Editor's Note: I hoard books. This is a dangerous tendency for someone in my business, because nice publishers are always sending newspaper editors more and more nice books to hoard. Well, not to hoard — their intention in sending all those books is to get them reviewed, preferably.
But for various reasons — lack of space in the paper, lack of time to read, pathological procrastination, basic greed — the books in recent months have just kept piling up on my desk. Higher. And higher. Until the pile was so precarious that it threatened to topple.
Which it did. But once the tower came down, I didn't rebuild; I distributed. After announcing to the entire CL staff that they could have their pick as long as they agreed to write a short review, I spread out the 70 or so titles on a conference room table and let the picking and choosing begin.
Below you'll find the books that got chosen. Short story collections by Florida writers. A zippy new novel or two. A racy memoir. The collected works of the original urban explorer, Joseph Mitchell. Books that publishers imagined would interest a Florida alt-weekly audience, an assortment that can be collectively summarized as Hunter S. Thompson Says He's A Stud She's A Slut Living in Ybor City Near Abu Ghraib's Military Misdemeanors Where Rabid Nun Talks Dirty Spanish You Know You Love It.
The publishers were pretty much on the mark, I'd say. No wonder I was hoarding. —David Warner
FICTION
Pins & Needles
By Karen Brown, University Of Massachusetts Press (2007), 176 P., $24.95
"How she had wanted him." Desire — unbidden, confusing, irresistible — drives many of the characters in this award-winning collection of stories by Tampa writer Karen Brown. So does a sense of loss, an inchoate ache as all-pervasive as the heavy Florida heat or grey Northern cold in which they take place. The women in these stories are conscious of their allure, yet not sure they're deserving of love; the men who watch and pursue them remain at a distance, even when a connection is made. Impulsive decisions lead down unexpected paths: A young mother in the title story goes home with a stranger she meets in a parking lot; a married woman, visiting the run-down waterfront home that belonged to her late stepfather, drifts into an affair with the younger family man next door; a bartender at a very Tiny Tap-like dive empties the cash register to help another woman flee her husband. Throughout, Brown displays an extraordinary eye for detail, whether in her acute awareness of the natural world or her sensitivity to the tiniest shifts of emotion on a lover's face. —DW 
Just In Case
By Meg Rosoff, A Plume Book (2008), 246 p., $14
"A Modern Catcher in the Rye," boasts The London Times' blurb on the cover of Meg Rosoff's second novel, Just in Case. "Horse shit!" I can almost hear Holden Caulfield reply. The success of Catcher had nothing to do with plot and everything to do with spitfire narration. Just in Case coasts entirely on a passive, omniscient voice more concerned with relating a transparent plot than exploring the psyche of its 15-year-old protagonist — a character as compelling as the pun he chooses for his alias: Justin Case. Convinced that Fate is out to kill him after he saves his infant brother Charlie from falling out a window, Justin changes his name, wardrobe and persona in order to escape an early death. While Rosoff's writing is snappy and efficient, it doesn't justify Justin's logic. Why doesn't he think Fate is out to kill Charlie — not him? If he truly wants to conceal his identity, why go around telling everyone? Teenagers are known to blow things out of proportion; in Justin's case, the problem is that no one slaps sense into him. His parents even go along with his plan to quit school and live with friends. (They're just happy he isn't gay.) At first I found myself cheering on Justin's classmates as they ridiculed his identity crisis, but by the end I was praying Fate would disfigure him so horrendously that his character truly would be altered into someone more entertaining — someone like Holden Caulfield. —Shawn Alff
Piercing
By Ryu Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy, Penguin Group (2007; originally published in Japan in 1994), 192 p., $13
Kawashima leads a seemingly perfect life — good job, loving and compassionate wife, beautiful new baby girl. But of late, he's been hovering over his daughter's crib at night with an ice pick and the compulsion to use it. Sanada Chiaki is a high-class prostitute who specializes in S&M and eats tranquilizers at a steadily increasing rate to block out the horror of her past. Both are deeply damaged individuals whose fates are inexorably linked in Ryu Murakami's provocative, dark-as-night thriller. —Leilani Polk
Body Language
