Booker Books

This is a good book for anyone looking for basic information on Booker T. Washington. The photos are well done, and the text is easy reading for early grade readers. While giving a good summary of Washington's life, including his childhood, this book does not go into the importance of many of his actions such as his speech in Atlanta (the Atlanta Compromise).

Park Service pamphlet treatment of Washington's times, life, and influence. Nicely illustrated introduction to Washington touches on the controversy surrounding his "Tom-ism" and overpowering control over white perception and political leadership on racial issues.

Read in conjunction with Up from Slavery (Dover Thrift Editions).

For those who like realistic, nail-biting suspense, I heartily recommend they buy themselves the DVD miniseries "Danger UXB." Even though it was shot nearly thirty years ago before the era of elaborate special effects, I am amazed at how suspenseful and true-to-life it is.

The novel (there is also at least one other nonfiction book about the same subject with the same title) is pretty faithful to the miniseries and is well-written. As did the series, it centers around young Lieutenant Brian Ash, newly minted bomb disposal officer living a dangerous life in the 1940 Blitz of London. However, there are also significant threads with the other characters.

This being said...the novel ends well before the narrative of the miniseries (right around the end of part nine of the miniseries). I'm rather bewildered by this because I felt the full story was a good one and there was no need to abridge it in the novel. The only thing that I can think as to why is that the there was a need to put the book out very quickly. It's too bad, but as far as I'm concerned, the narrative of the miniseries is what happened.

Good book about how God sent HIs Son to the earth and His Holy Spirt in us so we can have the abundant life in the Spirit. God wants us to have a good life now here on earth. Recommend to all that want to live a fulfilled life in Christ.

This is the third book in Monty Joynes' series about Anglo (AKA Booker Washington), a middle class white realtor who completely abandons his suburban lifestyle to magically wander across the country and into a leadership role in a traditional Pueblo Indian community.

I learned about SAVE THE GOOD SEED after stumbling across the initial work, NAKED INTO THE NIGHT, in my local college library. I was quite impressed, all the more so because I discovered half way through reading it that the author lived in my relatively obscure mountain town! I found him in the phone directory, gave him a call, and after a half-hour conversation, immediately went out and bought the other two books. I was not disappointed!

SAVE THE GOOD SEED removes much of the attention from Anglo onto Ray Rey, a Native American man who was adopted (some would say stolen) as an infant in the 1950s from his people into a white family in Western North Carolina. The story line alternates between Anglo's increasingly controversial integration into his assumed Pueblo community and attempted reconciliation with his children, Ray Rey's tortured and confused rediscovery of his Indian heritage, and the unfolding careers of White Wing the dancer and his former showgirl managers (who were introduced in the previous book). Perhaps because it struggles to weave together such disparate themes into a cohesive fable that is part history lesson, the tale doesn't quite hold together as well as in the previous two books. Although it ponders some disturbing questions and posits gentle, sometimes remarkable spiritual solutions, the book loses some of its metaphysical momentum and clarity. It was heavier to read, and less memorable.

Nonetheless, taken within the trilogy, SAVE THE GOOD SEED is an important and somewhat grounding contribution. However, it won't make any sense if you haven't first read its predecessors. All the books in Monty Joynes' series belong in the category of what might be called spiritual or allegorical fiction. Although the stories are obviously imaginary, they evoke perennial truths and awaken an intuitive sense of the sublime. I recommend all of them for anyone who wants to touch upon the essence of Native American spirituality, and the stillness of his/her own soul.

I was spellbound by this book.....I never realized how much the church needs to know about this subject. I have read this book a total of 5 times and plan to read it again. Fast reading, easy to understand. My favorite line from the book ......"If what you believe does not impact the way you live, then what is the value of what you believe?" Highly recommend this book to everyone!!!!!

New York Times - March 9, 2004
A Poet's Spirit Springs to Life on Death Row
By BRUCE WEBER

AIFORD, Fla. � Stephen Todd Booker, who at 50 has been on death row for more than half his life, was explaining how his imagination kept working without the stimuli that most people take for granted. "I remember thinking one time � I'd already been here a while � and I realized I hadn't seen a star in 12 years," he said in an interview at the Union Correctional Institution here. "And I started to wonder about them, thinking they'd changed or something, and I wrote this poem imagining stars but from the perspective of a bat."

