(++++) QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

882½ Amazing Answers to Your Questions about the Titanic. By Hugh Brewster and Laurie Coulter. Paintings by Ken Marschall. Scholastic/Madison Press. $9.99.

Dear Dumb Diary, Year Two: School. Hasn’t This Gone On Long Enough? By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $5.99.

How Do Dinosaurs Eat Cookies? By Jane Yolen & Mark Teague. Recipes by Heidi E.Y. Stemple. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $7.99.

     The questions posed in book titles may be there to elicit genuine answers, as in one of these works; they may be purely rhetorical, as in another; or they may be part of a longstanding title pattern, connecting something new in a series with what has gone before – as in the third. 882½ Amazing Answers to Your Questions about the Titanic is so named because the doomed liner was 882½ feet long (and that is the answer to the first question). Some of the answers really are pretty amazing, because they go well beyond the basic facts already known to many young readers – that the supposedly unsinkable ship struck an iceberg during its maiden voyage and sank, with considerable loss of life. For example, readers will find out here that although the Titanic was the world’s largest ship in 1912, a larger liner was built the next year, and some of today’s huge cruise ships are twice the size of the Titanic. Some question-and-answer entries debunk myths about the ship – for example, no one was sealed inside the hull by mistake, and no one painted “we defy God to sink her” on the stern. There are explanations of why the ship was considered unsinkable (because of a design using multiple watertight compartments), how long it took to launch it (62 seconds), why it carried dragon’s blood (which turns out to be the sap from a certain palm tree), how many crew members it carried (892 – although elsewhere in the book, in one of the work’s few flaws, the number is given as 899), and what animals other than dogs were brought aboard (two roosters and two hens). There is plenty of fascinating information as well about how the fatal collision occurred and what happened to those on board: 23 women worked on the Titanic and 20 were rescued; the first-class passengers had combined wealth equal to $9.8 billion in today’s money; one boy was almost denied entry to a lifeboat because he was wearing a hat that made him look older than he was; the ship’s lights stayed on until two minutes before it sank. Other questions deal with passenger rescues and recovery of bodies (with watches stopped between 2:00 and 2:20 a.m.), and then there is this: “Have any lives been lost due to ice in the North Atlantic since the Titanic disaster? No.” Hugh Brewster and Laurie Coulter carry the story of the Titanic into modern times, up to and past the discovery of the wreckage in 1985; and the book’s illustrations, which range from period photos to well-designed paintings by Ken Marschall, are highly evocative. The final “half question” of the book is whether people will always be fascinated by the story of the Titanic – an unanswerable but perfectly reasonable query.

     Middle-schooler Jamie Kelly’s question about whether school has gone on long enough is equally unanswerable, but there is nothing serious about this book – any more than there was about the first 12 in Jim Benton’s ongoing “Tales of Mackerel Middle School.” This may be “Year Two” of the school for Jamie, but she is still, well, Jamie, which means she starts out by warning readers not to read her “dumb diary,” then packs all the pages with a mixture of self-indulgent writing and highly amusing drawings (example: three “hideous math faces” followed by three “gorgeous language arts faces,” just to be sure you know which subject she likes and which she doesn’t). Jamie may have grown a bit older, but she has not grown a bit up; not a bit. She is still jealous of too-beautiful-to-be-real and too-good-to-be-true Angeline, to whom Jamie is now sort of related because Jamie’s Aunt Carol has married Angeline’s Uncle Dan. True, Jamie is now sufficiently self-aware to say of Angeline, “I think I would like her more if she was less likable to others.” But no fear: she is not so mature as to stop being unreasonable. Jamie also still has Isabella as a best friend, and Isabella is as cantankerous and generally difficult as ever – Jamie says her friend’s parents have received “all the Five Known Types of Letters Home” from school, the fifth of which is, “Your child is trouble.” Missing this year is Emmily, who was “not the sharpest knife in the drawer” or even “the sharpest spoon in the drawer. Most of the time, Emmily wasn’t even in the drawer at all. She was lost somewhere in the bottom of the dishwasher.” But Jamie does hear from her – and learns that Emmily is doing better in math than Jamie is. Now there’s a scary thought. So Jamie realizes she must do battle with math, and that is the main theme of the book – which also provides plenty of chances for Jamie to imagine (and draw) things that she would like to see, such as popped produce, on the basis that if there can be both corn and popcorn, there can also be popbroccoli, popcarrots and popwatermelon. Jamie, a year older, is no wiser, or not much wiser, and that bodes well for her continuing saga.

     The How Do Dinosaurs books by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague are a saga of their own, coming in multiple formats and designs. And now there is something new in the latest of them, How Do Dinosaurs Eat Cookies? The usual approach of the books has Yolen writing, in the first part of each one, the various things that dinosaurs (stand-ins for the young readers at whom the books are aimed) shouldn’t do…and then, in the second part, the things that they should do. Not this time: the yes and no elements are given on the same page, and for a very good reason. This is a short book, with only 14 pages, including the front and back inside covers – and it is packed not only with things to do and not do but also with scratch-and-sniff illustrations and two full pages of cookie recipes. That’s a lot of material in a little bit of space. On a single right-hand page, for example, Yolen writes, “Does a dinosaur baking just make a big mess, and splatter the batter on Mother’s clean dress? No – a dinosaur stirs with the greatest of care. She adds in some cinnamon just for the flair.” On the same page, below the text, is a dinosaur-shaped scratch-and-sniff panel that smells like cinnamon. And on the facing, left-hand page is one of Mark Teague’s usual, wonderful portrayals of a realistic-looking dinosaur (in this case a nothosaurus) acting like a not-very-well-behaved human child. Short the book may be, but seeing a caudipteryx carrying chocolate chips (the bag is sniffable) or a silvasaurus rushing to get a lemon cookie (which smells lemony) leaves no doubt that this book fits right into the delightful Yolen/Teague series very well indeed. The two recipes at the back of the book, for “Cinnama-Saurus Rex” and “Fossilized Lemon Tracks,” are easy to follow (with adult supervision) and make delicious, simple cookies that will make the book even more fun to re-read, as modern dinosaurs are sure to want to do.

(++++) LIFE ON WRY

Lunatics. By Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel. Putnam. $25.95.

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. By Alex Gilvarry. Viking. $26.95.

