All You Direct - Book Reviews

By Eric Clapton

“It’s difficult to talk about these songs in depth, that’s why they’re songs,” Eric Clapton writes of “Tears in Heaven,” the wrenching song he wrote in the aftermath of the freak death of his young son, Conor, in 1991.

Yes, it is difficult, Mr. Clapton. But as you sit pecking on your computer with one finger “like a demented chicken,” as you say, let’s remember that you have a book to write here — “Clapton: The Autobiography,” released last week — and the occasion calls for, um, writing: serious introspection, context, scene setting, an acknowledgement that one has lived an extraordinary life, the hum and throb of real human emotion.

Unfortunately, Clapton, ever the ambivalent frontman, can’t or won’t offer that up in “Clapton” and for that, the book joins a vast and deep collection of unsatisfying rock tell-alls. The problem isn’t that he doesn’t bring his best stuff to the table.

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By Donald Dewey

Since the time of the American Revolution, a rowdy band of hangers-on has lurked along the fringes of the nation’s political life, convinced they are unmasking the outrageous, lampooning the ridiculous and puncturing the pompous.

They are political cartoonists, whose lambastes of public affairs and public officials have metamorphosed through more than two centuries of communications technology from the woodcut to the Web.

Over those years, they have poured millions of drawings into the daily give-and-take of politics, even though they themselves have never had a secure sense of the real role they play in that process: Do their cartoons really shape public opinion and policies, or do they merely provide an evanescent garnish to the onrushing tide of events?

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By Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson’s new novel, “Tree of Smoke,” is his first in nearly a decade and, as it turns out, is well worth the wait. It is a novel large in both scope and ambition, chronicling America’s involvement in Vietnam over the course of 20 years. It begins in 1963 on the morning of President Kennedy’s assassination and devotes a section to each of the subsequent seven years. It ends with a coda set in 1983 in which the devastation and influence of that morning 20 years prior seem never to have ended.

The events of the novel unfold through the eyes of a diverse cast of characters. At the center is Skip Sands, whom we meet as a young and idealistic CIA recruit hoping to follow in the footsteps of his uncle Francis “the Colonel” Sands. The Colonel is a World War II vet and was a legend and hero in that war in which heroes existed. However, as quickly becomes evident, the Vietnam War is not in the business of making heroes, but rather in complicating the very ideas of heroism, of “good” and “right” — complications that result in the disillusionment and corruption of Skip, the Colonel and each of the myriad supporting characters who populate the novel.

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By Charles Atlas

Think kitsch with a message and you’ll see the appeal of “Strong Man: The Story of Charles Atlas.” Critically acclaimed illustrator Meghan McCarthy adds words to her sketchbook to tell the life story of the man who wanted to keep sand from getting kicked in the faces of 98-pound weaklings. McCarthy’s compassion for her subject lets her tell Atlas’ story without poking fun at the back-of-the-comic-book stalwart.

Though her interior illustrations are a tad static for a book about athleticism and don’t quite live up to the saturated, kinetic cover and jacket flaps, the book is packed with telling tidbits. I never knew, for example, that the exercise devotee dubbed “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” posed for more than 75 statues that now dot America, including figures of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Appendices with exercises for kids and more Atlas trivia make the package worthwhile. (Ages 5-8)

By Jim Dent

A football team without a football sounds way too implausible to be true. They used a Clabber Girl can? Really? But, OK, it was the Depression, and it was at the Masonic Home for orphans in Fort Worth, where the kids went shoeless for six months out of the year, where the football practice area was so sorry “even the goats and sheep had turned up their noses,” where the girls were basically incarcerated in dormitories whose windows wouldn’t open lest they sneak out to kiss the boys and where, at the tail end of the 1920s, coach Rusty Russell arrived to teach his orphans a thing or two about life and the game.

