Book reviews: Local, national authors

Everyday Evil,

by Marilyn Anne Pate

Wyatt McKenzie Publishing, 2009

$16.95, 301 pages

There are lots of memoirs on the shelves these days, but few stories are told with such unflinching courage as Marilyn Pate’s “Everyday Evil.” She opens her personal history and her heart — dare I say, a vein — to tell the truth about an abusive childhood that could have rendered her lost and incapable, but in the end did not.

After the premature death of their mother, 5-year-old Marilyn and her younger brother are at the mercy of their narcissistic, controlling and abusive father. He leaves them with his parents while he goes off to build his career. Marilyn is sexually abused by her grandfather, and Teddie, already stigmatized by his inability to live up to his father’s harsh expectations, continues to sink deeper into himself. Their father returns with a new wife — their “new mother” — and her daughter. “You love them,” he tells his children.

By then, Marilyn has learned how to make her father and other adults happy. She smiles and goes along, even when it means missing out on friends and school activities. Yet, the physical and emotional abuse continues; her father says it’s because he loves them. Their stepsister Gloria is spared thanks to her mother’s protection, as is their baby sister, Elaine. Years later on her deathbed, Gloria tells Marilyn, “I was always so scared. I hid in the closet and cried when Dad beat you. Did you hate me because he never hit me?”

Marilyn’s strength and determination pulled her through, proving that there is life after a traumatic childhood.

This book is not a light read, but Marilyn’s heartfelt story offers hope to anyone who has endured an abusive relationship and longs for healing.

— Denise Roessle

Resilience,

by Elizabeth Edwards

Broadway Books, 2009

$22.95 hardcover, 224 pages

The death of a loved one, loss of a job, diagnosis of a life-threatening medical condition, a divorce or discovery of a spouse’s infidelity — these are all major adversities many have experienced or will someday, often through no fault of our own.

It’s how we cope with these events and move beyond that counts, according to Elizabeth Edwards, terminal cancer patient, lawyer author of the best-selling book “Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities” and wife of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.

“Resilience,” a literate, deeply reflective, succinct and painfully honest account of the author’s own experiences, including the death of her 16-year-old son, has a long waiting list at the Green Valley library, and it’s easy to see why.

This is not your typical tell-all tome from a celebrity author. “Resilience” is refreshingly free of self-serving platitudes and titillating details. Instead it offers inspiration, one reason, undoubtedly, why it has proved so popular.

What many surprise many readers of “Resilience” is how little space Elizabeth Edwards devotes to her husband’s infidelity, or her husband for that matter. References to him in the book are rare indeed, suggesting that he remains a painful subject. She deals with the betrayal in a few short sentences. Upon learning about it from her husband, “I cried and screamed. I went to the bathroom and threw up.”

After that, she publicly stood by her husband’s side during the months before he dropped out of the presidential race because of his affair with a campaign staffer.

In the book, Elizabeth Edwards devotes the most space to the death of her beloved son in a freak auto accident during a wind storm, the death of her father, and her own battle with cancer, diagnosed in 2004 when her husband was running for vice-president. After many treatments, Elizabeth Edwards’s breast cancer was declared to be in remission, but the disease reoccurred in 2007, having spread throughout her body.

Despite the subject matter, the book conveys a message of hope, thanks to Edwards’ strength of mind, her courage, remarkable attitude, and acceptance of what she can never change. A reader might hope that the book be leavened with at least a modicum of the delightful sense of humor Elizabeth Edwards has displayed in radio and TV interviews, but this is not the case.

— Kathy Engle

That First Season,

by John Eisenberg

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009

288 pages, $25

You don’t need to be a football fan to know Vince Lombardi’s immortal line: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

The legendary coach relied on that philosophy 50 years ago to turn the Green Bay Packers from a raw, undisciplined squad into the near-flawless team that went on to win the first two Super Bowls.

Plenty of books have been written about Lombardi and his career, but author John Eisenberg was interested in just one year — 1959, the year the coach first came to Green Bay. He tells the story in “That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory.”

Even with seven future Hall of Famers on the roster, the team was coming off a 1-10-1 record that included a humiliating 56-0 drubbing by the Indianapolis Colts. Under Lombardi’s iron-fisted rule, the Packers posted a stunning turnaround the next season to finish 7-5.

To document what happened that year, Eisenberg interviewed dozens of former players, pored over newspaper records and studied more than a dozen biographies and autobiographies.

The result is often engrossing. He provides detailed play-by-play highlights of all 12 games, and he gives us keen nuggets about what the players were thinking and feeling.

That information would be great for a book subtitled “A Detailed Look at the Packers’ 1959 Season.” But the subtitle Eisenberg chose creates a different set of expectations, and readers may be disappointed when those expectations go unfulfilled.

— Associated Press

Eating the Dinosaur,

by Chuck Klosterman

Scribner, 2009

256 pages, $25

Chuck Klosterman has a theory. A lot of them, actually. He has a theory about why grunge rock icon Kurt Cobain was like the late cult leader David Koresh, why the read-option offense signifies something deep and meaningful about football, why ABBA will never reunite, and why Garth Brooks created that goofy alter ego a decade ago.

“I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things,” Klosterman writes in this book of essays. So true.

Klosterman’s trick is to use stupid-sounding subjects as grist for smart, funny essays. Klosterman has built a career on this, gaining early attention for defending ‘80s hair metal bands and later writing about popular culture for Spin and Esquire.

Klosterman performs literary high-wire acts with his essays: they’re great when he succeeds but things hit with a thud when he missteps. He mostly succeeds in this book.

Klosterman has more insights per page than most cultural critics and he really does think these things through. His riff on the different ways major sports leagues market themselves is dead-on and funny. His quirky takes on laugh tracks and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto are worth reading. And while many people have written about the cultural impact of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” Klosterman is probably the first critic to compare it to Keith Richards’s guitar playing and Snidely Whiplash’s mustache. In the same sentence.

Klosterman is so entertaining that readers might gloss over his tendency to pepper his arguments with ridiculously broad statements and the occasional sophistry. Consider this assertion: “People who follow politics closely cannot comprehend people who aren’t partially lying.”

And his argument tying the late Nirvana frontman Cobain to infamous Branch Davidian sect leader Koresh based on some similarities in their personalities is clever, but silly. By his same rules, you could argue Cobain was like Bill Clinton (talented with strong appetites, peaked in the ’90s) or Lindsay Lohan (brushes with trouble, long blonde hair).

Here’s another comparison in the spirit of Klosterman: The essays in this book are like guitar solos by his beloved Eddie Van Halen. They show exceptional talent and are original. They can soar and part of the fun is trying to guess where they’ll end up. The difference is that Van Halen didn’t record the occasional bum note.

— Associated Press