Andrew Davidson

The Gargoyle

(Doubleday)

 Amazon

The Gargoyle is a brutal story about a man terribly disfigured in a car crash, burned to an almost unrecognizable crisp following an alcohol and cocaine binge. Incongruously, it’s also about timeless love.

The nameless narrator may have been burned beyond recognition, but Maryanne Engel knows him. They’ve never met before, at least that he can remember, but she finds him in his recovery room and helps nurse him back to health through endless skin grafting, morphine doses, and physical therapy.

Maryanne is many things—an artist, a sculptor, a storyteller, a fantastic cook, and a tattooed schizophrenic. As Maryanne helps the narrator overcome his inclinations toward suicide and substance abuse, she gradually fills him in on their past romances. Davidson’s story mixes violence in the present with destruction in the past, conveying the intense connection that Maryanne feels about the man she perceives as her soulmate.

At times jarring, at times hopeless, at times saturated with a sense of inevitability, Maryanne’s stories are captivating and the narrator finds himself thoroughly dependent on her. Until, inevitably, the tables are turned and the narrator finds he must take care of Maryanne, trying everything he can think of to pull her out of her own spiral toward self-destruction. Davidson’s debut novel is a riveting page-turner. I’m hoping he’s hard at work on something equally fascinating.

—Lara Killian

Last week, Randall Stross wrote an article in the New York Times called “Will Books Be Napsterized?”. Stross reports as more readers opt for e-books over print or audio versions, the usual slew of piracy web sites that traffics in free music downloads is making it possible to download e-books for free. In other words: more grim news for the already beaten-down publishing industry. Book sales have been plummeting for the past two years anyway; the article reports a 13% decrease in 2008 and a 15.5% decrease in July 2009. Of course sales were down in every industry in 2009, but everyone knows that the book industry has troubles of its own.

The business model has never been particularly cost effective, with publishers footing the bill for printing, shipping copies off to booksellers and hoping for the best. E-books are certainly a more viable model in terms of overhead costs, but if the piracy of e-books takes off, the publishing industry is in big trouble. And of course, that’s not really an “if”. The piracy of e-books will take off, and it’s inevitable that books are headed down the path of CDS: towards the graveyard.

—Rachel Balik

Stephen Dodson & Robert Vanderplank

Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World

(Perigee)

 Amazon

It has been an irrepressible activity since the dawn of man: to heap insults on enemies, rivals, neighbors, and even friends.

Despite the ubiquitousness of expressions of disgust and frustration, just because one may be well versed in Anglo-Saxon cursing doesn’t mean you’ll be ready to call out a Russian or an Italian while traveling through this increasingly multicultural world. Not only do authors Dodson and Vanderplank want to give you the tools you’ll need to understand that Swede when he invokes the devil, but also the understanding of where many colloquial put-downs come from.

Dodson, creator of the LanguageHat.com blog, and Vanderplank have gathered an admirable representation of the wide variety of Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World. In his introduction, Vanderplank notes that:

For me, insults and curses are the “dark” side of manners and customs and all the more interesting for that, as they may inform us about what lies beneath the social codes, what verbal games men and women play with each other.

The quest to bring obscure insults to English-readers starts in the ancient world, where many Roman insults have to do with sex, and Greek ones with drunkenness. Some of the insults culled from modern vocabularies may be quite familiar; for example readers in the US may have heard someone on the playground tell someone else they’ve been ‘beaten with the ugly stick.’ The Brits have many ways to refer to someone as an idiot, too many to list in this collection, but a favorite Britist insult of mine is ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ to describe a woman who uses clothes and makeup to try to hide her age.

In my experience, calling someone a mama’s boy is usually an insult meaning that he has been coddled and isn’t able to take care of himself. In Italy, sons are traditionally quite close to their mothers and this insult bears no weight—so instead they have figlio di papá, meaning daddy’s boy, implying that the person has left his father behind as he moves up in the world. ‘Scum of soya paste’ wouldn’t have meant much when thrown around at my elementary school, but in Japan misokakku is a popular children’s curse to describe someone annoying.

Translating the ‘Untranslatable’ presents a challenge even for Vanderplank, the Directory of the Oxford University Language Center, so the contextual notes are key to making this guide worth flipping through. Whether you’re looking for an unusual way to taunt your older siblings, or you’re something of an armchair linguist, you’ll find something unique and possibly useful within the pages of Uglier.

—Lara Killian

Piero Ferrucci

The Power of Kindness: The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life

(Penguin; US: Oct 2007)

 Amazon

If you were lucky enough to wander into McNally Jackson Books in New York City on 30 September, employees from the Tarcher imprint at Penguin handed you a dollar attached to a postcard with information about the book The Power of Kindness by psychologist Piero Ferrucci. They explained to recipients that in these dark economic times, they didn’t just want to sell The Power of Kindness, they wanted to demonstrate it as well.

