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The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 102

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Louisville, Kentucky
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THE COURIER-JOURNAL BOOKS SUNDAY, JUNE 13, 1999 I 5 'I cBack to the Moon' b'City of Light': pa triumphant, confident America docket Boy' author has returned this time with captivating fiction ed happens that blows them literally off course. There's an abundance of space talk and high-tech jargon thrown around in the book, but Hickam does it so artfully that it doesn't detract from the sto 3 1 "If fj! fi'S'R. J'l i at A 1 i Sl'V 1 i 'lit if By DAVID WALTON Special to The Courier-Journal THE "city of light" in Lauren Better's richly evocative first novel is Buffalo in 1901, the year of the Pan-American Exposition, the construction of the Niagara power station, and the assassination of President I McKinley each of which fig-; ures significantly in her story. Buffalo, the "Queen City of the Lakes," the most important inland port in America, is a symbol for an age where wealth and privilege rule, where women, blacks and immigrants are kept strictly in their place. "We were triumphant.

As a city, as a Book Review says the City of Light narrator, By Lauren Belter Louisa Dial, 518 $24.95 Barrett, head- mistress of the city's exclusive Macaulay School for Girls. Louisa is 37, unmarried, and is widely assumed to have a I "Boston marriage" with her friend from Wellesley, Francesca Coatsworth a 1 cover she maintains against any suspicion of entanglements with the powerful men who form her i board of directors. Louisa is the novel's best fea- ture, an intelligent, feeling woman whose sympathies mir-tot the many social conflicts of her time, and whose position gives her entry to the homes of the mighty, and to all that year's I- key events. The central, motivating force of Louisa's own life is her goddaughter, Grace Sinclair, whose mother, Louisa's best friend, has been dead a year. Grace's father, Tom, is director of the power station, and one evening, playing on the stairs with Grace, Louisa overhears an argument between Tom Sinclair and Karl Speyer, the station's chief engineer; the next morning Speyer is found dead, fallen through the ice of a park lake.

This should be the sendoff for a classic romance of suspicion. Mrs. John Whitehead of Field, a miner's wife, and two of her children In a 1946 photo taken by Russell Lee. It's one of hundreds of splendid images In the modestly priced new book, "Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives" by Bruce I. Bustard (University of Washington Press, 136 By DONALD B.

TOWLES Special to The Courier-Journal WHEN Homer Hickam wrote his memoir, "Rocket Boy," he hit the best-seller list with a captivating book that inspired the movie "October Sky." That was less than a year ago. Now, Hickam has produced his fiction debut, "Back to the Moon," which is every bit as exciting Book Review as his earlier book It seems trite to refer to Back to the Moon By Homer H. Hickam Jr. Oelacorte 454 $23.95 "Back to the Moon" as a page-turning thriller, but it's the truth. As implausible and unbelievable as the plot is, Hickam's style of writing gives the impression that all he wrote really could have happened.

And maybe it could have. Hickam spent years as a NASA engineer, so there's no doubt he knows what he's talking about. He spins an incredible story about a group of space experts who hijack the space shuttle Columbia and go roaring off to the Moon. And, according to the alleged hijackers or spacejackers it's all legal. But that's just the beginning.

How they carry out their plot is fascinating. So why do they want to steal the Columbia and return to the Moon? To find a source of energy that will solve the world's problems of heating and cooling and running every type of machine for time eternal, that's why. Therefore it stands to reason that the world's oil producers and energy barons aren't too keen about a new source of energy that could well put them out of business. Neither is the vice president of the United States, who controls the nation's space agency and has for years been strongly opposed to space exploration and Moon landings. But all that doesn't deter these hardy spacejackers.

Many: other things come close to stopping them in their tracks and that's part of what makes, Hiqkftrn's book fas-. cihating. Just as it looks as if the explorers might make it through, something unexpect wave of sailing Lv 1 fit ry for those space-uninitiated readers. In fact, it may just add to the suspense of the tale. The characters are simply a hoot.

Dr. Isaac Perlman is the scientific brain behind the project. He believes the Moon contains certain fire beads that can produce fission, resulting in an energy source to solve the world's problems. Without it, Perlman says, Earth has about 50 years before the lights go out. Jack Medaris has long experience with space exploration, but got tossed out of NASA for infractions a long time ago.

A gung-ho sort of fellow, Jack knows more about spacecraft than most astronauts. An episode with his wife, Katrina, has scarred his very soul and left him hardened. It falls to Jack to take charge of the mission, including running the spacecraft, after an accident on board sidelines the original pilot. Medaris formed the Medaris Engineering Company to make the flight back to the Moon, with the help of Perlman and a bunch of other offbeat partners. The leading female character is Dr.

Penny High Eagle, a brilliant Native American biologist and writer scheduled to go along on the Columbia's original flight to gather data helpful to the nation's medical community. But all that changes as the scheduled flight, with a full crew of females led by a no-nonsense woman astronaut, becomes totally unscheduled as Medaris and his crew take command. High Eagle wasn't supposed to be on board, but she is, due to a fluke, and she and Medaris go after each other in many unexpected ways. In addition to being extremely intelligent and as tough as nails, Penny High Eagle is a knockout. Her changing relationship with Jack provides spicy entertainment in the book.

Jack's key'helper aboard tne shuttle is Virgil Juda, whose thoughts constantly drift from- his critically-ill daughter to his duties on the-; Columbia. through tough times. "Rushmore" (Scholastic, $17.95) captures another character of American history. Lynn Curlee tells how Mount Rush-more was carved and about Gut-zon Borglum, the man who designed and fought for it. With precise details, Curlee examines the many problems associated with the project from disbelief to finances and the hardships of men who set the dynamite charges and hung on ropes from Harney Peak in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Children will glimpse a bit of political maneuvering and "offensive egotism" in the story. It's not as good as a visit to Mount Rushmore and the little museum filled with data and photos below the faces. But it's good. Scholastic recommends the book for ages 7-10. Peter Rabbit, Mrs.

Tiggywin-kle and their woodland friends have touched every child's life. "My Dear Noel: The Story of a 1 fr 'i iiiiniirn Tnr Y--n -f- -T- Biographies for young people Joel White in the 1970s: a sailor in the classic style. JOHN EARLE Homer H. Hickam Jr. There are plenty of other interesting characters who move along with the changing story the vice president, Stuart Vanderheld, a powerful but stodgy politician whose agenda switches back and forth, and the nation's attorney-general, Tammy Hawthorne, who is tough, ungla-morous, and a key player in the drama being earned out in space.

After a hairy take-off, the Columbia crew finds there are those who want to help them in their mission and those who are dedicated to making sure they fail and perhaps die in the process. All sorts of nifty space gadgets are brought into play, including some from the time of Ronald Rea- fan's Star Wars program, hen there's a security service run by a diabolical director who takes his orders from different masters. At times it seems impossible that the twisted story can ever be straightened out. The reader is the true beneficiary of Hickam's vivid and inexhaustible imagination as the storyline blasts along at warp speed to its incredible and unbelievable conclusion. The writer is a retired vice president for public affairs of the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times Co.

i D- V-til' UU 'II MMT'Hir I Homer Hickam will be in Louisville on Wednesday, June 23, from 7 to 8 p.m. at Hawley-Cooke Booksellers, Glenview Pointe Branch. Letter From Beatrix Potter" (Dial, $15.99) tells how their creator, Beatrix Potter, began doing children's stories. Potter, who lived in England's Lake District, was a farmer, a political activist, an artist of nature and a storyteller. She had no intention of becoming a famous creator of children's books.

But when Noel Moore, the 5-year-old son of a friend, became sick, she wrote letters. One included "The Tale of Peter Rabbit." Potter continued to write animal stories to the Moore children, illustrating each with fragile character-filled drawings. On the front endpaper of the book is a facsimile of the original picture letter sent to Noel in 1893. The back endpaper shows the same letter cleaned up for greater legibility and laid out in the correct reading order. Jane Johnson tells Peter Rabbit's story clearly and with obvious affection for the bunny and Potter.

Recommended for ages 4-8. NON-FICTION 1. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. 2. The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zuhav.

3. A Pirate Looks at Fifty by Jimmy Buffett. 4. Real Boys by William Pollack. 5.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. 6. Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes. 7. Our Dumb Century edited by Scott Dikkers.

8. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. 9. Star Wars: The Making of Episode I The Phantom Menace by Laurent Bouzereau and Jody Duncan. 1 0.

The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger. 1 1 The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. D-mko. 12.