As a prison poet, a man whose creative spirit was set free by his body's confinement, Mr. Booker is in some ways a familiar American archetype. But unlike some jailhouse writers who have become celebrated causes (the murderer Jack Henry Abbott comes to mind), he has never been well known. He is, however, an indisputably accomplished poet whose work has appeared in top-level literary publications like The Kenyon Review, Seneca Review and Field, and has been championed by poets like Denise Levertov and Hayden Carruth.

"I'd have to say that anyone who has done 10 really glorious poems, and he's approaching that number, is a serious member of the inner sanctum," said Stuart Friebert, a former editor of Field who is retired from the creative writing department of Oberlin College. What is so exciting about Mr. Booker's work, he said, is that while there are poets who have influenced it � Gwendolyn Brooks is one � his combination of vernacular and formal language, and his perspective on the world give him a singular voice.

Having lived for 26 years under the threat of execution � a literal sword of Damocles � Mr. Booker can be seen as a case history: the criminal artist. Naturally gifted and emotionally tormented, he is an autodidact who did not take up the serious writing of poetry until after he went to prison and who has developed his craft entirely within a life of extreme circumscription.

The poem Mr. Booker was speaking about, "I, When a Bumblebee Bat," appeared in his book "Tug" (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), and like much of his often difficult work it contorts syntax with startling facility, deftly maneuvers the tools of prosody and leaps boldly from image to image as if laying down a challenge to the reader to follow him. Also characteristic, it echoes with the pangs of isolation:

Only twice in twelve long years
Has the Self in me transformed
To weighing less than a cent,
And blended with the evening,
Or heard ringing in my ears,
Or seen a star do its thing,
Umbrellaed aloft on air.
Swooping into a huge swarm
Of mosquitoes and gnats, there,
On velvety wings, I went
Gliding and eating until
Chilled to my buoyant marrow,
Convinced not to eat my fill,
To leave some for tomorrow.

To be clear: Mr. Booker's is not a romantic story, not a redemption story. He is a murderer, and his crime was especially despicable. On Nov. 9, 1977, evidently in a rage fueled by drugs and alcohol, he sexually attacked and stabbed to death Lorine Demoss Harmon in her Gainesville apartment, less than an hour from here in north-central Florida. She was 94.

Sentenced to death 11 months later, Mr. Booker is still alive because of a confusing welter of motions and appeals that in 1988 led to a United States District Court judge remanding the case for resentencing. Another decade passed before that resentencing happened, and by then several of Mr. Booker's literary supporters, as well as some of his victim's relatives, asked that he be allowed to live out his natural life in prison. But once again a jury voted to execute him. That sentence is being appealed.

"I won't be able to write fast enough, long enough, voluminously enough to make up for the stuff I've done," Mr. Booker admitted.

His story does, however, raise questions about poetry (what is it? what is it worth?) and poets (who are they? what do they need?), and about the value of individual lives and capital punishment. Mr. Carruth, who has never met Mr. Booker but whose correspondence with him goes back 20 years, said in an interview, "He's an intelligent guy, a talented guy, and intelligent and talented guys are not to be wasted."

Mr. Booker's story also yields a glimpse into a world � death row � that few people experience and maybe no other successful poet has to draw on. He almost spits his words when he speaks of the seemingly ever-changing rules of the prison and what he sees as the ever-increasing indignities of prison life, some as small as the fact that prisoners are no longer allowed writing implements other than finger-size flexible pens, which they must buy.

He clearly lives with intense stress, "not knowing whether they're going to whack you or what," he said. "That's an everyday thought, whether they're going to snuff you."

In addition to his poems Mr. Booker has written a volume of cabalistic biblical interpretation and a breathless autobiography. He is also a prolific letter writer, and as his correspondents attest, he can betray a frightening anger in his letters.

