Friday Freebie: The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal

Congratulations to Peter Landau, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: News From the World: Stories and Essays by Paula Fox.

This week's book giveaway is The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal, just published by Viking.  Subtitled "The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Imposter," The Man in the Rockefeller Suit is the true account of self-made man Clark Rockefeller who schemes his way through life.  It's a fascinating blend of Catch Me If You Can and The Talented Mr. Ripley.  Kirkus Reviews wrote: "Seal delineates [Rockefeller's] endless schemes in an irresistibly lucid and propulsive manner."  Here's more about the book from the publisher's jacket copy:

The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as a Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and his journey of deception began. Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts-culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a Rockefeller. The impostor charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions-working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection-until his marriage ended and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, all you have to do is answer this question:  What magazine originally published Mark Seal's article about Clark Rockefeller in 2009? (The answer can be found at Seal's website)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on June 16--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on June 17.

My Summer Vacation

I might be a little scarce and sparse around here for the next couple of weeks.  My son and daughter-in-law are coming for a visit and, weather permitting, we hope to go camping in Yellowstone and/or Glacier National Parks.

Thinking about Montana's backcountry reminded me of an essay I wrote several years ago about one summer vacation.  I'm posting this here so if you don't hear from me again--if bits and parts of me are later found in piles of bear poop--then this will serve as my final legacy....

Ursus Arctos Horribilis

My wife has never been disemboweled by a bear.  Let's get that straight right from the start.  She's still alive (frowning slightly as she reads this) and breathing.

But there was a time when, in the wild spaces of her imagination, she felt a set of three-inch razor-sharp claws start at her navel and work their way up.  And the teeth.  Oh yes, the teeth, the thick saliva, the hot bear breath and the eggshell-crunch of her skull.

These are the things we both remember from that summer vacation to Glacier National Park in Montana.

We started planning for the three-day backpacking trip long before we left Atlanta.  The city was hot that summer and I grew dreamy just thinking about how my feet would spring-step along the trail deep in the park's maze of forests, the wind striking my face, cool as it swept over the huge sheets of ice on the mountains and down into the carved valleys.

On a piece of paper, I drew a cross-section of our car's trunk, planning how to pack the tent, the sleeping bags, the freeze-dried food, the paperback novels, the flashlight, the fuel cans, the canteens, and the extra clothing.  On another sheet of paper, I divided the gear between our two backpacks.

With a Park Service map of Glacier spread across the dining room table, I traced my fingertip along the trail from St. Mary Lake to Lake McDonald.  A forked rivulet of sweat trickled down my back in the mid-June humidity.  I read in the guidebook about how we would cross the Continental Divide midway through the trip at Gunsight Pass.  Perched on the spine of the park, we'd have hills blanketed with alpine wildflowers sloping away on either side.  Marmots would whistle among the talus deposits, mountain goats gambol on the cliffs and athletic trout sprint through the mint-blue lakes.  If I thought of bears at all, I placed them in the distance, harmlessly browsing the berry bushes upwind of where we'd be standing.

My voice rose in pitch when I told Jean what it would be like, just the two of us walking through the dewy forest, momentarily free of the children, insurance payments, our loud neighbors (we could set our clocks by the Friday night drinking sprees in the next-door apartment) and the trappings of society.

Jean nodded, smiled timorously and bit her lip frequently, but never disagreed with the overall Plan.

In her mind, the bears were much closer than the distant, hazy slopes.

*   *   *

I drove like a madman across the country from Atlanta to my parents' home in Wyoming where we dropped off our three children before heading north to Glacier National Park.

Along the way, Jean and I felt buoyant.  We sped through the rolling fields of southwestern Montana, passing tractors, flocks of wild geese, ranchers at their mailboxes.  Our car, packed to the windows with camping equipment, skipped along the highway like a loose tumbleweed.

Just south of Great Falls, I held my breath at the sight of a mule deer wading the breast-deep Missouri River.  It was early in the morning, less than two hours after dawn, and the deer's coat, neck and antlers were bathed in the kind of light normally reserved for cathedrals.  Surely this was a good omen, I thought and nearly drove off the road in happiness.

When we reached the park's west entrance, I propped the camera on the hood of the car, set the self-timer, then jumped back next to Jean in front of the chocolate-brown "Welcome to Glacier National Park" sign.  We held hands for the camera.

At our campsite a few miles inside the park, we set up the tent, held our noses and joked about the bitter mildew smell, then unrolled our sleeping bags.

I gathered wood and chopped it.  Jean took pictures of me with the axe in my hand.  My shirt was off and if you look at the snapshot today, I'm proud to say you'll see a trace of muscle rippling under the skin on my back and shoulders.

I was ready for anything.

My Bear Protection Plan included acid-washed jeans & an olive-green puffy parka. A wardrobe designed to frighten away man & beast.

*   *   *

Things broke down for my wife when she entered the visitor center gift shop and—past the shelves of logo-stamped ashtrays, pennants, shot glasses, tote bags, pencils and back-scratchers—saw the book with the bear on the cover.  The grizzly's paw was raised in mid-swipe, mouth open and nose alert as if sniffing the title printed in red an inch above its head: Bear Attacks.

From across the gift shop, I watched as Jean opened the book and looked into Pandora's box.

