John Freeman

Forget about silkscreen t-shirts, mixtapes or even the Sharper Image catalog of wonders, there’s nothing as personal as a book. For every personality, every reading level, there’s a book out there waiting to provide that lucky Christmas or Chanukah or Kwanzaa celebrant with a few hours—maybe a few weeks—of pleasure. To help you unlock that potential for joy, here are a few holiday-time tips for the best books to buy this holiday season.

For your globe-trotting, hop-scotching pal, wherever the hell he is these days…



"Autonauts of the Cosmoroute" (Archipelago): This bizarre, touching little travelogue tells the story of Julio Cortozar and Carol Dunlop’s thirty-three day journey along the Paris-Marseilles freeway in 1982 in journals and drawings which capture the mess and muss of travel.

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" (McSweeneys), 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 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.



To the poetic, cumulus-headed soul in your life…



Michael O’Brien might just be the best kept secret of the poetry world. "Sleeping and Waking" (Flood Editions) is about to change that—these spare poems about love, life in a city and the in-between states of our lives drape as delicately as Japanese wall-hangings.



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, "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 society’s 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.


To the dedicated fictionista in your circle…



Dinaw Mengestu’s heartbreaking, exquisitely made "The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears" (Riverhead) tells the story of three African refugees making their way in Washington, D.C. long after they’ve given up on realizing their wildest American dreams.



To your sister, the aspiring physician…



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



For your favorite bookie, thug or all-around tough guy…with a brain…



Demonstrate your respect for his Machiavellian mind with "Sacred Games" (HarperCollins), Vikram Chandra’s wonderful thriller about a Sikh police inspector pursuing an overload in and around Mumbai (now Bombay), when gangsters got so powerful they took over part of Bollywood and began scripting their own mythology.



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 the journaler in your life…



Stare straight down into the powerful filament of Joyce Carol Oates’ working mind with "The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1972-1981" (Ecco), a period when she published an astonishing twenty-nine works of fiction, criticism and poetry.



To your do-gooding friend…



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



For your lover…



There is a rightness and terrible melancholy to every sentence of Hisham Matar’s debut novel, "The Country of Men"(Dial Press), which tells the story of a young boy who is entrusted with a secret much larger than him.


(2007-11-19)

Also by John Freeman

FICTION REVIEW
Until now, Ha Jin has written about life in China, during and before the Cultural Revolution. In his mammoth new novel, "A Free Life," however, he deploys the elements of his own powerful journey in an epic tale about a young couple at sea in America in the early 1990s
(2007-10-30)

Waking Up
New York writer Michael O’Brien might just be the best-kept secret of America’s poetry world. In the past four decades, he quietly has produced more than a dozen volumes of wry, effervescently meditative verse. "Sleeping and Waking," his latest, might just be your best ticket to a more reflective state of mind this fall
(2007-10-16)

FICTION REVIEW
If Richard Russo's lambent, mournful new novel were a university, there could only be one quote chiseled above its entrance gates, from Emerson: "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not"
(2007-10-02)

NONFICTION REVIEW
According to one theory of globalization, the spread of free-market ideas across the globe has occurred in a series of natural if sometimes painful historical developments and the unprecedented (and highly lucrative) excess Western capital enjoyed to these emerging markets is essential to kick-starting democratic reform. In this towering polemic, Naomi Klein demolishes this narrative, arguing that history tells a different story
(2007-09-18)

FICTION REVIEW
(2007-08-28)

FICTION REVIEW
(2007-08-21)

FICTION REVIEW
(2007-08-21)

NONFICTION REVIEW
(2007-08-07)

NONFICTION REVIEW
(2007-07-31)

What's in a Name?
(2007-07-17)

FICTION REVIEW
(2007-07-10)

NONFICTION REVIEW
(2007-06-26)

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