This is the sepia-steeped story that longtime Dallas-Fort Worth journalist Jim (”The Junction Boys”) Dent tells in “Twelve Mighty Orphans: The Inspiring True Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football,” which self-consciously seeks to be the “Seabiscuit” of high school sports. And like the iconic racehorse, the adventures of the Mighty Mites (officially dubbed the Masons, though almost no one called them that) were a tailor-made fable for the Depression era: Under the guidance of Russell, underweight, terminally hard-luck kids named Dinky, Pinky, Pee Wee, Trash Can and Possum fought their way into playing vastly bigger and wealthier schools. They played a visionary passing game decades ahead of its time, made it to the state semifinals several times and the finals once — and captivated fans across Texas and the nation who sent laudatory telegrams to the teams by the sackful. “They were Seabiscuit and Cinderella Man rolled into one little football team,” Dent writes, possibly putting too fine a point on an obvious comparison.

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By Robert Draper

Even for Robert Draper — a writer who sometimes felt his writerly ambition was out of place while living here during Austin’s Reign of Slack — it was no small undertaking: Write a nonfiction narrative about the inner machinations of an ongoing and famously media-phobic presidency.

And, if possible, get the president to sit for interviews.

But that was nothing compared to convincing publishers.

“When I sought to sell the book to publishers, I had to try to sell them on the notion of George W. Bush as a literary character,” Draper said last week from his hotel in New York. “This was not easy. This just in: The publishing industry is a little left of center. They had no trouble viewing Clinton as a Shakespearean character, but Bush they viewed as sort of a simpleton.”

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By Charlie Huston

As the Stephen King blurb (”blistering, unputdownable”) on the cover of “The Shotgun Rule” (Ballantine, $21.95) suggests, Charlie Huston is a monstrously gifted purveyor of suspense and mayhem. Readers of his Henry Thompson trilogy and his ongoing series of Joe Pitt vampire novels are well aware of his knack for pumping new blood — literally, and by the bucket load — into the well-worn pulp and horror genres.

But “The Shotgun Rules,” his first standalone book, is something else entirely: a story of wayward youth, stolen bicycles and drug deals gone bad grounded in a realistic setting — working-class, small-town Northern California, circa 1983 — that robs its characters of the protective armor of genre.

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By Stephen Pinker

In one of Plato’s dialogues, the Cratylus, Socrates propounds a number of theories about language, all of which have enjoyed popularity at one time or another ever since. One of the theories is about the importance of language, which is especially important in “distinguishing the nature of things.” Naturally, a property so important has a divine air, and Socrates plays with the idea that the names of things encode secret messages, instilled in them by the gods, which the philosopher, by using etymology, can uncover.

Science long ago discarded what has been called Cratylism. However, in the 20th century, philosophers and then social scientists made the so-called linguistic turn, taking language and its structure as a special product of the mind. Stephen Pinker, a Harvard psycholinguist who has written several best-sellers on this theme, is an intellectual heir of this movement, taking it into some strange places — notably, into the neo-Darwinian framework of evolutionary psychology.

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The Land, the Law and the Lord: The Life of Pat Neff

By Dorothy Blodgett, Terrell Blodgett and David L. Scott

When news broke recently that the Texas Department of Transportation was attempting to buy interstate highways in Texas from the federal government so they could be turned into toll roads, the appropriate response was: “Gov. Neff must be spinning in his grave.”

Pat Neff was governor of Texas from 1921 to 1925 and was responsible for the creation of the state highway system and the gas tax. But that’s not all Neff accomplished. He founded the state’s park system, established Texas Tech University and pioneered the appointment of women to state boards. Later in life, Neff was the president of Baylor University as well as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“He had a triple career,” says Terrell Blodgett, co-author of “The Land, The Law and the Lord: The Life of Pat Neff.”

Blodgett, along with Dorothy, his late wife, and David L. Scott, has written the first

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Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration

By Sam Quinones

Vaya al norte, joven (”Go north, young man”) is the advice that reverberates throughout Mexico, driving generations of men and women across the U.S./Mexico border.

“There is a culture of departure in Mexico,” says Sam Quinones, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and author of “Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration.”

The book is a follow-up to Quinones previous work, “True Tales of Another Mexico,” a compilation of nonfiction stories of Mexico’s underground. With “Antonio’s Gun,” Quinones once again demonstrates his talent for reporting on people in extraordinary situations, people usually hidden from our view, and for rich storytelling.

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