     It is tempting to call Lunatics “the buddy novel to end all buddy novels,” but of course it won’t really end them – it will just make them ashamed of themselves. To the extent that the genre is capable of feeling shame. Which isn’t a great extent. Still, few writers are as shamelessly exploitative of everything from the latest news headlines to the oldest flatulence jokes as Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, and as long as sophomoric humor packed in a Keystone-cops-style wrapper is your cup of tea (or an excretion that rhymes with tea), you will have a great time with this bit of international-chase lunacy (which, not the slightest bit surprisingly, has already been sold as a movie). Utterly mindless entertainment that tosses in plenty of gratuitous celebrity references (presumably from Zweibel, an accomplished TV writer) and plenty of equally gratuitous political ones (presumably from Barry, an accomplished newspaper writer, which is a bit like being an accomplished buggy-whip manufacturer in the automobile age), Lunatics lets each author assume his very own alter ego. One wonders how much they are altered from the authors’ true egos, but when you read the book, you will see why it is probably better not to go there. Wherever “there” is. For the buddies – Philip Horkman (“hork”: oh, ha ha) and Jeffrey Peckerman (“pecker”: oh, ha ha ha) – “there” is in fact pretty much everywhere. The two “meet cute” (except that it isn’t cute) when Horkman, the Zweibel character and referee of preteen soccer games, calls the daughter of Peckerman, the Barry character, offside. The two men are typical residents of alternative-reality-or-maybe-just-real New Jersey: Horkman owns a pet store called The Wine Shop (because it was financed by the Wines, his in-laws); Peckerman is a “forensic plumber,” which means he traces the causes of explosive toilet backups and solves poopy murder cases – and, not astonishingly at all, has his own Sunday morning cable show. The questionable soccer call leads to a series of increasingly ridiculous consequences, from an escaped lemur to a clothing-optional cruise on which Horkman starts to fall in love with a nun (who, duh, is not wearing her habit) to a new Cuban revolution (which the buddies co-lead) to – well, there is their capture by pirates in Mozambique, their rescue by the Mossad in Yemen, their protest leadership in Tiananmen Square, and their meeting with Donald Trump in California. Oh, and their nominations for president – Horkman by the Republicans, Peckerman by the Democrats. Think of Lunatics as a cure for sanity and you’ll have it just about right. Horkman tends to be on the prissy side (the Felix Unger role), while Peckerman is crude, sloppy, cynical and frequently incontinent (the Oscar Madison part, but much more foul-mouthed). There is nothing the slightest bit original in the overall plot structure, but there are plenty of outrageous (and sometimes outrageously funny) plot elements, and so many one-liners that people who find TV sitcoms hilarious will be entertained throughout. Typical Horkman line: “I looked at Peckerman and felt the distinct urge to smack him. But we had bigger fish to fry. Plus he was holding the gun.” Typical Peckerman line: “He was trying to look badass, but that’s a look a guy can’t pull off when he’s built like Olive Oyl and he’s naked except for a banana, which for the record – not that I made a point of looking; it’s just the way the angles lined up – was a good five inches longer than his dick.” So: rude, crude, lewd, far from subdued, and altogether unglued – that’s Lunatics. How could it not be a best-seller?

     From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is closer to satire than farce, using its frequent intersections with the real world to make points rather than go for cheap laughs. So it won’t match the popularity of Lunatics. But this over-enthusiastically overwritten debut novel by Alex Gilvarry nevertheless has a lot going for it. Its underlying theme is quite serious: false or mistaken accusations, and how the American political system handles them in the years since the 9/11 terrorist murders – that is, how an innocent person can show he did not do something when the system is set up to prove his guilt. For most of the book, Gilvarry steadfastly refuses to descend into preaching or polemics, managing to pull in such elements as the modern immigrant experience and the things an unknown fashion designer must do to make it in New York City while keeping his novel balanced with enough humor and off-kilter observations to make it a pleasure rather than a chore to read. His central character is Boyet (“Boy”) Hernandez, a Filipino man determined to start his own fashion label. Gilvarry is a Staten Island native, but his mother is from the Philippines, so the choice of Boy’s background is understandable; and parts of the book take place in the Philippines, filling in Boy’s background. In New York, Boy is backed in his dream by his neighbor, eccentric Canadian (or maybe Pakistani) businessman (and maybe arms dealer) Ahmed Qureshi – a fact that eventually leads to Boy’s imprisonment in a six-by-eight-foot cell at Guantánamo, where he is given a Koran (even though he is not Moslem) and locked away as a terrorist. The media jump on the story, giving Boy the title of “Fashion Terrorist,” and the hapless young man is left to prepare for his combatant-status review on his own. As he gets his thoughts in order by writing them down, he discusses everything from the influences on his design style to his publicist (unfortunately named Ben Laden, in one of the book’s weaker attempts at humor). Boy tries hard to retain his faith in American justice and the American immigrant experience, sorely tried though both are. In writing his life story, which is what From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is intended to be, Boy offers moments of lightness (such as some of his memories and certain exchanges with a guard named Cunningham) in a dark and frightening situation. The juxtaposition of comedy and fear is a difficult one to pull off, and the fact that Gilvarry does so successfully most of the time gives him considerable credit – although the much darker ending of the book is not a fully satisfactory conclusion stylistically. The novel is pulled into some unnecessary areas through some side issues, such as Boy’s determination to explain that he isn’t gay and Gilvarry’s decision to have him become a transvestite and fall in love, presumably for ambiguity’s sake, with a transgendered singer. But despite these flaws, which are concentrated in the book’s final pages, the main narrative, of an innocent and unconsciously witty young man pulled into a horrific situation through his own guilelessness, and trying to make the best of circumstances while retaining his faith in the country to which he has linked his life and fortune, is quite enough to sustain the novel. “I ask you,” writes Boy at one point, “is it fate that I am in here and you are out there?” A good question, and ultimately an unanswerable one. Gilvarry’s willingness to ask it is just one thing that sets the heartfelt intensity of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant apart from the silly surface-level antics of Lunatics. Yet both novels are quite distinctly American. What a country.

(++++) LIFE LESSONS WELL TAUGHT

Kitchen on Fire! Mastering the Art of Cooking in 12 Weeks (or Less). By Olivier Said and Chef MikeC. Da Capo. $35.

Your Pregnancy Week by Week, 7^th Edition. By Glade B. Curtis, M.D., M.P.H., and Judith Schuler, M.S. Da Capo. $15.95.

     What does it say about modern life that even the most straightforward human activities, such as making food and making babies, come with so many guidebooks nowadays? Whatever the answer may be in your particular case, there are some guides that will address pretty much any of your concerns. For cooking, one such is Kitchen on Fire! The title is rather unfortunate – one does not really want a kitchen on fire, thank you – and the coauthor’s name (“Chef MikeC”) simply screams “trendy” rather than “highly competent and helpful.” Get past those elements, though, and what you find here is a book in which both Olivier Said and his coauthor treat readers to many tricks of the professional chef’s trade, presented with clarity and with exceptionally useful photographs that show just what to do and just how food should look during various preparations. The information sequence in the book is drawn from the chefs’ school (called, of course, Kitchen on Fire, although without the exclamation point). There is pretty much everything here, from information on types of knives and how to use them to the specifics of all sorts of cooking techniques: searing, stir-frying, stewing, braising, roasting, broiling, grilling and more. The visual impact of the book is one of its best points: there are cross-references (similar to online hyperlinks) everywhere, in the form of red dots containing white numbers that refer to chapters where readers will find more information on a topic; and in addition to the expected pictures of finished dishes, there are excellent less-often-seen ones, such as different bones for stock, the basics of thickening beurre manié (a mixture of equal parts flour and softened butter), and the details of making a smoking packet to add flavor to grilled foods. Some of the illustrations are decidedly unusual, such as a full page showing the sizes of various cuts and giving their dimensions: a large cube is shown as ¾ inch on a side, for example, while a shape called paysanne is ½ inch high and wide but only an eighth of an inch thick. Sections called “Tips and Tricks du Chef” offer handy suggestions on teaching yourself techniques and knowing when foods are done as they should be, and each chapter includes recipes that are called “chapter exercises” but are no less delicious for all that. Unlike most “how to” books for the kitchen, this one is not primarily a recipe book, with a little instruction added – the recipes are the natural outgrowth of the techniques taught in the chapters. A reader might pick up the book to find the recipes for roasted fennel and orange salad, citrus-grilled skirt steak and vegetable fajitas, flaky blueberry-ginger scones, vegetable egg rolls with sweet chili sauce, or double cheese and bacon quiche, but it is the context in which those and other recipes are presented, rather than the recipes themselves, that is the main attraction here: 12 pages of “basic shaping methods” for breads, for example, including 60 photographs. Whether you want to work as a chef or just be a better cook at home, a very good place to learn is Kitchen on Fire!