He is always on his guard. A year after the murder, when Page Zyromski, the great-niece of the woman Mr. Booker killed, wrote to him to say she forgave him, he wrote back, Ms. Zyromski said, asking, "What are you, some kind of goody-two-shoes?"

"I wrote back to him, `I guess I am a goody-two-shoes,' " said Ms. Zyromski, 61, a religious writer and retired teacher who has visited Mr. Booker in prison several times from her home in Painesville, Ohio.

The interview with Mr. Booker would ordinarily have been conducted in a small cell with a pane of thick glass separating him from a reporter, but because of a power failure at the prison the interview took place in a common room where there was sufficient light.

Wearing an orange jumpsuit and white sneakers, Mr. Booker, trim and fit looking with hints of gray at his temples and a receding hairline, was led into the room with his wrists and ankles shackled. His lawyer, Harry P. Brody, was present, as were four armed guards, 20 feet or so away.

The interview lasted about 90 minutes, and Mr. Booker revealed the crafty, aggressive intelligence that is apparent in his poems and a fierce pride in his abilities. As he does when he writes, in conversation he uses a vividly amalgamated vocabulary, part formal English, part street vernacular. He speaks with a slight lisp, softly, and, as though measuring his conversation partner, carefully. He affects a calm, but his manner is taut. He declined to speak about his crime except to say that it was among many things in his life that he wished had never happened.

At times he can be unnervingly self-aware.

"I may be paranoid," he said. "That would take somebody else to diagnose, but if I am, it has served me well in here."

Mr. Booker, who said he never knew his father, was born in Brooklyn. He and an older brother were reared by his mother, who worked mostly as a civil servant, and her two sisters. In a bitter poem called "Democracy" he paid tribute to his mother, who died, he said, when she was 46, describing her as "a dandelion seed of a woman" who was nonetheless "the embodiment of strong."

In "Wisdom" he wrote about life in Brooklyn with striking, impolitic candor:

We kids did chase and stone a goofy square.
None of us knew the dude. A lapsed rabbi? . . .
Maybe . . . none of us cared. Shoeless, he ran
Through Crown Heights, and on into East New York

And while his life outdoors was rough and tumble, at home, he said, he read voraciously: Virgil and Homer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare, the Bible, Edgar Allan Poe.

"I lived two lives," he said. "Outside I was a thief and a hustler. I used drugs. But I was a bookworm in the house. Both my aunts belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club, and as they got older, they worked as domestics for white families, and the families would throw away books. So they brought books home. I was never at a loss for anything to read."

He said he left school at 14, eventually joined the Army and was sent to Okinawa, Japan. In "Sandii," a poem that shows off his acute ear for dialect, he wrote about a romance with a Japanese woman. One stanza takes place in a restaurant:

Before lowering the extra large milk,
she whispered, "You ordering that whiskey
and a beer is bummer. This is place of eating,
not to do boilermaker, Stevosan. You tripping?"

Heroin was his drug of choice, though he said that he did everything, and that alcohol was his real downfall. After the Army, he said, he slipped back into the hoodlum life, ending up in Florida. He was arrested for robbery and served three and a half years of a five-year sentence. Shortly after his release he committed the crime he has been paying for ever since.

It was early in his confinement, he said, that he decided to revisit his reading.

"When I got here," he said, "I wasn't going to let my mind just ferment. I started thinking that maybe everything I'd read hadn't done me any good, and I almost convinced myself that what I'd read had got me into prison, that it was too informative about life, that it answered too many questions for a young guy. You know, translations of Baudelaire, William Burroughs. You're not supposed to be reading `Naked Lunch' at 11, `Doors of Perception,' by Huxley. That had me in the kitchen cabinets trying to get off on nutmeg."

He continued: "When I got to death row, I couldn't blame it on society. I knew I'd put myself in prison. But if this was the end of my life, I wasn't going to sit in a cell and watch TV or crane my neck trying to look out the window at the other wing of the prison."

Mr. Booker said that he had not been writing because of stress and frustration at being unable to get his manuscripts typed. Even so, he said, he has about a dozen poems circulating at various publications.

