Cliffs of Despair
By Tom Hunt
Random House
Despite its title, this book will surprise you with funny moments, thanks to the appealing self-mockery of its author. Tom Hunt, a Connecticut teacher, says that he has "always been drawn to darkness -- to Dostoyevsky, Hopper, desolate landscapes, the double lives of crooked CEOs, pedophiliac priests and treasonous CIA agents." After his brother-in-law took his own life, Hunt decided to research suicide by visiting the high cliffs of England's Beachy Head, the world's third most popular suicide spot (after the Golden Gate Bridge and Japan's Aokigahara Woods). The act is so common there that a suicide-prevention group has installed a phone booth, and waiters in a local pub are told to watch for solitary drinkers. Over several visits, Hunt gets nowhere as an investigative journalist (the area's residents won't talk about its morbid fame), but succeeds as an earnest and compassionate listener when he visits a man who jumped but survived, views a body with a local mortician and befriends the family of a suicide. The book that grew out of his quirky curiosity is a kind and thought-provoking look at the act of self-destruction and the mysteries it leaves behind.
Nightlife
By Thomas Perry
Random House
This suspense novel features an unconventional villain, a serial killer who follows no discernible pattern and learns the finer points of murder as she goes along. Within the first 95 pages she stabs a woman to death, shoots two men and pushes another from an eighth-floor balcony. Perry's storytelling is also unpredictable. His characters come and go. A man who plays a big role in one chapter will all but disappear in the next. When we finally figure out who the main players will be, we're surprised that there are only two: The villain, who changes her name no fewer than eight times and leaves a grisly trail throughout the West; and Portland homicide detective Catherine Hobbes, the only investigator who doesn't under-estimate the killer because of her gender. The good news is that this mystery has more substance than melodrama.
A Handful of Dust:
Disappearing America
By David Plowden
Norton
"Photography is straight poker," Plowden says. "You play the hand you were dealt, or fold." He does not like to "disturb the light," so he works with what the day brings and does not resort to artificial means. This gives the photographs in his new book an appropriate look of stark reality, for the places in them are obsolete and have been left to suffer the cruelties of weather and time. These scenes seem familiar when we look at them: abandoned farms, churches, schoolhouses, banks and other businesses. A few of the images were taken in New Mexico and New England, but most were made in the Midwest, an area Plowden knows well. In Illinois, he found the deteriorating doors of an empty drugstore -- above them are the names of six pharmacists from several generations of the same family. And in Iowa he photographed a room in a deserted farmhouse. Dirt and dry grass had blown in and scattered across the floor, yet the air still hinted at the small human dramas that took place there.
Animals in Translation
By Temple Grandin
Harcourt
Grandin is autistic, which has made her life difficult and yet she believes it has given her a special understanding of animals. New in paperback is her engaging discussion of why she says "animals saved me" when she was a girl, of the many things she has learned about them and of her long-held belief that animals and autistic people are "visual thinkers." The result, she writes, is that autistic people can think the way animals think. "Autism is a kind of way station on the road from animals to humans, which puts autistic people like me in a perfect position to translate `animal talk' into English," she writes. "I can tell people why their animals are doing the things they do." Her book is anecdotal, provocative and appealingly chatty, whether she's talking about dogs, horses, cattle, pigs or cats. One book critic called it "hilarious, fascinating, and just plain weird." And Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs noted that Grandin "has a Ph.D., but the autism has probably served her better."
The Inheritance of Loss
By Kiran Desai
Atlantic
Much of this disarming novel takes place during the mid-1980s along the border between India and Nepal, where endless rebellion and political insurgency have ensured, as Desai says, that "it had always been a messy map." On a mountain ledge sits a house called Cho Oyu, its one-time grandeur lost, "its lines grown indistinct with moss." Inside are an irascible old judge and his beloved dog; the judge's orphaned teenage granddaughter, Sai; and their impoverished cook. In the early pages, this isolated existence is disrupted by evidence of yet another political uprising even as a second story unfolds in the US, where the cook's homesick son, Biju, tries to eke out a living as an illegal alien. The novel moves between India and America as political turmoil escalates, romance blossoms for Sai, loss comes to the judge and a somber Biju realizes that he and his father are no longer relevant to each other's lives.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby