Literature

Stockingstuffers

A few bookish suggestions for gift-giving

John Freeman

FOR YOUR HOT GRANNY

No one loves a late bloomer quite like a sassy older lady, so indulge her naughty sweet tooth with Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney’s), 90-year-old Millard Kaufman’s hilarious (and ribald) debut novel about a young man who bumbles from one misadventure to another before landing in a prison cell in Iraq.

FOR YOUR COLBERT-WATCHING, TRUTHDIG.COM-READING, NATION-SUBSCRIBING, ANGER-FATIGUED FRIEND WHO BELIEVES THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO LEARN ABOUT THIS CRAVEN WORLD

It all makes sense—Katrina, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Israeli wall, Halliburton—in Naomi Klein’s authoritative polemic The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan), which explores the relationship between shock therapy (either economic or military) and the spread of free-market ideals. Package with Blackwater (Nation Books) by Jeremy Scahill and stand back while your friend’s head explodes.

 

FOR YOUR FRIEND THE SMART-ASS

No one gave lip as wittily and as well as Ogden Nash. Even today’s hipsters could learn a thing or two from him in The Best of Ogden Nash (Ivan R. Dee), a gigantic compendium of the late New Yorker writer’s best light verse.

FOR DAD, WHO BUNKERS DOWN WITH ONE BIG BIOGRAPHY

Outside of Robert Caro’s life of LBJ, John Richardson’s ongoing study of Picasso is probably the most ambitious and magnificent biographical project in the world. His latest volume, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf), follows the sacred master/monster out of World War I and up to the summits of fame.

FOR YOUR NATURE-LOVING FRIEND

Eliot Weinberger’s metaphysical essay collection An Elemental Thing (New Directions) provides a stirring glimpse into the way societies around the world live in tune with the seasons, while Rebecca Solnit’s collection Storming the Gates of Paradise (University of California) explores the politics of place with a stylish remove reminiscent of early Joan Didion.

FOR YOUR SISTER, THE ASPIRING PHYSICIAN

Jerome Groopman is the best thinking-doc’s physician. His new book, How Doctors Think (Houghton Mifflin), meditates on all the most pressing issues of hospital care today with a palpable humanity and clear-eyed realism.

FOR YOUR FRIEND THE ATHEIST

Even the firmest nonbeliever will get a chuckle out of A.J. Jacobs’ quirky chronicle The Year of Living Biblically (Simon & Schuster), his tale of living the Bible as literally as possible.

FOR YOUR FRIEND THE (ENLIGHTENED) BIBLE-THUMPER

Write a sweet card, praising his or her open-mindedness, and enclose a copy of Christopher Hitchens’ razor-sharp God is Not Great (Twelve).

FOR YOUR DO-GOODING FRIEND

For Poor People (Ecco), William T. Vollmann traveled the globe, from Cambodia to Sacramento, asking the people he meets, why are you poor? This impressionistic, rhetoric-free book is a kind of Let us Praise Famous Men for our time.

  • Get More Stories from Thu, Nov 29, 2007
Top of Story