....The bear started biting me on the back of the head, which felt like a pick-axe scraping along my skull bones.  In defense I turned over to kick and push the bear off but then she bit my face.  I recall a deep bite which crushed the bones under my left eye.

....A grizzly can charge at a speed of at least thirty miles per hour, or forty-four feet per second.

....The bear took a few more bites, ripping three ribs loose from the spine and opening up the chest cavity.

....The bear grabbed Al's left forearm in his jaws and by standing up, pulled Al out of his sleeping bag, tossing him through the air...Like a flash the animal was over him...His teeth raked along Al's skull and managed to grip the scalp...With Al dangling by his scalp, the bear stood straight up shaking his head violently as a cat with a mouse.  Al's feet never touched the ground.

....When found, (the young biologist) had no flesh on her left arm for about five inches between her shoulder and elbow.

And then, this last sentence was all Jean needed:

Glacier Park, Montana, has had more grizzly bear-inflicted deaths than any other park.

She snapped the book shut, the pages whispering like ripped cloth.  Then Jean turned to me and said, "We are not going on an overnight hike."

"What?"

"I just don't think it would be a smart thing to go tramping off in the woods by ourselves."

"Why not?"

"All of a sudden, I don't feel very safe."  I had never seen her eyes move like this—coursing wildly from side to side behind her half-closed lids.  She was frightening me.  I'd fallen in love with her seven years ago because she'd seemed like such a no-nonsense, take-charge woman with the emotional strength of three people.  You could see it in her posture, the way she tossed her hair, the depth of her granite-blue eyes.

"There's absolutely nothing to worry about," I said, all the while worrying about the ninety dollars' worth of freeze-dried dinners we'd bought specifically for the backcountry trip.

"If what I just read is true, there's plenty to worry about," Jean said.  "No way am I going out there among the bears."

I snuck a glance at the bear on the cover.  His flared nostrils were pointed straight at me.  "Listen," I said, "these are probably isolated incidents.  I'm not saying that something like that will never happen to us, but I'll bet the chances are awfully slim."

That's when she opened the book again and read to me about the female biologist who watched the bear eat the flesh between her elbow and her shoulder.

We spent a restless night in our tent, kept awake not by the sour mildew of the canvas, but by the hump-shouldered shadows our imaginations projected against the moonlit walls.

*   *   *

Ask Jean for her most frightening memory and she'll probably tell you about the night her parents went bowling and left her in the care of her brother—the one with the hyena laugh, the one who thought nothing of putting rubber vomit on teachers' chairs or spiking the homecoming dance punch.  The one who cried wolf then laughed and laughed and laughed.

That night, when the front door shut and their parents' car backed down the driveway, this brother turned to Jean and said, "I'm going out to a movie and if you tell Mom and Dad, I swear I'll kill you."  He handed her a butcher knife for protection and left the house.

Jean was eleven years old at the time and though the house was brightly lit, she huddled on the sofa in the middle of the living room, her heart pounding beneath her thin nightdress.  She clutched the handle of the long-bladed knife between both hands.

When she heard a loud rustling noise outside the living room window, her teeth began to rattle as if she was sitting on a snowbank.

When there was a sound like dull knives scraping across the sliding glass door in the dining room, she gave a short, startled scream.

And when, minutes later, her brother snuck up behind the sofa and jumped out with a barking laugh, she very nearly stabbed him in the neck.

*   *   *

The grizzly bear is a lovely animal.  As it runs across a valley floor at forty-four feet per second, kinetic strength ripples in the muscles under the earth-brown coat.  The display of force is as breathtaking as tornadoes, floods and Army tanks.  When the grizzly charges up a mountain, the ground squirrels flick back into their burrows with a short, high scream at the passing thunder.

There is a tender side to the grizzly as well: the sow flat on her back, paws limp as her cub dines on milk; a family in hibernation, filling the den with breath that smells sweetly of rotted meat and fermented berries; a Herculean male, wife and two kids back home, stalking and bringing down with a single sweep of his claws a Dall sheep, and doing this not because he wants to but because he must.

There is a famous photograph showing a trio of grizzlies standing tall as circus animals in the middle of Yellowstone's Hayden Valley.  It is late evening and the sun is behind them, caught in the blond fur around their necks and heads.  Study the photo long enough and you will believe these are three haloed visitors from heaven staring at the camera, briefly distracted from their divine errand.

Bears once carpeted the land east of the Missouri River, as far north as the Arctic Ocean and as far south as Mexico.  At one time, more than 10,000 grizzlies roamed through California; but the last recorded sighting of ursus arctos horribilis there was in 1924.  Today, the grizzly is only an image on the state flag.

Squeezed out of its natural habitat by roads, farmlands and shopping malls, the grizzly has retreated to two islands of safety in the contiguous United States: areas surrounding Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.  Here, until the 1970s, the bears supplemented their normal diets of rodents, insects and berries, with food found in park dumps: canned spaghetti, suntan lotion, used tampons, dirty diapers.  Though some park officials sanctioned "bear shows" (true dinner theater) for visitors, garbage-habituated bears soon became "problem" bears when they crossed paths with human tourists.  "Problem" bears were routinely relocated after being shot with a tranquilizer--frequently Sernylan, a drug also known as "angel dust."  Gradually, some bears needed larger and larger doses of angel dust in order to be brought down.

In the inner city ghettos, teenage junkies hooked on angel dust jump from window ledges with visions of demons dancing in their heads.