Falling eaves by Adeline Yen Man. New Yor Times News Service The old 'Joel White's Last Boat' is a nostalgic, literary voyage By MICHAEL KENNEY The Boston Globe ANYONE SAILING on Maine's Penobscot Bay on certain days last summer would have had the good fortune to be transported with nostalgia back to the time when speed on the water also represented beauty in the wind, For to be seen sailing there out of a long-ago past, it seemed was a majestic and graceful creature. The boat was Wild Horses, the first of a new class of racing yachts, the W-76s, designed by Book Review Joel White and A Unit of Water, a Unit inspired of Time by the Joel White's Last Boat classic By Douglas Whynott lines of Doubleday the New 303 $23.95 York 50 sloops that had been designed by Nathanael Herre-shoff and built in the early 1900s like them, with hulls of wood, not fiberglass. "A Unit of Water, a Unit of Time" purports to be, as the subtitle puts it, the story of "Joel White's Last Boat." Wild Horses was the last boat that White designed and oversaw construction of at his boatyard in Brooklin, Maine, but he never lived to see it sail. He died of cancer at 67, six months before it was launched in spring 1998.

By far the major portion of "A Unit of Water, a Measure of Time" is taken up with an evocation of classic wooden sailing boats and with Douglas Whynott's warm and admiring portraits of the men (mostly) who build them today. Little is actually said about the W-76 a commission for Massachusetts developer Donald Tofias until close to the end of the book. But that is as it should be, for what becomes clear is that the "last boat," whether Joel White's or Herre-shoff's, is not important in itself, but as part of a living heritage of the people who build them. Readers might be alerted to that by the lack of illustrations, other than a jacket photo of Wild Horses under sail (in Eggemoggin Reach) and the construction plan for the hull on endpapers. This lack might seem to be like publishing a book about art with no pictures of paintings, but it establishes that the Is Tom somehow implicated in Speyer's death? Is his grant of $1 million to the Macaulay School soon after meant to buy Louisa's silence? Tom first seems the traditional romance hero a tough Irish Catholic who's battled his way up with energy, intelligence, and imagination.

"It's become a religion to me," he tells Louisa, "creating electricity from water." To another novelist, Tom and Louisa's story would probably follow a predictable line, but Belf er is more interested in the underlying meanings of power and position, loyalty and obligation. Hers is a novel of the mind as much as the emotions, a bit long and overeventful in the way of many first novels, but signalling the debut of a writer of genuine vision and range the kind you know will only get better. The dialogues are especially convincing, written with the repressed subtlety and indirection of a Henry James novel. And Belfer does a wonderful job of evoking the era, its manners and codes, its sense of the beauty of progress and technology the hum of generators like "a drape of velvet, soft and pliant," the first sight of the power house reminding Louisa of her first sight of Chartres: "The four cathedrals of electricity existed in proud isolation along the windy riverbank. Like white fire, morning sunlight glinted off the windows of the two powerhouses now complete on the Canadian side of the river.

Just beyond the powerhouses, the transmission lines began their journey upriver to Buffalo, cutting the sky like taut ribbons of black." "City of Light" also seems very contemporary, in its outlook toward gender, race, and ecology, but more especially in its unexpected view on current presidential politics. Two presidents figure in this story, Grover Cleveland, former Buffalo mayor, the book's least attractive character, but its most masterful characterization; and William McKinley, "jovial, expansive, gracious everyone's favorite uncle." It's a measure of Belfer's skill that the shooting of McKinley, coming at the book's climax, serves mainly as backdrop for the by-then much more enthralling and consequential fate of the Buffalo plutocrats and school mistresses, artists and radicals that Belfer so vividly portrays. The reviewer is a writer and author who lives in Pittsburgh. BEST SELLERS (PAPERBACKS) By JANE P. MARSHALL The Houston Chronicle FROM BOOKS, children learn about real people who influence in tiny or giant ways their young lives.

Many of those books fill community and school libraries, waiting for a school assignment on the explorers or the Revolutionary War or American Indians. Some parents relegate biographies and other books about real people to assignments. What a shame. In everyday reading at home, they could mix real-life stories with Charlie Bucket, Christopher Robin and Angelina the Ballerina. These new ones are a good place to start: "Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange" (Viking, $19) is the story of a haunting and unconventional life.

Lange is most famous for her photos of real people in desperate situations: tiny Japanese-Americans with evacuation tags hanging from the buttons of their cloth coats; cars overloaded with blankets, goats and children, California-bound in the hope of escaping the Depression; an 11-year-old boy picking hops in Oregon in 1939 alongside his grandmother at 5 a.m. Her image of a migrant mother and her three children taken in Nipomo, in 1936 has come to symbolize the tragic human despair of the Depression. The publisher recommends "Restless Spirit" for kids ages 10 and older. For readers ages 5-9, a story about the Great Depression is disguised in "The Babe (Harcourt Brace, $16). David A.