     Your Pregnancy Week by Week doesn’t teach readers how to become pregnant – they presumably know that already, since the book is aimed at mothers-to-be (and, to a lesser extent, fathers-to-be). But this excellent book by Glade B. Curtis and Judith Schuler, now available in a new 7^th edition, certainly does make the process from pregnancy to birth (and for the first month or so afterwards) much easier to cope with and understand. New editions of this preeminent guide come out every three years or so, generally without major updates but with new perspectives and information based on the latest scientific research and on changing medical and family attitudes. There is no specific update in the 7^th edition, but the approach to difficult subjects continues to be moderated and modulated according to the latest medical thinking. For example, the discussion of pregnancy in women with HIV and AIDS is entirely nonjudgmental and strikes as optimistic a note as possible: “A person is HIV-positive before developing AIDS. This process can take 10 or more years, due to the medications in use at this time. …We know if a woman is in the early course of the illness, she can usually have an uneventful pregnancy, labor and delivery.” Set against this carefully worded bit of reassurance is the sheer volume of pregnancy-related information in the book, including some material that will be anything but reassuring, especially to women who are pregnant for the first time. “In an effort to give you as much information as possible about pregnancy, we do include serious discussions throughout the book that some might find ‘scary.’ The information is not included to frighten you; it’s there to provide facts about particular medical situations that may occur during pregnancy.” The sensitivity and care with which Curtis and Schuler present all information – positive, negative or neutral – remain hallmarks of this fact-packed and thick oversize paperback (nearly 700 pages). The sheer volume of material can be overwhelming; this is the work’s greatest problem. The authors try to cope with information overload by sticking carefully to the week-by-week format, which helps a lot, although readers must remember that every pregnancy is different and not all will reach the stated milestones in the designated weeks. They also spin out snippets of important information into highlighted boxes sprinkled throughout the pages. One such pullout reads, “Be careful with bottled waters – some contain caffeine.” Another notes that taste tests are not enough to determine whether food is hot enough to be safe to eat and recommends using “a quick-reading thermometer to make sure food has reached an interior temperature of 165F,” at which harmful bacteria are killed. Some of these items are short and to the point; others are more extended, such as “You May Be Sexier than You Think,” which contains 13 bullet points giving statements men have made to the authors about why they find a pregnant partner sexy. One example: “Sex during pregnancy often requires some creative thinking on both your parts.” Most of the book, of course, is devoted to weekly changes in fetus and woman, including detailed drawings showing fetal development (some actual size, some designed to highlight particular occurrences). Body changes, nutrition and exercise recommendations, types of testing, alternative-medical approaches to pregnancy, food cravings, “Dad Tips,” and many other subjects are treated here, sometimes at length and sometimes in brief, but always with care and in substantive ways. Few women will have the patience, or the time, to read this book through from start to finish – but there is no need to do so. Your Pregnancy Week by Week, 7^th edition, really is a book that you can use on a week-to-week basis, perhaps getting a week or two ahead to learn what you can anticipate in the near future. Reading it provides much of the assurance of a knowledgeable 24-hour-a-day companion who can take you through the many vicissitudes of pregnancy with a firm and knowing hand. Even women who have been pregnant before will benefit from the information here – and those in their first pregnancies will find the book invaluable.

(+++) TEEN LOVE, LOSS, AND SO FORTH

Magic of the Moonlight: A Full Moon Novel. By Ellen Schreiber. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $17.99.

The Amanda Project, Book 3: Shattered. By Laurie Faria Stolarz. HarperTeen. $8.99.

If We Kiss. By Rachel Vail. HarperTeen. $8.99.

The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers. By Lynn Weingarten. HarperTeen. $17.99.

     Year in, year out, some things don’t change, such as teenage emotional angst and the books about it. That includes both the more-or-less realistic novels and the ones with a supernatural focus. In the latter category is Magic of the Moonlight, which opens with the line, “It was official. I was in love with a werewolf.” And that’s the plot, in two brief sentences. The complications of the plot, though, take a lot longer to present and work out. In this sequel to Once in a Full Moon, Celeste is determined to find a way to “cure” boyfriend Brandon of his werewolfishness, hopefully with the help of Brandon’s scientist father. For the time being, Celeste needs to keep Brandon’s secret safe, so she hides their relationship from her best friends, setting up conflicts on that level. And there’s a big dance coming – can Celeste find a way to go with Brandon? And where does Nash, Celeste’s first crush and also a werewolf, fit into all this? The plot stumbles so much that it practically falls down repeatedly, but Ellen Schreiber gamely pulls, pushes and urges it along until Celeste ends up in the arms of her “hot, handsome, and heroic werewolf” and starts thinking ahead to the next book in the series. Even harder to take seriously than most books in the now-popular werewolf genre, Magic of the Moonlight is so frothy and so easy to read that it will make a tasty but very light meal for teenage girls hungry for a touch of otherworldly wolfishness.

     The Amanda Project is no more realistic, but this series – each book written by a different author as a “collaborator” with the title character – is more of a mystery sequence than a supernatural one. Amanda Valentino is the mystery; her friends, Nia, Callie and Hal, are the mystery-solvers – although by now some readers may wonder why they are bothering. The supposed reason is that Amanda is in danger and the friends are determined to help her. Amanda has disappeared and left clues behind; the friends follow those clues to try to help – presumably the secret organization that is supposedly hunting Amanda cannot follow the clues itself or the friends themselves. In Shattered, Nia finds mysterious symbols used by that secret group in various places around town. She also finds the poem “Shattered,” which is “handwritten in [Amanda’s] distinctive penmanship” and which begins: “The rock’s been thrown./ The window is broken./ Shards of glass have torn through your walls of trust./ Do not think I am unaware that your perception of me/ Is shattered.” The entrance of a fourth searcher, Zoe, whose motives and knowledge are mysterious to the three friends, complicates matters further. So does Vice Principal Roger Thornhill, who is given to such pronouncements as “it’s best if they think they’re in control” and “I can’t get into anything now,” just to make sure the searchers don’t learn anything that is too, you know, useful. The Amanda Project gets sillier with each book in the series, but readers who like the sequence so far will enjoy continuing to follow it.

     If We Kiss has an unusual title for a book for ages 13 and up – an age range in which something like “If We Have a Baby” would be more typical nowadays. But Rachel Vail’s novel is a deliberate throwback to a more-innocent time, when kissing made life, you know, complicated, and had all sorts of implications. The central character, Charlotte (Charlie) Collins, has never been in love and never been kissed, and no, she is not nine years old; she is a ninth-grader. Her best friend, Tess, has been in love three times and has kissed all three boys. Now Tess is in love with a boy named Kevin – and Charlie, much to her discomfiture, finds she is falling for Kevin herself. Furthermore, Kevin’s dad is dating Charlie’s mom, which means Charlie can’t discuss her budding feelings either with her mother or with her best friend. She is On Her Own (you can practically hear the capital letters). Charlie comes across as immature in many ways – for instance, when worrying about whether her mom might remarry, she is concerned that “I’d get demoted to the backseat. My personal space would be back there with two other kids and no toast-your-buns feature.” And she sticks her tongue out at friends when they argue. Kevin’s eight-year-old sister, Samantha, seems wiser than Charlie – Samantha is the one who tells Charlie that Kevin and she seem to feel the same way about each other, even though Kevin is dating Tess. It takes almost 200 pages until the inevitable kiss, and of course it is wonderful, and of course it creates problems, and of course Charlie eventually suffers and learns and grows because of it. The end; the expected end.

