Early warning

Review by New York Times Review

EMBATTLED REBEL: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, by James M. McPherson. (Penguin, $17.) Putting aside his own professed sympathies with the Union side, the author examines the Confederate leader, who is often portrayed as the static foil to Abraham Lincoln. In McPherson's telling, Davis emerges as a leader deeply involved in the Confederate military strategy and fiercely committed to the secessionist cause. THE EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY OF THE FAKIR WHO GOT TRAPPED IN AN IKEA WARDROBE, by Romain Puértolas. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Vintage, $17.) An Indian con man arrives in Paris with a fake 100-euro note and one goal: to purchase Ikea's newest bed of nails. Puértolas's wry novel, a postcolonial sendup of immigration and commerce, follows the fakir on his journey across Europe and from sly trickster to compassionate global citizen. A LIFE OF BARBARA STANWYCK: Steel-True 1907-1940, by Victoria Wilson. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) Long admired for her profound emotional expression and comfort across a range of genres, Stanwyck is a star who has defied easy categorization. This is the first volume in Wilson's sensitive exploration of the actress's life, spanning her childhood and early forays as a performer. As our reviewer, Molly Haskell, said, it's "the book to bring her to center stage." EARLY WARNING, by Jane Smiley. (Anchor, $16.) Readers last met the Langdons, the Iowa farming family at the center of Smiley's multigenerational trilogy, in "Some Luck." Now it's 1953, and the family has gathered to mourn their patriarch, Walter. This middle volume spans the societal shifts and changes of 20th-century America as the family comes up against turbulent times that encompass the Vietnam War and Jim Jones's Peoples Temple. WHERE THE DEAD PAUSE, AND THE JAPANESE SAY GOODBYE: A Journey, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett. (Norton, $16.95.) Grief has been woven into Mockett's life for generations: Her family has survived violent episodes in Japan's past, including the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. In the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami, the event around which this memoir is shaped, Mockett traveled to her family's Buddhist temple in Japan and gained insight into her own sorrows while immersed in the nation's grief. THE SAME SKY, by Amanda Eyre Ward. (Ballantine, $15.) Ward's novel brings together two incomplete families. After a stretch of failed adoption attempts, Alice and her husband have abandoned hope of welcoming a child into their family. Meanwhile, 11-year-old Carla has decided to make the journey from her dangerous Honduras home to America in pursuit of her mother, who left when Carla was younger. SHRINKS: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, by Jeffrey A. Lieberman with Ogi Ogas. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) Sensing a disconnect between the public's mistrust of psychiatry and the field's genuine virtues, Lieberman sets out to debunk the myths that have mischaracterized his medical specialty for years.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 7, 2016]