By Kelly Magee, University of North Texas Press (2006), 208 p., $12.95
Not quite postmodernist, not quite Southern gothic, Kelly Magee's stories are nevertheless populated by strange, sad, almost magical people in dire surroundings. The 2006 winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction, Magee places her tales throughout the South, from Alabama to South Tampa. The Orlando native has a good feel for the weirdness of a place, but never overtly points it out. She lets her narrative do that for her. Take the first story in this excellent collection, "Not People, Not This." The framework is a tornado warning in small-town Alabama. The story has a gothic feel as you hurtle toward the disaster, with two misfits, one possibly sociopathic, right in its crosshairs. But Magee doesn't take the easy way out. She maintains ambiguity, an uncertainty couched in the truth that no matter how much cable television news we have blaring at us, we increasingly don't know what is going on in the world around us. Her writing is lean but rich, her female protagonists thoroughly modern constructs — like Em, a half-Cuban lesbian maid living in South Tampa in "All the America You Want." If we forgive Magee for placing casitas and urban renewal in South Tampa instead of Ybor City, we can enjoy the realism of this story of cultures clashing: the Puerto Rican woman from South Florida who is building the huge home colliding with the apartment dwellers across the street; the maid who falls for the rich homeowner; the maid's brother who wants outsiders gone from his neighborhood at all costs. And so this collection goes, with transvestites and queers and migrant workers and the rest of what makes the South and the state of Florida so real, so alive, so cable-newsworthy. —Wayne Garcia
How to Talk to a Widower
By Jonathan Tropper, Bantam Discovery (2008; originally published by Delacorte Press, 2007), 380 p., $5.99
In a quiet town outside New York City, 29-year-old widower Doug Parker is languishing in the suburban home he shared with his wife Hailey, pouring whiskey into the bottomless pit of despair caused by her death in a plane crash a year earlier and writing about his failure to cope in a monthly magazine column, "How to Talk to a Widower." But Doug can see that something's gotta give, and a cast of captivating characters enter the picture to facilitate the process: an equally grief-stricken teenage stepson, a dominating twin sister with a potty mouth and an agenda, and a lonely housewife who uses meatloaf to get him into bed. Despite dialogue that's almost unrealistically clever, How to Talk to a Widower is a quick, funny and surprisingly moving read. —LP
Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician
By Daniel Wallace, Anchor Books (2008), 290 p., $13.95
Wallace's fourth novel — his most well-known is 1999's Big Fish — is a charming read that combines elements of magical realism and mysticism into an engaging yarn about a Depression-era white kid who makes a name for himself as a black magician. And then it all goes bad. Or does it? The strange saga of Henry Wallace and his final stop as an inept magic act in Jeremiah Mosgrove's Chinese Circus is told from the points of view of several different characters. Along the way, Henry makes a Faustian deal, encounters fame, deals with brutal racists, fights in WW II and searches for a long-lost, much-loved little sister. If this sounds a bit scattershot and overstuffed, that's not the case. Wallace always maintains control over his ambitious, freewheeling narrative. It's Southern fiction with plenty of quirkiness, still managing to hit on big themes in a fresh way. —Eric Snider
Anywhere But Here
By Tim Bugansky, J.B. Solomon (2007), 287 p., $22.95
In his first collection of short stories, Ohio native and former Tampa Tribune reporter Tim Bugansky explores themes of transition and isolation through a broad cast of characters: an angry bus driver shuttling around college students, an Ecuadorian woman laboring inside an American sweatshop, a Midwest reporter slowly losing his idealism. Though some of the dialogue and jokes fall flat — like something you'd read in your college creative writing class — Bugansky is at his best when he's describing the jungles of South America, disintegrating Rust Belt towns and the numbing depression we all share when something inside us is lost. —Alex Pickett
Rabid Nun Infects Entire Convent and Other Sensational Stories from a Tabloid Writer
By Tom D'Antoni, Villard Books (2005), 108 p., $13.95
