... and so little time. Every year in this country some 60,000 tomes are published, and Books can't get to most of them. Nonetheless, we've culled some from the herd that might be worth a look. These are not reviews – they are book alerts.
As former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman puts it in “Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity From Tokyo to Tennessee” (Penguin Press, 291 pages, $24.95), “Researching sex anywhere is not for the faint of heart.” Luckily, Druckerman – who speaks five languages – is up to the task.
Neither prude nor libertine, Druckerman “started thinking seriously about affairs” when she was a correspondent in Latin American and “married men routinely tried to sleep with me.” Though she imagined herself “a cultivated woman of the world ... these men had tapped into a moralizing streak I hadn't known was there. ... Merely by growing up in America, was I saddled with some kind of Puritan baggage that would keep me from experiencing great pleasure?”
She was; and by research and implication, so are the rest of us in the U.S. of A. – despite the seeming liberalization of sexual mores since the 1960s. Druckerman interviews cheaters, sexologists, marriage counselors and “relationship entrepreneurs” from France to China and comes up with a delightful look at different societies. She got “some offers. But that blasted American guilt ... kept getting in the way.”
And now, for another form of lust: “Tabloid Prodigy: Dishing the Dirt, Getting the Gossip, and Selling My Soul in the Cutthroat World of Hollywood Reporting” (Running Press, 352 pages, $24.95) by Marlise Elizabeth Kast could not have been written but for our insatiable itch for celebrity “news.”
Fresh out of college, Kast lands at the L.A. office of Globe (“It wasn't as if I intentionally set out to work for one of the lowest forms of media”) and is off to the races. Her tools: lies, deception, manipulation, fake IDs. She learns quickly, covers some 200 stories (Leo! Madonna!) and can't stand it, or herself, after three years.
Despite the pangs of conscience that Kast cites among reasons for quitting, she dishes “to retain the integrity of 'Tabloid Prodigy.' ”
Quickies: “Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson” edited by Peter Matthiessen (Houghton Mifflin, 208 pages, $14.95, paperback) – An appreciation of Carson's “transformative insights.”
Martin Zimmerman, a Union-Tribune copy editor, has been known to read a book every now and then.
