(++++) SUNNY STRANGENESS

Atomic Lobster. By Tim Dorsey. William Morrow. $24.95.

Nuclear Jellyfish. By Tim Dorsey. William Morrow. $24.95.

     There must be something in the Florida air. Or the water. Or the sunshine. Or, more likely, in the combination. Whatever it is, it seems to attract authors with truly bizarre senses of the interrelationship of crime and humor, from Carl Hiaasen to Elmore Leonard (originally from Louisiana) to Tim Dorsey. Dorsey isn’t quite at the level of Hiaasen or Leonard in terms of plot, but he artfully conceals the fact with a scattershot narrative style that mixes up time, place, characters and sequence to a fare-thee-well, leaving readers so breathless (both from laughing and from trying to follow what is going on) that they just have to get their hands on whatever Dorsey comes up with next.

     Atomic Lobster is the “next” of 2008, and Nuclear Jellyfish is the “next” of 2009. They are, respectively if not respectably, the 10^th and 11^th annual novels that Dorsey has produced since Florida Roadkill (1999) introduced his thoroughly unlovable but strangely likable central character, a super-smart serial killer with a logical but twisted sense of justice and the name of Serge A. Storms (as in “a storm surge,” get it?). Dorsey is a former Tampa Tribune reporter, and seems to take reportorial delight in ferreting out details of events and describing them carefully (notably the inventive ways that Serge finds to kill people who are evil, or whom he considers evil); Dorsey also gets revenge on traditional inverted-pyramid style by never, ever writing in a way that makes it clear what is important and what is subsidiary. This means that it is perfectly possible to enter Dorsey’s series of novels anywhere and be at the same confused place where you would have been at the start – although, if you begin with Atomic Lobster or Nuclear Jellyfish, you will probably wish you had more background on some of the characters (which will encourage you to go get the earlier books; Dorsey is not dumb). The plots of Dorsey’s books are complex to the point of indescribability – and nearly irrelevant, since the fun of the books is in the weird characters and the way Dorsey writes about them. Atomic Jellyfish includes, among others, Serge; timid Jim Davenport; Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin; the E-Team (four man-hungry grandmas); Coleman, Serge’s dim, drug-bingeing buddy; Rachael, a very sexy but down-on-her-luck prostitute; and Tex McGraw, a bad guy imprisoned in part because of Jim Davenport’s testimony who is now out of jail and out for revenge (thus providing the gist of the plot). Throw together some anger-management classes for Serge and Tex’s “bobbing for catfish” game with his unsuccessful defense attorney, and you can pretty well figure out where Atomic Lobster is going – except that you probably won’t, because Dorsey has a way of twisting things just enough so you don’t quite guess what’s eventually going to happen, or how. This book, like all Dorsey’s novels, is a wild and funny ride – funnier, actually, if you have not read too many of his works, since there is a certain sameness to some of the characters and situations after a while.

     And then comes Nuclear Jellyfish, with yet more of some of the same characters clustered around Serge, but this time with a bad guy called the Eel, plus a stripping community-college instructor, a cameo appearance by former Florida Governor Claude Kirk (hey, Dorsey put Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen in Florida Roadkill), and visits to such Florida attractions as Marineland and the old Spanish fort at St. Augustine. Serge is, among other things, a devotee of Florida’s history; this lets ex-reporter Dorsey toss in some legitimate background and then mercilessly skewer its normal, placid presentation. In Nuclear Jellyfish, it is Serge’s interest in Florida that sets the plot in motion: our friendly neighborhood mass murderer starts blogging about the state for a travel Web site, but his unique approach to certain elements of state travel (say, carjackings) doesn’t go down particularly well, so he decides to travel around and file to his own site. As Serge continues finding Rube-Goldberg-like ways to commit mayhem (with a vegetable peeler, model railroad tracks, and plug-in air fresheners, among other items), Dorsey treats readers to bad blood between philatelists and numismatists, shopping at Home Depot, a series of deaths involving trade-show exhibitors, some hotel drink coupons, and a bit of John Travolta. It’s all madcap fun, if by “fun” you mean blood, drugs, sex, confusion and lots and lots of Florida. Where, apparently, all this stuff is fun. At least when you read about it.

(++++) PACKAGING PLEASANTRIES

Good Egg. By Barney Saltzberg. Workman. $9.95.

You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! By Jonah Winter. Illustrated by André Carrilho. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99.

Monsters vs. Aliens: The Junior Novel; Ginormica’s Big Battle; Meet the Monsters. HarperEntertainment. $5.99 (Novel); $3.99 each (Battle, Meet).

     Sometimes the major attraction of a book – or one of the major attractions, anyway – is simply how it is put together. That is certainly the case with the very clever Good Egg, a board book for ages 2-5 that features…well, an egg. But this is not just any egg: it does tricks – or, to be more precise, kids make it do tricks. That’s the cleverness both of the book’s design and of Barney Saltzberg’s story. The book opens with a picture of the egg and the word “egg.” Then come simple commands – things kids can get the egg to do by pulling, pushing or opening tabs, slots and foldover pages. “Lie down,” says one page, and when you pull the tab at the bottom, the egg moves 90 degrees clockwise and the words “good egg!” appear. “Roll over” is on another page with a tab – pull the tab to the right and the egg actually spins around on the page, again with the words “good egg!” appearing. For the page that says “catch,” there is an object that looks like a beach ball, adhering to a bit of Velcro – you pick the ball up from the left page and put it on the Velcro at the top of the right page, so it seems to sit atop the egg…and of course the words “good egg!” are at the bottom of that page. The egg “training” ends with the command to “speak!” – which of course an egg cannot do. Ah, but there is something inside the egg…and that brings this delightfully designed book to a suitable climax.

     You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! is for older kids, ages 4-9, but it too attracts readers through its appearance. The front cover is a very clever design in which André Carrilho’s drawing of Koufax actually winds up and pitches as you move the cover back and forth. And the good packaging doesn’t end there: “baseball cards” of Koufax adorn the book’s inside front and back covers, and Carrilho’s art throughout the book has an elongated, streamlined look that is both old-fashioned and in tune with Jonah Winter’s story. The narrative is cleverly packaged, too, in a “Brooklynese” accent to reflect the fact that Koufax started to pitch for the Dodgers when they were the Brooklyn Dodgers: “It didn’t take long for the major league scouts to start sniffin’ around Dyker Field, where Sandy was pitchin’ to his pals in sandlot games.” “Says nothin’ to nobody, just leaves. Quitsville.” But all this presentation matters mostly because it is at the service of an excellent story: about Koufax’s initial problems, his later successes, his introversion, his Judaism (which led to his refusing to take the mound for the first game of the 1965 World Series), and his early retirement from baseball. Fact boxes are sprinkled around the pages, too, about baseball’s color barrier, about teams’ name changes, about bad years that happened to good pitchers, and much more. You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! is primarily, of course, a baseball story, but it is better presented than many other tales of its type and therefore may be of more interest to kids who might in fact never have heard of Sandy Koufax (who, as Winter points out, is still alive, living in Florida, where he recently celebrated his 73^rd birthday).