*   *   *

The sun shone every day of that week we spent in Glacier National Park.  The bellies of the clouds—white as glaciers themselves—split as they crossed the jagged mountains then seamlessly mended as they sailed out above the lakes.  Wildflowers bobbed in the soft evening breezes.  It was perfect weather for a backcountry hike.

Jean and I stayed close to our tent at Lake McDonald's crowded campground.  We took all the precautions: stored our food inside the car, went to sleep in fresh, odor-free clothes, stopped using deodorant and perfumed makeup.  At night, we were comforted by the sound of other campers' voices echoing between the lodgepole pines.

We toured the park during the day and at each gift shop, Jean gravitated toward the bookshelf and picked up The Book almost against her will, magnetized by the lurid accounts of maulings.  I hung back, unable to explain why I felt differently about camping among the grizzlies.  Though the passages in Bear Attacks made my mouth go dry, I wanted to believe our backcountry experience would be the rule, not the exception.  I wanted to believe all of nature would be as serene as the deer breasting the Missouri River at daybreak.

But even serenity is logically balanced by violence.

*   *   *

As we stood on the wooden deck five feet above the frothed water of McDonald Creek several miles north of our campsite, I remembered two things from my childhood.

I grew up watching a commercial on TV that began with a middle-aged man walking alone down a dark street at night.  He hears footsteps behind him.  We see two pairs of loud, clicking shoes.  The man quickens his pace, pulls out a handkerchief and mops his brow.  A trash can overturns, an alley cat yowls.  The footsteps come closer and closer.  We can hear the man's heartbeat.  He is just about to break into a dead run when he passes under a street lamp, looks over his shoulder and sees two Boy Scouts emerge from the shadows behind him.

The second memory is more persistent.  I've been to Glacier before; in fact, I stood on this very spot 18 years ago.  I was holding a book, Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen.  I'd been reading it in the back seat as my parents drove from Pennsylvania to Montana for our summer camping trip.

Night of the Grizzlies describes what happened on August 13, 1967—the night two bears killed two women in two different locations of Glacier.  Lightning storms, sonic booms, freshly caught fish, perfumes and cosmetics were all suggested as possible motives for the attacks.  But park rangers were ultimately baffled by the maulings.  I was nine years old at the time I read Night of the Grizzlies and I accepted it as a truth far stranger than fiction.

After all, lightning never strikes the same place twice.

Carrots are good for your eyes.

Presidents do not authorize break-ins.

Those aren't really Boy Scouts behind you.

*   *   *

Our hands knotted in a tangle of fingers, standing there on the slick overlook above McDonald Creek.  The water surged from right to left, glacial blue and hissing with foam.

Eight years ago, I slipped and fell into a creek like this high in the mountains of Wyoming and was swept downstream, bouncing like a pinball between boulders.  When I went over the crest of the waterfall, I choked on my own scream.

Jean, however, is not frightened by the water in McDonald Creek.  She leans over the railing, catches the mist on her face and a smile curls across her mouth.  The only way the current can harm her is if she allows it to have that power by setting her foot on a slippery rock as I did eight years ago.

At the moment, Jean is more concerned about the unpredictable grizzly—the beast that one day bolts at the sight of hikers and the next attacks a young biologist and eats her arm.

The image of that shredded arm, stripped to the bare bone by those slavering teeth, haunted us and, in my mind, the biologist's arm became many arms, like a trunkful of mannequins—all chewed mercilessly by something beyond our control.

Slowly, I began to understand the heart of Jean's fear.  This was not just a rogue grizzly bear we were talking about.  It was something much larger, more universal: a distrust of nature programmed into the strands of our DNA months before we're even born.

Early man banked the fires higher to stave off the blinking yellow eyes.

Little Red Riding Hood stayed on the path, but eventually she ran into the wolf.

These days you can't go swimming off Martha's Vineyard without seeing a dorsal fin in every breaker.

I think everyone has this unease toward nature, packed around in our spleens, bred into us as far back as Eden.  We try to dampen the dread we feel toward natural ferocity with concrete, with roads, with non-profit organizations.  Mountain climbers, kayakers, safari porters, rodeo cowboys—all try to gloss over what they know is there in the pit of their stomachs.  We have overcome, but not subdued, the feral threat hidden by the branch, the leaf, the crag.

When I finally conceded to Jean that yes, perhaps wisdom was the better part of valor and that we should live among other members of our own species—protected by the blue glow of Coleman stoves, lulled by the sound of Winnebago engines—I knew I'd surrendered more than my pride over the cancelled camping trip. I'd also acknowledged my fear of the wild.

*   *   *

The next day, we came upon a crowd clotting the side of the road which curves around Swiftcurrent Lake several miles from the east entrance of Glacier.  Cars were parked half on the road, half on the shoulder.  It looked like the scene of an accident and I expected to see blood, brain, bone smeared across the narrow road.  People in bright clothes rushed by, armed with cameras and binoculars.  They shaded their eyes and pointed up the slope below Grinnell Point.  There was something in the heather and berry bushes.

Jean said, "What do you think it is?"

But as we walked along the road to join the gathering crowd, both of us with jelly-weak legs, I didn't need to answer.  We knew what we'd see on the hillside.

At last, at last, this was the moment of encounter.

There is a bear in this photo.