     Lucy Wrenn isn’t much older than Charlie – she is just starting sophomore year of high school – but her story, The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers, is written at a very different and more typical teen level. And it gets back into the supernatural. It starts when Lucy’s boyfriend, Alex, breaks up with her just as school starts and just as she lets him know she is willing to give him her virginity; continues as three exceptionally attractive girls named Olivia, Liza and Gil offer to heal Lucy’s heart and initiate her into their “ancient secret sisterhood”; and moves into the magical realm after Lucy learns her initiation: she must get a boy to fall in love with her, without using any special powers or enhancements, and must then break his heart – all within seven days. After much uncertainty about what to do, Lucy ends up drinking “a liquid Magic Magnet” and realizing how much magic the world really holds. She is instructed in the use of Empathy Cream and Involuntary Muscle Control Serum and other magical potions and objects. And she eventually finds a way to join the Sisterhood by following the letter of the girls’ requirements but not the spirit. This is the cleverest twist in the book, and manages to make Lucy into a smarter and more interesting character than she has been through most of the novel. By the end, there is an attractive impishness to her, an awareness of magical power and at the same time an understanding of her powers as a young woman – and of her errors in her relationship with Alex. Although formulaic in many ways, The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers is more interesting than run-of-the-mill teenage-targeted supernatural-romance novels, largely because its emphasis is not really on romance at all, but on empowerment. Teen girls looking for a book that uses and bends genre conventions instead of simply following them slavishly will enjoy it – and wish for a sequel, which Lynn Weingarten seems perfectly capable of delivering.

(++++) THE VIRTUES OF SERIES

Johann Strauss Sr. Edition, Volume 20. Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina conducted by Christian Pollack. Marco Polo. $9.99.

John Philip Sousa: Music for Wind Band, Volume 10. Royal Norwegian Navy Band conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $9.99.

Hanson: Symphony No. 3; “Merry Mount” Suite. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

Hanson: Symphony No. 4, “Requiem”; Symphony No. 5, “Sinfonia sacra”; Elegy in Memory of Serge Koussevitzky; Dies Natalis. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

Idil Biret Archive Edition, Volume 11: Adnan Saygun—Piano Concerto No. 1; 12 Preludes in Aksak Rhythms; Jean Françaix—Piano Sonata; Charles Valentin Alkan—Le chemin de fer; Mily Balakirev—Islamey. Idil Biret, piano; Orchestre Colonne conducted by Adnan Saygun (Concerto). IBA. $9.99.

     Although it is certainly possible for ongoing series devoted to a particular composer or performer to become tiresome, or to be less interesting over time because they offer less and less notable material in the interest of completeness, all five of these releases in continuing series are top-notch in their own ways – giving listeners a better sense of the depth and quality of the work of composers and artists alike. True, “depth” is not a word often associated with Johann Strauss Sr. or John Philip Sousa: both wrote occasional music, very much of its time, intended to entertain and bring enjoyment to audiences rather than to storm the heavens in a Beethovenian sense – and indeed, certainly in the case of Strauss, not necessarily planned to be heard more than a couple of times during a single season, after which the composer would deliver something new to entice audiences. But it is a measure of the quality of the creations of Strauss and Sousa that so much of their work retains tremendous charm in an era so divorced from theirs – almost as if their pieces endure in spite of themselves.

     The latest Strauss Sr. volume, performed with the usual relish by the very fine Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina under the expertly idiomatic direction of Christian Pollack, includes six waltzes, two marches and three quadrilles (a form to which Strauss Sr. was quite partial), all from the composer’s very productive years in the mid-1840s. The waltzes were created for specific occasions, ranging from Carnival celebrations to benefits for flood victims and a children’s hospital – Strauss was a highly civic-minded composer and often gave generously of both his money and his music to disaster victims. Sofien-Tänze (“Sophie Dances”), Moldau-Klänge (“Sounds of the Moldau [Vltava]”), Die Vortänzer (“The Dancing Masters,” for an event whose motto was “Life Is a Dance”), Epionen-Tänze (“Epione Dances”), Fest-Lieder (“Festival Songs”) and Die Unbedeutenden (“Those of No Importance,” after a farce by Johann Nestroy) are all very well-made, elegantly assembled and thoroughly danceable, even today. Concert-Souvenir-Quadrille (based on melodies from a work by Félicien David plus, of all things, “Yankee Doodle”), Zigeunerin-Quadrille (“Bohemian Girl Quadrille,” using melodies from an opera by Michael William Balfe), and Eldorado-Quadrille (composed to celebrate improvements made to Europe’s biggest dance-hall, the Odeon) are all bouncy and enthusiastic within their rather foursquare format. And Österreichischer Fest-Marsch (“Austrian Celebration March”) and Esmeralda Marsch are fine examples of works Strauss composed in his role as bandmaster of the First Viennese Civilian Militia.

     It is Sousa, though, whose name is most firmly attached to marches, and the 10^th volume of Keith Brion’s excellent survey of Sousa’s works contains seven of them – all comparative rarities. The Salvation Army March (1930), The Free Lance March (1906), The Quilting Party (1889), When the Boys Come Sailing Home (1918), The Beau Ideal March (1893), Anchor and Star (1918), and Who’s Who in Navy Blue (1920) show Sousa, decade after decade, producing gems, most of them as suitable for the concert stage as for the parade ground. Yet there was more to Sousa’s work than marches, as this fine series continues to show. Brion intersperses the marches here with Jazz America (1925), a fantasy that is not so much jazzy as it is inspired by the Jazz Age; People Who Live in Glass Houses Suite (1909), a balletic tribute to various forms of alcoholic beverages by a composer who was scarcely a teetotaler; Myrrha Gavotte (1876), a very early work set in formal classical dance style; Vautour Overture (1886), a Rossinian opening for a play by Adolphe Eugene Philippe d’Ennery; and Look for the Silver Lining Humoresque (1922), a highly amusing work based on a 1919 hit tune by Jerome Kern and several other recognizable songs of the time – and containing a touch of early big-band jazz. One of the best things about the Naxos Sousa series is that it provides a chance to hear both well-known and little-known Sousa marches while also showing, time and again, that the famous bandmaster composed in a variety of forms with considerable flair.

     There is more to Howard Hanson’s music than symphonies, but his seven symphonies are of major importance among his compositions, and Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony received well-deserved commendations for their fine Hanson symphony recordings on Delos, from performances done in the late 1980s and 1990s. Naxos is re-releasing the Delos discs, and they have stood up very well – as indeed do the symphonies themselves. No. 3, composed from 1936 to 1938, was written to commemorate the first Swedish settlement in the United States. It is the longest of the symphonies and the most strongly redolent of Sibelius – always a potent influence on Hanson. Expansive, lyrical and knitted together by a recurrent chorale theme, it has a strong spiritual undercurrent that is presented through skillful and colorful orchestration. The suite from Hanson’s only opera, Merry Mount, is a fine complement to the symphony. The opera too is about spirituality – but focuses on its perversions. Based loosely on a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, the 1934 opera is a grim story of Puritans and Indians, with a libretto whose language was considered unusually blunt. Hanson extracted a suite from it in 1938, and the fervor and intensity of the music come through well in strictly orchestral form – from the austerity of the Overture, to the light-sounding “Children’s Dance” that has a darker undercurrent in the opera, to a “Love Duet” that also is troubling in context, to a final set of “Maypole Dances” that scandalize the Puritans in the opera but that here make for a bright conclusion (and a disconcerting one for those who know the stage work itself).

     Hanson’s Symphony No. 4, Requiem, is a wartime work, from 1943, and was one of the composer’s favorite compositions. Its inspiration was not the battlefield, however, but the death of Hanson’s father, to whom he dedicated the score. Its four movements, which bear titles from the Mass for the dead, range emotionally from an acerbic scherzo to a concluding Largo pastorale that dies off in a form of catharsis. Symphony No. 5, Sinfonia sacra, is Hanson’s shortest, a 15-minute work from 1954 written in one movement, with echoes of Sibelius (as in several other Hanson symphonies) and a Gregorian-style theme whose old-fashioned nature contrasts with the modern compositional techniques with which it is handled. Elegy in Memory of Serge Koussevitzky, written five years after the conductor’s death in 1951, combines full-orchestra writing with chamber-like sections that give the piece a more-personal cast – Koussevitzky had given the first performances of Hanson’s piano concerto and three of his symphonies. Completing a CD pervaded by sacred elements even without any overtly religious works, Dies Natalis (1967) is a set of variations on a Lutheran Christmas chorale. It features some particularly effective instrumentation, including impressively constructed brass chords and an eight-bar timpani solo. Schwarz has taken the measure of all this music and conducts it with understanding and considerable sensitivity.