"Writing is like a magic carpet or a time machine," he said, before the guards cuffed his wrists again and led him away. "I go back in time to my own experience. I finally saw stars again, you know, when I was coming back from court or something. And they hadn't changed. I got it right. So I can leave the cell in my poems."

Surprise Winner of the Man Booker Prize, this satire about a Columbine-like school shooting has moments of brilliance, and equal moments of tedium. Overall, the first-person narrative about a massacre in small-town Texas is swiftly moving, entertaining, and full of clever jabs at Hicksville, U.S.A., the media and the legal system. Told by Vernon Little, a 16-yr. old witness to the murders at his high school -- the gunman his best friend, Jesus -- the narration is written in a slap-dash, hip, disaffected voice that at turns feels like a teenage version of Hunter S. Thompson, but with a style unique to the author himself (in this first novel by Australian Peter Finlay, under the pen name DBC Pierre).

The first 150 pages barrel along; the next 50 meander a bit; then the final 75 come flashing forth in a fevered run to expose all the secrets and tie up all the loose ends. A satisfying climax and, though definitely not for all tastes, a recommend.

Vernon God Little is a dissecting and vitriolic literary overview of the modern American culture and its media obsessed thirst for celebrity, looks, and fame (both good and bad). Though, to some extent the novel is minutely inflated, DBC Pierre, the pseudonym for Peter Finlay, it does indeed touch a nerve that internally says, "Finlay's not too far off the mark."

Vernon God Little takes place on school grounds, and when sixteen kids are murdered in a rage killing, Vernon Little, because he was on friendly terms with the student killer and had some insights on the boiling rage that seethed inside him, becomes suspect number one, all due to police incompetence, unrestrained media involvement and witnesses who give false testimony. When all that is merged into the pot and heaped against a boy who is not fully developed intellectually and in many other respects, DBC Pierre, creates and an almost credible scenario for his protagonist, a skittish flight to Mexico, an escape from the dominating lights, cameras and ridiculously incessant "How do you feel?" questions that reporters and media personnel often like to harass citizens and victims with.

The dialogue of the novel is realistically imbued with hard bitten and cynical indifference, for the act of murder is not really murder to some people; it is unreality. The conveyance of genuine human suffering by those left behind after an unimaginable tragedy is in some skewered perception of folks not of grief but an acting competition for who can obtain the most time on camera. DBC Pierre conveys that observation very very well; it is one of the hard truths laced throughout the book.

Vernon God Little my not be one of the best novels to have won England's preeminent writing prize-the Man Booker-but it sure did earn its nomination, for it is brooding, crude, acerbic, all the fancy terminology; it does reflect-sad to admit-our present-day-culture. And when a novelist (not to mention a first timer) is able to convey an unpleasant truth (even if we want to ignore it), you have to admit, that's one hell of an achievement!

This book is considered a satire, but really good, modern satire optimally has one foot in reality (i.e., The White House Mess, Thank You for Not Smoking). Even though the author takes great leaps into the sea of outrageous and ridiculous, there are so many holes in the plot where it is supposed to be realistic that it is distracting. For instance, the narrator is a high school student who witnesses the end of a shooting at his high school and is accused of it, but apparently there are no witnesses that saw what happened. But those who die are only those in his physics class and they fled the classroom to the front lawn of the school. So, even though the shots are loud, no one in the whole school, or outside it, saw what was going on? The plot's more stupid than biting in parts, and parts are a bit disgusting, but the protagonist and his narrator's voice are fascinating. In brief, I'm surprised that it won the Booker Prize. But while it's not particularly enjoyable or great, it's generally well-written.

Didn't love it, didn't hate it....the writing style blares at you. Sentences are sometimes funny/clever, sometimes overly "poetic" in a melodramatic way that actually affected my gag reflexes. Few times the writer uses a more UK word that didn't fit....like, would a Texas teenager call dollars "banknotes"? I found myself pausing and mentally trying to make excuses for the word....maybe Vernon watched a lot of BBC America? Maybe he heard someone say it in class...possibly he read it even though he's not really what you'd call a scholar, but at times somehow too "wise" for his overall character...The description for the book here at goodreads begins "surprise winner of Booker prize"...yeah, I was surprised...shocked even, after reading it. I had higher hopes for the novel because I usually really enjoy Booker prize winners and the concept of the novel sounded really interesting. I found that around page 150 I was really laboring to get through the rest, having come too far to abandon it at that point.

