books sent to us by publishers, and aim to help librarians in the selection of books for their libraries.  To this end, we have a set of Instructions for Reviewers and a list of Materials  available for Review.  However, I’d also like to hear about other books that you have read lately and that you’d  recommend or otherwise expound upon.  The structure of these reviews can be more informal and brief than those included in the regular book review section; think of those times you’ve cornered a friend to tell her about a book you just finished reading and write it down.  I’m looking for enthusiastic recommendations and heartfelt raspberries – tell us if you really disliked a book, too.  Please email these to me.  Thanks!  Kristi Austin.

Abrams Discoveries Series.    “The Discoveries series of paperback books provides a visually exciting, accessible look at subjects ranging from art, archaeology, and music to history, science, and nature.”  (From the Abrams website.)

I’ve been working my way through this nicely packaged, fairly affordable series of books, thus far finding little to criticize.  “Discoveries” actually comprises a number of subject-specific series:  The Ancient World, Literature and Film, Art and Music, Legend, Folklore, and Traditions, Science and the Environment, and History and Religion.  I have focused particularly on those that deal with individual artists, including Picasso, Cezanne, Chagall, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Although nothing can really compare with a big, well printed, coffee-table sized book for examining individual works of art (except a trip to the art museum to view the actual work, a delightful experience though perhaps outside the realm of everyday possibility for most of us), these charming little books present a fairly well written overview of the artist’s life set within the context of his times, and are copiously provided with myriad small but well-produced full color illustrations.  This illustrative material might include reproductions of the artist’s work and his contemporaries, the work of those who influenced him, photos of the artist and the people and places in his life, etc.  The “Documents” section that follows the main part of each book tends to include writings by the artists, by his friends about him, interviews, and other contextual materials such as photographs, letters, and newspaper and journal articles; this primary resource material can be even more fascinating than the biography itself.

The books in the Discoveries series, written by scholars and curators (and often translated into English from their original language, which might account for the very occasional lack of narrative smoothness), are well indexed and include a Further Reading list, as well as a list of Illustrations that locates each work of art, should one have the opportunity to visit Paris or Moscow or Chicago.  They’re affordably priced at around $12.95 each, and the compact size (5” by 7”) makes them portable and easy to read in bed.

Aside from the books in the Art and Music series I’ve mentioned above, I’ve also looked at Golden Treasures of Troy: the Dream of Heinrich Schliemann; The Search for Ancient Greece; Writing:  The Story of Alphabets and Scripts; and The Vikings: Lords of the Seas.  These tend to be broader in scope than the biographies, but still quite interesting, informative, and well illustrated.  I believe the Discoveries series is still being expanded, and currently includes some 90 titles. They’d probably be welcome additions to almost any library collection, including middle school and above, public, and academic libraries.  You may even want to own a few yourself!

 --Reviewed by Kristi N. Austin

Trevor, William.  The Story of Lucy Gault.  Viking Penguin, 2002.  ISBN 0670031542

 William Trevor is an Irish-born author who has lived in England for many years and produced a substantial body of writing: short stories, novels, plays, movie, radio and television scripts.  His latest publication, a novel entitled The Story of Lucy Gault, is fairly typical of his work: it tells a peculiar story, one that is untidy and surprising – the way life is untidy and surprising – and in that story things often don’t work out for the best.  The characters are neither heroes nor villains, and they seem to cope with life much as you and I do, with little and only partial success.  There is a good deal of “making do” in Trevor’s fictional world, a considerable amount of regret and resignation, but also, ultimately, a certain degree of acceptance.

The book is written in a prose of extraordinary measure and dignity, a prose where each sentence is shaped to rise and fall, creating a cadence of almost hypnotic calmness, yet also capable of devastating poignancy.  The preternatural calmness of the narrator, the even-temperedness of his voice, can be unnerving; a bookseller once said to me that in his books Trevor narrates as God might.  Fortunately, it is not the God of the Old Testament, for Trevor treats his characters with an almost maddening compassion.  He writes from within each of them, and we are rarely allowed to be entirely on anyone’s side, or wholeheartedly against anyone.  His fictional worlds, though they are usually more dramatic than our real ones, and sometimes quite horrifyingly so, are no less complex or ambivalent.     

 What is the novel about?  It is about a young girl who loses her parents, in a most unusual manner.  It is about unwarranted, but unavoidable, guilt.  It is about happiness rejected.  I suppose one must say that it is a melancholy book, for Trevor’s characters not only suffer, they suffer in an undistinguished way, not with panache, as tragic heroes do.  But somehow those characters often earn not only our sympathy but also our admiration.

 There are those who believe that Trevor is one of the greatest prose stylists writing in English.  I am one of them.  And, though he is classified as a “realist” author, I find his work to be remarkably experimental.  He diffidently characterizes himself as nothing more than a story-teller. 

 The Story of Lucy Gault was short-listed for the Booker Prize, which it didn’t win, but Trevor’s works have received a great number of literary awards over the forty years he has been writing; he was even made a Commander of the British Empire in 1977 – an honor rarely granted to Irishmen.

--Reviewed by Leonard Hitchcock