|
Year
In Review 2008 | Food
| Cinema | Theater
| Dance | Art
| Books | Classical | Live
| Recordings
Best
of 2007
Critic:
Margaret Black
1.
A Long Way Gone
By
Ishmael Beah
A harrowing but highly nuanced story of a boy child soldier
in Sierra Leone who, by sheer luck and the affection of a
commander, managed to survive, be rehabilitated and ultimately
come to the United States.
2.
Measuring the World
By
Daniel Kehlmann
This deft, ironic, often funny, and always insightful tale
plays against each other the life stories of two famous Germans:
the genius mathematician-astronomer-physicist Carl Friedrich
Gauss and the great naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt.
3.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
By
Michael Pollan
Pollan poses the big question here: Since people will eat
just about anything, what exactly are we eating and is it
safe and wholesome? To answer this question he explores four
meals, one made from items in the “industrial food chain”
(what most of us eat most of the time), one from the organically
grown industrial food chain, one from local organic food grown
on a farm in Virginia, and one that he literally hunts and
gathers himself.
4.
Out Stealing Horses
By
Per Petterson
Petterson offers up a tale in which Trond, an old Norwegian,
reflects, with great attention to the natural world, on the
year he was 17—shortly after World War II—and the summer he
spent with his father in the woods, after which his father
abruptly disappeared out of his world altogether.
5.
Flower Children
By
Maxine Swann
A family of now-grown children, especially daughter Maeve,
examine their elusive hippie past, trying to grasp just what
their unusual father meant to their lives. Like Trond in Out
Stealing Horses, Maeve maintains emotional distance and
a profound objectivity about her father, while at the same
time carefully rendering the backdrop of the world around
them.
6.The
Indian Clerk: A Novel
By
David Leavitt
The
Indian Clerk does far more than fictionalize the story
of real-life Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan—poor,
ill-educated, unconnected—who was brought to England in 1914
and published, with the help of one of the country’s preeminent
mathematicians, G. H. Hardy, extraordinary advances in number
theory and mathematical analysis. The novel also provides
a penetrating account of England just prior to and during
the Great War. At the same time, it maps great gulfs of cultural
and emotional ignorance, while dramatizing the disasters such
ignorance generates.
7.
Mister Pip
By
Lloyd Jones
This novel tells the story of the last white man remaining
on a small Pacific island during a vicious little civil war
and how his approach to teaching—principally reading Great
Expectations aloud and drawing on the folk wisdom of the
native adults—ignites the imagination of the novel’s 13-year-old
narrator, Matilda.
8.
The Woman Who Waited
By
Andrei Makine
Once again Makine delineates a time—the 1970s—and a place—a
nearly abandoned village in northern Russia near the White
Sea—with lyric precision in a story of a jaded young man from
Leningrad who, despite his corrosive cynicism, falls in love
with an unusual woman old enough to be his mother.
9.
The Maytrees
By
Annie Dillard
Two young people on the tip of Cape Cod fall in love, marry,
have a baby, split over infidelity, etc. The novel bears a
greater resemblance to the author’s poetry, her essays on
nature, and her speculations on meaning than it does to your
typical novel. In this story, we may barely count as objects
in the universe, but we count nonetheless—especially to each
other.
10.
Twinkie, Deconstructed
By
Steve Ettlinger
Ettlinger dissects that quintessential manufactured snack
cake, the Twinkie, ingredient by ingredient—right down to
the polysorbate 60. We get to know everything about its parts,
where they come from, and how they are processed.
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