---

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Smiley continues the multigenerational, cross-country saga of the Iowa-rooted Langdon family she began in Some Luck (2014). As before, each chapter covers a year, this time from 1953 to 1986, and once again Smiley adeptly meshes diverse personal experiences with landmark events and seismic shifts in social consciousness. First-born Frank, a darkly glamorous former WWII sniper with an eidetic memory, glides into the upper echelons of the booming postwar weapons and oil industries while continuing to assist Arthur, his profoundly tormented CIA operative brother-in-law, in covert operations. Frank's wife fears the atomic bomb, lies to her psychoanalysts, and drinks too much, while their daughter is drawn into Reverend Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, and their twin sons practice a violent form of sibling rivalry. Arthur and Lillian's son serves in Vietnam; Frank's professor brother carefully embraces his taboo sexuality; sister Claire endures a smothering marriage; and the matriarch, Rosanna, turns startlingly adventurous. With penetrating looks at the military, the dawn of rock and roll, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Watergate, and the farm crisis, Smiley demonstrates an incisive historical perspective, virtuosic omniscient narration, free-flowing empathy, and a gift for sparring dialogue. Every scene is saturated with sensuous and emotional detail as Smiley consummately articulates the micro and the macro, the comedic and the tragic in this grand story of an iconic American family. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Some Luck was beloved by critics and readers alike, ensuring an enthusiastic reception for the second novel in Smiley's extraordinary Last Hundred Years trilogy as the author tours the country.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Smiley has a big cast to wrangle in the second volume of the Last Hundred Years trilogy, which began with 2014's Some Luck, and she starts this entry at the funeral of Walter, the Iowa farmer and paterfamilias of volume one. While the Langdons, scattered across New York, Chicago, and California, reunite, readers get a refresher on the family relationships. Covering 1953 to 1986 at a clip of one year per chapter, the focus here is the Cold War and its fallout. This material occasionally feels like the greatest hits of the post-WWII era, with Langdons brushing up against a Kennedy assassination, Jonestown, and Vietnam. And since the post-war baby boom means cousins by the dozens, the cast of characters isn't as vivid and particular as it was in the knock-out first volume. Still, Smiley keeps you reading; as a writer she is less concerned about individual characters, but still as deft as ever at conveying the ways in which a family develops: some stories carrying on, while others fall away. This isn't a series you can start in the middle, so pick up Some Luck, ride out the Depression and WWII with Walter, Rosanna, and Frank, then come back to the atom-and-adultery-haunted volume two. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Convening in 1953 for father and grandfather Walter's funeral, the Iowa Langdon family notes another recent passing-Joseph Stalin. The Cold War escalates; weapons and the fortunes of Walter's descendants (mostly) proliferate. Marriages and careers disperse the clan nationwide to reckon with the likes of McGeorge Bundy and Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple. This immersive chapter per year (through 1986) saga showcases Smiley's gift for empathetic characterization. Her spot-on rendering of children's viewpoints presages their formidable potential-another reason for readers to anticipate the trilogy's concluding volume. Adults frequently channel the tribe's agricultural roots, pondering nature vs. nurture and genetics-breeding, like the future, being fraught with risk. Sputnik, Vietnam, and grain embargoes induce life-altering consequences, but so do chance encounters, parenting miscues, and one's choice of roommate. Diverse and engaging, the Langdons continue to fascinate; this cohesive presentation owes much to Lorelei King's adept handling of a sweeping narrative and complex cast. VERDICT A necessary purchase for fiction collections, this title (and the prerequisite Some Luck) will charm literary and historical fiction fans. ["While Smiley's latest offering is not as captivating as the first installment, readers interested in a story well told will be satisfied": LJ 4/1/15 review of the Knopf hc.]-Linda Sappenfield, Round Rock P.L., TX © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

Opening with the 1953 funeral of patriarch Walter, Smiley follows the Langdon family introduced in Some Luck (2014, etc.) through its second and third generations.Only steady second son Joe stayed home on the Iowa farm; he watches the land soar in value during the 1970s, though the farmer fatalism he inherited from Walter is justified when crop prices tank in the '80s. Brilliant, predatory older brother Frank rises through the Manhattan business world while wife Andy raises their kids on automatic pilot, devoting her principal energies to psychoanalysis and worrying about nuclear war. Lillian has the happiest marriage among the siblings, though husband Arthur's employment at the CIA provokes several crises of conscience. Observing them all in her customary critical spirit, widowed Rosanna cautiously expands her horizons, learning to drive and paying a visit to youngest son Henry, a gay academic, in Chicago. His sister Claire finally dumps her husband in 1979, after years of never talking back. "He had failed to pass the test," she judges, "not daring to recognize that all was changed." Smiley's narrative web snares almost every major postwar social change, and inevitably there are some generic touches: One member of the third generation is killed in Vietnam, another gets involved with Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. Such boilerplate is generally redeemed with nicely specific details, as when Andy imagines the impending nuclear apocalypse to be something like the Ragnark envisioned by her Norse forebears. Each of the large cast of characters has sharply individualized traits, and though we're seldom emotionally wrapped up in their experiencesSmiley has never been the warmest of writersthey are unfailingly interesting. The surprise 1986 appearance of a hitherto unsuspected relative prompts a semiconfrontation between Arthur and resentful daughter Debbie that reminds us life and love are never perfectthey simply are. Sags a bit, as trilogy middle sections often do, but strong storytelling and a judicious number of loose ends will keep most readers looking forward to the promised third volume. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

