Larry King as depicted in a detail from the cover of his new book "Truth Be Told"
QUICK READS
Four new books you ought to know about
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
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LIES AND DEATH
The End of the Wasp Season
By Denise Mina, McArthur & Company, 404 pages, $24.95
Glasgow Detective Sergeant Alex Morrow, pregnant with twins, returns in this deft, multi-layered murder thriller from one of Scotland’s premier crime-fiction writers. There are two events that begin this book. A rich and powerful financier hangs himself from the old oak tree in the front yard of his mansion. His death doesn’t garner much sympathy in a time when the world is reeling from financial meltdown. He leaves behind two ruined children and a broken wife. Meanwhile, the body of a brutally murdered young woman is found in a Glasgow suburb. DS Morrow begins untangling the web of lies behind the murder, and soon discovers that the story spreads through Scotland and, eventually, hundreds of miles away.
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KING OF THE HILL
Truth Be Told
Off the Record About Favorite Guests, Memorable Moments, Funniest Jokes and a Half Century of Asking Questions, by Larry King, Viking Canada, 225 pages, $35
It’s still good to be Larry King. The CNN fixture marvels on his remarkable career in this brisk summer read. Over a half-century in radio and TV, King built a reputation as a non-confrontational interviewer in his chats with newsmakers, movie stars and potentates. So why ask himself the tough questions? Breezier than a sit-down with Richard Simmons, the book is a basic compendium of the last decade of Larry King Live, with King shamelessly name-dropping celebrities at length (“Not only did I once dance with Janet Jackson, but she gave me suspenders with the nipples cut out”). Remember the rambling column King used to write for USA Today? This is the book version. Truth be told, Truth Be Told is much like watching an episode of Larry King Live, except with the host interviewing himself. In either case, there are worse ways to kill an hour.
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CONSUMERISM AMOK
Crass Struggle
Greed, Glitz. and Gluttony in a Wanna-Have World, by R.T. Naylor, McGill-Queen’s, 487 pages, $34.95
R.T. Naylor is economics professor at McGill. More importantly, you might call him a neo-muckraker, a man bent on afflicting the too comfortable (besides a compelling interest in black markets, terrorism and other criminal pursuits). Crass Struggle, as the title suggests, is a passionate, highly researched screed about the excesses, the vast excesses, of the super-rich. And its about the effects of what Naylor clearly sees as an obscene pursuit of wealth. It’s about class and greed and lying and political manipulation and social dislocation and tax evasion and environmental devastation and the endless financial scandals that plague modern capitalist society. And of course, its about how another sort of trickle-down effect, how the lifestyles of the rich and famous are emulated in miniature by wanna-have-mores. That, at least, is Naylor’s thoroughly dispiriting reading of the way we live now.
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PAPA, OH PAPA
Fathers
A Literary Anthology, edited by Andre Gerard, Patremoir Press, 429 pages, $27.95
Fathers are becoming less mysterious now that so many of them have embraced hands-on parenting. Feminism has played its part and so has paternity leave, skimpy though it is, but men too have allowed themselves the softness and joy of taking care of the babies they have fathered. In Fathers: A Literary Anthology, Andre Gerard has combed through memoir, autobiography, poetry and fiction to compile a collection of happy, sad, troubling and mournful encounters between fathers and their offspring. Contributors include Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Derek Walcott, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje. So many of these pieces are about loss, elegies for fathers who kept themselves hidden emotionally, or who couldn’t escape the rigid rituals of what men and fathers were expected to be in the old days when men earned the money and women raised the children. As this writerly collection shows, exploring that past reveals a reality far richer and more varied than anybody glimpsed.