*   *   *

When I slip the snapshot from the photo album, I can hold the bear in the palm of my hand.  He is small as a fleck of chocolate among the berry bushes in the picture.  In fact, if you didn't know what you were looking at, you'd probably think there was a fleck of chocolate on the picture and you'd try to scrape it off with your fingernail.

We waited nearly fifteen minutes that day to see the grizzly dash from the bushes where he'd been foraging to a stand of spruce trees a quarter-mile upslope of us.  I was using a telephoto lens on my camera but the bear still looked no bigger than a fleck of you-know-what.

After the grizzly bolted, muscles visible under his coat, he disappeared into the vegetation.

A groan went up.  The sideshow was over.  The tourists dispersed and Jean and I walked back to our car.  She squeezed my hand and we quickened our pace.

Something in the way my wife pulled me along made my blood curdle, made me think about an unpredictable explosion of fur and fang.  I looked over my shoulder at the shoulder-high berry bushes that ran in a continuous line from the spruce trees to the road where we stood.  Vegetation can hide many things.  I wished I had a handkerchief to mop my brow.

When we were in the car, doors slammed shut, locks pressed down, we began to breathe.

We drove to the Many Glacier Hotel along the shores of Swiftcurrent Lake.  We could still see the heather-covered slope from the pay phone outside the hotel.  We called my parents and Jean talked to the kids.

"Guess what Mommy just saw?  Can you guess?  A real live grizzly bear!...Yes!...I'm completely serious.  In fact, we can still see where it was on the side of the mountain."  She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece.  "Has it come out yet, David?"

I looked through the telephoto lens.  A tour bus rolled through the hotel parking lot, stirring up dust, and it was impossible to see anything through the haze.  "Nope," I said.  "I don't think it's come out of the trees yet."

"Daddy says he can't see it right now, but it's there in the forest...What?...Well, of course we were scared."

*   *   *

Next to the photo of the chocolate smudge is a picture of Jean with her arm in the mouth of a bear.

I took the snapshot when we stopped in Hungry Horse, a small town just outside the park.  Along the side of the road there is a woodworker's shop with several sculptures, all carved by chainsaws. There is a cigar-store Indian, there is an eagle, there is the head of Abraham Lincoln (big as a log cabin), and there is a bear.  One ear broke off years ago and was glued back on.  The brown paint of the bear's hide is flaking off.  Still, there is a defiant expression chainsawed into his face.  His mouth is open and his paw is raised.

"Put your arm in there," I said.

"Oh, sure," Jean said, shuddering.

"C'mon, just for the picture."

She sighed, put her purse and coat on the ground and walked up to the bear.  She slipped her forearm between the teeth, gave a squeamish shudder and said, "Hurry up!"

I clicked the shutter on the "u" of "up!" and now when we look through the photo album, we always stop at this picture and laugh.  Jean is bent at the waist, as if doubled in pain.  The broken-eared bear has her by the soft fleshy part of her arm.  Jean's mouth is rounded in a vowel-shaped cry.

This is what we will always remember from that week among the bears: the wild fear we will never tame.

 
This essay originally appeared in The Anchorage Daily News.

Friday Freebie: News From the World by Paula Fox

Congratulations to Laura Knight Moretz, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, He Said What? edited by Victorian Zackheim.

This week's book giveaway is News From the World, stories and essays by Paula Fox.  Not your typical book which can be neatly shelved under "fiction" or "non-fiction," News From the World is a hybrid volume which mashes truth, half-truths, and outright fabrications into one reading experience.  Since none of the seventeen selections in the book are labeled, it's often hard to separate fiction from essay.  The result is probably one of the purest reading experiences you can have because without the preconceptions and limits of form, you concentrate strictly on the words and Fox's lucid style.  But don't just take my word for it; here's what Tom Bissell (God Lives in St. Petersburg) has to say about the book: "Paula Fox is one of our greatest writers.  Her prose is a model of ruthless, gorgeous efficiency and her mind is so unnervingly alert to the messy contradictions that come with being human.  These essays and stories will delight and inspire anyone who cares about literature, storytelling, and truth itself."  To pique your curiosity further, here's the publisher's jacket copy for News From the World:

This complete gathering of Paula Fox's short works spans forty-five illustrious years of her career, from 1965 to 2010. There are perfectly turned stories (two of which—"Grace" and "The Broad Estates of Death"—won the O. Henry Prize) in which characters unexpectedly find themselves at a crossroads and struggle to connect with others. There is memoir—a genre where Fox's honesty, grace, and perception set her apart—in which Fox revisits childhood ideas about art and reality, life in New York in the 1960s, and her relationship with her husband's family. And there are essays—pointed, funny, relentlessly persuasive pieces on such topics as censorship and the corruption of language. Enlivened by Fox's signature wit and electrified by her unsparing insights into human nature, News from the World is essential for Fox's loyal readers and perfect to introduce those who are meeting her for the first time.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of News From the World, all you have to do is answer this question:

What author helped revive Fox's career when he discovered her 1970 novel Desperate Characters while at the writer's colony Yaddo and later praised it in a 1996 essay for Harper's?  (The answer can be found in this Paris Review interview with Fox)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on June 9--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on June 10.

In the war, but not of the war (an excerpt)

I'm still tinkering with the opening of my novel-in-progress (Fobbit), but here's the latest version of what I hope will draw readers into this dark comedy about the Iraq War.

