Dayton Daily News from Dayton, Ohio • 38

8 Dayton Daily Newt Dec, 9, 1990 These books sure-fire hits under any tree 'Toledo Stories' a rich account of immigrant life Colleen McCullough pursues new love, literary interests THROUGH AND THROUGH Toledo Stories By Joseph Geha. Graywolf Press. 125 pages. $7.95. 1 Jr.

4tM 1 p. By Sarah Booth Conroy THE WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON When last we looked in on Colleen McCullough, she had escaped from her job as a technician in a neurophysiology lab at Yale University by writing a best-selling novel, The Thorn Birds, set on a sheep ranch in her native Australia. With millions in the bank, but no love in her life, she sailed away to Norfolk Island in the South Pacific. As today's episode begins, we find in the ensuing decade or so the hitherto self-described spinster, now 52 years old, has: found true romance on the island; cast aside her image as a teller of tales mostly about lovelorn women; and, transformed into an erudite scholar, written The First Man in Rome. "When I decided to do a historical novel, I thought, this is a period no one has done," McCullough said from her Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite.

"I actually worked out the novel about the time I did Thorn Birds. I carry novels in my head a long time. "I first thought I'd do a single book about Julius Caesar. Then I realized that the period was too juicy, too meaty, too bitter and nasty for just one book," she said. "I had the nucleus of what I needed for the book, 180 Loeb classics from the Harvard University Press Latin on one side, English on the other.

The 1914 translations are rather quaint: "Morally they say, when we'd translate it as "so and so interfered with little boys. Latin called a spade a spade." At least one authority says her research shows. In a review in the Ottawa Citizen, Trevor Hodge, of the Carleton University department of classics, wrote: "Academics in particular will have pre-judged the issue, and will open the book at all only for the fun of sneering at the author of The Thorn Birds trying to be a Roman historian, and falling flat on her face amid howlers of every sort. Unfortunately, she doesn't." But Hodge goes on to criticize the prose as being "on the level of creative writing in Grade 11." Indeed, despite the glossary, the book is full of anachronistic cliches. "Well, I wasnt writing in Latin, mate," McCullough said.

"The roots of all these words are Latin. I tried to write in good standard English prose. You can't get away from idiom." With her bluff, hearty manner, McCullough is a formidable presence. Her lavish, colorful clothes, made for her in Australia, are well suited to her orange hair and 5 feet 10 inches with proportions to match. She chain-smokes without apology.

McCullough was born in 1938 in Wellington, New South Wales. Her parents were poor, and, she says, they couldn't afford to pay for her to study to be a doctor, but she did go to the University of Sydney and worked at enough different sorts of jobs to give her a good background for her novels. She taught in the Australian Outback, drove a school bus and worked as a librarian before she trained as a medical technician and moved to New Haven, Conn. Then in 1977 the paperback edition of Thorn Birds sold 7 million copies (the hardback, half a million), well-justifying her $1.9 million advance, a record for the time. The story also became a television miniseries, and according to Maclean's magazine, McCullough reaped $5 million or so from the Outback epic.

The writer's success freed her from money worries, though not from other kinds. She once told the Brisbane Courier-Mail: "Four of my five novels have unmarried women as heroines or villains. The life I gave Missy (in The Ladies of Missalonghi') is based on my own experiences and those of my mother, who really had a tough time ofit. "Let's face it," she said. "I'm no Miss Australia to look at.

And it was because of my own personal experience that I Colleen McCullough have had a particular fascination with the old maid." Even so, the author isn't the man-hater some people presumed from Thorn Birds. In some of her other novels, an older, professional woman is attracted to a craftsman or a man not her intellectual or social equal. McCullough now says, "I don't care how famous or intelligent you are, it's lovely to lean on a man." She prefers men who work with their hands "you can lean on them and they don't fall over," she said with a laugh, more bronchial than belly. McCullough's own husband sounds very much like she wrote him instead of met him. "Like most people on Norfolk Island, he's a descendant of the crew of the Bounty," she said.

"He's a colonial aristocrat a cross between Isaac Newton, a Samoan prince and a convict." Not to mention he's "good company. He's my sounding board. He doesn't criticize; he's not a talker, but I bounce it all off on him." She looked enormously pleased at the thought of him. "I think I was fated to go to Norfolk to meet the only man I could ever marry," she said. She moved to the 15-square-mile volcanic island 1,100 miles east of Australia in January 1980.