     Sometimes, it is only the packaging that is likely to attract readers to a book, and that is the case with three tie-ins to the new Dreamworks animated movie, Monsters vs. Aliens. Kids who like the film, in which the monsters (kept at a secret government base, of course) are the good guys, will enjoy having parts of the plot rehashed in the books, which are aimed at different ages but which all draw from the same source and reflect the movie without trying to add anything to it. The Junior Novel, by Susan Korman, is for ages 8-12; Ginormica’s Big Battle, by Gail Herman, is a Level 2 book in the “I Can Read!” series, which means it is for ages 4-8; and Meet the Monsters, by N.T. Raymond, is a pictorial book in the style of a tabloid newspaper, designed for ages 3-7. Kids probably won’t realize that a lot of Monsters vs. Aliens is a sendup of the old “B” monster films of the 1950s: The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman gives us Susan Murphy, who is struck by a meteor and grows to be the 49-foot-11-inch-tall Ginormica; The Fly gives us “Dr. Cockroach, PhD,” a polite and intelligent man with the head of a cockroach; and so on. Parents may or may not make these connections, but ultimately they won’t care: these books, which get a (+++) rating for fans of the film and no rating at all for anyone else, are designed not for their stories but exclusively for the way they have been packaged as movie souvenirs for different age groups.

(++++) BEGINNING, ENDING AND CONTINUATION

Sir Eugene Goossens: Phantasy Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Symphony No. 1. Howard Shelley, piano; Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox. Chandos. $19.99 (SACD).

Bernstein: Mass. Randall Scarlata, baritone; Company of Music, Tölzer Knabenchor, Chorus Sine Nomine, Absolute Ensemble and Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich conducted by Kristjan Järvi. Chandos. $29.99 (2 SACDs).

     The final recording made by the late conductor Richard Hickox was supposed to be the start of one of the Chandos label's many series exploring less-known but highly worthy music – in this case, that of Sir Eugene Goossens, the celebrated composer-conductor whose career was infamously ruined when he fell afoul of the sexual mores of the mid-1950s. Goossens (1893-1962) was the son of a conductor-violinist and grandson of a conductor, all of the same name (although the earlier family members spelled their first name Eugène, with an accent). Sir Eugene was Sir Thomas Beecham’s assistant conductor, conductor of the Rochester Philharmonic, and conductor from 1931 to 1946 of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra – to which his Symphony No. 1 (1938-40) is dedicated. Although not as well known for his compositions as for his conducting, Goossens was a skilled craftsman with a fine feeling for orchestral scoring and color and a conductor’s attentiveness to performance details: the four-movement Phantasy Concerto, for example, has no fewer than 51 tempo indications. Goossens was not an especially inspired melodist, but he understood very well how to pull together a large-scale work such as Symphony No. 1 or a medium-scale one such as the concerto. The Phantasy Concerto, recorded here for the first time, is really more of a concertante, with the piano and orchestra in dialogue rather than competition and with few significant passages of virtuoso fireworks. It is an interesting rather than involving piece, played respectfully (if perhaps a bit coolly) by Howard Shelley, with Hickox and the Melbourne Symphony providing fluid backup. Symphony No. 1 is a larger and grander work and one that especially benefits from Chandos’ top-notch SACD sound. In the traditional four movements, the symphony projects a repeated air of menace suitable to the times in which it as written, although it is certainly not a “war symphony” like those of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Its most impressive movements are its scherzo, called Divertimento, which is dark and insistent; and its finale, which is conceived on a large scale and is very impressively orchestrated, and which pulls together multiple elements from the earlier movements. Hickox fully plumbs the depths of this music, and it is a real shame that he had no opportunity to delve further into Goossens’ output.

     Better treated by society than Goossens, Leonard Bernstein – whose bisexuality was never the major issue that Goossens’ involvement in what was once deemed pornographic became – was another composer-conductor, and in many ways more successful at both endeavors. Bernstein’s showmanship and his willingness to cross musical lines had a lot to do with building and maintaining his reputation – and shielding his personal life from condemnation. His use of multiple musical and theatrical forms to create something new and distinctive is nowhere more apparent than in his 1971 work, Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers. Commissioned by Jackie Kennedy for the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., Bernstein’s Mass uses the Roman Catholic Tridentine Mass – sung in traditional Latin – as the basis for an emotional exploration of faith, and the challenges to it, in the modern world. In 32 sections that stretch through nearly two hours, Bernstein’s Mass starts in harmony, passes into doubt and uncertainty, climaxes in abnegation and sacrilege, then slowly rebuilds itself into an affirmation of faith that allows the work to conclude with the traditional, “The Mass is ended; go in peace.” It is a remarkable emotional journey that gets its full due from the very strong forces directed by Kristjan Järvi in the new Chandos recording. Especially impressive is the vocal contrast between Randall Scarlata as the initially accepting, then doubting Celebrant, and the Company of Music as the Street Chorus that first starts the questioning of the tenets of the Mass. The momentum of this lengthy work is well sustained from start to finish, and the newly created pre-records – playbacks used during the performance, previously available only in a version made by Bernstein himself – are highly effective. Certainly Bernstein’s own recording of the Mass has unequaled authenticity and tremendous historical value, but its 1971 sound is not up to that of Chandos’ SACDs, and Järvi nicely highlights and balances some elements of the choral and orchestral forces in ways that even Bernstein himself did not. Clearly, despite Richard Hickox’s death, Chandos’ commitment to the recording of distinguished modern music is continuing and will continue, and will do so at the highest level of quality.

(++++) SMALL LABELS, BIG AMBITIONS

Allegro Danzante: One Century of Italian Music. Rocco Parisi, clarinet; Gabrielle Rota, piano. Concerto. $16.99.

Jewish Baroque Music. Ensemble Salomone Rossi. Concerto. $16.99.

Carlo Broschi detto Farinelli: Il Quaderno dell’Imperatrice. Angelo Manzotti, sopranista; Ensemble Isabella Leonarda conducted by Maurizio Schiavo. Concerto. $16.99.

Bach: Works for Lute, Volume 1. Jason Vieaux, guitar. Azica. $16.99.

Bohemian Maestro: Django Reinhardt and the Impressionists. The Hot Club of San Francisco with Jeffrey Kahane, piano, and the Aeros Quintet. Azica. $16.99.

     Although the recording industry today is dominated by a handful of huge companies, there remain ambitious entrepreneurs in the field who are convinced that there is an audience for niche productions of unusual, frequently little-known music in high-quality performances. Concerto, an Italian label launched in 2000, is a particularly good example of this type of company, being devoted mostly to Italian music performed by members of Italy’s famously deep classical-music talent pool. You might think this means lots of Baroque music, but Concerto spans the ages – in fact, Allegro Danzante: One Century of Italian Music is devoted to the 20^th and 21^st centuries, including works from as early as 1920 and as recently as last year. Rocco Parisi and Gabriele Rota give poised, elegant performances of Ferruccio Busoni’s Elegie, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Sonata, op. 128, and a sonata and Allegro Danzante by Nino Rota – plus brief works by four living composers: Vittorio Fellagara’s Wiegenlied (1981), Michele Dall’Ongaro’s Errata corrige (1998), Ennio Morricone’s Ipotesi (2000), and Raffaele Cacciola’s Storie (2008). The Busoni, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Rota works anchor the CD in what is largely a post-Romantic tradition, while the more recent compositions show Italian composers, in harmony with others worldwide, seeking new forms of musical language that will continue to connect with audiences.

     Two other Concerto CDs focus on the Baroque and Classical eras, peeking into corners of the repertoire with which listeners are likely to be unfamiliar. Jewish Baroque Music features works by some Jewish composers and on some Jewish themes by non-Jews – in the latter category, for example, two excerpts from Handel’s Esther. Several short pieces by Salomone Rossi, the namesake of the group performing on this disc, are especially interesting, being based on Hebrew texts such as En Kelohenu and Shir hammaalot. Other composers heard on this CD are Avraham Caceres, Cristiano Giuseppe Lidarti and Carlo Grossi – minor masters all, whose works do not depart in any significant way from standard Baroque practices, but whose music is of interest because of a focus that was decidedly non-mainstream in Italy in the 16^th through 18^th centuries. What was mainstream at the time was the singing of castrati, and one of the most famous of them was Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli. He sang contralto and soprano roles – and was also a fine composer, on the evidence of Il Quaderno dell’Imperatrice, a set of five soprano arias dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Written late in Farinelli’s life (he lived from 1705 to 1782), the arias show a fine sense of balance and scale and fit neatly into the time of Mozart (who knew Farinelli and visited him). Angelo Manzotti’s specialized countertenor voice, the sopranista, fits these arias as well as any male voice is likely to today, revealing great beauty in the music and considerable flexibility in Manzotti as a vocal performer.