Let this be known: I, Chance Gooding Jr., never wanted to be a man of war.  Growing up, and well into my adult years, I never imagined myself uniformed, head-shaved, be-gunned.  A hard, stoic minion of the military going around saying things like “Kill a Commie for Mommy!” and “Last night I drove my POV to the PX so I could DX my BDUs” or “I’m being all I can be”?  Nope, not in the cards for Chance Gooding Jr.

A writer.  That was more like it.  A lover of language, a scribe of moonlight and madness, chronicler of the human condition.  Someone like John Cheever or Raymond Carver or the great F. Scott F.  But without all the drinking and early death.

If you’re like me, when you’re sitting in the high school guidance counselor’s office and you’re looking at the computer printout tabulating your ASVAB and you’re wondering if, in the end, it really does boil down to a choice between mortician and commodities trader, all sorts of possibilities branch out in your head, roads opening to the horizon, untrod paths waiting to be trod.  You start giving serious consideration to standing at the front of a college lecture hall wearing corduroy jackets with elbow patches ogling the heavy-bosomed co-ed in the front row who insists she really does love the feminist spirit of Edith Wharton.  You begin to wonder what a pipe would taste like clenched between your teeth.  You imagine yourself chopping wood outside a Walden-style cabin as you turn the lake into poetry, or framing a scene in a box between your hands on a Hollywood movie set, or hunching over a slab-sized manuscript with a red pen on the 18th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper.

But a soldier?  No.  Especially not one sardined into an ass-crunching seat between identically-clad, slick-sweating men sitting in a C-130 which, skittish of sniper bullets and mortar shells in the sky above Iraq, danced a wild tango of what the pilots called “pattern irregularity,” scrotum shriveling at the thought of terrorist rocket launchers which, at that very moment, could be aimed directly at the plane’s fuselage.

And yet, there I was: buzz-cut and be-gunned and shit-pantsed.  To borrow a phrase from the New Testament, I was in the war but I was not of the war.

Front Porch Books: May 2011 Edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly assessment of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mr. UPS, deliver them with a doorbell-and-dash method of deposit, I call them my Front Porch Books.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm just here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists.  To see a larger version of the book covers, click on the thumbnails.

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan (Knopf):  Jacket Copy:  "Meet Jake.  A bit on the elderly side (he turns 201 in March), but otherwise in the pink of health.  The nonstop sex and exercise he’s still getting probably contribute to that, as does his diet: unusual amounts of flesh and blood (at least some from friends and relatives).  Jake, of course, is a werewolf, and with the death of his colleague he has now become the only one of his kind.  This depresses Jake to the point that he’s been contemplating suicide.  Yet there are powerful forces who for very different reasons want—and have the power—to keep Jake alive."  At first glance, Duncan's novel looks like it aims to do for lyncanthropy what Justin Cronin's The Passage did for vampirism.  If it's even one-third as good as Cronin's novel, The Last Werewolf will be the one to beat this year.  After reading only two pages, I'm guessing it's already at the head of the book wolf pack.  Lord knows it has climbed to the summit of my To-Be-Read pile.  I first heard about this epic monster novel ("monster" as in "shaggy beast") from Josh Christie over at Brews and Books when he raved:

      Three months into 2011, and I may have already found my favorite book of the year.
      Due out this summer, Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf is being cast by some as “genre fiction for non-genre-fiction readers,” the same way as Cronin’s The Passage was in 2010. To be honest, that kind of terminology makes me cringe. To me, saying a novel transcends genre always sounds like an insult to genre fiction, literary fiction, and the book.
      So, I’ll just say that The Last Werewolf is a fucking awesome book. It’s surprising, it’s beautiful, and it sets the bar high for every other book I read this year.

I love it when bloggers get all frothy around the mouth.

We the Animals by Justin Torres (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):  Torres' debut novel is slim as a knife and looks just as sharp.  It opens with this epigraph by Plato: "Now a boy is of all wild beasts the most difficult to manage.  For by how much the more he has the fountain of prudence not yet fitted up, he becomes crafty and keen, and the most insolent of wild beasts.  On this account it is necessary to bind him, as it were, with many chains."  Judging by the first chapter, the prose is unbound and crackles with life in this story about three brothers living in Brooklyn who, according to the Jacket Copy, "tear their way through childhood--smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift."  The Opening Lines are pretty damn compelling:

We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats, we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.

Months before its publication date, We the Animals already has the jet-propulsion of an endorsement from Michael Cunningham (The Hours): "We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book.  It’s heartbreaking.  It’s beautiful.  It resembles no other book I’ve read.  We should all be grateful for Justin Torres, a brilliant, ferocious new voice."

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (Doubleday):  Some books have eye-catching cover designs (this one is bordered by a gaping tiger's mouth which surrounds a watercolored etching of a boat tossed on spaghetti-like waves).  Some books have hook-y plot summaries (in this case, a 19th-century London street urchin named Jaffy Brown goes to work for a Mr. Charles Jamrach, famed importer of exotic animals, who lures him out to sea on a three-year whaling voyage in search of a fabled sea dragon).  Some books come with a solid pedigree (Birch is ranked among Britain's finest novelists and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize--though this is her first full-length work of fiction to be published in the U.S.).  But some books, like this one, have undeniably killer opening paragraphs:

I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.

