Falling Angels (1990)
Barbara Gowdy
A whiskey-chugging mother who must be kept
from leaping off the roof. A father who substitutes two weeks in an
air-raid shelter for a long-promised trip to Disneyland. These are
the parental burdens of the three Field girls, who slouch toward
womanhood in this excellent first novel. A
Dispatches (1977)
Michael Herr
Before Dispatches,
Vietnam novels were just war stories. But Herr's reissued
classic — still the definitive vision of 'Nam — gave us all the
particulars of this fresh hell. Trippy and surreal, it captures the
apocalypse in a series of images that pulse against a background of
'60s rock. The edgy humor goes beyond the gallows to the grave. A
Legacies (1990)
Bette Bao Lord
Lord, author of the
best-selling Spring Moon, links her eyewitness account of the
Tiananmen Square uprising with the stories of her family members
during and after the cultural revolution. The result is a haunting
patchwork of China in the past half century. Lord writes so elegantly
that you will wait in vain for something untoward to break through
the seamless reserve of her prose. B
All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes (1986)
Maya Angelou
The latest installment in Angelou's autobiographical series
(which began with the superb I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) is a
grace note. Describing her years in Africa seems to have released
something triumphant in Angelou and erased the smugness that has
marred some of her more recent books. B+