“It’s a real dollar, don’t throw it out,” advised a Tarcher employee as she handed me my free money. I happily accepted it, but couldn’t help blurting out, “I’m sorry, but from a marketing perspective, can you explain to me how this is actually a valid way for you to be spending your budget?”

She explained the plan: $1000 spread over five Manhattan bookstores. They expected that they could reach a lot more people that way than if they used the same amount of money to pay for a small ad in a trade publication. “It’s a kind of grassroots movement,” she concluded. Grassroots seems to be the way of the world right now, from fund-raising house parties to nomadic yoga studios to clothing swaps. What that means to me is that the rest of the world is following in the footsteps of the Internet.

Blogs have long offered promotions for readers, and writing on the Web is transmitted through direct sharing, either person to person, or within social networks. Essentially, The Power of Kindness is using a marketing strategy that adheres to the principles of the semantic Web; thus, it suggests a glimmer of hope for the publishing industry. People have argued that print is dying because people don’t want to pay for reading material anymore, but suddenly, today, while clutching my dollar, it dawned on me. It’s not about money, it’s about the power of kindness.

People read what’s on the Internet because it’s targeted at them, and that kind of specificity makes them feel special. When you send me an article you think I’d love, that’s kindness. When you comment on my blog, that’s kindness. When the Daily Kos delivers the stories I care about based on an implicit understanding of my politics, that’s kindness. If print industries can offer the same kindness to audiences that the Web does, they will thrive again.

Of course, not coincidentally, that is exactly the mission of Ferrucci’s book: to show that if we employ his eight principles of kindness, we’ll ultimately thrive ourselves. Times are bleak, not just for the print industry but for many others affected by the global recession. With an introduction from the Dalai Lama, the book shows us how we can take the kindness we receive at the beginning and ends of our lives and make it continuous and global. When we do so, we’ll be happier.

If print industries can follow Tarcher’s example and be a little kinder and a little less desperate to preserve the past and their own superiority, they may very well find that there is space for them to grow in the 21st century.

—Rachel Balik

Warren Dotz, Masud Husain

Ad Boy: Vintage Advertising with Character

(10 Speed; US: Apr 2009)

 Amazon

Ad Boy is little more than a scrapbook, albeit a bright, shiny and reasonably well-organized one. This collection of images, depicting characters dreamed up to shill for everything from spark plugs to soft drinks, offers plenty of colorful eye candy, but little in the way of context, to say nothing of analysis.

Ad Boy is like a companion volume to Dotz and Husain’s earlier work, Meet Mr. Product, if not for the fact that the two books contain some of the very same characters. If anything, Mr. Product stands out as a stronger work, offering as it does more in the way of context and analysis.

The rear cover blurb suggests that “illustrators, graphic designers, advertising enthusiasts, and nostalgia buffs” are the book’s target audience, but the latter two categories may be disappointed by how little they learn about these mascots and the companies they represent. Each image is accompanied with a company name, a date and an indication of where the image appeared. For example, we’re told that a fellow named Quisp, who sports a propeller on top of his head and a goofy facial expression, was found on a “water decal” in 1972 to promote Quisp cereal.

—Emily F. Popek

Beowulf on the Beach
by Jack Murnighan
Crown
May 2009, 374 pages, $15.00

That’s my hundred-character introduction to what I hope will be a regular installation on Re:Print looking at the way books are changing in form and content. If art reflects zeitgeist what do we do when the zeitgeist seems totally unartistic and computerized? This question as it pertains to books is particularly pressing because the going attitude seems to be that we’re incapable making it through a thousand-word magazine article.

If that’s really true, who is going to read Middlemarch? Well, possibly you, says Jack Murnighan in his recently released Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits. Murnighan offers a reading guide to what he, a writing professor and doctor of English literature, believes to be the 50 greatest pieces of literature in the Western canon. He starts with the ancient Greeks and works his way to Toni Morrison. The concept calls to mind the description of a shelf filled with books so ubiquitous in our culture that we can pretend we’ve read them in Italio Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler.

Of course, this book will help the reader keep pretending. Each section begins with the buzz, a few pages that describe and summarizes the book, its greatest assets and pitfalls. Then he provides his opinions on “best line”, “what’s sexy”, and “what to skip”. In short, these aren’t your average Cliff’s notes. From example, he introduces Henry James by calling him the most constipated writer in history. Emily Bronte, on the other hand, is a “bushfire waiting to blaze”. And by the way, don’t feel bad about skipping the first few acts of