Honestly, do you really expect me to stop there?  Must.  Keep.  Reading.  Jamrach's Menagerie is due out this month and it already has my full, undivided attention.

The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma (Atria Books):  Here's another big June release (is the publishing world getting wiser to the movie industry's summer blockbuster formula?) with another insistent opening paragraph:

Andrew Harrington would have gladly died several times over if that meant not having to choose just one pistol from among his father's vast collection in the living room cabinet. Decisions had never been Andrew's strong point. On close examination, his life had been a series of mistaken choices, the last of them threatening to cast its lengthy shadow over the future. But that life of unedifying blunders was about to end. This time he was sure he had made the right decision, because he had decided not to decide. There would be no more mistakes in the future because there would be no more future. He was going to destroy it completely by putting one of those guns to his right temple. He could see no other solution: obliterating the future was the only way for him to eradicate the past.

Here's the Jacket Copy: "Set in Victorian London with characters real and imagined, The Map of Time is a page-turner that boasts a triple play of intertwined plots in which a skeptical H. G. Wells is called upon to investigate purported incidents of time travel and to save lives and literary classics, including Dracula and The Time Machine, from being wiped from existence.  What happens if we change history?  Félix J. Palma explores this question in The Map of Time, weaving a historical fantasy as imaginative as it is exciting—a story full of love and adventure that transports readers to a haunting setting in Victorian London for their own taste of time travel."  It sounds like a mishmash of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels and the Back to the Future movies, but I'll admit I'm hooked.  Pull the Delorean around to the front of the house, Watson.  I'll be right there.

In Caddis Wood by Mary Francois Rockcastle (Graywolf Press):  For a novel which, according to its rather pulse-less Jacket Copy, "explores the competing rhythms of romantic love, family life, and professional ambition, refracted through the changing seasons of a long marriage," In Caddis Wood sure has some Opening Lines which quicken my blood:

      Carl sits upright in bed and gazes into the furry dark. Something hot and galloping in the room, black walls leaping like a Tilt-A-Whirl, the steady thump of his heart. Terror. Not from a dream, either. Hallie sighs and turns into his arm. There is a stirring in the corner behind the glass door, and he remembers a similar movement that afternoon while he was weeding in the garden. A motion as of a bird startled, jarred into flight. Scanning the shadowy contours of the room, he sees the pale curtain, the silhouette of clothing hung on hooks. He concentrates on each breath, his eyes locked on the steepled pines that frame the edge of the porch, then pads across the wooden floor.
      The air outside is resinous, soft, completely still. Only the silver stream moves. Maybe it's the unnatural quiet that has awakened him, the absence of nighttime's customary clamor: leaves, the soughing wind, whine of insects. The moon is sickle shaped and bright, not a single cloud.  Everything--trees, sky, birds--is watching.

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (St. Martin's Press):  Selling a book is all about timing, isn't it?  Today's headline could boost tomorrow's bestseller.  That's why it's a shame this new novel from Perrotta (Little Children, The Abstinence Teacher) won't be released until August--just think of how author and publisher could have cashed in on the flash-in-the-pan media hysteria surrounding Harold Camping and his recent predictions of the Rapture.  Take one look at the empty, smoking shoes on the front cover and it's pretty easy to guess this book is about the LeftBehindOvers.  Perrotta (the "Steinbeck of suburbia"*) puts his date of "Sudden Departure" at October 14 (no year given) and once again delights readers with a lemon-sharp satire about How We Live Today.  By the time The Leftovers opens, the big whoosh up into the sky has already taken place and society is carrying on as best it can--organizing a parade down the Main Street of Mapleton and forming groups like the Orphans of October 14th, the Grieving Spouses' Coalition, Bereft Siblings Network, and the Guilty Remnant.  If anyone can make us laugh at the Apocalypse, it's Perrotta.

Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam (Other Press):  There's something about the last sentence of the first paragraph in Nadzam's debut novel which snaps me to attention with its clear, clever imagery:

About the tops of upturned trash bins, black flies scripted the air.

I like the construction of the sentence, the specificity of the flies' blackness, and especially that verb "scripted."  I don't know how the rest of the book holds up, but Nadzam sure has my attention at this point; she's a writer to watch.  Here's the Jacket Copy: "Lamb traces the self-discovery of David Lamb, a narcissistic middle aged man with a tendency toward dishonesty, in the weeks following the disintegration of his marriage and the death of his father.  Hoping to regain some faith in his own goodness, he turns his attention to Tommie, an awkward and unpopular eleven-year-old girl.  Lamb is convinced that he can help her avoid a destiny of apathy and emptiness, and even comes to believe that his devotion to Tommie is in her best interest.  But when Lamb decides to abduct a willing Tommie for a road trip from Chicago to the Rockies, planning to initiate her into the beauty of the mountain wilderness, they are both shaken in ways neither of them expects."  Blurb-worthiness:  "Lamb is a wonder of a novel.  Bonnie Nadzam has offered an exploration of interpersonal and sexual manipulation and power that left me reeling.  This is a novel about responsibility, complicity, blame, neglect, and finally love."  (Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier)

Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine by Lou Ureneck (Viking):  The cover design for Ureneck's memoir is the first thing that pulls me in: the purple snow, the spider-silhouettes of trees, the palpable warmth of the light spilling out of the door and windows.  The word "Maine" in the title is the second thing that convinces me I need to make this a must-read.  I've never been to Maine, nor even to New England (does New Jersey count?), but I want to go so badly I can taste it like woodsmoke on the tongue.  From what I can see, Ureneck's story of escaping the city, going into the woods, and--a la Thoreau--living deep to suck out all the marrow of life will only prime my wanderlust to epic proportions.  Great Opening Lines, too:

      The idea had taken hold of me that I needed nothing so much as a cabin in the woods--four rough walls, a metal roof that would ping under the spring rain, and a porch that looked down a wooded hillside.
      I had been city-bound for nearly a decade, dealing with the usual knockdowns and disappointments of middle age. I had lost a job, my mother had died and I was climbing back from a divorce that had left me nearly broke. I was a little wobbly but still standing, and I was looking for something that would put me back in life's good graces. I wanted a project that would engage the better part of me, and the notion of building a cabin--a boy's dream, really--seemed a way to get a purchase on life's next turn. I won't lie. I needed it badly.

Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington (Pamela Dorman Books): I'm looking forward to reading this novel which looks at the Iraq War from a unique angle: the titular character is a young girl wrenched by the news her father is being deployed.  While Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone primarily examines the catastrophic effects of combat on adults left at the homefront, Harrington's novel gives us the story from a more impressionable and tender viewpoint.  I'm anxious to read this one--if nothing else, to get some sense of what my own three children went through when I got on that plane to Baghdad six years ago.  Jacket Copy: "When Alice learns that her father, Matt Bliss, is being deployed to Iraq she's heartbroken.  Alice idolizes her dad, working beside him in their garden, accompanying him on the occasional roofing job, playing baseball.  After Matt ships out, her mother begins to crumble under the pressure of suddenly being a single parent and Alice struggles to fill the void as she balances the drama of adolescence with the effort of keeping her family together.  But Alice is supported by a safety net strung with relationships, including almost boyfriends, a grandmother, a baker with too many children, her track coach, her kid sister, her Uncle Eddie, and even her well meaning but complicated mom.  She will learn to drive, plant her father’s garden, and fall in love, all while trying to be strong for her mother, and take care of her precocious little sister, Ellie.  But the smell of Matt is starting to fade from his blue shirt that Alice wears everyday and his infrequent phone calls are never long enough."  Blurb worthiness: "I put down this book and thought, there is no one like this girl, so fully and richly has Harrington brought a new Alice to life.  The great sorrow, of course, is that there are many Alice Blisses out there.  The power of Harrington’s richly delineated novel lies in putting a girl like Alice before us and asking us to remember how many beautiful, feisty others are staring down the long hall of adulthood with a father or a mother gone to war."  (Sarah Blake, The Postmistress)

A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles (McSweeney's): Like Saturday Night Live's faux household cleaner Shimmer ("It's both a floor wax and a dessert topping!"), Sayles' 955-page epic about American Manifest Destiny serves two purposes: It's both a book and a murder weapon!  It's also a wrist-breaker, toe-stubber, and cat-squasher.  Pair it with McSweeney's other brick-book from last year, the 1,030-page The Instructions, and you've got a good set of barbells for a weight-training program.  All kidding aside (sort of), big books like A Moment in the Sun always daunt and depress me because I know I'll be so intimidated by their length I won't get around to reading them anytime soon.  Sayles (who in another life is the gifted filmmaker behind Return of the Secaucus Seven, Matewan and Lone Star) has gathered good reviews for this novel (Adam Langer in San Francisco Chronicle: "His breathtaking precision and attention to detail can make E.L. Doctorow's historical novels look puny and slapdash by comparison") and the subject matter is certainly dialed in to precisely the era of which I'm most fond: the turn of the century (19th to 20th, that is).  It's big and sprawling and will likely take weeks (nay, months!) to read, but I've got the whole summer stretching ahead of me, don't I?

Johnny Appleseed by Howard Means (Simon & Schuster):  Here's another book of epic proportions--not in page length, but in subject matter.  I've long been fascinated by the folkloric character of Johnny Appleseed, tree planter extraordinaire.  Surely there must be more to the man than the goofy Disney cartoon.  Howard Means appears to have probed beneath the skin of myth to reach (....wait for it....) the core of Appleseed's character.  The Opening Lines indicate Means is a good storyteller, too:

