"Roads" shows that Larry McMurtry has learned to accept, if somewhat begrudgingly and with wry humor, the Wal-martization of America. Unlike William Least Heat-Moon in 1982's "Blue Highways," a Whitmanesque paean to the nation's vanishing back lanes, McMurtry refuses to disparage the Pizza Huts and K-Marts and 7-Elevens that dot the strip malls and dysfunction junctions that span today's United States. Instead, he expresses delight that Hope, Ark., has a Sizzler; that Duluth, Minn., has a revolving restaurant; and that he has stayed in more than 200 Holiday Inns. "Roads" is, in fact, a coyly upbeat celebration of the great East-to-West super-slabs, Interstates 10, 40 and 70, and the usually trustworthy 5, 25, 33 and 75 running north to south. It's also a meditation on growing old in America and a sharing of the wisdom McMurtry has gleaned from his years as a cattle rancher, first-rate novelist, English professor, Hollywood screenplay writer and Washington, D.C. rare book dealer. What makes McMurtry's marvelous book as much a credit to its genre as "Travels With Charley," however, are its author's sharp eye and fine prose, whether he's describing Cajun cooking, Kansas street fights, Idaho skinheads, Century City parking, Key West flora, Brazos Valley sunsets, Georgetown grandees or Montana skies.
The Best Nonfiction Of 2000
The Best Books of 2000
RUSH FOR RICHES
Gold Fever and
the Making of California
By J.S. Holliday
Oakland Museum of California/ University of California Press:
336 pp., $55
J.S. Holliday has tried to recognize the messiness of the Gold Rush while still seeing it as an occasion for celebration. Beautifully illustrated, clearly and engagingly written, his "Rush for Riches" is the product of years of reading and thinking about the event. The book is a stunning synthesis. "Rush for Riches" is an engaging, vivid and wonderfully crafted book.
THE SCALPEL
AND THE BUTTERFLY
The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection
By Deborah Rudacille
Farrar, Straus & Giroux:
320 pp., $25
"Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?" asked Dr. Frankenstein in his gothic way. Thus Deborah Rudacille, formerly a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, begins her brilliant analysis in "The Scalpel and the Butterfly" of the history of the antivivisection and animal rights movements by tracing our still potent, still visceral fear of those "horrors" back to the mad scientist, the archetypal figure who is both monstrously arrogant and impotent to control the inhuman forces he lets loose on the world. "The Scalpel and the Butterfly" unpacks the power politics and anxieties that have driven antivivisection and animal rights since the beginning.
SCENES FROM THE END
The Last Days
of World War II in Europe
By Frank E. Manuel
Steerforth Press: 144 pp., $20
To read this passionate, slender book is to be transported 55 years back in time to the turmoil of a Europe upheaved by the defeat of Nazi Germany. Frank E. Manuel, the distinguished historian of ideas, was a 34-year-old counterintelligence officer in the U.S. Army when the war ended. "Scenes From the End" reads as if it was written right then, on the spot, without the reflection--and, often, as a result, the emotional distancing--that the passage of time brings to one's memories. Fluent in German, French and Yiddish, Manuel worked as a prisoner-of-war interrogator, interviewing captured German generals, German soldiers, the dispossessed and starving Jews and even Adm. Miklos Horthy, the pro-Nazi regent of Hungary. He traveled the German countryside and lived, gloomily, for a time in the vast, destroyed city of Leipzig.
In Manuel's skilled hands, this method renders the spring and summer of 1945 among the ruins of the Third Reich with a shocking vividness. "Today," he writes, "I feel ashamed of verdicts pronounced in the heat of battle or at the sight of human atrocities. I regret the summary judgments that poured out of me and the sentiments of superior virtue that besmirch all victors." Manuel is now in his 80s, and those he interviewed are either gone or octogenarians. After 50 years of democracy, the burden of the past does not lie on Germany so heavily. But, not so long ago, it did. "Scenes From the End" is a riveting memoir that brings that tormented past rudely and vividly into the more placid present.
THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE
OF WATER
Discovering the Essence
of the American Desert
By Craig Childs
Sasquatch: 288 pp., $23.95