The Pope called me the other day and recommended this book. He's been having a bad case of "the runs" and spends most of his time at his other porcelain throne. Between episodes of Jerry Springer and audiobooks on the Illuminati, he quickly read through this brief paperback. And he thoroughly enjoyed it. "I know you would like very much," his Holiness croaked to me in broken English. "Better than my Jesus of Nazareth. By far!" OK, OK. I never talked to the Pope. But sometimes fiction can be a helluva lot funnier than the truth, right? That's the gist of this book by Tom D'Antoni, a former Baltimore journalist who abandoned fact-checking for tabloid writing at The Sun. Rabid Nun Infects Entire Convent isn't D'Antoni's memoir per se, but a compilation of his craziest Sun stories with commentary on how he received a paycheck for making up tall tales. From "Grandma Turns Pet Dog Inside Out Looking for Lost Lottery Ticket" to "Bag Lady's B.O. Kills Five People on Bus," D'Antoni gives us an inside look at the outrageous world of the tabloid press, not to mention the depravity of his own imagination. —AP
Dear American Airlines
By Jonathan Miles, Houghton Mifflin (2008), 192 p., $22
If you read enough books, memories of them get muddled and sometimes outright vanish. Jonathan Miles' Dear American Airlines is one I'm not likely to ever forget. Fifty-three-year-old Benjamin Ford, stranded in O'Hare Airport on his way to his lesbian daughter's wedding in California, starts to write a venomous screed to the airline. His letter goes on to form the narrative, as he wanders into his personal history (alcohol abuse, bad behavior, bad decisions), then routinely snaps back to ragging on the airline and describing the circle of hell that is an extended airport wait. (In one particularly clever segment, he addresses the presumed office drone in charge of reading his tome-like complaint.) Dear American Airlines is witty and irreverent, sometimes outright funny, but also heartbreaking. —ES
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
By Dinaw Mengestu, Riverhead Books, 228 p., $14
As an agnostic, I was worried this book would be a Joel Olsteen-esque inspirational drag. Little did I know the title was actually swiped from The Divine Comedies. We're introduced to three immigrants playing a never-ending drinking game that involves naming African countries and rulers. What these immigrants understand that most Americans don't is how quickly and irrevocably everything can change. The story follows Stephano, who finds himself facing middle age from the register of his corner store, which collects more bills than profits. Since fleeing Ethiopia, where his father was dragged away to be executed, Stephano has existed in a kind of limbo. When he meets a white woman, Judith, who restores the crack house next to his apartment to the four-story mansion it once was, Stephano's anonymous American existence is threatened. Judith is the face of gentrification that is causing the rent to rise and his customers to be evicted. But she might also be the face of the happy life Stephano could lead. Mengestu raises questions about American identity through the restrained voice of an outsider. For him, the slogans that portray America as the land of opportunity or the great melting pot are neither blatant lies nor inalienable truths, but at best advertisements for how things could be. Part of me wanted to see more words given to Stephano's flight from the violence and beauty of Africa rather than his wanderings through D.C. But perhaps this is only due to the discomfort that accrues to any over-long self-examination, whether the identity in question is national or moral. —Shawn Alff
NON-FICTION
Up in the Old Hotel/ My Ears Are Bent
By Joseph Mitchell, Vintage (2008 reissues), Up in the Old Hotel 716 p., $16.95, My Ears Are Bent 299 p., $13.95
These two books, recently reissued, capture virtually the entire oeuvre of the legendary NYC journalist Joseph Mitchell. A newspaper reporter in the '30s who went on to work for several decades at The New Yorker, Mitchell wrote at street level (often from the point of view of a barstool), preferring to interview saloonkeepers, bums and street preachers than pillars of the establishment (although he did profile some celebrities of the day). My Ears Are Bent compiles Mitchell's hardscrabble newspaper articles; collectively they offer a history of 1930s New York in snapshot form. Up in the Old Hotel includes four of Mitchell's books of New Yorker writings, the most famous of which is "Joe Gould's Secret," about a colorful Greenwich Village gadfly who claimed to have written an exhaustive Oral History of Our Times. Together, these books offer a compelling view of narrative nonfiction in its infancy. —ES
It's a Jungle Out There: A Feminist's Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments
By Amanda Marcotte, Seal Press (2008), 233 p., $13.95
He's a Stud, She's a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know
By Jessica Valenti, Seal Press (2008), 219 p., $13.95.