     Idil Biret shows those same characteristics, and to quite a high degree, in the music of Adnan Saygun (1907-1991) and Jean Françaix (1912-1997) on the latest IBA release. Small wonder: Biret has been intimately involved in the works heard here from the pieces’ inception. She gave the first performance of Saygun’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1958, the year after the work was completed, and Saygun dedicated his 12 Preludes in Aksak Rhythms to her in 1967; while for his part, Françaix dedicated his piano sonata (1960) to Biret as well. These performances are as close to definitive as these works are likely to get – but this CD gets a (+++) rating rather than (++++) both because of the repertoire and because of considerable sonic deficiencies. The Saygun concerto is a monophonic recording of the work’s 1958 première, transferred to CD from an acetate disc, while the preludes come from a homemade cassette tape recorded in the 1970s. The restoration for IBA is fairly good, but there remain notable sonic inadequacies that mar the flow of the music – making these recordings of historical interest and importance for fans of Biret, but less than satisfactory for a general audience. The remaining works here come from more-modern recordings and are in stereo: the Françaix dates to 1960 and is a studio recording; the Alkan is a studio performance from 1998; and the Balakirev was recorded live in 1993. Despite the engineers’ hard work, there are noticeable differences in sound quality throughout the CD, making it somewhat frustrating to listen to, and at times in the 12 Preludes actually unpleasant. As for the music, Saygun’s concerto is in the traditional three movements, with traditional contrasts among them, although its harmonic language is clearly that of the mid-20^th century. The 12 Preludes are rhythmically derived from Turkish folk music; Bartók used similar rhythms (“aksak” means “limping”) in Mikrokosmos and elsewhere, describing them as Bulgarian. Biret does an especially good job here of showcasing the contrast between the binary and ternary units that together create the “limping” feeling. In the Françaix, which is quite short but packed with technical demands, Biret’s grasp of rhythmic complexity is particularly well shown in the opening Allegrissimo section in 7/4, although she handles this largely neoclassical work well throughout. However, neither the Saygun pieces nor the Françaix sonata will likely be found highly memorable by most listeners – they are competently made works, but do not seem to have a great deal to say. Alkan’s Le chemin de fer and Balakirev’s Islamey, positioned as afterthoughts on the CD, are more interesting pieces, requiring considerable pianistic dexterity but putting the virtuosity at the service of some intriguing musical ideas and expressions. Biret again shows herself on this CD as a technically formidable pianist and a highly thoughtful one, but most of the music, like most of the recorded sound, is less than enthralling.

(++++) COLD COMFORT

The Polar Bear Scientists. By Peter Lourie. Houghton Mifflin. $18.99.

Little Bea and the Snowy Day. By Daniel Roode. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $12.99.

     These days, the poster child, or poster animal, for global warming is the polar bear, whose struggles to survive as Arctic sea ice shrinks and disappears earlier in the year than it used to have been chronicled in many articles and seen in videos, TV shows and elsewhere. The Polar Bear Scientists, the latest book in Houghton Mifflin’s very well-done series about the real, everyday, often unglamorous lives of scientists working in the field and in laboratories, is built around interviews with biologist Steven Amstrup, “the godfather of Alaskan polar bear research for the past thirty years.” Amstrup talks not only about climate change but also about the history of studies of the largest bears in the world, the capture-release-and-recapture program that makes modern scientific study of them possible, the use of radio collars to track bears that move between polar nations, and more. Other scientists and support personnel, such as George Durner and Kristin Simac, discuss the bears as well, and all are seen with bears, with the equipment used to catch and track them, and in the laboratory and office settings where data are entered, assembled and correlated. Peter Lourie’s words and photos clearly depict the difficult conditions under which scientists work with the bears – and the frigid land where the bears thrive, or try to. Some of the photos tell the story in ways that are more immediately dramatic than the text: a female with three cubs trying to scare off the scientists’ helicopter, a bear print that is elevated because Arctic winds have blown away the lighter surrounding snow, a female bear lying in snow as a scientist prepares gear to weigh and measure her, yearling male bears roughhousing, and of course the adorable cubs without which no study of polar bears would be complete. The sorts of decisions the scientists face are clearly explained. A missing collar, for example, needs to be located if at all possible. “Of course it’s expensive to go find a distant collar, with the cost of fuel and time, but it’s equally if not more important to find a collar in order to determine whether a bear has died or has just dropped it.” A photo showing scientists with pickaxes trying to break through ice to dig up a collar gives some idea of what is involved in retrieval. The Polar Bear Scientists tells as much about the people who study these bears as it does about the bears themselves: the humans are concerned, dedicated and meticulous in their work. The global-warming debate may continue, but Amstrup puts it into perspective after Lourie points out that the bears have gone through at least two periods that were warmer than the current one. In those earlier warm periods, says Amstrup, “we didn’t have nearly as many humans out there competing with bears and otherwise affecting their security. …[A]s temperatures rise and habitat is reduced, polar bears are going to be competing with a lot of human uses of their environment.” The scientists’ concern is not political, although that is the typical framework for global-warming discussions. Amstrup and colleagues have first-hand knowledge of how current climate changes are affecting polar bears, and their worry comes through as genuine and as transcending politics.

     A much, much lighter winter-oriented book – created, just for fun, for pre-readers and the youngest readers – Little Bea and the Snowy Day has a bear in it, too, but this is the sort of illustrated bear designed to entertain young children with amusing and pleasant antics. Daniel Roode’s book is a followup to his Little Bea, whose title character really is a bee – a thoroughly adorable one without a stinger who, in the new book, wears a cap and scarf and wants nothing more than to play in the snow with Bear, Rabbit, Beaver, Owl, Deer and Goose. There is really no plot here – the friends simply go outside and do snow-related things, such as making snow angels, sledding, throwing snowballs and building a snowman. All the characters have huge heads and perpetual smiles, and all are cuddly and cute as can be. Scenes in which Roode lines them all up or displays them all at once – going uphill with a sled at one point, ice skating on a pond at another – are especially delightful. So is the hot-chocolate break that everyone takes (no grown-up animals are shown; the steaming cups apparently appear by magic). Little Bea and the Snowy Day is a just-right bit of entertainment for a young child on a winter day that may be a little too cold for outdoor play…or one on which playtime in the snow is over and a little bit of quiet reading, perhaps with some hot chocolate, is just the thing.

(++++) HARD-BOILED AND HARDER-BOILED

Breakdown. By Sara Paretsky. Putnam. $26.95.

     Just how complex do you want a mystery to be? How difficult a character do you want the mystery-solver to be? How convoluted do you want the twists and turns to be? If your answer to all three questions is “very,” Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski novels are likely to be near the top of your reading list already. Breakdown will keep them there, and maybe even elevate their place a notch or two.

     This is Paretsky’s 17^th novel. Of those, only two – Ghost Country (1998) and Bleeding Kansas (2008) – have not featured the female detective first introduced by Paretsky in Indemnity Only (1982). V.I. (Victoria Iphigenia, “Vic” to her friends) has not exactly aged well, although she has aged: in the new book, she is pushing 50. But she is recognizably the same woman she has been throughout this three-decade series: difficult, demanding, quite up to fighting when necessary, not always cooperative with the nuances of the law, but nevertheless inclined to sing along with opera and dress nicely – at least when her good outfits aren’t being trashed in her investigations, as several of them are in Breakdown. “Clothes are a projection of the self,” Vic remarks when one of her outfits proves to be unsalvageable. “I felt personally damaged.”