      Near sunset, one day in mid-March 1845, a seventy-year-old man named John Chapman appeared at the door of a cabin along the banks of the St. Joseph River, a few miles north of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Barefoot, dressed in coarse pantaloons and a coffee sack with holes cut out for his head and arms, Chapman had walked fifteen miles that day through mixed snow and rain to repair a bramble fence that protected one of his orchards. Now, he sought a roof over his head at the home of William Worth and his family—a request readily granted. Chapman had stayed with the Worths before on those few occasions when he felt a need to be out of the weather, a little more than five weeks in all over the previous five-plus years.
Inside, as was his custom, Chapman refused a place at table, taking a bowl of bread and milk by the hearth—or maybe on the chill of the front stoop, staring at the sunset. Accounts vary. The weather might have cleared. Afterward, also a custom, he regaled his hosts with news "right fresh from heaven" in a voice that, one frontier diarist wrote, "rose denunciatory and thrilling, strong and loud as the roar of wind and waves, then soft and soothing as the balmy airs that quivered the morning-glory leaves about his gray beard."
      One version of events has him reciting the Beatitudes, from the Gospel According to St. Matthew: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. …" That could be, but for last words—and this was to be his final lucid night on earth—the Beatitudes are almost too perfect, like those morning-glory leaves fluttering in the old gray beard. More likely, Chapman expounded for the gathered Worth family on the "spiritual truths" of the Bible, its hidden codex, a subject for him of inexhaustible fascination.
      John Chapman slept on the hearth, by the fire, that night. On that everyone agrees. By morning, a fever had "settled on his lungs," according to one person present, and rendered him incapable of speech. Within days, perhaps hours, he was dead, a victim of "winter plague," a catch-all diagnosis that dated back to the Middle Ages and included everything from pneumonia and influenza to the cold-weather rampages of the Black Death. Whatever carried him away, Chapman almost certainly did not suffer. The physician who pronounced him dying later said that he had never seen a man so placid in his final passage. Years afterward, Worth family members would describe the corpse as almost glowing with serenity.

      That's overblown, of course, but with John Chapman—or Johnny Appleseed, as he eventually became known throughout the Old Northwest—just about everything is.

The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott (Nan A. Talese):  In the first chapter of Abbott's debut novel there is a random act of violence that is so shocking, so horrifying, it's all but impossible to stop reading.  The fact that Abbott describes it with such precise control over tone and pacing makes it all the more gripping.  I won't say more for fear of spoiling the experience of those first few pages, but if you're in a bookstore and you happen to pick up The Upright Piano Player and start leafing through the beginning of the book, you're a stronger person than me if you can put it down and walk away.  Me, I'd be taking it up to the cash register, my fingers full of paper cuts from turning the pages too fast.  Here's the Jacket Copy to tease you a little more:

      Henry Cage seems to have it all: a successful career, money, a beautiful home, and a reputation for being a just and principled man. But public virtues can conceal private failings, and as Henry faces retirement, his well-ordered life begins to unravel. His ex-wife is ill, his relationship with his son is strained to the point of estrangement, and on the eve of the new millennium he is the victim of a random violent act which soon escalates into a prolonged harassment.
      As his ex-wife's illness becomes grave, it is apparent that there is little time to redress the mistakes of the past. But the man stalking Henry remains at large. Who is doing this? And why? David Abbott brilliantly pulls this thread of tension ever tighter until the surprising and emotionally impactful conclusion. The Upright Piano Player is a wise and acutely observed novel about the myriad ways in which life tests us—no matter how carefully we have constructed our own little fortresses.

Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff (Harper):  In an introductory note to the Advance Reader's Edition of this book which is subtitled "The Epic True Story of a Plane Crash Into the Stone Age," Harper Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Claire Wachtel writes: "On a very warm day in August 2009, I was lunching with an agent who mentioned a great project he'd be sending out in the fall.  'It's one of the last untold stories of World War II,' he began, raising instant skepticism.  But within minutes this jaded book editor was hooked.  At each crucial point in this thrilling story--and there are many--I interrupted, 'Are you sure this isn't a novel?"'  One look at the Jacket Copy and it's easy to see why Wachtel was so incredulous:

      On May 13, 1945, twenty-four American servicemen and WACs boarded a transport plane for a sightseeing trip over “Shangri-La,” a beautiful and mysterious valley deep within the jungle-covered mountains of Dutch New Guinea. Unlike the peaceful Tibetan monks of James Hilton’s bestselling novel Lost Horizon, this Shangri-La was home to spear-carrying tribesmen, warriors rumored to be cannibals.
      But the pleasure tour became an unforgettable battle for survival when the plane crashed. Miraculously, three passengers pulled through. Margaret Hastings, barefoot and burned, had no choice but to wear her dead best friend’s shoes. John McCollom, grieving the death of his twin brother also aboard the plane, masked his grief with stoicism. Kenneth Decker, too, was severely burned and suffered a gaping head wound.
      Emotionally devastated, badly injured, and vulnerable to the hidden dangers of the jungle, the trio faced certain death unless they left the crash site. Caught between man-eating headhunters and enemy Japanese, the wounded passengers endured a harrowing hike down the mountainside—a journey into the unknown that would lead them straight into a primitive tribe of superstitious natives who had never before seen a white man—or woman.
      Drawn from interviews, declassified U.S. Army documents, personal photos and mementos, a survivor’s diary, a rescuer’s journal, and original film footage, Lost in Shangri-La recounts this incredible true-life adventure for the first time. Mitchell Zuckoff reveals how the determined trio—dehydrated, sick, and in pain—traversed the dense jungle to find help; how a brave band of paratroopers risked their own lives to save the survivors; and how a cowboy colonel attempted a previously untested rescue mission to get them out.
      By trekking into the New Guinea jungle, visiting remote villages, and rediscovering the crash site, Zuckoff also captures the contemporary natives’ remembrances of the long-ago day when strange creatures fell from the sky. A riveting work of narrative nonfiction that vividly brings to life an odyssey at times terrifying, enlightening, and comic, Lost in Shangri-La is a thrill ride from beginning to end.

Sigh.  Between The Last Werewolf, Shangri-La, A Moment in the Sun, The Upright Piano Player, and a dozen other new releases, it looks like my summer is already booked.

*TIME magazine