She met her husband, Ric Robinson, when he came to paint and plaster her house. One friend marveled that she was fortunate enough to find Robinson, and McCullough retorted that some women might overlook their house painter. "Some of the Norfolk people are terrible social snobs. One of the retired British colonial servants said, 'Don't you miss intellectual And I said, 'Dearie, when the typhoon blows the roof off your house, which had you rather have, an intellectual or a He also is a member of the local parliament. McCullough is chairman of the hospital board (and the principal tourist attraction).

The island has been a tax haven, thanks to its administrative status with Australia. "It's not a paradise," McCullough demurred. "No place is paradise when there's more than one person on it. Norfolk has 2,000...." "No, I'll never write about Norfolk Island," she added. "I want to live there." By Mike Hale KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE If you believe that the pleasure of the gift is in the giving, then you must admit that the pleasure of the giving is in the watching watching as your carefully selected bibelot is passed, approvingly, around the room, and listening: "Oh, that's nice.

Isn't that nice?" If you're also someone who must give books and there are those of us who must this can put you in a bind. Let's say you know your sister is dying to read Rabbit at Rest. The $21.95 Knopf hardcover edition is nice; substantial, elegantly bound, good to the touch. But there's not much there for your assembled relatives to see, beyond that boss typeface designed in 1931 by Frederic Goudy. Not much living-room oomph.

Now take something like New Kids (Kodak-Rizzoli, 224 pages, Ten-by-14 inches. Four pounds. This is a book people will notice; all you need is someone under the age of 16 to give it to, and it's on its way. Photographer Lynn Goldsmith spent three months earlier this year touring with the New Kids on the Block, and emerged with a lavish photo album, full of huge, elegantly exposed snapshots of the New Kids on stage, on the street, surrounded by fans and fast food. Each kid gets his own chapter, with revealing quotes did I idolize when I was a kid? Rob Lowe" Jonathan; "J've worked hard for my success.

I've paid my dues." Donnie; "I'm not gonna say that I've never had sex because I'm 21 years old." Danny). Best of all, the 140-square-inch pages rarely contain more than 40 words of text. New Kids big, colorful, scannable will be a hit with everyone present, not least the parents who want to see just what it is their kids are so worked up about. But what if there's no one at your holiday gathering young enough to receive it? In a more mature crowd, you should be able to find a taker for The Big Book of Hell: A Cartoon Book by Matt Groening (Pantheon, 169 pages, Lots of Binky, Bongo, Akbar and Jeff, very little Bart. Lots of laughs.

And, these being mostly Life in Hell strips, there are often lots and lots of words. Given the right audience, this book could circulate slowly and draw attention throughout the gift opening. 4 Finally, what if you're spending the holiday not in the bosom of the family, but in the spare bedroom of your baby-boomer friends? Then you'll probably have a likely victim, for The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs, by Andrew J. Edel-stein and Kevin McDonough (Dutton, 215 This is not sociology; the book devotes five pages to The Sexual Revolution, 59 pages to Films of the Seventies. The writing is serviceable, the photos a hoot and the nostalgic rush immediate.

Everything that might have meant "the '70s" has been noted, so guests can reconstruct their own version of the decade; say, The Omen, The Joy of Sex, the Commodores, streaking, Gerald Ford and MaryHartman, MaryHartman. A month-by-month time-line runs across the bottoms of all the pages figure out what grade you were in when the decade started and blow several hours tracing America's progress. Big Printings: The following hard-cover best sellers were recently released, or are due soon, in paperback: The Broken Cord, by Michael Dorris (Harper Perennial, 300 pages, winner of a 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award; The Captive, by Victoria Holt (Fawcett Crest, 341 pages, Confessions of an S.O.B., by Al Neuharth (Plume, 372 pages, Drive: The Story of My Life, by Larry Bird (Bantam, 290 pages, The Great and Secret Show, by Clive Barker (Harper, 688 pages, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan, with William Novak (Dell, 408 pages, Personal Fouls: The Broken Promises and Shattered Dreams of Big Money Basketball at Jim Valvano's North Carolina by Peter Golenbock (Signet, 396 pages, Spring Moon, by Bette Bao Lord (Harper, 575 pages, Tales From Margaritaville, by Jimmy Buffett (Fawcett Columbine, 230 pages, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars, The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988, by Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover (Warner, 496 pages, ByMikeSakal When it comes to major cities in Ohio that have been the butt of jokes, Toledo has sometimes been near the top. How could anyone imagine someone writing something good about it? Joseph Geha does.