     A multifaceted character, Vic, and not always a likable one in “the world where I spend most of my time, filled with the dying or the lying.” Readers might not want Vic as a friend or drinking companion (she prefers Johnnie Walker Black Label), but most would certainly want her on their side in a fight. And not just a street brawl – a political fight, too, which is a big part of the foundation of Paretsky’s latest book.

     It takes an author of considerable skill to create as many confusions as Paretsky builds into Breakdown, and then to pull all the strands neatly together. The book starts with Vic being asked to find seven members of her cousin Petra’s book club, 12- and 13-year-old girls who are out after curfew. Turns out they are in a cemetery, invoking the spirit of the fictional female vampire, Carmilla, Queen of the Night (a nod there to J.S. Le Fanu’s 1872 novel, Carmilla). Also turns out that they are just steps away from a gentleman, or rather ex-gentleman, named Miles Wuchnik, who has been stabbed through the heart in a killing reminiscent of what happens in vampire novels. Wuchnik was a private investigator and not, it turns out, much of a gentleman. And Vic must have had something to do with his death – or so claims right-wing media darling and rabble-rouser Wade Lawlor, from whose party Vic was called to look for the tweens. It seems that one of the girls, Arielle, is the granddaughter of billionaire Chaim Salanter, a wealthy Jewish businessman, Holocaust survivor, and prominent contributor to the senatorial campaign of University of Illinois president Sophy Durango – who is running against creationist Helen Kendrick, whom Lawlor is backing.

     Got all that? Then you don’t have the half of it. Vic compares this case to a Rubik’s Cube, and the metaphor is apt, because just as she tries to align certain elements, others go off into non-matching directions. Lawlor, whose one-dimensional bigotry is overstated in a way that will not surprise readers who know of Paretsky’s strong liberal leanings, uses his 24-hour-a-day cable network, GEN (“Global Entertainment Network”), to attack Salanter (as Durango’s proxy) with allegations about how he was really treated by the Nazis. The families of the girls from the cemetery have reasons for wanting to keep the murder quiet, and it is not just the rich and well-connected who feel that way: two of the girls are children of illegal immigrants, whose families want as little light shed on their circumstances as possible. And then there is the matter of Vic’s old friend, brilliant but deeply unreliable Leydon Ashford, a bipolar attorney who has fallen – or been pushed – from a gallery above the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel, and who provides a cryptic, repeatedly written comment, “I saw him on the catafalque.” Leydon’s mother wants Vic to keep her theories about what happened to her daughter quiet. And she is not the only one who wants Vic to take it easy: Salanter and Vic meet repeatedly, but not to try to solve the cemetery murder – Salanter wants Vic to stay away from the case. Furthermore, the various victims, it seems, have as many secrets as do the perpetrators.

     Clearly, the various elements of Breakdown will turn out to be interconnected; indeed, the book’s title has multiple reference points, relating to everything from Leydon’s mental breakdown to the breakdown of civility in politics and by extension in society. Few readers are likely to figure out just how all the pieces join until Paretsky performs her usual sleight of hand – with impeccable logic – in a thrilling climax. Given Vic’s personality (she is a modern inheritor of the “hard-boiled” mantle, even though she is not above pointing out to readers the differences between herself and “a literary detective like Spenser or Marlowe”), and given her determination to see that social justice as well as legal justice is done (reflecting Paretsky’s own commitments to the mentally ill homeless, troubled teens, reproductive rights and other causes), readers will know that Vic will solve the case, or cases, come what may and no matter who gets hurt (herself included). The fascination here is in watching how Vic pulls together elements as disparate as a state mental hospital, class warfare, a wrongful conviction for murder, a couple of highly warped brother-sister relationships, and the incessant nastiness of modern politics – all within a framework that accurately portrays aspects of life in Chicago (where Paretsky lives) even when some of the specific settings are invented. Thirty years after introducing V.I. Warshawski, Paretsky still manages to keep her detective fresh, witty, plainspoken, filled with righteous anger, and dedicated to justice. Breakdown, which is written in Paretsky’s easy-to-read style and is well packed with hard-to-decipher (but scrupulously fair) clues and mysteries, is sure to be a best-seller, and deserves to be.

(++++) THE NEW AND THE TRIED-AND-TRUE

New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change. By Winifred Gallagher. Penguin. $25.95.

The Smartest Money Book You’ll Ever Read: Everything You Need to Know about Growing, Spending, and Enjoying Your Money. By Daniel R. Solin. Perigee. $25.

     Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – literally, “the more it changes, the more it stays the same.” Or, as we usually put it nowadays, 163 years after Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr coined the epigram, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Things change faster than ever now – our world, and the information it gives us for processing, seem to run at hyperspeed all the time. Yet some things stay the same, and one of them, behavioral-science writer Winifred Gallagher argues, is neophilia – the human attraction to the new. Like so many human characteristics, this one has positive and negative aspects. Extreme neophiliacs (about 15% of the population, Gallagher estimates) can become so addicted to newness that they jeopardize their safety, fidelity in relationships, jobs and more – yet neophiliacs may also have a creative streak that makes them the first to see things in an entirely different way and create inventions of genuine value to humanity. At the other extreme, neophobes (another 15%, Gallagher says) can be the foundational rocks of society, handling everyday tasks with caution, care and concern, proceeding slowly rather than precipitately – but they can also be significant barriers to progress. Most people, of course, fall somewhere between the extremes, Gallagher says, but she deems it important to understand that we humans, by our very nature, are “hard-wired to be interested in new things.” And that can spell trouble in a world so packed with new information, new gadgets and new consumer products that even if we run twice as fast in an attempt to stay in the same place, we will still have a vague feeling of falling behind. Gallagher makes a series of good points. Some are direct – novel information is like food: some is nutritious and some is junk. Some are made amusingly and in passing – for all the benefits of walking upright, “we’re still paying the price for this handy bipedalism with our fallen arches, tricky knees, and bad backs, to say nothing of the world’s biggest butts, created by [our] ancestors’ repositioned pelvic muscles.” And some of her points are genuinely thought-provoking, such as her discussion of neophobia in an environment where one would expect neophilia: college. “The twenty-first-century college campus offers a dismaying and stunningly underremarked example of how anxiety about the risk associated with new ways of thinking can limit learning and stunt creativity,” writes Gallagher, then quoting a lecturer named Daniel Pink as saying that today’s students “aren’t good risk managers. They overstate the risk of novelty and divergence, and they understate the risk of being compliant with authority figures. It’s a colossal mistake – and frightening.” Frightening in another way is the preponderance of consumer addiction – and it is addiction – to ever-newer versions of products that were really just fine before. This involves the feeling that one must have an iPhone 4S to replace one’s iPhone 4. Patently absurd on the face of it and indicative of a society in which some people have too much discretionary money (or believe they do) and too little discretion in the use of it, this sort of newness addiction – Gallagher calls it the “new boredom” – contradicts and undermines the socially useful elements of neophilia, turning it into an inevitable losing attempt to have the newest everything all the time. What to do about all this? To her credit, Gallagher is prescriptive, not merely descriptive. Her recommendations probably won’t take hold – they are too common-sensical, too middle-of-the-road, in a sense too old-fashioned – but they are clear-headed and intelligent. They include taking time away from electronics and other things and just staring into space; asking whether you really need something before you buy or use it; considering the investment of mental resources in various new things, and deciding whether those resources could better be used elsewhere; and managing E-mail and other potentially useful potential time-wasters carefully and systematically. Good ideas, all of these, and following even a few of them can help our brains tune out some of the junk information in our environment so we will be better attuned to the nutritious stuff – that is, the data that feed creativity and improvement.