     Another small company offering top-notch performances of a carefully focused repertoire is Azica, founded in 1992 as a classical-and-jazz label (the “az” comes from “jazz” and the “ica” from “classical”). The Azica idea is to bring some jazz-like spontaneity to classical recordings and some classical-like acoustical precision to jazz CDs. This aim does not appear especially evident in practice in two recent Azica CDs, but both are interesting and well played on their own terms. Guitarist Jason Vieaux offers transcriptions of four Bach lute works in what is intended as the first volume of a series, adeptly and sensitively playing the Suite in G Minor, BWV 995 (transcribed into A Minor); the Suite in E Minor, BWV 996; the Suite in C Minor, BWV 997 (transcribed into A Minor); and the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat Major, BWV 998 (transcribed into D Major). The key transcriptions do no harm to the music – Bach can be played in almost any key, on almost any instrument – but the guitar arrangements, although well done, will not be to purists’ tastes. The intricacy of Bach’s lute music is well known; Bach took full advantage of the lute’s structure and tuning (for instance, the fact that in lower courses, one of the two strings is generally tuned an octave higher than the other), as is particularly clear when the composer himself arranged a work originally written for a different instrument (BWV 995 is a transcription of the fifth Cello Suite, BWV 1011). The warmer, more blended tones of the guitar produce a different sonic experience from that afforded by the lute itself – neither better nor worse, but sufficiently different to make Bach’s music an aural experience rather far from what the composer intended. Still, Vieaux plays the works with skill and considerable virtuosity, and this CD provides an interesting way to look at some aspects of Bach’s music.

     The virtuosity is of a different kind in Azica’s tribute to master jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910-1953). Reinhardt was one of the first top European jazz musicians and was cofounder (with violinist Stéphane Grappelli) of the Quintette du Hot Club de France – after which the Hot Club of San Francisco is named. The California group, with 10 CDs to its credit in the past 20 years, performs a mixture of classical works (in jazz arrangements) and original compositions on Bohemian Maestro. This creates an interesting sonic world in which Debussy, Poulenc and Villa-Lobos rub shoulders (so to speak) with Jelly Roll Morton and works by Hot Club’s own guitarist, Paul Mehling, and violinist, Evan Price. Also included is a nearly lost work by Reinhardt himself, part of a Catholic Mass whose score is long gone – Price transcribed the music from an organ recording. Bohemian Maestro is an exhilarating mixture of music that does not, on the face of it, blend particularly well – but whose sound and emotional impact fit together surprisingly effectively on this very well-played, well-recorded CD.

(++++) BIRTHDAYS FOREVER!

Birthday Books: Edward Gorey—Verse Advice; Kliban’s Cats. Pomegranate. $12.95 each.

Anne Geddes Birthday Calendar. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     In these trying economic times, it can be a real pleasure to find a small thing you can do that will save money in the long run and be enjoyable as well. Here’s a pleasant example: track family members’ and friends’ birthdays and other special occasions with a perpetual birthday book or calendar. You buy it once and keep it for years – in fact, as long as you like (or until you get tired of its design or it becomes frayed from use).

     Pomegranate makes a number of sturdy, attractive perpetual-recording books, decorated with art for just about any taste and containing, as bonuses, lists of birthstones and flowers, zodiac signs and dates, and a compendium of wedding-anniversary gifts (both traditional and contemporary). These little books – just under five inches square – easily fit in a drawer or on a frequently used shelf, so you can grab them anytime. If, for example, you keep a standard calendar in the kitchen, you can keep one of these books nearby so you always know whose birthday, anniversary or other special event is coming up. Then you can transfer the information to your regular calendar once a week or once a month, so you will always know when and for whom to buy a card or gift, or whom to telephone or E-mail to acknowledge a special day. The little books are very simply laid out: each day of the year gets its own space, a little more than an inch high and about four inches wide (except that February 28 and 29 share a space). This is plenty of room in which to write several people’s birthdays, anniversaries or whatever else you want to remember. And the book’s decorations make them fun to look at. Edward Gorey’s Verse Advice, originally published in The New Yorker in 1993, shows up in one book as a series of couplets at the starts of months. For March, for example, there are two ice skaters facing each other with rather quizzical looks on their faces, with a dog in the background, and the words, “The person who today is here/ May by tomorrow disappear.” Make of this what you will – the verse and pictures are classic Gorey (and some individual dates have little bits of Gorey illustrations adorning them). Kliban’s Cats features B. “Hap” Kliban’s plump and amusing felines in big pictures at the start of each month and small ones on various dates. Either book, or any of the others in Pomegranate’s birthday-book line, will be useful perpetually (or at least for a long while) as a timely reminder of special occasions.

     Alternatively, you can actually hang up a perpetual calendar in addition to whatever dated one you use – for example, the Anne Geddes Birthday Calendar from Andrews McMeel. This looks just like a standard wall calendar of its size (it opens to 20 inches high by seven inches wide), giving a small amount of space to every day of every month – but there is no year, so you can use the calendar for as long as you like. Fans of Geddes’ photos of miniature babies (well, apparently miniature babies) will love this calendar, which includes some of her most charming pictures: a baby with butterfly wings asleep on a red-and-white mushroom cap for February, four babies peeking out of the openings in a planter for June, three babies with daffodil caps in individual flower pots for October, and so on. This calendar offers less room in which to write events than you get in a birthday book; but unlike the books, the calendar can be hung so you always see it and can simply glance at it regularly to find out which special occasions are coming up. These perpetual date books and calendars jog the memory, look good, last for a long time and are a great way to economize while being sure not to forget important people’s significant dates – a lot of value in some small, attractive packages.

(+++) TROUBLES OUT OF TIME

Alligator Bayou. By Donna Jo Napoli. Wendy Lamb Books. $16.99.

Carolina Harmony. By Marilyn Taylor McDowell. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

     It has become increasingly fashionable, in books for preteens and young teenagers, to dig down to traumas of the past in order to offer historical fiction that authors think will resonate emotionally with young people today. The reasons for this are obscure, but perhaps the ability simultaneously to escape from modern-day difficulties while learning that the past has lessons that still apply in the 21^st century is an element of authors’ and publishers’ thinking. Books in this historical-fiction category tend to follow familiar patterns, establishing the time frame and explaining how people lived then while focusing on the emotional lives of the families profiled – and subjecting them to all sorts of difficulties from which the young protagonists eventually emerge stronger and more capable of handling life.