He writes about what it was like growing up in a Lebanese family trying so hard to hold on to its ethnic traditions and struggling to be a part of the American way. Toledo wasn't such a bad place for Geha's characters, whom this reviewer believes are his relatives. In Through and Through, Toledo Stories, Geha debuts as a reminiscent and sentimental writer through his eight interrelated fiction stories set in a struggling Lebanese and Syrian community in Toledo. The stories range in time from the 1930s to the present. Voices of the members through three generations of a Lebanese-Christian family intertwine in these stories and tell of the changes they encounter during the process of cultural integration.

In Through and Through the elders of the family struggle to maintain their traditions while the younger people accept both the old and new ways. In 1946, Geha and his parents left Zahleh, Lebanon, and came to America on the first steamship out of Beirut Harbor after World War II. They went through Ellis Island and settled in Toledo in an apartment above the grocery store which his father owned. Three of Geha's stories that are easy favorites are Almost Thirty, And What Else? and the title story, Through and Through, which concludes the collection. In the sentimental Almost Thirty, HaleemYaboub's cousin George Yakoub worked in Yakoub's Yankee Cafe and Grille, which his Uncle Najeeb owned.

Haleem's father, Ra-sheed Yaboub, also worked in the restaurant. The story chronicles the closeness of the cousins growing up together talking with each other after hours at the Yankee Cafe, both of their financially-troubled fathers dying at an early age and their eventual growing apart. Haleem remembers all of the good times with the family in flower-filled Walbridge Park, how his father loved a good joke and hated snow and how George, the shyer cousin, was nervous about dancing until the right partner came along. The self-titled story, Through and Through, is kind of a surprise at the end of the book. The story is about John Doe a gangster who was the finger man in the '30s murder of Toledo beer baron Jackie Kennedy.

Most of Geha's work in poetry, prose and plays is about families from the Middle East and the conflicts within an immigrant culture. His fiction has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize XV and is included in the American-Arabian Collection of the Smithsonian Institution. 'First Man in Rome' fascinating, superb THE FIRST MAN IN ROME By Colleen McCullough. William Morrow Co. $22.95.

896 pages. of the illustration! The publisher notes she has the world's largest private library on the Roman Republic and that it took her ten years of research and one year of writing to produce The First Man in Rome. She added a pronunciation guide and an index to explain the more confusing Roman names, places and events. It's not really criticism to say it's hard to get interested in most of McCullough's books. But it is.

Her stories are always fascinating, her descriptions superb. But they're long and it takes a reader a while to hit the stride. In The First Man in Rome there are peaks and valleys. The peaks find the reader unable to put the book down until a particular scene is played out. The valleys find the reader slogging through Roman names and trivia, waiting for the next interesting scene.

This book has already made the bestseller list, and for good reason. It's a refreshing change of subject for readers. Reviewed by Mary Sikora, Dayton Daily News staff writer. By Mary Sikora It's thick and sometimes plodding, but Colleen McCullough has come through with a good one again with The First Man in Rome. McCullough, who has written several novels since her overwhelmingly successful The Thorn-birds, seems to do better with meaty, weighty subjects.

In this case, it's the first of what she says will be a series of books on the fall of the Roman Republic and the beginning of Imperial Rome. The First Man in Rome opens in 1 10 B.C. as two men, one patrician and one plebian, begin a course that will take them to greatness. Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla are true historical figures brought to life by the author. Using them as the protagonists, McCullough both educates and regales her readers with their stories.

Readers learn quickly about the rigid Roman social strata and watch as it begins to deteriorate under the most shallow and greedy of Rome's prominent families. Marius, who finally finds his power through marriage to a daughter of Ga- ius Julius Caesar, is elected consul six times in the wake of his successes as a general. Sulla, who begins his adult life a sorry excuse for a man, matures throughout the novel as he thinks and studies under Marius. Marius becomes the First Man in Rome, a distinction first given to Romulus. One senses the younger Sulla is destined for even more in subsequent novels.

McCullough peoples The First Man in Rome with a huge cast of Romans, all of whom we vaguely remember from somewhere. There are the Caesars, of course. And, as this segment of the projected five-novel series gains momentum for the next, Marcus Antonius makes his debut. McCullough says, in her author's note, that she did the research for this huge volume herself. She also did much Mike Sakal is a sports writer for the Dayton Daily News Fiction Last Week 1 1.

THE PLAINS OF PASSAGE Jean M. Auel, $24.95 Fallen angels The AIDS era has bred some strange hybrids, and Peeping Thomas, the second Robert Reeves mystery featuring Boston professorsleuth Thomas Carlyle Theron, is one of them. In his first appearance, in Doubting Thomas, Theron showed a taste for high jinks and low life in the city's downtown Combat Zone. Now that sex has become a "blood sport" that scared suburban folks prefer to engage in vicariously, via their VCRs, that old hotbed of sin is cooling down. Nonetheless, a feminist group that includes Theron's ex-wife is picketing one of the district's last X-rated theaters, called, ironically, the First Amendment.

