How Can I Keep From Singing
The Ballad of Pete Seeger
by David King Dunaway (Villard)
Pete Seeger, now 88, has always been courageous – and entertaining. In an interview a couple of years back, he told me he never really wanted music as a “career.” Well, he couldn’t help it, and that career, and his lifelong activism is relived in a newly updated version of Dunaway’s acclaimed bio, originally out in 1981. There’s new material on FBI and CIA spying on folk musicians, and details of Seeger’s Communist Party days. And Seeger went over the entire book, offering new comments and observations.
Life and Death Are
Wearing Me Out
by Mo Yan (Arcade)
It would take something epic to capture the half-century history of the People’s Republic of China. And Beijing writer succeeds with his sweeping novel, which expands the notions of reality and brings to mind the great writers of Latin America. In Mo Yan’s world, Ximen Noa is a village landlord who is fried to death at the behest of a mobster. He is reincarnated throughout the story as a donkey, ox, pig, dog and big-headed boy. Oh my!
The Shameless Carnivore
by Scott Gold (Broadway)
Rare in the growing tide of books on vegetarian cooking, Gold’s memoir of meat is well done. And while he offers bites of history and health in his “Manifesto for Meat Lovers,” the meat of his tale is his mission to eat 31 different meats – from alligator to yak – in 31 days. Our advice to anyone who would try to mimic the good-humored author: Don’t fill up on bread!
Snow Falling In Spring
by Moying Li (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
From 12 to 22, Moying Li witnessed children turning in their parents for insufficient fealty to Mao and the Communist Party; city dwellers and intellectuals sent to the countryside for forced farm labor; marauding Red Guards. Her school headmaster hanged himself. But she survives to become of one of the first Chinese students to study in the US, and now lives in Boston. She tells the story with simple eloquence.
Retribution
The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
by Max Hastings (Knopf)
As a companion to his “Armageddon,” which looked at the final 12 months of the battle to defeat Germany, Hastings turns to the Pacific and the end of the war against Japan, which culminated with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hastings, who tells not just what happened, but why, comes down on the side of those who says using the atom bomb helped save lives.