     That is the pattern of both Alligator Bayou, for ages 12 and up, and Carolina Harmony, for ages 9-12. Donna Jo Napoli’s book is set in 1899 in the small town of Tallulah, Louisiana, and its focus is a family of Sicilian immigrants who do not quite look like the white people of the town – but certainly not like the black ones, either. So 14-year-old Calogero (“Calo”) Scalise and his uncles and cousin have even more trouble than immigrants usually do as they try to adapt to a strange country with strange customs (including Jim Crow laws) and strange ways. The bayou atmosphere of the book is established through midnight alligator hunts and other touches of local color; the unremitting prejudice is established both through the white townspeople’s belief in the inferiority of the Sicilians (even if they are not quite black) and through the introduction of a black girl named Patricia who is far too intelligent and sweet to be believable, but who is a common type in modern books of this sort, where the downtrodden are always nobler and better than those who repress them. There are noble and suppressed Indians in Alligator Bayou, too, and one member of the Tunica tribe tells Calo about his people’s legend of finding the seasons (thanks to two alligators, one red and one blue), while Calo – the book’s narrator – remarks that as a Catholic he knows “the world is full of miracles and mysteries,” but he doesn’t believe the Tunica ones. What he does believe, and what he should believe, become issues for Calo as he and his relatives “fraternize” with blacks and get beaten up by the inevitable ignorant and nasty white youths. Calo discovers that even the “educated men” – white men, that is – are ignorant and nasty – and never more than one step from violence. And it is violence that ultimately forces Calo to make choices that will carry him into adulthood – and away from the childhood he has known. The nuanced portraits of Calo, Joseph (the Tunica) and Patricia are in stark contrast to the one-dimensional portrayals of the many bad white people in Alligator Bayou, but that is part of the pattern of historical fiction of this type.

     The pattern is a bit different in Carolina Harmony, the debut novel by Marilyn Taylor McDowell. This is set closer to the present time than Napoli’s book, in 1964, but for 21^st-century preteens, that seems as long ago as Elizabethan times. The setting is the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where an 11-year-old girl – also named Carolina – has lived through too many tragedies in her young life: the death in an accident of her parents and baby brother, Caleb; a year spent with her Auntie Shen (who then “took sick”); then a series of foster homes. She lands with the Harmonys, Mr. Ray and Miss Latah, but bad things happen with them too, including a farming accident and the arrival at Harmony Farm of a boy named Russell, whom Carolina mistakenly considers a friend. This era is developed as a time of moonshine, of continuing prejudice against those who are “different” (such as Miss Latah, a Cherokee; and there are “white” and “colored” water fountains), of harsh treatment of runaways such as Carolina, of reform schools and hopping trains to get away to…somewhere else. But Carolina brings all her fears, worries and troubles with her wherever she goes, and even though she is sure wishes don’t come true – hers certainly haven’t – she eventually discovers faith, sees a vision of an angel that makes her feel re-connected to her family, and realizes that she must return to Harmony Farm to face her past. Auntie Shen’s comment, “Sometimes the heart does the praying for us,” is the ultimate affirmation here; and if the sentiment seems overly simplistic and the problems faced by Carolina seem rather too contrived, that is in keeping with the overall tone of this historical novel that reads as if it is set not so much in the mid-20^th century as “once upon a time.”

(++++) SWIFT, SURE COMPUTER CLEANUP

Norton Utilities 14.0. Windows Vista or XP. Symantec. $49.95.

     The best iteration yet of the venerable Norton Utilities computer tuneup suite, with the best-looking interface that Symantec has created for its 2009 product line, Norton Utilities 14.0 is not a product for everyone – but everyone who understands what it can do will be tremendously pleased with how efficiently it performs its functions.

     This is software that really gets into the innards of your PC, ferreting out problems that are difficult – sometimes nearly impossible – for users to handle on their own, and automating the repair of those issues with genuinely impressive speed. And style, too: this program looks good while doing what it does.      The main Norton Utilities screen offers six functions under a category called “optimize”: clean registry, clean discs, manage services, manage startup, defragment registry, defragment hard drives. Each function gets its own slick, modern icon with a brief explanation of what clicking on that icon will do. Pick one and click, and Norton Utilities goes to work with exceptional speed and excellent accuracy. “Clean registry,” for example, automates the chore of searching the enormous and complex database that is the guts of Windows operating systems – and that tends to accumulate unneeded “keys” and “values” as programs are installed, updated, reinstalled or uninstalled. Eventually, this accumulation slows down a computer and can (worst case) cause operating instability. In short order, Norton Utilities finds what doesn’t belong in the registry – in a dozen categories, from “registry integrity” to “file extensions” – and displays the problems, which a user can fix with a single click on “repair.” This works amazingly well – and includes the automatic creation of a restore point, so you can bring your computer back to its prior state if it turns out that Norton Utilities has misidentified and removed an entry that you really needed after all.

     The registry can also be defragmented for smoother, quicker operation; and Norton Utilities can analyze your hard drives and tell you whether they too have files so scattered that some housekeeping is in order. But the “optimize” category is only one part of this program. The “monitor” category lets you test, benchmark and improve system performance, keeps an eye on your registry for changes and alerts you when they occur, and lets you view and manage Windows processes.

     If your eyes are glazing over by now, you may think you are not a good candidate for Norton Utilities 14.0, because the program does require some basic understanding of how Windows computers work. Indeed, its “Windows tools” category gets more deeply into that, providing a one-stop shortcut to functions you can get to elsewhere on the computer, but not as straightforwardly: System Information, Control Panel, Windows Update, Device Manager, Windows Security Settings and more. Interestingly, for this functionality alone, the new Norton Utilities can be a worthwhile purchase for less-knowledgeable users, who are sure to need access to some of these areas from time to time and may find the often-confusing Windows interface more difficult to use than the simple, clean Norton Utilities one.

     For more-knowledgeable users, Norton Utilities 14.0 provides an “administer” category for dealing with white lists, restorations and other functions that a novice will likely not want to touch – but that experienced PC users will welcome. Like everything else in this program, these functions work quickly, easily, and highly efficiently.

     There are, though, a couple of areas for improvement even in as well-designed a piece of software as this. The main issue is program updates. Norton Utilities 14.0 includes a “Smart Update” feature that works well – but it does not integrate with other Norton applications’ Live Update, so you have to run Live Update and Smart Update separately. Given the fact that Live Update itself is annoying – it repeatedly tells you that updates are available to induce you to run it, then usually tells you that you are already up to date – adding Smart Update as a separate requirement is irritating. Furthermore, much of what Smart Update discovers may be useless for many people – multilingual process viewers, for instance. Those are small updates, only a few hundred kilobytes each, and you can deselect them if you do not want them – but if you do so, they show up again and again, every time you run Smart Update; there is no “ignore” button. It is probably best just to accept the inevitable and download all updates, including ones you will never use.

     These matters aside, Norton Utilities 14.0 is an exceptionally useful product that does its work quickly and well, is easy to use, performs some highly valuable functions, and – on top of everything else – looks good (the look of Norton AntiVirus, Norton SystemWorks and other Symantec programs would be improved by following the Norton Utilities graphic model). Norton Utilities 14.0 is not inexpensive, but it will be worth the price to anyone who hopes to keep a Windows computer operating as quickly and efficiently as it can for as long as possible.

(++++) UNUSUAL ENJOYMENTS

Balakirev: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Grande Fantasie on Russian Folksongs. Anastasia Seifetdinova, piano; Russian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dmitry Yablonsky. Naxos. $8.99.

Janáček: Orchestral Suites from the Operas, Volume 1—Jenůfa; The Excursions of Mr. Brouček. New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Breiner. Naxos. $8.99.

