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Home Land by Sam Lipsyte (Picador, $13). Lipsyte is not only a master of language and prose, but he is the funniest writer I know. His most recent novel will make you laugh the kind of laugh that can crumble into tears of recognition for those of us who feel that our lives didn’t quite work out the way we dreamed they would.
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The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (Free Press, $14). The first time I saw this book it was screaming at me from a bin at a Los Angeles Goodwill store. The title seemed to sum up and explain its surroundings, and when I picked it up, I believed it could explain me. This is a heavy, dense book that shouldn’t be read while on medication because it will have no effect. It will explain why you’re on medication and probably shouldn’t be. I keep it nearby at all times.
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Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (Collins, $15). Written by a couple of Canadian smarties, this recent book deconstructs the history of modern radicalism and provides a good case for it being a chaotic growth spurt of capitalism.
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Dino by Nick Tosches (Delta, $14). Tosches is one of the glowing dark lights in the even darker darkness, and this is a genius biography. Tosches uses Dean Martin’s enigmatic persona to explore the nature of celebrity and the gritty, seductive truth about show business from the ’40s through the ’70s.
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Straight Life by Art Pepper and Laurie Pepper (Da Capo, $22). I wasn’t a big jazz fan when I read this autobiography of the great alto sax player Art Pepper, but the reason the book is awesome is that it is also an autobiography of addiction. It’s an insane, egocentric screed—about 50 pages of sax and 250 pages of drugs, jail, and insanity. In the end, though, Pepper puts across a simple code for living: Don’t be a rat.
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Generation of Swine
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