The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 26

A26 Editorial The Boston Globe FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2003 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 iiiiiiiMiiimiiiiiiniiiiiii 1 1 i 1 1 1 1 1 1 mi im ii im iiiiiiiiiuiiiii i minium Founded 1872 RICHARD H. GllMAN Publisher MARTIN BARON Editor RENEE LOTH Editor, Editorial Page HELEN W. DONOVAN Executive Editor RICHARD J. DANIELS President IliMlllllllllllllllHHIHIIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIilMlllllMMMIMIIIIIIIHIIIIIIIItlllllllllttlillllHIIIIIIIIIIIIMIIIHIIIIIlllllllllllHlllllllllllllllii S9E5SJ i mm epntiiffiiiKd A BOUNTY OF BOOKS user rr fc Bill jts i-rl: I MSI T'l V.IBiK 1 1 ii 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 IIIIIIIIIUIIIII I i I II I II I I Letters to the Editor How to prevent seasonal gridlock packed into "The Harlem Reader: A Celebration of New York's Most Famous Neighborhood, from the Renaissance Years to the Twenty-First Century" (Three Rivers Press), editor Herb Boyd's literary trek through Harlem life. Langston Hughes sings of Harlem.

David Levering Lewis tells its history. Sonia Sanchez and Maya Angelou remember when. And African-American intellectual Hubert Harrison scolds his neighbors for not achieving more. Also included is an essay called "409 Edgecomb, Baseball, and Madame St. Clair," written by Newton resident Katherine Butler Jones, who grew up in 409 Edgecomb, one of Harlem's well-known upscale apartment buildings.

As long as there have been writers who offend power, there have been exiled writers. David Shrayer-Petrov, author of the rich and varied short stories in the collection titled "Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America" (Syracuse University Press), belongs to that mournful and honorable tradition. There are stories here expressing the inner exile of a Jewish Refusenik entwined in Russian literary forms but hostile to the "bastards" who run the Soviet system. There are satiric miniatures of actual exile, as in the story of a Russian writer fishing for his old self in Newport. And threaded throughout BOOKS WELCOME all comers, offering comfort, excitement, exposure, shelter, and insight.

The quiet and solitary pastime of reading opens up worlds that can be as hud and lively as a Times Square New Year's Eve. It has been said that reading is essential because it isn't humanly possible to have enough friends to learn all there is to know. Below is a selection from the crowded community of books, all published this year, that caught the attention of the Globe's editorial board: In 1970 a young Republican infiltrated the Illinois state treasurer campaign of Democrat Alan Dixon, giving a false name and posing as a supporter to steal some campaign stationery. When Dixon planned to open his Chicago headquarters, the GOP zealot printed invitations, adding "Free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing," and handed them out at a rock concert, a commune, and soup kitchens. The event was a mess.

That dirty trickster is now one of the most powerful men in the country President Bush's political adviser Karl Rove. As the election year approaches, "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential" by Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater gives a detailed portrait of Rove, the brilliant and ruthless misfit who changes occur, especially during busy shopping hours. I have witnessed police directing traffic in other states and you would be surprised at how well it helps to eliminate traffic jams. This would benefit the shop owners, the public, and the city.

It is worth a shot. FRED DOLMAN Maiden Liberal bias in the news AFTER READING "Democrats prepare to make stand in Senate" (Page Al, Nov. 24) by Susan Milli-gan and Charlie Savage, I wondered: Whatever happened to impartial journalism and letting the reader decide? I am amazed at the liberal bias of The Boston Globe and how you slant your news toward liberal views. Let people decide for themselves. Print the truth how it is, not how you see it.

If I want a writer's opinion, 111 read the editorials. 1 want the news! STEPHEN McKIERNAN Worcester I SYMPATHIZE with the Faneuil Hall and North End merchants who are leery of the Big Dig changes scheduled during the busy holiday shopping season fear a detour in sales," City Region, Nov. 25). They fear that gridlock will result and scare customers off during the most critical time of the retail year. It is, of course, critical that the project go on and that the southbound tunnel open as scheduled.

But it is also critical that local business not be too disrupted at this important time of the year. This benefits not only them, but the city as a whole through increased tax revenue. I have a suggestion that might help. These changes will most certainly cause gridlock. I think that is a given.

My suggestion is a radical one: Put police officers in these areas to direct traffic and help clear up the gridlock as these DEAN ROHRER ILLUSTRATION these ironic fictions are allusions to heroes of the author's literary homeland. The ghost of Pushkin puts in an appearance, Chekhov and Tolstoy flit by, and the attentive reader may sense the spirit of the master of the genre, Isaac Babel, hovering over every page. Julius II, a most impious pope, had great taste in art. While he was fighting the French and the Venetians, Michelangelo was battling mildew and his rival Raphael to create the world's most beautiful ceiling over the Sistine Chapel. Ross King explains how they all fared in "Michelangelo the Pope's Ceiling" (Walker will likely do as much as anyone to shape the campaign.