     The works on these CDs are unlikely to be familiar to most listeners – and that is a good thing, since they provide both enjoyment and insight into some composers whose music is less often played than it deserves to be. Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), leader of the Mighty Five (or Mighty Handful) of Russian nationalistic composers in the 19^th century, wrote a relatively small number of works and often did not complete them until decades after he started them. His ideas about nationalism, and his specific musical themes, often found their way into the works of Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and others, but he did not end up getting much credit for them – because it often took him so long to bring them to fruition. Balakirev was a fine pianist, and his two piano concertos provide interesting insight into his thinking both in terms of folk themes and in the matter of pianism. The first concerto, written in 1855-6 and published as his Op. 1, is in a single movement in the style of Liszt, but its themes and their working-out are more reminiscent of Chopin, who clearly influenced Balakirev’s style. And this was not Balakirev’s first work for piano and orchestra: the Grande Fantasie on Russian Folksongs dates to 1852, although it was published as Op. 4. This is an interestingly designed work, not intended as a bravura piece so much as an exploration of the folk tunes at its heart – it does not end in a great climax or provide any spectacular virtuoso passages, although there is a good deal of arpeggio. As for Piano Concerto No. 2, it is a classic case of Balakirev’s delayed-completion syndrome: the first movement dates to 1861-2, but he did not add the second until 1906, and it was left to fellow composer Sergey Lyapunov to complete and orchestrate the finale along lines specified by Balakirev – the work was not finished until 1910 and was published posthumously. Yet despite this exceptionally long gestation period, the concerto hangs together rather well, with the second movement’s coda and the conclusion of the third movement both referring back to material from the work’s opening. The heart of this concerto is its lovely Adagio, in which a chant from the Russian Orthodox Requiem is extensively developed. Anastasia Seifetdinova plays all these Balakirev pieces attractively, and the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitry Yablonsky provides excellent support in a CD that may well make listeners go looking for additional music by this less-known Russian master.

     The nine operas of Leoš Janáček cannot be said to be unknown nowadays, although not all of them are performed very often. However, it is safe to say that listeners will not have heard the orchestral suites from Jenůfa and The Excursions of Mr. Brouček before listening to Naxos’ new CD, since they were created by Peter Breiner and are recorded here for the first time. Listeners familiar with the operas will be able to trace the plots through these suites, which follow the operas’ dramatic sequences in the order in which they occur. But the music, especially that of Jenůfa, is highly effective even if one does not know the opera. The darkness and family tragedy of Jenůfa come through effectively as the music opens and closes with a representation of the sound of the mill that is central to the action (Jenůfa’s stepmother drowns the young woman’s illegitimate child in the millstream). Janáček’s skillful use of Moravian folk music helps anchor the story geographically, and a series of ominous foreshadowings makes it clear that all is not well even in the more upbeat passages. The Excursions of Mr. Brouček is not as well known an opera, and its music is less interesting. This is a comedy about a rather unappealing central character who journeys first to the moon and later back in time to the 15^th century. The most interesting parts of the Breiner-arranged suite are the central movement (“Waltzes and Other Dances”), which includes a particularly well-formed waltz, and the fifth and last movement (“Those Who Are the Warriors of God”), one of whose primary themes is the same Hussite chorale used so effectively by Smetana in Má vlast and by Dvořák in his Hussite Overture. The New Zealand Symphony handles Janáček’s tunes and rhythms with considerable skill, although its sound is thinner than that of Central European orchestras. Like the Balakirev CD, this one of Janáček’s music presents an unusual opportunity to hear less-familiar but very worthy works in performances that, if not always elegant, are highly satisfying throughout.

(++++) TARNISHED GOLD, BURNISHED SILVER

Lehár: Die Blaue Mazur. Johanna Stojkovich and Julia Bauer, sopranos; Johan Weigel and Jan Kobow, tenors; Hans Christoph Begemann, baritone; Kammerchor der Singakademie Frankfurt and Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt conducted by Frank Beermann. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

Strauss: Fürstin Ninetta. Tua Åberg, Elin Rombo and Henrikka Gröndahl, sopranos; Fredrik Strid and Göran Eliasson, tenors; Jesper Taub, Ola Eliasson and Samuel Jarrick, baritones; Ninetta Chorus and Stockholm Strauss Orchestra conducted by Valéria Csányi. Naxos. $17.99 (2 CDs).

     Franz Lehár’s first big hit, the Gold and Silver Waltz of 1902, was not intended as a demarcation between the Golden Age and Silver Age of operetta, but in retrospect, that is pretty much what it turned out to be. Lehár himself was the prime successor to the operetta mantle of Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss Jr., with other composers (notably Emmerich Kálmán) also making significant contributions to operetta in the 20^th century. But except for The Merry Widow, Lehár’s operettas are underperformed today, and certainly the peculiarly titled Die Blaue Mazur (“The Blue Mazurka”) is almost completely unknown. The new CPO recording is therefore most welcome, showcasing some wonderful tunes in an unusual plot that starts with a wedding instead of ending with it. This 1920 work is a late pre-Tauber Lehár operetta – he started writing for tenor Richard Tauber with Frasquita in 1922, and his works from then on were darker and lacked happy endings. Die Blaue Mazur, though, sparkles. It is an operetta set in Poland, where (according to the libretto) it is said that a “blue mazurka,” played at dawn as the sky turns blue, is danced by a man only with the woman he wants to claim as his own forever. The plot has Count Olinski (Johan Weigel) marrying Blanka (Johanna Stojkovich) at the start, then lamenting his lost romantic freedom to his friend Adolar (Jan Kobow) at just about the same time Olinski’s ex-lover, Gretl (Julia Bauer), shows up. Blanka overhears Olinski’s concerns, Gretl stirs the pot of jealousy, Blanka flees the scene, and it takes the rest of the operetta for all misunderstandings to be sorted out and for Olinski to sweep Blanka into the blue mazurka. Dance itself is central to the operetta’s plot, and Lehár supplies an ample stream of it, from a lovely waltz song in the first scene, to a gavotte with typically beautiful Lehárian solo violin passages in the act’s second scene, to a waltz scene and the blue mazurka in Act II. There are also a march duet and a madrigal quintet. Everything is quite lovely – perhaps too lovely for a work written after the devastation of World War I (which is why Lehár did nothing like Die Blaue Mazur again). The singing is poised and heartfelt throughout the new CPO recording, and Frank Beermann keeps the action flowing smoothly and warmly. The only big disappointment here is the lack of a libretto: there is plenty of dialogue, and non-German speakers ought to have a chance to know both the spoken words and the lyrics of the arias. CPO used to be distinguished for the fine libretti it included with its recordings of less-known works. Its decision to stop issuing them is particularly unfortunate in the case of an operetta such as Die Blaue Mazur, whose libretto will be virtually impossible for interested listeners to find. A decent summary of the action is included, but it is scarcely enough.

     There is a summary of the action in the new Naxos recording of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Fürstin Ninetta, too; and Naxos offers the libretto online – but only in German, which won’t help English speakers much. In this case, though, it is harder to lament the absence of the text, since this operetta’s libretto is truly execrable – and Strauss wrote the music without knowing what the text in between the numbers would be! (He later expressed disappointment, saying the spoken sections did not go well with the music.) If Die Blaue Mazur is something of an undiscovered pleasure from operetta’s Silver Age, Fürstin Ninetta is a little-known example of an inferior production of the Golden Age. This does not mean that Strauss’ music for this 1893 work is poor – much of it is bright and charming. (The best-known piece, the Neue Pizzicato Polka, was written a year before the operetta and inserted into its third act.) But the story is completely incoherent, involving (among other things) a princess who first appears dressed as a man (for reasons never explained), and who in that guise attracts female guests at a beach hotel; a hypnotist with an Italian circus who was previously an Egyptian government official but is really a Russian nobleman; an English Lord who, because of a bet, is not allowed to speak; reports of a thief and murderer attacking people on the path to Mt. Vesuvius; and more. With such an incomprehensible mishmash of a plot, it may be just as well not to know the words and to be able to focus on the Strauss tunes, which include (in addition to the well-known polka) a “hypnotizing duet,” an effective tarantella, an attractive women’s chorus and, not surprisingly, some lovely (if mostly short) waltzes – the best being a paean to polygamy. This live performance of Fürstin Ninetta is not as polished as the studio recording of Die Blaue Mazur, with the large number of soloists (four sopranos, a contralto, four tenors and three baritones) often having indistinguishable vocal tone – although Jesper Taube shows some nuance, and fine comic timing, as both Cassim Pascha and the unfortunate Lord Plato, who can only sing “hum.” Conductor Valéria Csányi does an adequate job of propelling the action, but there is a little less bounce and flair than this bit of Straussian fluff ought to have. The result is a (+++) rating for this rendition of an operetta that is good to have available on CD despite its many manifest theatrical shortcomings.

