Men's Vogue
Best Books of 2007
- Tree of Smoke
disable drop cap
In 2006, The New York Times included Denis Johnson's superb 1992 story collection, Jesus' Son, in a roundup of the best American fiction of the last 25 years. His latest, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a brilliant pillar of fire. An epic novel of bungled espionage and small mercies in the Vietnam era. The story cross-cuts between two pairs of characters from 1963 to 1983: The Houston brothers drop out and join the military, while a duo of spooks—the legendary, whiskey-swilling Colonel Sands and his ineffectual nephew, Skip—get neck-deep into delusional derring-do. It doesn't really matter that the Houstons and the Sandses never connect; they parallel each other until a rogue operation the wily colonel concocts has Skip doing business with a Vietcong double agent. This is the novelist as psy-ops agent, and the novel as quest for redemption.
- House of Meetings
- Martin Amis's House of Meetings traces two brothers condemned to overlapping sentences in an Arctic prison camp. The life force that gives them both hope is Zoya, a Jewish sexpot blessed with a foul mouth, a figure like "a platitude," and a nickname for her substantial proportions—"The Americas"—that invites arrest when uttered aloud. The triangle formed by the three makes for compelling storytelling in and of itself, but the journey through the decades, over a time of convulsive global change from Stalin to Putin, is where Amis's elegy for the victims of Russian failure reaches its fullest flower. House of Meetings just might be the most somber book that he has written.
- Boomsday
- Boomsday (Warner Twelve) is an uproarious crystal-ballish tale about what could happen if Generation Y stopped being polite and started getting real about paying for the retirement of 80 million baby boomers. Think J. Crew–clad mobs storming Florida retirement communities, upending golf carts and defiling putting greens—forcing the government to actually consider tax incentives for boomers who choose to kick the bucket.
- Divisadero
- With Divisadero (Knopf), Ondaatje's fifth novel, the Booker Prize–winning author of The English Patient ups the ante with a magnificently splintered story. If we think of novels as little machines packaged between two covers that braid together multiple narratives and characters into neat wholes, then Divisadero—which is mainly set in the countryside around the Bay Area and in the South of France—explodes that expectation, sending story lines off in all directions.
- Travels with Herodotus
- For 40 years, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuciski, who died in January at age 74, was, as John le Carré called him, the "conjuror extraordinary of modern reportage." His subject was the postcolonial world—its wars, madnesses, corruptions, and sufferings. Only now, however, in the unexpectedly posthumous Travels with Herodotus (Knopf), does Poland's (and, possibly, the world's) greatest foreign correspondent reflect upon the idea of travel itself: not as a pleasant diversion, but as the investigative duty of a curious intellect unsettled and fascinated by history's fickle cruelties. Kapuciski finds his alter ego in Herodotus, the most gossipy, engaging, and footloose of ancient chroniclers, the man whose Histories captured all the alien richness of the cultures surrounding the Greek world.
- Peter Blake: A Retrospective
- If Pop Art has a daddy, it's not Andy Warhol, American prodigal son, but Sir Peter Blake, a Brit who, at 75, continues to meld and morph the category. Peter Blake: A Retrospective (Abrams, $49.95) spans the artist's copious 60-year career, and traces, decade by decade, his artistic expansion. No matter what he plucks from the cultural landscape, Blake cultivates his work with a rare combination of wit and intimacy. Put him in a museum, sure, but you can't put him in a box.
- The Abstinence Teacher
- The Abstinence Teacher charts the unlikely meeting of minds—and possibly much more—between Ruth Ramsey, a divorced human sexuality instructor with traditionally liberal ideas about the deed, and Tim Mason, a recovering drug user, former small-time rock 'n' roller, soccer coach to Ruth's daughter Maggie, and member of the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, an evangelical church housed in a former Fashion Bug on the outskirts of Stonewood Heights, USA. The satisfactions and heartbreak of everyday parenting provide many of the revelatory moments in The Abstinence Teacher. Whether on the sidelines at a soccer game or over yet another dinner featuring boneless chicken breasts, Perrotta's eye is intimately attuned to the way parents search for meaning in their own lives through the experiences of their children, and how children both depend on and resist the spotlight that parents throw on them.
- Ballet in the Dirt: The Golden Age of Baseball
- Neil Leifer's Ballet in the Dirt: The Golden Age of Baseball—a lush Taschen edition priced at $400 with a limited run of 1,000 copies—collects the celebrated Sports Illustrated and Time photographer's best diamond images from the sixties and seventies. It has its share of infielders frozen in midair pirouettes, bone-jarring collisions at home plate, sluggers pretzel-twisted after missing a pitch, and runners making wild, gnomic gestures as they argue a call. But Leifer was also masterful at illustrating a stadium's atmosphere and capturing the thousand-yard stares that made stars like Koufax, Clemente, and Aaron seem even more heroic.
- Twenty Thousand Roads
- Born Ingram Cecil Connor III, Parsons was a wealthy Southerner who wanted you to know he was most at home, as he versified in the semi-autobiographical 1973 ballad "Return of the Grievous Angel," "with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels." Lost amid the purple sage was the fact that the exalted family pedigree was riven, like something out of Tennessee Williams, with alcoholism and despair. Now an encyclopedic and likely definitive Parsons biography, Twenty Thousand Roads, by David N. Meyer (Villard), gamely takes the measure of the man without fixing the legend even further in amber. Meyer, a journalist who teaches at the New School in New York, notes that Parsons "had everything: looks, cool, charm, charisma, money…and threw it away with both hands." Nevertheless, "the most talented musicians in America would do anything for him."
- Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer
- Jack Unterweger had style enough for 10 men. "Who is that character?" he made people ask. And before they knew it, he started reeling them in, because Jack Unterweger was also a gifted conversationalist who could go into a bar and walk out with every woman's phone number. Unterweger was many things, we learn in John Leake's Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He was a promising Austrian fiction writer who had charmed the literary underground. He was a journalist who traveled halfway around the world to do research. And he was a murderer of women, clearly committing more than the nine killings he was ultimately convicted of during wanderings from Vienna to Prague to Los Angeles.
- Born Standing Up
- Born Standing Up (Scribner) is Steve Martin's latest book, and it's not a novel or a collection of New Yorker humor pieces. It's a slim, economically worded memoir of his early days as a comedian. There are some personal revelations, including how he lost his virginity to a singer named Stormie Sherk: "I was a late-blooming 18-year-old when I had my first sexual experience, involving a condom (swiped from my parents' drawer) and the front seat of my car." But rather than write a lurid Hollywood tell-all or therapy-driven voyage of self-discovery, Martin has taken a lucid, good-humored, and somewhat dispassionate look back at the larval stages of his career—not an autobiography so much as a chronicle of, as he puts it, "someone I used to know."
More on MensVogue.com
Peak Performance
Fashion
Arts + Entertainment
Features
Blogs
Multimedia