Adler writes about a young boy who loves Babe Ruth and yearns to see him play in Yankee Stadium. The boy's father has lost his job and sells apples on a street corner. Embarrassed, he pretends to go to the office everv day, hiding the truth from his wife and son. The boy hawks newspapers. No matter what the headline, he calls out the latest news about the Babe.

How he learns about his father, how he finally meets his hero and gets a $5 tip, how he finally in July 1932 sees the Babe play make a heartwarming story about a national hero who helped at least this family wonderfully realized subject of this book is a culture. It's a culture made up of men such as Sonny Williams, a carpenter who "liked planking most, attaching the spiled planks and then getting on the inside of the hull to see if light came through." But in true Maine fashion, he also took time off in August to rake blueberries, and he loved clamming: "when the tide was right he'd clam on a low tide before coming in to work and then on the second tide after work." In that culture, too, are the people who have been sailing all their lives sometimes (and most admired by Whynott) the same boat. Among them is Dave Bradley, a man in his 80s who has been sailing Mischief, a Herreshoff-de-signed S-Boat, since 1932. Bradley comes one winter day to the Brooklin yard where Mischief is stored. Whynott writes: "It seems to me, as I sit in the cabin and listen to Bradley (talking about the boat and its fixtures), that this is the most intimate connection between a person and a boat.

Everything on it means something to him." Joel White was the son of the writer E. B. White and "A Unit" is as much about the elder White's relationship to his son, and his own love of sailing, as it is about Joel White. "With me," E. B.

White once wrote, "I cannot not sail." As Whynott defines that compulsion, "he's written a note to the boatyard to put the boat up for sale, but doubts he means it. He knows that when the breeze comes, the sloop will be there, and he'll get underway." weather and devoted his life to planting apple seeds in the remote places of the American frontier. Paul Bunyan never existed at ail stories about him are called "faketales" by folk-lorisls who believe Bunyan was the creation of lumber companies and chambers of commerce. This anthology also includes the myths, legends and folktales of Bigfoot, Uncle Sam, Billy the Kid and Hiawa-' tha. The tales are tall, and pe "Stuart Little" was Joel White's favorite of his father's three children's books.

"One can imagine the delight of the little boy who was crazy about boats," writes Whynott, "listening to his father tell the story of two-inch Stuart wearing a sailor's suit" who skippers a model sailboat in Central Park. The title is a slightly contrived attempt to merge E. B. White's notion that "contemplation is work," and his boat-builder son's knowledge that the amount of water displaced by a boat is "equal to the time and money spent displacing it." To many readers those who happily accept the designation as people who "mess around in boats" the title will more aptly suggest the time warp known to patient spouses and indulgent parents as "boatyard time," wherein the boat owner disappears to check on some seemingly minor matter and returns many, many hours later, unable to account for the missing hours. The clock is just about to go on "boatyard time," so there are more practical matters painting the bottom, installing some piece of not-entirely-needed new gear to be concerned about than a book about them.

But that boat owner would be well advised to tuck a copy of "A Unit" into the ditty bag before heading down to the yard. It will serve as a reminder of why he or she is going there and justify whatever measure of time is spent. The reviewer is with The Boston Globe. tales culiarly American. "They serve as mirrors in which a group of people can see themselves," the editors write.

"More specifically and more often, Ihey are like those minors in which we apply makeup or even disguises, designing images of who we think we are, how we believe we should appear to the world, and how we think we should perform in it." Anne Stephenson The Arizona Republic FICTION 1. Summer Sisters by Judy Blume. 2. The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve. 3.

Secret Prey by John Sandford. 4. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. 5. You Belong to Me by Mary Higgins Clark.

6. Genius Lies by Nora Roberts. 7. The Midnight Club by James Patterson. 8.

The Elusive Flame by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. 9. Bag of Bones by Stephen King. 10.

Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons. 1 1 The Reader by Bemhard Schlink. 12. Homeport by Nora Roberts 13. Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace and Journal.

14. 1 Know This Much Is True by Waily Lamb. Exploring America's myths and folk "Myths, Legends Folktales of America" edited by David Leeming and Jake Page (Oxford, $25). It's said that when the legendary blues singer Bessie Smith was 11, she was kidnapped and taken in a burlap bag to Ma Rainey, who gave her singing lessons. "Johnny Appleseed" was really an eccentric, homeless man called Jonathan Chapman, who walked barefoot in the coldest.

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