It is a far better book than another on Rove, "Boy Genius" (Public Affairs), a hodgepodge thrown together in obvious haste by writers Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl M. Cannon. In "Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan" (Atria Books), Jordanian Norma Khouri tells the chilling true story of her best friend Dalia's murder a so-called "honor killing" committed by Dalia's Muslim father to save face after she falls in love with a Catholic. By confronting Dalia's family, then standing Keeping the Wellstone dream alive Non-objective news source LT IS outrageous when the media begin to create the news. Who is to stop Fox, the Weekly Standard, and other Murdoch-owned vehicles if not you? Please let Americans know what is going on.

I am a college professor, and it is absolutely depressing how many of my students get their news from Fox. My students really have no idea that it is not an objective source of the news. CORNELIA DANIEL Amherst DEAN ROHRER ELLEN GOODMAN, ordinarily one of the most astute columnists at the Globe, has somehow missed the one Democratic presidential hopeful who is keeping the Paul Wellstone dream alive: Representative Dennis Kucinich ('In search of the happy warrior," op ed, Nov. 23). Where are the big dreams about universal health care or education or jobs, she asks? Kucinich is proposing universal health care, publicly funded education, and an end to NAFTA and our place in the WTO.

Along with his health and education ideas, Kucinich clearly explains how we can afford this: Cut the military budget by 15 percent and repeal the tax cuts to the high-income bracket. In the service of his Ohio district, he saved jobs by preventing the closing of a steel mill and by blocking the privatization of a public hospital. Perhaps Kucinich is no more cheerful than the others, but he deserves credit for standing alone in his vision for global fairness and equality and an end to US hy-permilitarism. Millions of Americans share Goodman's hopes. Dennis Kucinich embodies them.

PAUL CUNNINGHAM South Portland, Maine The writer is a volunteer for the Dennis Kucinich campaign. Get serious about the real issues plish anything that's really lasting.) The Globe would better serve its readership if instead of providing multiple articles discussing the hair and motorcycle choices of the candidates, it printed stories setting forth their positions on actual issues. HOPE DRURY FOLEY Weston IF MARK Feeney had really wanted to advise the presidential candidates on how to be more like Bill Clinton, he should have added more information about infidelity with mindless morons wanna be like Bill," Living Arts, Nov. 24). (I'm sure the Globe will forgive me for being redundant and wasting the nation's time with personal scandal while failing to accom Coverage of Kerry campaign has been skewed I HAVE been reading the Globe's political coverage with particular interest these past few weeks as the New Hampshire primary heats up.

I find that what your reporters and columnists write about John Kerry's campaign here doesnt reflect what is happening. I see Kerry yard signs popping up all over my neighborhood, and when I go into the Kerry headquarters there are always lots of enthusiastic volunteers helping out There is an energy in the candidate that I have never seen before, and New Hampshire voters are starting to pay attention. But all I ever read in the Globe are negative stories. GEORGE DERKOORKANIAN Manchester, N.H. iiiiiilliliiiiiHiiiiliiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiimiii fthe dMobe MANAGING EDITOR Mary Jane WiMasoaAdministration DEPUTY MANAGING EDITORS Lucy BartholomayDegn Photo Robert L.

TamerEditorial Page Michael J. LarkinMws Operations Peter S. CanellosWasAtngton John YemmaSundaj Mark S. UonowProjecta SENIOR VICE PRESIDENTS Gregory L. ThorntonEmployee Relations and Operations Mary Jane PatroneSata Marketing Yasmin NaminLCtradaft'on Alfred S.

Larkin, JrGenroi Administration andExtemalAffairs GeorgeA. iarriosChief Financial Officer VICE PRESIDENTS Robert T. UuTphyInJbrmation Technology Harriet E. GoutyEmpUiyee Relations Stephen CahowftDducfion Peter O. NewtonAdvertising William F.

ConnollyAdministration Robert Services Christopher MayerCiretdatton Sales Susan Hunt StevensCrautofion Marketing Scott B. MeyerStrategic Planning IIIMIMM II 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 III! 1 1 Mil I II 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 till I i 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 II 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 III 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 II The murders of Half and Susanne Zantop in January 2001 taxed the capacity of the police and public to understand who might want to kill the beloved Ivy League professors. In "Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders," (HarperCollins) former Globe staffers Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff uncover the values and pathologies of a pair of teenage killers whose everyday lives in pastoral Chelsea, mask murderous appetites. Through meticulous reporting, the authors track the movements of the killers, Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker, from classrooms and playing fields to the scene of the horrific crime. Traditional visions of country living slip away with the lives of the Zantops.

