The Fine Print – 4/8/10
May 10th, 2010 | By administrator | Category: EC Book ReviewsNew in hardcover
Scranton: The New Electric City
Written by Jennifer Mahalidge, Mark Olderr, Debbie Dunleavy, David J. Wenzel, Robin Walker; foreword by Mayor Chris Doherty; featuring photographs by an array of photographers
M & M Publishing, Inc; 2010, $39.95
Hot off the presses of independent Mississippi publisher M & M, this vastly photographed book of Scranton’s past and present will surprise and enlighten. Forgiving some of its minor flaws (pixilated photos in places; odd uses of Photoshop-altered skies; an empty jacket flap featuring captions but no photos; some hyperbolic language) the book does a good job of making Scranton look good. Thanks to a bevy of photographers and a slew of mostly well-written captions, we watch the history of Scranton unfold before our eyes. Scranton: The New Electric City does a good job of reaching across boundaries to explain what makes Scranton work: our thriving arts culture, our natural beauty, our gorgeous architecture, our progress, our hospitals and colleges. Of course, like any over-arching pictorial, it misses a few things along the way (the local media, ethnic diversity) but the good vastly outweighs the bad here. For an intense historical look at Scranton, make sure to supplement this with gems like Kashuba’s A Brief History of Scranton or any of the local history titles from Tribute Books. For a beautiful, lavishly photographed, up-to-date hardcover tome, this is a must-have for every coffee table-top in the greater area.
New in paperback
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories
By Wells Tower
Picador/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux; 2010; $14
I didn’t realize until after I decided to read and review this book that it had already had the distinction of being reviewed twice in The New York Times Book Review, once by Edmund White and once by Michiku Kakitani. So, a word of advice — if you’re interested in my brief treatment, do yourself a favor and look up the full reviews. There is a reason that this book was recommended twice by the NYT, added to countless Best of 2009 lists and compared to everyone from Charles Dickens to Charles Bukowski: because it’s uncomfortably good. These creepy small-town narratives mostly feature pathetic, sexually-stilted men and at times, the women who try to love them. Towers’ trick of imbibing humor and poetic syntax into these vignettes is what makes you want to read them. There is a variety represented here, a story with an adolescent female protagonist (in “Wild America,” arguably one of the strongest) and the title story, which takes us out of modern-day America and crashes us into a boatload of vikings, ready to pillage, ravage and, well, burn. Every story is water-tight, solid and full of ordinary magic. Try it and see.