(++++) HEAVY, MIDDLE AND LIGHT

Deeper. By Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams. Chicken House/Scholastic. $18.99.

The 100 Cupboards, Book 2: Dandelion Fire. By N.D. Wilson. Random House. $16.99.

Dear Dumb Diary #8: It’s Not My Fault I Know Everything. By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $5.99.

     Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams are creating quite a series with their tales of a mysterious and often frightening underground world. Tunnels, the first book in the sequence and the authors’ first novel, introduced 14-year-old Will Burrows and his best friend, Chester, who investigated the mysterious disappearance of Will’s father – who vanished shortly after discovering a mysterious abandoned tunnel underneath London. The young explorers found an entire underground civilization and a malevolent and genuinely scary group called the Styx that dominated the belowground world through fear. Will and Chester eventually made it back to Topsoil – the everyday aboveground world – but there were plenty of loose ends that made it clear they would need to return to the world beneath soon. And so they do in Deeper, which combines the frightening elements that Gordon and Williams brought to Tunnels with an expanded sense of intricacy involving family relationships – including a confrontation between Will’s birth mother and adoptive mother that turns out to have a great deal to do with a Styx plan to eliminate Topsoilers altogether. The story proceeds in multiple threads, flashing from Styx activities to Will’s continuing search to the adventures of Will’s father himself. The notes that Dr. Burrows enters day after day in his journal provide a great deal of information on the underground world and the people living there, but it is the events involving the other characters that give Deeper its emotional punch and overarching sense of dread. Not surprisingly in a series of this type, Will’s importance increases as the events progress, as a Styx elder explains: “Will Burrows is contained for the moment, but he may yet become a false idol, a figurehead, for our enemies. They might seek to use him in their opposition of us and the measures we intend to take. He cannot be allowed to continue to roam unchecked in the Interior. He must be flushed out and stopped.” So as Will searches, others search for him, and the world beneath becomes increasingly multidimensional and complex, filled with alliances, renegades, competing social structures and considerable danger for the unwary. The elements of the story gradually interweave, and eventually Will and his companions learn of a deadly virus called Dominion that the Styx intend to release to destroy the Topsoilers. Pursued by Limiters and Stalkers, Will and the others are hopelessly overmatched and outmaneuvered, and anyone hoping for a happy ending will not find it here. Deeper is clearly a way station between Tunnels and the next book of the series, Freefall, but it does serve to deepen the story while providing a higher level of intensity than is usually found in books for ages 8-12. It will, in fact, likely be too intense for readers on the lower end of that age spectrum.

     Dandelion Fire, on the other hand, will be just fine for pretty much all preteens. Exciting but not nearly as disturbing as Deeper, N.D. Wilson’s sequel to The 100 Cupboards continues the adventure that began when rather timid 12-year-old Henry York found a wall covered with 100 cupboard doors in his aunt and uncle’s house in Kansas. Go through the cupboards and, to use an obvious phrase, you’re not in Kansas anymore. And Henry found in the first book that the cupboards were really portals that could conceal evil (in the form of the witch of Endor) in addition to wonders. The second book’s title refers to the gift of second sight: dandelion fire is said to run through the veins of those who have it. And Henry discovers that he is one of those. He now knows that he was born in one of the cupboard worlds, and is determined to reenter the cupboards to find his real parents and learn his own background and, perhaps, destiny. This is a rather formulaic setup for a quest story, and the tale is often told in rather formulaic language: “A knot tied in her stomach, and she felt the first stage of panic. She didn’t want to express her thought. Not even to herself. But she did. She might never get home.” Still, the very simplicity of the writing will make Dandelion Fire attractive to many young readers, and the nearly nonstop – if not particularly intense – action is well enough handled to earn the book a (+++) rating.

     Intensity is the last thing Jim Benton wants in his “Tales from Mackerel Middle School,” of which It’s Not My Fault I Know Everything is the eighth. In these books, Jamie Kelly’s diaries follow a familiar pattern (starting with an admonition to readers not to read them), although this one includes a “Diploma of Everything” foldout just to make things more interesting. In this episode as in earlier ones, Jamie has problems with her “best enemy,” Angeline, imaging that Angeline “wakes up in a puddle of her own beauty, and she glides over to the mirror and radiates gorgeous glamour all over the place.” Jamie has problems with boys, too (“bathing won’t kill you”), and with dogs (her dog and Angeline’s just had puppies together, leading Jamie to give the puppies names ranging from “The Bubblegum Duchess” to “Stinkette”). Jamie does not have problems (usually) with her best friend, Isabella, or with those quizzes in magazines: “I’m a Magazine Quiz Genius, so it just naturally follows that I am a genius at everything. I mean, we have to admit: The people who write these quizzes are the brightest people in the nation.” Like the other Dear Dumb Diary books, this one is a collection of largely unrelated events that eventually turn out to be sort-of-related after all. It helps that Jamie’s Aunt Carol works in the school office and is married to Uncle Dan, the assistant principal – who is Angeline’s uncle. But what really helps the book – and gives it a (+++) rating despite its predictability – are Benton’s drawings, which are consistently funnier than the often-amusing stories. This time, one picture shows a girl carrying a “sacred diary” and accompanied by a “sacred koala assistant, which would be awesome”; one shows a girl literally turning into a puddle when stared at by a huge-eyed puppy (“a puppy’s gaze can actually make a human girl melt with PURE LOVE”); one shows a famous-but-ugly person improving his looks by taping his paycheck to his face. Dear Dumb Diary is scarcely great writing and is not even great drawing; but it is great fun, which is clearly all that Benton wants it to be.

(++++) SF WITH A GERMAN ACCENT

The Black Mirror & Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany & Austria. Edited by Franz Rottensteiner. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Wesleyan University Press. $27.95.

     Although this outstanding book is part of the Wesleyan University Press “Early Classics of Science Fiction” series, a great deal of it is not early at all: of the 25 stories here, only eight predate World War Two, and four were written in the 21^st century. But these tales will be terra incognita to most SF readers, because Germany and Austria have been, surprisingly, backwaters of the science-fiction field.

     This does not seem logical. The vaunted German prowess in scientific endeavors, including Germany’s development of the first successful rockets (admittedly under the Nazis and for purposes of war), would seem to indicate a culture where science fiction would flourish. But the field largely traces its modern roots to England (H.G. Wells) and France (Jules Verne), and even those who would push its origins back further – say, to Jonathan Swift’s tale of Gulliver’s voyage to Laputa – would be unlikely to find them in Germany. It is not entirely clear why this should be so (an “engineering” rather than “speculative” cultural mentality, perhaps?), and Franz Rottensteiner’s introduction to The Black Mirror makes no attempt to explore the question, instead tracing German SF’s early days and showing how the authors in the present volume fit into the flow. But Rottensteiner’s “Short History of Science Fiction in German” does do an excellent job of naming many of the authors who have used the SF form and showing how they influenced each other.