Invited, because of his raffish reputation, to escort the protesters as they hunt for an expose allegedly hidden women, "pornography is proof of (men's) hate From the nice guys to the bad guys, from the mama's boys to the lover boys, they hate us." True or not, this is gloomy stuff; it casts a pall even on Theron's reconciliation with his ex, and takes much of the fun out of what promised to be a romp through the demimonde. a PEEPING THOMAS, by Robert Reeves. Crown. $18.95. 244 pages.

Sex, God, religion In the very first of these 13 short stories, Walter Kim proves himself to be a tactful writer. You have to have tact to write a story about masturbation without embarrassing your readers, and Kirn who was raised on a Minnesota farm and educated at Princeton and Oxford keeps a very straight face indeed. The coach of a Mormon church basketball team comes up with a plan to cure his players of self-abuse. He gives them poster paper and invisible-ink markers and tells them to record each sin with an X. A month later, at a team meeting, he hangs up the posters and turns on a black light "so that you can see yourselves the way God sees you." The youthful narrator expects to be shamed; instead, he is awed by "our X's emerging out of the wall in bands and columns.

Our sins were yellow stars that ran together. I wanted to stay there all night, just looking." In this and several other stories about Mormons, Kim manages to write as both insider and outsider. One youth, the chaperon of a girl whose boyfriend is serv ing as a missionary in Korea, lets her take him to bed after the missionary, now an ascetic and a martial-arts freak, returns and spurns her. Kirn writes of idled land and dying animals, of people who don't win or lose so much as simply hang on with a measure of dignity. Some of his stories are understated to the point of flatness.

But others such as the one about an old man who tries to recruit a wife for his son from among motorists marooned by accidents on a "devil of a curve" near his house hint that even the straight-est face can hide a taste for mischief. a MY HARD BARGAIN, by Walter Kim. Knopf, $18.95. 145 pages. Reviewed by Michael Harris for the Los Angeles Times.

in videos made by a former honor student turned porn queen, Theron witnesses a bomb blast that kills the group's leader. "Don't think sex, think money," a business-school colleague advises him. And, indeed, Theron's search for the murderer leads him through publishing houses, faculty meetings, street scams, strip joints and drug-fueled film sessions (all wittily rendered by Reeves, who writes good dialogue) into mortal danger at the hands of the profiteers behind the skin trade. Reeves could have poked fun at the feminists; he might even have been expected to. That he takes them seriously is admirable, but he goes further.

He seems to agree that pornography should be banned; that the free-speech issue is a fig leaf for public indifference; even that, for 2. FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT Stephen King. $22.95 3 3. THE WITCHING HOUR Anne Rice, $22.95 2 4. LONGSHOT Dick Francis, $19-95 4 5.

DAZZLE Judith Krantz, $21.95 8 6. MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT Sidney Sheldon, $21.95 5 7. LADY BOSS Jackie Collins, $21.95 6 8. THE RUBY KNIGHT David Eddings, $19.95 7 9. OH THE PLACES YOU'LL GO Dr.

Seuss, $12.95 13 10. THE BURDEN OF PROOF Scott Turow, $22.95 9 Non-Fiction UstwJk 1. A LIFE ON THE ROAD Charles Kuralt, $19.95 1 2. BO KNOWS BO Bo Jackson and Dick Schaap. $18.95 3 3.

THE CIVIL WAR Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric Bums. $50 2 4. MILLIE'S BOOK Barbara Bush, $17.95 4 5. AN AMERICAN LIFE Ronald Reagan.

$24.95 6 6. THE CAT THE CURMUDGEON Cleveland Armory, $17.95 8 7. GET TO THE HEART Barbara Mandrell with George Vecsey, $19.95 7 8. IRON JOHN Robert Bly, $18.95 5 9. ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW Robert Fulghum 9 10.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS H.G. Bissinger. $19.95 13 Miscellaneous L3st Week 1. FIND WALDO NOW Martin Hanford. $10.95 1 2.

WHERE'S WALDO? Martin Hanford. $10.95 4 3. THE GREAT WALDO SEARCH Martin Hanford. $10.95 2 4. THE FRUGAL GOURMET COOKS YOUR IMMIGRANT HERITAGE Jeff Smith.

$19.95 3 5. FINANCIAL SELF DEFENSE Charles Grvens. $22.95.