The Victorian England of the novel "Signal Noise," (Picador) by New Hampshire writer John Griesemer bears only a passing resemblance to Charles Dickens's world of clerks and orphans. Griesemer recreates inventors and engineers, dreamers and speculators, who turned countries of farmers and artisans into linked units of the Industrial Age. American engineer Chester Ludlow leads one frustrating attempt after another to lay the first trans-Atlantic cable connecting North America with Europe. The husband of Ludlow's mistress helps London develop a sanitation system to cure "the Great Stink," which was making the city unlivable in the 1850s. Back home in America, Ludlow's wife, heartsick over their daughter's death, gets caught up in the spiritualism that attracted so many Americans, including Mary Todd Lincoln.

This is a dark rendering of the 19th century, a fit sire of the even darker 20th. Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio, the heart of the great Red Sox teams of the 1940s, never won a World Series, but they gained a greater personal prize life-enduring friendship. David Halberstam in "The Teammates" (Hyperion) describes how they got along (one prerequisite: Never argue with Williams about hitting or fishing) and recreates the bittersweet 2001 journey of Pesky and DiMaggio to say goodbye to Williams as he neared death. Jamaica Plain's Mark Zanger brings together history and cooking in "The American History Cookbook" (Greenwood), a compilation of recipes from pre-Colonial times to the 1970s. As Zanger, author also of "The American Ethnic Cookbook for Students," notes in the preface, some make for delicious dishes, some not, but all "tell people's stories." Zanger's deft writing style and evident love of both food and history make this book a treat.

up to her own and writing the book, Khouri put her own life in danger and had to flee the country. She exposes a hideous ancient custom still practiced in modern times and rarely punished. To solve a truly diabolical series of murders in post-Civil War Boston, what sleuths should be summoned? First-time novelist Matthew Pearl has chosen Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, and what a trio of detectives they turn out to be. For some reason, the killer wants to subject his victims to torments described in Dante's "Inferno." Should the literary men, at work on a translation of Dante, suspect each other, or perhaps the classicists at Harvard who disdain their work? While the young Pearl is himself a Dante scholar, "The Dante Club" (Random House) makes no pretence at literature.

It is a murder mystery, well paced and compelling, richly colored with scenes from Brattle Street, Harvard Yard, and the Old Corner Book Store in Boston. It's fine entertainment. In her slim first novel "The Hazards of Good Breeding," (Norton), Jessica Shattuck sends up the prototypical Boston WASP family at the turn of the 21st century already extinct but not knowing it. Employing a witty and insightful kind of cultural anthropology, Shattuck describes the dotty, preppy, eccentric world of the Dunlop family Mayflower scions and all shaken to its entitled core by ennui, infidelity, and dread. The seams sometimes show in the writing, but several hugely enjoyable scenes redeem the tale.

Jacob Cullen, neither gentleman nor servant, makes his way through 17th-century England in Maria McCann's novel "As Meat Loves Salt" (Harvest Books). Whether in the Puritan New Army, in the muck of London, or in a Digger's quixotic settlement, Jacob remains fascinating and unsettling as McCann unmasks his sexual identity and character defects. J.C. Hallman's "The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game" (Thomas Dunne Books) is indeed a nonfiction tale about chess that veers around the world from Atlantic City and Greenwich Village to Chess City, built in the Republic of Kalmykia, in Russia. But this book also tells of vivid journeys through the territories of friendship, passion for a game, and chess history.

Readers who may be indifferent to the game of chess will be charmed by the people, politics, exhibitions, and backrooms of this world. Politics, personalities, and poetry are all Don't fix it and make it worse ceived more care and higher quality care than anyone else. In striving to improve the medical care system, we should not move people to a plan that is universally understood to be inferior to what we have now. BRUCE CANTWELL Merrimack, N.H. IN A Nov.

24 op-ed article, Loretta McLaughlin proposed putting the entire country on Medicare as a solution to the health care crises Medicare model for health Is there even a single person on Medicare today who, if given a choice, would rather be on Medicare than have Tufts health insurance, or Blue Cross? How about asking the people who do have Tufts or Blue Cross if they would rather be on Medicare? What makes anyone think this is even a remotely good idea? One fact cited in the article is that Americans spend twice as much money on heath care as any other nation. Do you know what that means? It means we get twice as much care and twice as many services as any other nation. We can debate whether health care should be paid for by individuals or by taxes, but if you add up total spending, both private and government, and conclude that the United States spent more money in total than anyone else, that means we re- The Globe welcomes correspondence from readers. Letters should be written exclusively to the Globe. They should be signed by the writer and should include fir verification the writer's name, address, and daytime telephone number.

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