The BiblioFiles

Troost, J. Maarten: Getting Stoned with Savages

Broadway Books © 2006, 239 pages [amazon]

In his best-selling travel memoir The Sex Lives of Cannibals (read my review), J. Maarten Troost chronicled the two years he spent living in Kiribati in the equatorial Pacific with his girlfriend Sylvia. After the period covered by the book Troost spent another two years in Washington D.C. working as, of all things, a "hoity-toity consultant to the World Bank," a change in lifestyle akin to, say, giving up a job on Gilligan's Island to work for Donald Trump. Fortunately the suit and tie and dependable paycheck of buttoned-down life didn't capture Troost, and he and Sylvia left civilization behind again, lured by warmer climes and the laid-back tropical mentality: "Stuff happens, but tomorrow the sun will rise again."

Rehak, Melanie: Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

Harcourt © 2005, 364 pages [amazon]

Melanie Rehak has written a fascinating history of Nancy Drew, the preternaturally competent girl sleuth whose line of wholesome mysteries was one of some two dozen series published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate beginning in the early 20th century. Edward Stratemeyer, a prolific writer of children's literature himself--Rehak reports that he published 42 dime novels between May of 1892 and November of 1893 alone--created the Syndicate in 1905. The idea was that children's books would be written by Stratemeyer in collaboration with a number of ghostwriters and published pseudonymously. Stratemeyer provided detailed outlines and farmed the stories out to his stable of writers, and he edited the incoming manuscripts, sometimes extensively, a process meant to ensure consistency in style and plot from book to book. At the same time, the publication of the books under pseudonyms meant that the continuation of a series would not depend on the performance of any one author. Stratemeyer's creations included a great many familiar names--the Bobbsey Twins, Bomba the Jungle Boy, and of course the Hardy Boys. In 1929 he interested his publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, in a new series of mysteries aimed at girls, and he assigned the first Nancy Drew books to Mildred Augustine Wirt, the first of two strong-willed women who would be inextricably linked with the girl detective. Stratemeyer did not live to see the meteoric success of his creation. He died in 1930, after which the Syndicate was run by his two daughters, Harriet and Edna, but primarily by the former. Harriet would control the Syndicate and its creations up until her death in 1982.

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Winspear, Jacqueline: Pardonable Lies

Henry Holt © 2005, 352 pages [amazon]

Pardonable Lies is the third installment in Jacqueline Winspear's series of historical mysteries featuring Maisie Dobbs, Psychologist and Investigator. (Read my review of Maisie Dobbs, the first book in the series.) This outing finds Maisie juggling three cases. The first and least demanding of her attention involves a fourteen-year-old girl who's been charged with murder. More interesting, and more dangerous for Maisie, are the two cases that require her to confront her ghosts. Both an old friend and a prominent barrister charge Maisie with investigating the fate of their loved ones, a brother and son respectively, who were listed among the dead of the Great War. What happened to the men in fact proves to be more interesting than anything that was reported to their families by telegram. Looking into their deaths brings Maisie back to France, which in 1930 hardly resembles the shell-shocked landscape she knew during the War, when she'd served, and nearly died, working as a nurse at a casualty clearing station.

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Shachtman, Tom: Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish

North Point Press © 2006, 286 pages [amazon]

When they turn 16, children who have been raised among the Old Order Amish experience a curious coming-of-age ritual, the rumspringa--or "running around"--a period during which they are given license to experience the conveniences and temptations, previously forbidden them, of mainstream, "English" society. Amish youth in rumspringa can dress like their mainstream contemporaries, and they can drink and smoke and date and party, and some of them engage in such behaviors with dangerous abandon. Some of the rumspringa parties attended by Amish youth differ little from those thrown by non-Amish teenagers: sex and drugs and rock and rap, vomiting and sleeping in, unplanned pregnancies. The Amish, that is--and this is something I would never have dreamt I could say prior to reading this book--are, some of them, too wild for this reviewer. Other Amish youth, perhaps most, are more restrained in their rumspringa explorations, confining their wild behavior to attendance at parent-approved events.

Harris, Bob: Prisoner of Trebekistan

Crown Publishers © 2006, 333 pages [amazon]

Bob Harris, a one-time "B-minus-list comedian" turned five-time Jeopardy champion, has written a memoir centered around his experiences as a contestant on the show. His Prisoner of Trebekistan--a title hearing which Alex Trebek is said to have "smiled inscrutably"--is everything you'd hope for in a comedian's Jeopardy memoir. Harris proves to be an affable, goofily amusing escort through the various stages of Jeopardy playerdom, from the tests administered to would-be contestants through the mind games played backstage in the green room to chats with Alex mid-game. Having lived it, Harris is able to describe the life of a Jeopardy contestant in training. The regimen of study he adopted makes for fascinating reading: notebooks filled with information to be absorbed (lists of presidents and Shakespearian plays and European rivers), innumerable cartoons, very often buttock-related, drawn as mnemonic aids; Harris's lifestyle and living room rearranged to facilitate his "state-dependent retrieval" of information once on stage.  (Which means that he ate green-room-style food for months and moved his furniture around so it resembled the Jeopardy set.)