One is a first-time book by a feminist writer and blogger with a controversial track record; the other is the second effort of a feminist writer and blogger who's a Rutgers grad and freelance contributor to numerous rags, from Ms. to The Guardian. While the subject matter in both books is related, the difference in effectiveness is profound. 
In It's a Jungle Out There: A Feminist's Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, Amanda Marcotte makes sweeping generalizations about feminists, conservatives, anti-choicers and a slew of other neatly categorized personality types. She relies on vague references to news stories or blog posts or conversations with her feminist friends to back up what she's saying, and offers in-your-face retorts for use in hypothetical situations (a pro-life rally, an abstinence-only classroom) that are tired and uninspired. Ultimately, Marcotte comes off as insincere, and the comic book-style illustrations that open each section don't help. Jessica Valenti relates to her readers on a more personal level. From page one of He's a Stud, She's a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, you really get a feel for where she's coming from and why you should care about what she has to say. She's droll without trying too hard; her anecdotes augment her argument that society rewards men for behavior that women are criticized for; she cites specifics from her own life and research (from the American Association of University Women and sciencedaily.com, among others); she uses real conversations and quotes, and generally makes you feel like she knows what she's talking about. —LP
Armed Madhouse
By Greg Palast, Dutton (2006), 360 p., $25.95
You usually have to hunt online for dispatches from Greg Palast. The investigative journalist works "in exile" for London's Guardian newspaper, depriving Americans of some of the best reporting on the underhanded activities of Bush and Company. Armed Madhouse is a compendium of Palast's best stuff from the last few years; everything from following the money in the war on terror to the coming theft of the 2008 election. (Hint: It involves systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans.) Palast's potboiler writing style is a bit of an acquired taste, but it also makes reading about hundreds of pages of leaked government documents more palatable. Noted Armed Madhouse fan: University of Florida student Andrew "Don't Tase me, bro!" Meyer, who was holding the book when he got the prongs last year. —Joe Bardi
Torture Central
By Michael Keller, iUniverse (2007), 176 p., $16.95
Michael Keller, a software developer from Tampa, joined the National Guard shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Four years later, his unit was called up to serve at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This is his story, told via e-mails sent home. Keller arrived at Abu Ghraib after the infamous scandal, yet he found that detainee mistreatment was still commonplace. His observations during his time in Iraq are among the most honest and humane to emerge from either side of the war debate. Some of his accounts are quite humorous, while others are beyond disturbing. This is a must-read for anyone interested in what has been happening in Iraq, and should be required reading for every member of Congress. —Gabe Loewenberg
Dandy in the Underworld
By Sebastian Horsley, Harper Perennial (2007), 327 p., $13.95
Sebastian Horsley would have ended up dead at a very early age, track mark bruises covering his arms and a plethora of painful STDs littering his naughty bits, if only he hadn't been so filthy rich. After reading Dandy in the Underworld, an autobiography "in the honorable tradition of the eccentric dandyism of Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp," I'm not certain that would have been much of a loss.