What a strange book! A surprise winner of the 2003 Booker Prize and certainly not what I expected.

I suspect that many people, particularly the prudish and easily offended, will be aghast at the book and mark it down accordingly. I am not in that camp. The use of four letter words is fine depending on context and, in the context of this book, they are of no problem. The book, however, can be marked down for other reasons.

I found the plot to be confusing. I found the characters to be little more than caricature. In fact, except for a brief section well into the book where Vernon is arrested in Mexico, I really couldn't wait for the torment to be over. Quite simply, this book has been given way too much hype.

Having laid my cards on the table, this will still not turn people off the book. My opinion counts for little in comparison with a Booker Prize. Regardless, you have been warned!

It took me forever to get into "Hotel du Lac." I love Jane Austen and I love Anne Tyler and this books sorta straddles both and was recommended to me by a used bookstore owner who said his wife liked it.
Finally after several chapters I got hooked and I read it slowly enough to relish it. I lived in Geneva and Basle so I could understand the place and was fascinated to read her version of Lake Geneva. The book slowly unfolds and has the unexpected twists you get in mysteries and at the end you are still puzzling - it isn't so neat in fact like a good movie it makes you want to go out and discuss it with others. The reviews here make me think the people who are reading it prefer action novels and would be the last people I'd like to discuss this book with.

But I really loved it. I'm only sorry every one says it's her best as I'd like to read others by her and not be disappointed.

This is the most painfully boring book I have ever read. I grant that it is well written but it makes my teeth ache, it is so boring. I cannot believe the praise plus the Booker prize, but trust me, it is beyond any interest that anybody could have.

This well polished short novel is a fine diversion, easily read. It focuses on a set of society's lonely misfits who come together in a respectible, albeit slighly unfashionable, Swiss resort hotel. The author pays due homage to Virginia Woolf in many ways: in particular she takes a view of the way women carry themselves in the world that is neither traditionally feminist nor boilerplate traditionalist--it is a fresh view that transcends Woolf, and it was for this that I most enjoyed the book. The ending provided a satisfying piu mosso to this piece, which on the whole must be described as adagio moroso, although punctuated throughout with a subtle wit and humor.

I ordered this book because it was the March selection for my book club. Ms. Brookner has a distinctive writing style and a rather clever sense of humour, but the story she tells is age-old and a bit worn -- despite the two major twists and turns she carefully builds up to. It's a story about a still-single, perhaps destined to be single forever, fiction writer who writes romance stories that are alluded to as being rather old-fashioned, just like their creator. Edith Hope is old-fashioned in the way that she cooks and waits upon her man, but he is married to another woman. Edith hopes (how clever Ms. Brookner) for something better, and the setting for this hope is the Hotel du Lac where other single women migrate before the bleak winter season settles into the Swiss landscape and their beings. This setting is where the age-old scenario of sarcastic, biting soundbites of cat fight and cutting glares is exchanged between women competing for the scarce male attention at the hotel. Even with Ms. Brookner's writing flair and unexpected turns in the story line, it lacks the oomph to make it anything more than diverting read. Actually, the book club discussion was much better than the book itself.

Anita Brookner offers up a deft and moving work in her lyrical tale of loneliness, love, and human interaction. Edith Hope, a writer of romance novels, has been banished to an isolated hotel in Switzerland for reasons which are at first unclear. The slow unfolding of her story and the reasons behind her banishment kept me mesmerized, as Brookner weaves a delicately intoxicating spell in Edith's interactions with the often bizarre hotel guests, including the wealthy and selfish Mrs. Pusey and her over-shadowed daughter, Jennifer, whose brilliant vibrance at once attract and repels Edith. She also finds herself courted by the equally wealthy, charming, and unscrupulous Mr. Neville, who understands her and yet would use her to his advantage. In long walks, dilatory conversations, and her meetings with and reboundings on these people, Edith is revealed more and more to be a woman of incredible depth and intensity, facing a turning point in her life, and her story, told in Brookner's clear prose and spiced with subtle irony, humor, and tragedy, is like sinking luxuriously into cool water. A quietly vivid, modern masterpiece, and not to be missed.