Frank did not haunt Front Street and Maiden Lane; he circled it, wending here and there, his eye always peeled. He had the time--he'd given up the whoring and the flying and practically everything else. He told Andy that he had taken up golf, and was planning to join a country club but hadn't decided which one, so he was visiting all of them. He even bought a set of clubs and kept them in the trunk of his Chrysler. But he didn't drive the Chrysler anywhere near the Knickerbocker. He zipped over the GW Bridge, down the West Side Highway, then left on Canal Street. Then he parked in a lot near China-town, and started walking. Sometimes he walked first toward the river and then south (southwest--his inner compass was still accurate). Other times, he walked down Pearl Street or Gold Street, scanning the passing women. He saw her twice in the first week in March. Both times, she was wearing the black coat. He followed her at a distance, taking note not only of where she went and which buildings she frequented, but also of whom she spoke to, whether any men walked along with her or picked her up (they did not), and whom she greeted. The first afternoon, he followed her for an hour and never got closer than half a block. The second time, she went into that same brick building after thirty-seven minutes. He needed a plan. Events at the office interfered for a while. Friskie got drunk and slapped the Sulzberger cousin in the street outside the Waldorf after a dance--it got into the papers; the girl broke the engagement; Dave Courtland said high time, she was a Jew; and Frank had to fly down to Galveston and talk not only to Dave, but to the wife, Anna. It took seventeen days to work out a reconciliation, and the Sulzberger parents were not happy, but, on the other hand, they had not heard the "Jew" comment, and Friskie was a very, very handsome young man. Then the head of the Venezuela office, Jesús De La Garza, came for a visit, and he was in New York for seven days and out in Southampton for a long weekend. After he left, Jim Upjohn told Frank, he tacked a note to the door of the room Jesús stayed in that read, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the going of the Lord." The gift was that Frank was sitting at a table in the White Horse Tavern, and he saw her through the window. She passed the outside tables, came in, sat down nearby, and pulled out a copy of The Atlantic Monthly. Her coat was a slender trench, two years out of style. When she pushed her scarf back, he saw she had short, thick hair now, dark with scattered gray streaks, but neatly cut. She was fuller in the bust than she'd been during the war, and had just the beginnings of a belly, though she was neatly girdled. As she read, two wrinkles formed between her eyebrows, and her mouth thinned a bit, though her lips were still fuller than most women's. She ordered a sherry and kept reading. He squinted: it was an article entitled "Anyone Can Play the Harmonica." This was true, in Frank's experience, so he was surprised that there would be an article about it. She must have sensed him looking over her shoulder, because she glanced in his direction and gave him one of those little smiles. He said, "Do I know you?" "I don't think so." Her accent was very good, just an underlying melody of the Mediterranean. Then he said, "May I know you?" This time she laughed, and it was the same laugh he remembered, merry and deep, the laugh of a woman with plenty of experience. "I come from a long line of harmonica players." "Is that possible?" said the woman. Right then, Frank knew that his fate depended upon pretending that he had never met her before, to collude in the idea that he believed she was from Queens or Rome or wherever she wanted to be from. What people had done to survive the war was their own business, was it not? He smiled, knowing that his smile was still hypnotic if he really meant it. "My brother is a farmer in Iowa who makes harmonicas by hand, from roots and branches." She did laugh. She did. They chatted for an hour, exchanging only names--hers was Lydia Forêt--but nothing about occupations or background. Button by button, she removed her coat. He took it from her and hung it on the coat rack. She was wearing a navy-blue sheath with a slender red belt. Frank took off his own jacket and loosened his tie. They discussed whether the humidity had gotten worse and the likelihood of a storm. Others were talking about Carol Burnett, who had won an Emmy the night before, so they did, too. "She's funny," said Frank. The woman said, "She'll do anything. I like that." Then she reddened a little and said, "For a laugh, I mean. I saw her do a show a few years ago somewhere around here, I think." Frank said that he had seen Nichols and May on Broadway the previous year. The woman said that she had a ticket for My Fair Lady, and she was looking forward to seeing it. Frank said that he knew some people who had gone to the opening night of that. There was a pause in the conversation, and Frank said, "So--can anyone play the harmonica?" "I guess this gentleman did." She glanced at the page. "Herbert Kupferberg. In between watching Tannhäuser and Mozart, he taught himself to play 'Taps.' " She glanced at her wristwatch and moved her feet. Frank stood up and fetched her coat. Then she stood, and he held it for her. He said, "I would like to talk with you again." She smiled. It was that same smile from eighteen years ago, sunny, retreating. She said, "Perhaps we shall run into each other." She shook his hand, then turned and walked briskly through the White Horse Tavern door and click-click down Hudson Street. When she turned her head to look at something, Frank felt ravished and limp. Excerpted from Early Warning by Jane Smiley. Copyright © 2015 by Jane Smiley. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted from Early Warning by Jane Smiley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---