Oh, it's an engaging read, from his fucked-up family life as the scion of a food magnate to his on-again, off-again flirtation with art and journalism. He did a lot of drugs and a lot of prostitutes, an obsession that saw him turning tricks for a time for both the thrill and the money. But you never like him, especially when his self-destructive lifestyle is saved by absurdly canny success in the British bonds market. The final scene, where Horsley travels to the Philippines to be actually crucified in a self-improvement scheme like some regular Joe trying out a yoga class, feels like an ending. To the book, sure, but also to how much I'm willing to put up with the blathering of a privileged and self-important prat desperately trying to live a life worth writing about. —Brian Ries
You Know You Love It
By Ilona Paris, Stewart Tabori & Chang (2008), 240 p., $22.95
If you're looking for cheap thrills and mondo kink, like I was, you'll find less of that than you'd think in You Know You Love It: Lessons in Sexual Mischief. In the book, former professional dominatrix and practicing clinical psychologist Ilona Paris chronicles her rise from a too-vanilla marriage in Boston to an apartment loaded with custom bondage gear and specialized cock-and-ball torture paraphernalia. There's a lot of titillating promise, but rarely will the juicy bits engorge your, uhm, juicy bits. Instead, think of You Know as a guide for people like the old, vanilla Paris, folks who know there's a bit of ballbuster or pony girl in their nature and want to get a glimpse into the lifestyle. Innumerable sidebars and info brackets detail the dos, don'ts and how-to of The Scene, with just barely enough anecdotal storytelling to liven up the story and keep this from being strictly a high-end S&M&B&D For Dummies. —BR
The Talk Dirty series
By Alexis Munier and Emmanuel Tichelli, Adams Media (2008), Talk Dirty: French, 200 p., Talk Dirty: Spanish, 183 p., $7.95
More edgy than the usual conversational foreign language books, the Talk Dirty series contains words and phrases that should come in handy on your next drug-fueled rampage through Europe. Who hasn't wished they could say, "As always, you're so calm and it's me who ends up paying for a crime I didn't commit" while traveling through Barcelona with good friends? The books are available in Spanish, French and Italian editions, and the authors have included nuggets of etymology and local history that help bring the languages to life. Personal favorite revelation, from Talk Dirty: Spanish: "That's right, little statues of famous people and characters hunched over taking a poop can be found all over [Madrid] at Christmastime." —JB
Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print
Edited by David Wallis, Nation Books (2004), $16.95)
For those readers and reporters as yet uninitiated into the ways of cynicism, I can think of few issues more likely to be seen as an affront to journalism's "noble enterprise" than the "killed" story. And yet, in reading Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print, one is perhaps just as likely to feel bewilderment as outrage that, only 50 years ago, Betty Friedan's well-reasoned and scientific account of the positive effects of higher education on women was considered subversive. Or that Terry Southern's insider look at the making of Dr. Strangelove (and its attendant insight into the brilliant mind of director Stanley Kubrick) could have been labeled a "puff piece." For some readers, Killed will likely bear the fruit of contemplating the tension between ideology and fact, the prudent and the provocative. But at its core, Killed is an absorbing read, from P.J. O'Rourke's detailed if rather glib look at his travels through Lebanon to Todd Gitlin's analysis of the forces that worked relentlessly to undermine Bill Clinton's presidency. For those expecting wide-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth exposés of corporate malfeasance or political corruption, be advised that few of the 24 articles in this collection address the deep, dark forces that wield unscrupulous power. Even so-called "progressives" in the media come across as cowardly when faced with information that doesn't conform to the party line. While it's not always clear, as the authors admit in their introductions, why a story was "killed" before publication, and there's more than a noxious whiff of smug satisfaction that their articles had been deemed too something or other — racy, profound, damn good — all of them are very well-written. Today, as media owners and shareholders demand greater profits, journalists weigh financial security against their principles and the line between advertising and editorial further diminishes, one can only wonder how many more worthy articles will be quashed to avoid costly legal battles and lost revenues. We can at least take comfort in knowing that these thought-provoking stories, though initially suppressed, are now available to be read, enjoyed and discussed. —Anthony Salveggi
Feet to the Fire, The Media After 9/11: Top Journalists Speak Out
Edited by Kristina Borjesson, Prometheus Books (2005), 627 p., $26
There's a point in Feet to the Fire where you can see exactly what makes some people capitalists and others journalists, determined to speak truth to power even at the cost of making a profit. It comes when the editor — Kristina Borjesson, an Emmy- and Murrow-award winning investigative producer for CBS and CNN — interviews Ted Koppel, late of the long-running wonkfest Nightline. Koppel makes a compelling case that, contrary to those who would argue for the "good old days" of TV news, more quality broadcast journalism is available today than ever before. But there is a downside; the quantity of complete shit on the airwaves is way up as well. "What I'm saying," Koppel tells Borjesson, "is the volume of crap and the volume of quality have both increased." The real problem with delivering news via television is that the viewers don't pay much attention to it, he argues, and laments that TV journalism is becoming like the candy bar business, segmented into countless different brands for all kinds of different tastes. "[The news] will be like every other product that is sold in America," Koppel says. "When people perceive a need for it, they will buy it. But you can't force them to. All we can do is put it out there."