     It is the stories themselves, though, that make this book so special. This is one of those rare anthologies in which the relatively lower quality of some stories is quite deliberate: Rottensteiner says he did not try to select “‘the best,’ but [rather] a collection of texts and writers important for the development of the genre in the German language.” Still, if some tales are turgid or unconvincing, and others are derivative (of Wells and Verne, among others), most are quite intriguing, showing speculative explorations different from those attempted by SF writers in other languages. There is a considerable amount of purely philosophical thinking in some of these stories. The title tale, written by Erik Simon in 1983 in what was then East Germany, involves realized abstractions and ideally permeable mathematical surfaces. A much earlier story, “Malvu the Helmsman” (by Paul Scheerbart; 1912), starts with elements of Swiftian fantasy in its conception of a race in which all individuals have different types and numbers of limbs and different means of locomotion – and then, when the title character loses all limbs at the same time, becomes an exercise in philosophically reimagining how the race should live.

     There is more than a touch of surrealism in Scheerbart’s tale, and more than a touch as well in “Jules Verne in Hell” (Ludwig Hevesi; 1906), which fascinatingly and humorously imagines the French SF author attempting to understand how Hell works and then to convince its rulers to use more modern methods to achieve their aims.

     A number of the stories here are short-shorts, and while they do not rise to the level of Fredric Brown, the most consistently excellent creator of such tidbits, they are mostly excellent. Some examples: “Is the Earth Inhabited?” (Egon Friedell; 1931) explains why, from an alien point of view, no one could possibly live on our planet; “Thought Control” (Herbert W. Franke; 1961) shows a captive human outthinking a machine that can read his thoughts; “Say It with Flowers” (Ernst Vlcek; 1980) has a pithy and rather elegant anti-war message. There are plenty of longer stories, too, and some of the newest tales in the book are packed with particularly ingenious ideas: “Project 38 or the Game of Small Causes” (Thorsten Küper; 2003) features a protagonist who manipulates pictures, then news, then events themselves – until he inconveniently discovers that he has a conscience; “Hitler on the Campaign Trail in America” (Oliver Henkel; 2004) is an alternative-history tale featuring the Führer meeting with Al Capone, who proposes turning an old cruise ship into a “floating pleasure dome” with security provided by Hitler’s Brownshirts – a plan neatly foiled by Hitler’s translator, who has his own agenda, through some ingenious reworking of words.

     Speaking of translation: Mike Mitchell’s English versions of all these stories are as unstilted as can be, with the result that the writers’ many styles – which range from the pedestrian to the genuinely clever – come through quite clearly. As a book of stories, a book of ideas and a book of literary history, The Black Mirror & Other Stories is a pleasure, and a highly welcome discovery in the SF genre.

(+++) SHORT AND SWEET (OR NOT)

Variety’s “The Movie That Changed My Life”: 120 Celebrities Pick the Films That Made a Difference (for Better or Worse). By Robert Hofler. Da Capo. $15.95.

Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience—Short Fiction from Then to Now. Edited by Ishmael Reed with Carla Blank. Da Capo. $19.95.

     Stringing together unrelated vignettes or stories no more makes a coherent book than stringing together lots of words makes a coherent book title. So authors and editors of lengthily titled books, such as Robert Hofler and Ishmael Reed, create, or try to create, large themes within which their works’ small individual elements fit neatly. Unfortunately, the fit is not always neat – although when it is, it can be highly interesting. Variety magazine senior editor Hofler asked a wide variety of celebrities in various fields to tell him what movie made the greatest impression on their lives. Now, this is a recipe for self-aggrandizement if there ever was one. Can you imagine, say, Senator John McCain saying that The Bridges of Madison County mattered most to him – even if it did? Of course not; McCain picks Viva Zapata! – Elia Kazan’s 1952 story of the Mexican revolutionary. Can you imagine feel-good guru Sanjay Gupta saying that Rambo did more for him than any other film? Nope – Gupta picks the heartwarming E.T. What about director Tim Burton – can you imagine him choosing, say, Bambi as the movie that influenced him most? He picks, not at all surprisingly, Frankenstein (although James Whale’s sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, is actually a better film). The point is to take everything these celebrities say with several grains of salt – they are celebrities, which means they are always on the lookout for their image, and nothing they say about films is likely to go against whatever public persona they have carefully tried to cultivate. With that major caveat, Hofler’s book is fun, and it’s quite easy to read – each entry takes only a page or two, and there are plenty of illustrations from the films mentioned to make the brief text even shorter. Also, some of the celebrities use the book to extend their professional lives – Joan Rivers, for example, turns her appearance into a mini-sample of her frequently profane comedy. Hofler tries to divide his celebrities into categories into which they really do not fit: Danielle Steel and Hugh Hefner are in “The Romantics,” Kurt Vonnegut is among “The Front Liners” (with McCain and Senator James Webb, among others), Governor Bill Richardson is in “The Athletes,” Tom Brokaw appears among “The Historians,” and so on. Given the arbitrary nature of the classifications, the book would have worked better by simply presenting the celebrities in alphabetical order (they are not even alphabetical within the sections). But this is a minor issue in a book that, in the final analysis, has little that is major about it – although it is often entertaining in the way that minor movies can themselves be.

     Pow Wow, on the other hand, sets its sights on something very serious indeed: “a gathering of voices from the different American tribes,” as Reed, a poet and novelist, puts it in the Foreword. Reed here offers more than 500 pages of stories and poems – 63 of them in all – about various aspects of the American experience. Most of those aspects are negative – no Horatio Alger tales here – as the authors explore homelessness, bigotry, abusive relationships, racial and social isolation, and a general feeling of being outside the mainstream (however defined). There are some well-known or moderately well-known authors included, from Langston Hughes to Paul Laurence Dunbar to Mark Twain to Benjamin Franklin (yes, that Benjamin Franklin); and there are lots of unknowns. The backgrounds of the authors are highly varied: Aphrodite Désirée Navab is Iranian-Greek American, Ty Pak is from Korea, Bharati Mukherjee is from India, Mary Tallmountain is Alaskan, Lucha Corip is from Mexico, and so on. The “Contributors” section of the book is in its own way as interesting as many of the stories, showing just how many people fall under the category of “American.” As for the tales themselves, they vary extremely widely. Anna Nelson Harry’s fable “The Giant Rat” is about the meaninglessness of the things that cause war. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Imagine My Life” is about living “on the dark side of life…nosing my way into patches of rotting life to find my answers.” Fielding Dawson’s “Pirate One” is about a memory of Roberto Clemente. Vivian Demuth’s “Night of the FEMA Trailers” is a post-Hurricane-Katrina story. And so on – each tale in its own style, with its own subject matter, related to the others only by virtue of having been placed between the covers of the same book. Reed’s work is as much hodgepodge as powwow, with its contents’ one nearly universal connecting thread being bleakness – even the Twain story, “The War Prayer,” is a dark and deeply cynical one. This is not a book for those seeking uplift – although a close reading of its “Contributors” section indicates that there are more positive things in America than these individual writers choose to observe.

(++++) STRING THINGS

Carter: String Quartets Nos. 2-4. Pacifica Quartet. Naxos. $8.99.

Bottesini: Fantasia “La Sonnambula”; Melodia in E (Romanza patetica); Capriccio à la Chopin; Melodia (Giovinetto innamorato); Tutto che il mondo serra; Introduzione e Gavotta; Meditazione (Aria di Bach); Nel cor più non mi sento; Ci divide l’ocean; Romanza; Variations on a Scottish Air “Auld Robin Gray”; Réverie; Introduction et Variations sue le Carnaval de Venise. Thomas Martin, double bass; Anthony Halstead, piano; Jacquelyn Fugelle, soprano. Naxos. $8.99.

