Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush (Scribner, 2010) Close to a year and a half since her husband finished two terms as President of the United States, and seventeen years since her father-in-law was voted out of office, former First Lady Laura Bush--the “more interesting Bush”--goes on the record with a memoir. Those who have long wondered about the fatal car accident Laura was involved in will be satisfied; but those who have wondered more about what a former librarian whose favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov was thinking when she married a man whose presidency was defined by bumbling malapropisms and two questionable wars will be disappointed. Laura is tight lipped when it comes to her George, a skill foreshadowed in the book's beginning: “This habit of suppressing the unpleasant, linked to the harshness of life on the West Texas plains, was ingrained in Bush early on. Not bad training for a political wife.” Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife by Lisa Miller (Harper/ HarperCollins Publishers, 2010) This new book from Newsweek magazine's religion editor aims to summarize and explain our abiding fascination with the afterlife, in all its manifestations. It is "a somewhat formless mix of historical summary, tours through theological controversies and interviews with some of the roughly 80 percent of Americans who say they believe in heaven.” But Miller's style defeats the book's promise, according to this reviewer, whose distaste with Miller's gentle approach drove him to sin. By the end, I had invented a drinking game: do a shot every time Miller describes the interviewee's eyes, two shots for the weather, three shots for the meal. Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman (Pantheon Books, 2010) The first novel by this South African poet takes on what this reviewer calls a “grand theme,” that is, “the tyranny of chance, the way a small act can unleash ever larger consequences, sending a person spinning unwittingly toward a disturbing fate.” The book's protagonist, a Ghanian who goes by the alias “Eddie Signwriter,” negotiates a typically arduous and ostracizing immigration to France, and Scwartzman, although not “entirely comfortable with the novel's longer form,” traps the reviewer's interest with poetic writing and a gripping story that veers from the usual portrayal of Africa as a place of strife, a “statistical catastrophe.” Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats by Robert Wuthnow (Oxford University, 2010) and How Risky Is It, Really: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts by David Ropeik (McGraw Hill, 2010) “They're out there, and they're ready to kill you” begins a spirited review of two new books on our fears of everything from global warming to the Ebola virus, the “great boogey men of modern life.” The authors' approaches are vastly different, though, Wunthow as a sociologist and Ropeik as a historian, and are equally failures. “Both books are bloated explorations of the obvious, but they do teach a valuable lesson: The world is full of dangers, and life is fleeting. So use your dwindling days wisely--read other, better, more interesting books.”