The market may love such diversity of product, but the journalists who sat for this post-mortem on 9/11 reporting clearly are uncomfortable with the endless fragmentation of media. This is an astounding portrait of the last of the great Mainstream Media titans, wrapped in a veneer of self-examination of how it performed in the run-up to the Iraq War. Many of the giants are here: New York Times op-ed economist Paul Krugman; Ron Suskind, perhaps the best of the postwar Bush critics; CNN's Peter Arnett; White House press room fixture Helen Thomas; and Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder, widely viewed as the only news operation that got it right before the war: the lies, the lack of proof, the spin.
Borjesson is overbearing and overbroad in some of her questioning, but the volume is indispensable for both political and media junkies. The book is less valuable for its lessons about post-9/11 reporting than it is a fascinating look at how media are changing, fracturing into a thousand shards where there once used to be just three reliable TV networks and one daily hometown newspaper coming into your house. In his interview, Strobel blames the lack of interest from other reporters in his stories about the missing evidence of WMDs in Iraq on a post-9/11 psychosis: "Everybody believing we were going to be hit again and everybody wanting to be patriotic and believe what the president said. I think that's a lot of it." But a lot of what we know now about the Bush administration's weak case we knew then and was reported at one level or another (or at least openly suspected in print) in the MSM, blogosphere and alternative journalism world. The truth is that media voices are so fragmented that partisans can believe any outlet they want and ignore the rest. Frankly, the public had little appetite for anything that ran counter to the official version from the White House, and the networks knew it wouldn't sell soap. —Wayne Garcia
The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes from a Conscientious Objector in Iraq
By Aidan Delgado, Beacon Press (2008), 224 p., $15 (paper)
There is no shortage of first-person accounts and memoirs concerning the war in Iraq. The Sutras of Abu Ghraib is, uh, one of them. Delgado tells his story ploddingly, for the most part. After a well-traveled early life of privilege, he matriculates at New College in Sarasota and hates it; signs up for the Army Reserve on Sept. 11, 2001; becomes a Buddhist; gets shipped to Iraq; applies for conscientious objector status; gets assigned to Abu Ghraib and is horrified.
Even great writers have trouble writing about tedium, and that's how Delgado, unfortunately, begins his book, by describing his early time in Kuwait and then Iraq. The book picks up a bit when he ends up working in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, but Delgado only hears rumors about the scandalous acts perpetrated by guards. He's appalled by the inhumanity, the filth, the anti-Arab racisim, but his writings come across as little more than boilerplate ruminations on familiar themes.
The most engaging aspect of The Sutras is Delgado's quest for CO status; although he's ostracized for his stance, overall he's treated quite fairly. —ES
Military Misdemeanors
By Terry Crowdy, Osprey Publishing (2007), 320 p., $16.95
A pleasure to read, Military Misdemeanors highlights some of the most bizarre and controversial episodes in military history, from ancient Spartan shenanigans in the Battle of Thermopylae to modern outrages such as the Iran-Contra affair. Author Terry Crowdy throws political correctness to the wind, providing an entertaining and humorous perspective on famous acts of military mischief. Recommended for history lovers and anyone who enjoys a good scandal. —Anthony LaFon
Icon of Love: Ybor City of the 19th and 20th Century
By Gus Rodriguez, Xlibris (2007), 173 p.