     Leave it to Elliott Carter, whose music combines intellect with emotional appeal (although it leans more toward the brain than the heart), to create some of the most challenging and complex string quartets of the 20^th century. Carter, who turned 100 on December 11, created a quartet every decade or so, starting in 1951. Every one of the five quartets is challenging to play and to hear – and every one in a different way. The Pacifica Quartet – violinists Simin Ganatra and Sibbi Bernhardsson, violist Masumi Per Rostad, and cellist Brandon Vamos – previously released the first and fifth quartets on a Naxos CD, and now brings its same apparent indifference to the works’ tremendous complexities to the three remaining quartets. A single hearing will not be enough for most listeners to absorb the intricacies of this music, but it will be plenty to create tremendous admiration for the players’ skill. In the second quartet (1959), Carter is at his most intellectual, constructing each instrumental part from different intervals and rhythms – and forms of expressiveness, so the work does not became a dry exercise in compositional technique. This quartet comes across as if the players are arguing much of the time, agreeing occasionally and eventually going their separate ways. Quartet No. 3 (1971) subdivides the quartet into two duos: second violin with viola and first violin with cello. The subgroups play different types of music simultaneously, but each duo gets to play all the forms eventually – again, an intellectualized approach to quartet writing; but again, the Pacifica players make it work sonically and conquer the work’s very considerable difficulties with enough ease to leave room for expressiveness. Carter’s fourth quartet (1986) reverts to traditional four-movement form, but proves surprisingly hard to listen to, with harmonies that do not lie easily in the ear and a series of dramatic contrasts between sound and silence. It is not always clear whether Carter is writing quartets (or other music) for connoisseurs or the general public; certainly these quartets are not “easy” music in any sense, but they have genuine emotive power that may take a while to perceive but that emerges effectively when they are played as well as the Pacifica Quartet plays them.

     The playing is also outstanding in the latest Naxos rerelease of Thomas Martin’s renditions of double-bass music by 19^th-century virtuoso Giovanni Bottesini. But this CD, originally released more than a decade ago, is filled with salon pieces rather than ones that boost the brain cells. This does not mean the works are easy to play – quite the opposite! – and it does not mean they are uniformly soothing: several are sit-up-and-take-notice spectacles or highly demanding encore-like quickies. In fact, two of the works – Capriccio à la Chopin and Nel cor più non mi sento (variations on a theme by Paisiello) – require great leaps between high and low notes that must be especially impressive to see in concert. Four of the works here – Melodia (Giovinetto innamorato), Tutto che il mondo serra, Ci divide l’ocean and Romanza – include vocal parts and would have been effective art songs in Bottesini’s time. Ci divide l’ocean is especially moving. The most interesting works on this CD, though, are strictly instrumental. They are Fantasia “La Sonnambula,” an early work that helped make Bottesini famous and that effectively merges Bellini’s rather delicate opera tunes into the double-bass register without depriving them of their charm; and Introduction et Variations sue le Carnaval de Venise, a showstopper if there ever was one, in which Martin’s ability to maintain equanimity and a flowing line through some truly amazing acrobatics is quite outstanding. Anthony Halstead provides top-notch piano accompaniment, and Jacquelyn Fugelle sings the four songs with sensitivity and feeling, but this is Martin’s disc through and through – and a perfect demonstration that, in the right hands and under the right fingers, the double bass is anything but a lumbering instrument.

(+++) SYMPHONIC QUIRKS – YOUR CHOICE

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9. Lucia Popp, soprano; Ann Murray, mezzo-soprano; Anthony Rolfe Johnson, tenor; René Pape, bass; London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir conducted by Klaus Tennstedt. LPO. $16.99.

Mahler: Symphony No. 6. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Artek. $16.99.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5. Royal Flemish Philharmonic conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Ambroisie. $16.99.

      There are enough versions of all these symphonies available to make it a safe bet that few listeners will pick any of these recordings as a first choice. For a second or third version of the music, though, all these CDs are worth considering: each is quirky in its own way, none is close to definitive (to the extent that these symphonies will ever have definitive performances), but all offer some unusual perspectives on the music and some insights that set them apart from other performances.

      Klaus Tennstedt’s Beethoven Ninth is the most intriguing of these discs. Recorded live in October 1992, two years before ill health forced Tennstedt to retire, it is an unapologetically old-fashioned, even Victorian-style treatment of the Ninth, giving it a cathedral-like structure that hints in parts at Bruckner while pacing the work generally slowly and with great majesty. The forces are large, the chorus full, the brass round and full-throated, the strings warm, and the percussion emphatic – the second movement is a real rouser, especially after a first movement that opens by plumbing near-Lisztian depths. The third movement wears its emotion frankly on its sleeve, and the finale simply bursts forth with the sort of intensity that Leopold Stokowski brought to his arrangements of Bach. Tennstedt’s Ninth may not be idiomatic Beethoven, but it hits every emotional button there is. In the finale, the singers are with the conductor all the way, with the lovely soprano of Lucia Popp (who died a year after this recording was made) soaring effortlessly above while the broad, round tones of René Pape provide the firmest of foundations. Ann Murray and Anthony Rolfe Johnson also acquit themselves admirably. But this is really Tennstedt’s show, as is especially clear whenever the chorus enters with as full and intense a sound as one would expect in Mahler. Indeed, there is something Mahlerian about this entire performance: grandiose, yes, but also world-spanningly intense and emotionally very strong. This is Beethoven that leaves a listener more drained than exalted – but it is convincing on its own terms.

      Gerard Schwarz’ Mahler Sixth is less so. Schwarz is proving himself surprisingly adept in his new series of Mahler symphonies with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic – his recording of the Seventh is excellent – but he is a bit off the mark this time. Schwarz seems to see this symphony as a series of episodes, emphasizing its tempo and mood changes while downplaying its tight formal and key structure (three of the four movements are in A minor). As a result, this deeply felt and very intense work, often called Mahler’s “Tragic” symphony, seems to meander without focus much of the time. The opening march, for example, is nowhere near as crisp as it should be, and when the lovely second theme, possibly representing Mahler’s wife Alma, enters, the movement changes character altogether instead of growing in depth. Schwarz also makes a curious decision in the order of the movements: he plays the Andante Moderato second and the Scherzo third. Mahler himself couldn’t make up his mind about the best order – wherever you put the Scherzo, you get two consecutive A minor movements – but he eventually decided to have the Scherzo come second, and that seems structurally more convincing: in that position, the Scherzo continues to build the intensity of the first movement, with the Andante providing a modicum of relief before the huge finale again brings pain and woe. As Schwarz plays the movements, the finale starts as a bit of an anticlimax after the Scherzo’s conclusion; and there is a certain turgidity to the last movement throughout. Oddly, the booklet notes to the CD mention the uncertain placement of the middle movements and then state that this performance puts the Scherzo second. The error is symptomatic of a Mahler Sixth that offers some lovely detailing but that never effectively produces an overarching architecture of tragedy steeped in melody.

      Jaap van Zweden’s performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 does get some of the work’s tragedy right – the first three movements are all, at the very least, melancholy – but this well-played CD is strongest in the finale, which van Zweden gives a thoroughly triumphal air. This is an exhilarating conclusion – a vast distance from the very slow finales that some conductors have become fond of as they attempt to show that Shostakovich did not really cave in to Soviet pressure in writing this symphony. In fact, like Tennstedt’s Beethoven Ninth, van Zweden’s Shostakovich Fifth is a bit of a throwback, since conductors used to take the finale at its triumphal face value and not worry about any possible political undercurrents. Unfortunately, van Zweden emphasizes the dark elements of the first three movements so effectively that the finale seems almost to belong to another work – one of Shostakovich’s earlier theater pieces, perhaps. The symphony founders on its lack of unity, sounding a bit as if van Zweden has not thought through the relationships among the movements, or has not found any worth exploring. This is by no means a bad performance (although it is a pricey one, with nothing on the CD except the 47-minute symphony); but neither is it a particularly thoughtful rendition. It does have its moments, though, especially in that slam-bang conclusion.