This book is about style and the journey. It is about rehashing the past. It's about how we dwell on little things that done differently would have had huge impacts on our lives. It is not a mystery. It is not "hard boiled". It is obviously not what a number of reviewers were looking for when then started it. That doesn't mean it's not good. It just means they haven't separated the two.

It's true that the narrator seemingly falls for this woman without reason or explanation to the reader. One critic said this was hard to believe, that without enough this depth and explanation the whole premise to the story was flawed. But then isn't that exactly what guys do. Suddenly they are mad about someone for absolutely no reason. Just the right time or mood when they meet a woman, or a unexpected comment or smile. It's that easy.

The book is maybe a little long but it does feel like you've rehashed the incident as if it were your own. This is exactly what happens when people go down a road that makes them miserable but one that they feel stuck in. They spend ridiculous amounts of time going over and over the situation, with slightly different tangents each time.

Don't expect a plain Jane detective novel. Don't assume you know George because of what you read about him on the flyleaf and you may enjoy how the book says what it does.

I think Swift was striving for something subconscious and suffocating with this story, and he accomplished this to a degree, yet I did not feel any great level of empathy or identification with the main characters.

Having said that, it was written in a particularly stylish way, employing short, punchy chapters, mostly operating within the mind of George Webb, private eye, who is drawn into an area of grey that is an extension of what his profession is intrinsically concerned with. There are no "happy" endings in his line of work, which consists mostly of spying on infidels, mostly husbands, cheating on their wives. He crosses the line with a client in an emotional way, and much of the story is spent in flashbacks, and then back to George waiting, waiting, interminably, for his love, the object of his obsession, to be free to be his. There is quite a bit of dramatic build-up and suspense, even though we know the gist of what is going to happen. This was done well, although parts of the book tended to be somewhat repetitive and slow.

This was my first Swift novel, and I will seek out more, as I suspect this was not his high point, although it was a completely satisfactory and engaging story.

Graham Swift has crafted a special novel. It seemed as if each word was carefully selected and each sentence is special so as to slowly develop a theme through careful repetition and enhancement. The unveiling of the narrative was rather like a modern film such as "21 grams". I wasn't ready for it to end.

With THE LIGHT OF DAY, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Graham Swift has turned the classical mystery novel on its head. In place of the typical whodunit, he introduces a plot that centers around a private investigator, George Webb, and his more-than-passive involvement with a woman client who unexpectedly murders her unfaithful husband just as Webb has completed his assignment to observe the departure from London to Croatia of the "other woman."

THE LIGHT OF DAY is not a detective story - we know from the beginning who is killed, who did the killing, and the ostensible reason. Nothing is hidden from an investigative standpoint, but underneath those surface facts, almost everything is hidden, waiting to be discovered. Swift has written not so much a crime story as the story of a crime. It is an investigation of the lives and motivations of a small constellation of characters orbiting the fatal event: the cheating husband (Bob Nash), his betrayed wife (Sarah Nash), the young Croatian refugee (Katrina) with whom Bob has an affair, the private investigator (George Webb) Sarah hires to verify that Katrina boards the airplane for Switzerland, George's ex-wife (Rachel), his secretary and former client and one night fling (Rita), George's parents and his father's mistress, and the almost-retired police detective (Marsh) who investigates the Nash murder.

Swift guides us in his novel through George Webb's almost Kafkaesque transformation from physical and emotional detachment to an unrequited emotional attachment to Sarah as she serves her prison sentence for murder. George's bond with Sarah is as inescapable for him as Sarah's jail cell is for her, yet both find a sort of long-sought fulfillment in their mutual situation.