Born in Ybor City, Gus Rodriguez is best-known for his model-making, including World War II ships and other projects that have earned him a few stories in the local dailies. But the retiree, now living in Plant City, puts away his modeling tools for an attempt at writing history in Icon of Love. It's an uneven effort, though he is clearly filled with love for his subject. He writes about the motivation behind his self-published book that "it indeed would be a tragedy if the first OLD LATIN CULTURE would be submerged by time and perhaps forgetfulness."
His focus is on the church now known as Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the first Catholic Church in Ybor City and the alma mater for a number of Latinos in Tampa who attended classes at its school. Founded in 1891 as Our Lady of Mercy Church after three Jesuit priests staffing a downtown Tampa church died in a yellow fever epidemic, OLPH (as it is still known today) played an important role in Ybor life and history. Its school, St. Joseph Academy and later OLPH Academy, opened in 1891 and took its name from the three Sisters of St. Joseph nuns sent to open it. Rodriguez writes that the three nuns begged and borrowed beds and linens for their convent and that they were offered financial assistance from Vicente Martinez Ybor, the Latin quarter's founder — at an interest rate of 10 percent. The nuns turned the offer down.
Rodriguez was a product of the academy and the nuns who taught there; he grew up on 11th Avenue just 60 feet away from the convent. He writes with great adoration of their work, at times just listing various nuns' names without any further explanation.
Icon of Love is more a collection of vignettes and factoids than a traditional narrative, its effect like that of watching disconnected scenes from a fascinating movie. Part history, part memoir, it should prove to be of more use to future historians than to today's readers, unless you, too, grew up in Ybor City. —WG
American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work
By Susan Cheever, Simon & Schuster (2006; paperback 2007), $15
In this slim work of nonfiction, author Cheever sets for herself the task of delving into the lives and loves of figures who would make their mark as pioneers of Transcendentalism and leading writers of American literature. That Concord, New Hampshire in the mid-19th century would be home to a small group of literary giants seems remarkable enough in itself to warrant academic inquiry, but Cheever is far more interested in the web of relationships and love affairs among her principal characters. While she provides precise (if somewhat dubious) details of the Concord landscape, and takes liberties to assume the subjective states of her real-life characters, she's unable to render her subjects as flesh and blood, and her florid prose describing apple orchards and long walks in the woods only highlights this deficiency. Cheever's unabashed idealization of her subjects appears to reflect the way they often idealized one another. Margaret Fuller comes off as a raven-haired feminist no man could resist, while Emerson (the benefactor for Thoreau, the Alcotts and others in need of financial help) is referred to as "The Great Man." As for Thoreau, I have to believe there are biographies that give far better insight into an enigma more interested in the divinity of nature than in the company of his fellow man. Louisa May Alcott cuts a more sympathetic figure, but that's mostly due to the inclusion of her witty, insightful prose. Faring far worse is her father, Bronson Alcott, who seems to have been a genuine weirdo seeking Utopia and having no compass to find it. Hawthorne may have come closest to the truth when he described Concord's philosophers as "oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny yet were simply bores of a very intense character." Right on, Nate. —AS
A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (Tales From a Life of Cringe)
By Lauren Weedman, Sasquatch Books (2007), 256 p., $16.95
In her latest book, Lauren Weedman has moved beyond TV (The Daily Show) and theater (one-woman shows) to aspiring essayist. Weedman seems to believe that she is the most damaged, insecure and emotionally unavailable person on the planet, and her book goes a long way toward proving it. A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body shows us why her good-looking boyfriend needed to escape from her, why Jon Stewart felt awkward around her, and how she's moved on to a new relationship with a ready-made family. It's a quick read, offering insight into a person desperate to be liked (along with a few laughs). —Amanda Osmera
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2008.