     And speaking of neophilia and junk information – there are few places more dangerous to become preoccupied with the unimportant (if attractively packaged) stuff than the investment world. And there are few bigger warning signs of financial neophilia than believing the oft-repeated phrase, “This time it’s different.” Fortunes can be and have been lost through precipitous investment in the latest, greatest, newest and soon-to-be-biggest new thing. In fact, it could be argued that the world’s recent deep recession came about in large part through major investors’ determination to put tons of money into such newly developed financial products as collateralized mortgage obligations (first created in 1983) and collateralized debt obligations with multiple tranches. You will find none of this stuff in Daniel R. Solin’s latest plainspoken and intelligent investment book, with a typically somewhat-too-self-important title: The Smartest Money Book You’ll Ever Read. In this (+++) book, Solin deals not only with investing but also with spending, including buying health and life insurance, getting out of debt, minimizing taxes and cutting college costs. He talks about whether it is better to buy a home or rent, how to handle estate planning, and how to go about “making your money outlive you” – always in easy-to-understand prose that tends to oversimplify but that is packed with good thinking and good advice. Each chapter – and the chapters are very short – ends with a comment in answer to Solin’s self-posed question, “What’s the Point?” Among those answers: “Budgeting is the first step toward getting control of your finances and increasing your net worth.” “In general, it’s best to avoid annuities, except for immediate fixed annuities.” “The enemies of high returns are high fees, costs, and taxes.” An occasional answer turns out to be at odds with Solin’s analysis elsewhere in the book. “Avoid debt, but if you do use credit, use it to finance only assets of equal or greater value,” he writes, but almost everyone must go into debt to purchase a home, and “owning a home can be gratifying, but as an investment it is overrated. …[I]t is a gamble as an investment strategy.” Taking these statements at face value would deter anyone from buying a home – although Solin does qualify them to a degree. Still, readers should not be fooled by the ease of reading this book or the brief length of its chapters into believing that the subjects Solin discusses are simple or have one-size-fits-all approaches. Actually, the most irritating thing about the book is not its once-over-lightly approach but its repeated references to Mint.com, a free financial-planning Web site that recommends the book and that (not as a result, says Solin) gets a series of “Mint Hints” throughout. True, there is not necessarily a quid pro quo here, but the repeated urgings to consult Mint.com for information and articles – with Solin saying, for example, that the site offers “several sound approaches to building a solid portfolio” – make it look as if there is a strong tie-in between what Solin is saying and what Mint.com says. Solin is no shill, but he comes perilously close to looking like one here, and that does neither him nor his readers any good. The appearance of lack of independence can sometimes be as damaging as actual lack of independence, and the fact that Mint.com is free and Solin has written other books without the tie-in does not change the appearance here of a relationship that is scarcely at arm’s length. Solin says directly that he “has no association with Mint.com, other than obtaining its agreement to use its logo in this book and to reference its website where appropriate,” but the many appearances of the site here – in boxes decorated with a sprig of mint and bearing the “Mint Hint” title – may well make some readers look askance at what Solin is saying. In fact, both Solin and Mint.com offer a great deal of value, not only within this book but also outside it. Readers should not, however, make money decisions based solely on this book or solely on the material at Mint.com – its subtitle to the contrary, Solin’s book does not provide “everything you need to know” about money. Further research, which may include Mint.com but should not be limited to it, is strongly advised.

(+++) STRICTLY FOR FANS

This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl. By Paul Brannigan. Da Capo. $26.99.

PacMan: Behind the Scenes with Manny Pacquiao—the Greatest Pound-for-Pound Fighter in the World. By Gary Andrew Poole. Da Capo. $15.

     Some books start out with limitations. They are not intended to reach a wide audience or to attract people unfamiliar with their subject matter. Pretty much all books on minor celebrities fit this category – they are strictly for readers who already know and care about the people being profiled, and are looking for some sort of “behind-the-scenes story” on people the readers will never meet, and know about only through their performances and public personas. So Paul Brannigan’s This Is a Call will be of no interest whatsoever to readers uninterested in the punk scene where Grohl has had his career. Brannigan – former editor of a magazine called Kerrang! – preaches to the converted throughout, assuming that anyone picking up the book will not only know about and be fascinated by Grohl’s stint as drummer for the band Nirvana and singer/songwriter for the Foo Fighters, but also want to know all the ins and outs of Grohl’s personal life. As it happens, some of Grohl’s ups and downs would be interesting, or at least a cautionary tale, even to those not fully immersed in the punk scene: his troubles keeping a band together, the difficulties of his personal life, and his eventual descent into homelessness have resonance far beyond his music. But they are not the focus of the book. Brannigan knows what his audience wants: “It was Metallica who altered the playing field. Formed in Los Angeles in 1981 by vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, and influenced by Motörhead, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the Misfits and nihilistic West Coast punk, the quartet began life as front-runner of the violent, chaotic Thrash Metal scene.” And, of course, “When Dave Grohl talks about Kurt Cobain’s last days his body language and speech patterns change. The bounce disappears from his voice, and his recollections are delivered haltingly. …‘It’s hard for me to even talk about it,’ he said finally. ‘It was just so nuts, I don’t even know how to explain it.’” Fans of Grohl’s work, up to and including his appearances with Them Crooked Vultures, will get plenty of name-dropping and behind-the-scenes insights from a writer who has known Grohl since 1997 and does a good job of pulling together many sorts of musical and personal minutiae. But Brannigan never digs too deeply into Grohl’s mind or heart, which is a shame, since there are fascinating tidbits there. For example, Grohl’s freshman and sophomore years in high school were at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a highly selective school generally considered the best high school in the United States; his family then pulled him out because his marijuana use was affecting his grades. But getting into the school in the first place – which requires taking a difficult entrance exam – indicates that Grohl had considerable aptitude in fields with which one would scarcely associate him. Where did that come from, and where did it go? There are no answers here to questions of that sort; indeed, there are no questions of that sort at all. Brannigan delivers a nicely written biographical sketch of Grohl that will interest Grohl’s existing fan base and readers of Kerrang! and similar magazines. That is all. For the target audience, it will be enough.

     Similarly, the primary target readership of Gary Andrew Poole’s PacMan is boxing fans – although this book may reach a bit beyond the core, simply because Manny Pacquiao sometimes shows up in general-news headlines as well as boxing stories. For example, the third fight between Pacquaio and Juan Manuel Marquez, which Pacquaio won by a controversial majority decision last November 12, provoked commentary even beyond the boxing world. But that fight is not included in PacMan, and cannot be – it takes too much time to produce a book for it to include up-to-the-minute information, and besides, PacMan originally came out in 2010; the new paperback edition is updated only with an afterword by Poole. The focus of the book is not the boxing ring, although of course that is a prominent venue, but the background from which Pacquaio rose to pugilistic prominence. A Philippine Congressman using his political position to fight the sort of poverty into which he himself was born, Pacquaio is a fascinating character in many ways, not the least of which is financial: “Pacquaio sends his children to an international school outside of Manila. He sponsors nine-ball billiard games in which the Philippines’ best players compete, which has [sic] a pot of one million pesos. …Pacquaio spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money for tickets. He has to maintain a fleet of vehicles, a handful of condos, apartments, and houses, and pay the freeloaders, and give his money to the poor. Pacquaio’s spending habits, it is argued, have been good for [boxing promotion company] Top Rank because Pacquaio must continue boxing to earn even more money.” Readers not especially enamored of Pacquaio or of boxing may wonder why the fighter “has to” maintain so many vehicles, “pay the freeloaders” and so on, and Poole does not explain – this biography is interesting in many ways but is short on analysis, much less criticism, of its subject. Poole’s style is often wanting, too: “Training in the Philippines was obviously a mistake because there were like 2 billion distractions there.” Or: “[Oscar] De La Hoya didn’t punch back. His left eye was closed. He hit De La Hoya with fifty power punches.” Yet the book’s underlying theme – actually stated by De La Hoya, once known as the Golden Boy but no match for Pacquaio when the two welterweights fought in 2008 – comes through clearly: “‘The word I get is that Pacquaio means so much not just because of the excitement of his boxing but what he is as a man.’” Those looking for confirmation that Pacquaio is an important man as well as an important boxer will find it in PacMan. Those who disdain boxing and might have preferred a more objective and more carefully assembled book (this one does not even have an index) will likely avoid Poole’s work altogether.