Graham Swift tells his story through jump cuts and time shifts among three major story lines: the events surrounding the murder itself, Marsh's investigation of George Webb's role in the murder, and George's fortnightly visit to Sarah in prison on the second anniversary of the murder. Interspersed are lesser threads detailing events surrounding the marital infidelity of George's father and the failed investigation by George into a near-murder by a man named Dyson, a failure that led to George's dismissal from the police force. The result is a fine weave in which each story line complements the others and fills out our understanding of George's character. We gradually come to see the reasons for George's seemingly inexplicable attachment to Sarah despite her crime.

While the main story line is motivated by a classic love triangle (Sarah, Bob, and Katrina) gone bad, the author fills his story with triangulated relationships: George, Sarah, and Rita; George, Marsh, and Dyson; George's father, mother, and Carol (the mistress); George, Sarah, and Bob; and Sarah, Napoleon III, and the Empress Eugenie. Each triangle plays out simultaneously as Swift cuts between scenes, building our appreciation of George Webb's character and his transformational relationship with Sarah.

Typical of mystery novels, THE LIGHT OF DAY employs short, choppy sentences to create a terse, almost noirish atmosphere. The prose is short on description and long on actions, but Swift's frequent use of rhetorical and hypothetical questions, seemingly addressed to the reader, creates a strong sense of introspection. In the end, we are, like George, left with many unanswered questions about how events such as these come to pass and why we cannot prevent them, only try to suffer through their consequences. As with Sarah and George, we each can hopefully survive our lives' tragedies and find our true place, leaving our fog of confusion and uncertainty and "step[ping] out at last into the clear light of day."

THE LIGHT OF DAY is a a winner, a cleverly-constructed and entertaining read, Ellery Queen with a literary bent. Fans of Paul Auster should particularly enjoy this book for its style, atmosphere, and structural execution.

For some reason, a number of reviewers use the term "hard boiled" in their description of this deeply psychological novel. Presumably this is because the protagonist is an ex-policeman who was kicked off the force for "corruption" and is now doing seedy "matrimonial" detective work. And other familiar "hard boiled" types on hand as well: the efficient secretary who pines for the PI, the femme fatale client, a cheating husband, and the PI's long-gone ex-wife. While these are certainly well-established hard-boiled types, Swift is much more interested in noir than hard-boiled. Now "noir" is itself a very tricksy word in film and litcrit circles, with many and varied meanings. However, noir's main recurring theme is that of fate, and fate is what Swift is really interested in investigating in this novel. Another of noir's key themes is the individual's inability to escape the past, and this too, plays a major role.

The story takes place over the course of a day in the head of middle-aged George Webb, the aforementioned ex-cop turned private investigator. His interior monologue takes quite a while to get used to, lurching around in fits and starts, back and forth in time, with little glimpses here and there. This is a canny writing job of capturing the fractured nature of thought, which is rarely so kind as to adhere to complete direct syntaxóbut it also makes for jarring reading. The style only really works because it's a special day for Webb: the anniversary of the day a client killed her husband. Not just any client, but the client he's become completely obsessed with and visits every two weeks in jail.

Over the course of this emotionally distressing day, Webb's thoughts gradually reveal not only the story of his client's crime, but the story of his dismissal from the police, as well as his childhood, and his relationship with his daughter. Swift is careful to release only micrograms of information at a time, so that the complete portrait of Webb's life accumulates in fragments, like a pointillist painting gradually coming alive as the dots mount up. But for all this coyness, there's no real suspense in the narrative, events proceed along an inevitable track dictated by fate. It's heavily suggested early on that Webb was unjustly dismissed from the police, and it turns out he was. Webb's career in "matrimonial " detective work turns out to be linked to his childhood. Webb's obsession with his murderess client is based on... well... nothing really, it just inexplicably exists (as in a film noir). Ditto with any explanation for the client's crimeóit's just what fate had in store, and that's all there is to it. Ultimately, all of this is rather unsatisfying, if stylistically well-written. I've long wanted to read one of Swift's books, but this doesn't seem to be a good one to start with.