Molly Ivins December 9AUSTIN — More good books! The publishing industry may be going to hell in a hand basket (see spate of recent hand-wringing about same in many journals), but there's nothing wrong with American writers. Voices from our many racial and ethnic subcultures; great, sweeping overviews of our national life; funny stuff; great yarns — what a rich and festive year for readers it has been. Share the wealth, and buy books for holiday gifts — and remember, the bookstores will be open until the last minute. "The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996" by Charles Kaiser is an excellent general history of gay life in America, with the focus on New York City. I recommend this for straights as well as gays because I think it's a perfect "crossover" book. I learned something new on every page. Kaiser's thesis that World War II was the real beginning of "gay culture" in this country — taking millions of men out of their hometowns and scattering them all over the globe in large groups let the gays realize how many of them there actually were — is fascinating and, I believe, entirely fresh work. To the extent that even those of us who consider ourselves quite "enlightened" about homosexuals are still uncomfortable with the subject, this book is most helpful because it is simply a very interesting and straightforward history. The account of how gays had to struggle to get themselves out of the classification of "mental illness" is amazing and touching. (Obligatory disclaimer: Charlie Kaiser is a friend of mine from our days together on The New York Times, but I would certainly recommend this book even he weren't.) Another former Times colleague, Greg Jaynes, has written an entirely different kind of book, "Come Hell On High Water." It's sort of appropriately subtitled "A Truly Sullen Memoir," except that it's also hilarious. I'm not sure I can explain why this grumpy account of a sea voyage is so funny, except that it does remind of us Jean-Paul Sartre's thesis that hell is other people. As a hopelessly unfastidious liker of people myself, the worse Jayne's shipmates got, the more I laughed. This book is a salutary warning for anyone who is having a mid-life crisis and thinks the answer is to ditch it all and go around the world. And yet another Timesie has committed book, although I don't know this one: Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shoutin'" is a delightful and touching memoir about "his people" — one of America's most despised minorities, the folks known as "poor white trash." Some of this book will seem so familiar to Southerners that they'll be wondering why anyone bothered to write about such ordinary folk, but to the many in the "intelligentsia" to whom fundamentalist Christians seem to be a weird subspecies, this is a wonderfully moving corrective.
"One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism" by William Greider is an excellent antidote to all the globaloney we get from the corporations about the wonders of free trade. As the Asian economies reel, Greider's book seems almost eerily prescient. One of the greatest sour satisfactions in life is being able to say "Told you so," and Greider did tell us so. The national debate on globalization and trade has been so heavily weighted by corporate money that if I could, I would make Greider's book required reading for all Americans. But why make it mandatory when reading it is so instructive that it is its own reward? "The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea" by Sebastian Junger is a classic "guy" book that I enjoyed a whole lot. It's not just the men-against-the-sea theme; it also has the satisfaction offered by all those Tom Clancy books about how stuff actually works — in this case, how storms are formed. A great read, and perfect for your friends who watch the Weather Channel, too. "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon is a wonderful, picaresque historical novel about the guys who drew the famous line, with touches of Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding. Gosh, he's a good writer. You'll enjoy this. "Requiem" is by photographers who died in Vietnam and is edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page. The photos are superb, and the tragedy never loses its impact. Yes, it still hurts to revisit how stupid and useless it all was, but we owe remembrance to the dead. And these photos, by journalists who died trying to make us see it clearly then, are moving beyond description. And, of course, there are many more I haven't room to mention. OK, fellow procrastinators, see you at the bookstore on Christmas Eve. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1997 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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