(++++) PIANO AND OTHER FOCUSES

Debussy: Orchestral Works, Volume 7—Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra; Première Rapsodie for Orchestra with Principal Clarinet; Rapsodie for Saxophone and Orchestra; Deux Danses for Harp and Strings. Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano; Paul Meyer, clarinet; Alexandre Doisy, saxophone; Emmanuel Ceysson, harp; Orchestre National de Lyon conducted by Jun Märkl. Naxos. $9.99.

Wilhelm Stenhammar: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. Niklas Sivelöv, piano; Malmö Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mario Venzago. Naxos. $9.99.

Vivaldi: Bassoon Concertos, Volume II—RV 499, 472, 490, 496, 504, 483 and 470. Sergio Azzolini, bassoon; L’Aura Soave Cremona conducted by Diego Cantalupi. Naïve. $16.99.

Johann Friedrich Fasch: Orchestral Works, Volume 2—Concertos in D and G; Ouverture in A minor; Sinfonia in G minor. Tempesta di Mare—Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra. Chandos. $18.99.

     The seventh volume in Naxos’ excellent Debussy series with Orchestre National de Lyon under Jun Märkl moves into territory not often associated with this composer: concertos or concerto-like works. True, nothing here is as long or flamboyant as were typical concertos of Debussy’s time; and true, all these pieces have Debussy’s sensitive feel and flair for color rather than display. It is nevertheless interesting to have several of the composer’s pieces for soloist and orchestra on a single CD – all of them receiving excellent performances. Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra is an early work, dating to 1889-90, although Debussy continued changing It throughout his life and it was not published until after his death; indeed, the version performed here was published only in 1968, incorporating changes that did not show up in the first (1920) publication. Whatever the work’s provenance, it is a well-proportioned piece in which the piano and orchestra remain nicely balanced throughout, playing with rather than (as so often in Romantic concertos) against one another. The same is true of Première Rapsodie, which is notably titled as being for orchestra with principal clarinet. Written in 1910 for clarinet and piano and orchestrated the following year, this is a competition piece, designed to allow students to show their abilities in contrasting tempos and moods. Yet it is not a mere competition piece, having a prevailing dreamlike mood that is quite in keeping with Debussy’s usual manner. The saxophone rhapsody is evocative, too, even though Debussy was not very comfortable with the instrument – and even though he only sketched the work’s orchestration, which was completed after his death by Jean Robert-Ducasse. The CD concludes with two short dances from 1904 that focus on the harp – originally written for the chromatic harp, but nowadays played on the conventional instrument. These are works firmly embedded in their era and in the sensibility of such turn-of-the-century composers as Erik Satie, but they also carry faint suggestions of ancient times and require both sensitivity and virtuosity in interpretation – and receive both qualities here.

     The virtuosity needed for Wilhelm Stenhammar’s two piano concertos is of a more traditional Romantic type. Stenhammar (1871-1927) was considered the finest Swedish pianist of his time, and had a career more as a soloist and conductor than as a composer. He also took some time to find his own compositional voice: his first concerto (written in 1893 and first performed in 1894) is distinctly Brahmsian, not only in its four-movement structure with the scherzo placed second, but also in its vast scope and broad themes. There are hints in this work of an attempt to reach for a more individual style, especially in the writing for the keyboard, but the piece – although undoubtedly effective – leaves an overall impression of being more imitative than original. It is, however, well scored and impressive in its expectations of the soloist. The second concerto (1908) is more original: its four movements are played continuously, and the sound world here is no longer that of Brahms, nor even that of Liszt, although there are hints of the earlier composers here and there. Stenhammar had at this point moved from immersion in the works of Wagner and Bruckner to influence by Nielsen and Sibelius, although there is nothing especially Nordic about this concerto’s themes or approach. The things that are different here, in comparison with the first concerto, are a tighter and better-integrated design and a use of recurrent thematic material that makes the work as a whole sound more completely thought-through and less expansive than the earlier concerto. Niklas Sivelöv plays both concertos with mastery and a fine sense of style, and the accompaniment by the Malmö Symphony Orchestra under Mario Venzago is sure-handed, idiomatic and convincing throughout.

     It is not keyboard concertos but ones for the violin for which Vivaldi is known – but listeners are often surprised to discover that the Red Priest also wrote more than three dozen concertos for the bassoon. No one quite knows why. The concertos are all in Vivaldi’s standard three-movement form, and all require a fair degree of virtuosity, treating the bassoon not as the comic instrument it was to become in later times but as a full-fledged soloist to be set against a complement of strings. The second volume in Naïve’s survey of the bassoon concertos includes RV 499 (A minor), 472 (C major), 490 (F major), 496 (G minor), 504 (B-flat major), 483 (E-flat major), and 470 (C major). There is little except detail to distinguish among the concertos, although the two in minor keys do have some additional wistfulness (if not depth) when compared with the brighter and more common major-key ones. Sergio Azzolini plays all the concertos stylishly, overcoming their usually modest difficulties without any apparent strain, and the period-instrument ensemble L’Aura Soave Cremona provides excellent accompaniment, producing sound that is both warm and vivid – and melds quite well with that of Azzolini’s solo bassoon.

     Vivaldi’s dates were 1678-1741, while those of Johann Friedrich Fasch were 1688-1758, but the musical directions of these two contemporaries were quite different, as the second volume in Chandos’ series devoted to Fasch’s orchestral works makes clear. Two of the four pieces here are called concertos, but they – as well as the works labeled “ouverture” and “sinfonia” – more closely resemble Classical-era symphonies (early ones) than they do Vivaldi-style concertos. Fasch was highly respected in his time – notably by Bach, who owned copies of six Fasch orchestral suites and arranged a Fasch piano trio for organ. But Fasch’s music is quite unlike that of Bach – or Vivaldi. Those Baroque composers favored a certain austerity in style and a general coolness in themes and organization, exemplified above all by the fugue, of which Bach was such a master. Fasch’s music starts to move away from the Baroque model toward the Classical, with greater thematic development and frequently more interesting orchestral color than is generally found in the Baroque. The four works played by the rather awkwardly named Tempesta di Mare—Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra are all world première recordings, and all are solid, well-constructed and filled with lovely flow. The Ouverture in A minor is the most impressive of the pieces, being fully symphonic in scope (it lasts nearly half an hour) and offering multiple mood and orchestration changes. Despite his popularity in his own time, Fasch was overshadowed by Baroque giants – Telemann as well as Bach and Vivaldi – and his early progress toward Classical style led to his later being passed over, much as proto-Romantic composers such as Hummel and Field were later to be largely ignored after their own lifetimes, despite their once-innovative approaches. Hearing Fasch’s works today opens a window on a very interesting transitional time in music – besides which, these compositions are elegant and well-crafted statements in their own right.