Lincoln Journal Star Page design: George Wright Sunday, May 15, 2005 BOOKS 3K Author joins storm chasers in search for 'Big Weather' "Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America" by Mark Svenvold, Henry Holt and Company, 289 pages, $26. BY CARA PESEK Lincoln Journal Star Five years ago, Mark Svenvold was visiting Oklahoma and found himself in a tornado warning. He didn't know what to do. The motel where he was staying didn't have a basem*nt, and the front desk clerk didn't seem particularly alarmed. Neither, he recounts in his new book "Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America," did a pair of locals drinking beer outside his motel room window.
Still, the sky was gray, the clouds churned, and the local news predicted violent storms. Svenvold, a poet from New York, was worried. After discarding the idea of climbing into the motel bathroom and pulling a mattress over his head, he decided instead to flee in his rental van. He drove away from the storm (which he later found out indeed produced tornadoes), before changing his mind and driving back to his motel. The next morning, as he peered into a clear blue sky, he marveled that a beautiful morning could follow such an ominous night.
In "Vanishing Acts," author Jodi Picoult explores whether it is ever right for a parent to steal a child. Ponderous vanished "Vanishing Acts" by Jodi Picoult; Atria Books, $25, 418 pages ANA CABAN Milwaukee Journal Sentinel lemon tree in a dream A that hook loosen feels that the too tidy begins real to is seams the of Delia Hopkins' idyllic life in Jodi Picoult's latest novel, "Vanishing Acts." Delia was raised in New Hampshire by her widowed father. A town councilman, senior citizens' a advocate and amateur magician, Andrew is a model citizen and the kind of parent other children desire as their own. Delia, who does search and rescue for a living, is a parent herself and is engaged to her daughter's father. Along with not having known her mother, the greatest pain of Delia's life has been dealing with her fiance Eric's alcoholism, from which he is recovering.
All that changes when police come knocking on her door to arrest her father for kidnapping her kidnapping, 28 years earlier. Thus, Svenvold's interest in tornadoes was born. To satisfy his curiosity about the storms, he spent May of 2004 on the road with a lively bunch of experienced storm chasers a charismatic IMAX filmographer driving a homemade 7- ton tank he hopes eventually to drive into a tornado; a man with a rare BIG WEATHER TORNADOES IN CHASING HEART OF AMERICA MARK SVENVOLD bone disease searching for respect from God; assorted Weather Channel scientists; and geeky graduate students. He logged thousands of miles throughout South Dakota, Oklahoma, Kansas and I Nebraska, too. "Big Weather" is part travel diary, part history book and part scientific study of a group of people for whom big weather is an obsession and, in a few cases, a livelihood.
The book opens with a description of that fateful night in Oklahoma, dur Svenvold pokes fun at one storm chaser's ing which Svenvold experienced black snowboarding helmet, which he his first tornado warning. From wears in an effort to look cool. He notes there it chronicles meetings the vast number of karaoke bars in the with storm chasers, his attempts to Nebraska Sandhills and wonders how better understand the storms that karaoke mixes with ranching. produce tornadoes and finally his He also describes a 1999 tornado outmonth on the road. break in Oklahoma that killed 40 people The book progresses, for the injured hundreds more.
He describes most part, chronologically. But Ohs' posttraumatic stress disorder, the Svenvold frequently strays from lack of basem*nts in the tornado-alley his path, addressing topics like state of Oklahoma and the possibility global warming and the history that global warming could make the skies of the Weather Channel, giving more volatile. the book a chaotic feel that's ap- 'The book has its faults. Svenvold is propriate, given its subject mat quick to generalize about Midwesterners, ter. about evangelicals, about storm chasers, But the most interesting and his descriptions, while elaborate and parts of "Big Weather," at least to often funny, rarely ring entirely true.
And, people around here, may very well those that focus on Nebraska. Larry Ohs, a Lincoln lawyer and weather spotter who was just outside Hallam when the May 22 tornadoes swept through, explains what he felt as the town was being leveled. Will Togstad, a young farmer from rural Clatonia, remembers what it felt like when his family's farmhouse was lifted off its foundation while he, his brother and two friends huddled in the basem*nt. The book is at once serious and light. Author to read at Lee Mark Svenvold, author of "Big Weather," will read and sign books Saturday at 2 p.m.
at Lee Booksellers, Edgewood Center, 56th Street and Nebraska 2. at times, "Big Weather" reads more like a college term paper than a book written by a poet about the quirks of a subculture. Still, "Big Weather" is a book that at its very least is entertaining. At its best, it could give those of us who live in tornado- prone states like Nebraska a better idea of what to do when big weather strikes in our own back yards. Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or Deaver's 'Garden of Beasts' lets readers reap rewards "Garden of Beasts" by Jeffery Deaver, Simon Schuster, $24.95 BY JOHN ORR Knight Ridder Newspapers Jeffery Deaver has made a nice living writing about sociopaths in novels such as "The Bone Collector" and "'The Coffin Dancer," so it makes sense for him to take on Nazi Germany, which he does in "Garden of Beasts." It's an excellent mystery thriller, filled with Deaver's usual deep research and superior writing, but one that may be a bit too subtle for some of his fans.
Readers who come to Deaver for nigh thrills will find only hints of that scariness in "Garden of Beasts," despite the horrors of his source material. There are deaths, constant danger and clever twists of plot. But there is not the razor's edge of creepiness that puts adrenaline in the blood of readers, as in Deaver's earlier books. Those fans may have to work a little harder to get into this book, but "Garden of Beasts" will reward the effort. It's a fascinating look at Nazi Germany, told largely from what may be a unique perspective: that of an American "button man," Paul Schumann, who's been hired to hit Reinhard Ernst, Hitler's "brains behind rearmament." The powerful men who want Schumann for the job tell him it's because he is fluent in German and they know he's smart: "What we've heard about you is that you check everything two, three times before the job.
You make sure your guns're in perfect shape, you read up about your victims you know when they'll be alone, when they make phone calls, where they eat." That little speech ends up being somewhat ironic later in the book, when Deaver's signature twists and turns heat up, and a possible double- or triple-crosser apparently forgets Schumann's intelligence and ability. What's in it for Schumann? A "get-out-of-jailfree card," al large wad of cash and having his record completely expunged. And two other benefits: He'd been OF UHF VANISHED WAN BESTSELLING AUTHOR a DEAVER OPUS OF BEASTS in the Army in World War 1 I and doesn't like this talk of Hitler starting another war. And he thinks that Ernst's real importance to him is that he will be the last man that he would ever kill. We like Schumann.
He is an honorable killer who targets only bad men, a process he calls "correcting God's mistakes." Incognito on the ocean crossing, he works out with the young boxers on the Olympic team and makes friends with Jesse Owens. But a body hits the cobblestones almost as soon as Schumann gets to Germany. He goes to an alley where he is to meet his contact and is accosted by a man with a gun- who is in turn shot by someone else. The shooter identifies himself as Schumann's contact and tells him "you've been in town for less than a day and already we've managed to kill a Stormtrooper." They take the body's identification papers and depart. Before long, police Inspector Willi Kohl is on the scene.
And he's good. He learns that the tall man seen near where the body was found had Schumann's task is complicated by having to survive in Hitler's Germany. He is at first confused by the yellow paint splashed on some of the homes in the otherwise immaculate city of Berlin. Then he gets in a tussle with some Hitler Youths. Then he falls in love with a starving refugee.
Kohl has to contend with the new levels of bureaucracy and paranoia among government agencies in Berlin. A gifted detective and someone we come to like and admire, Kohl must deal with Nazi fanatics and members of other police agencies more interested in politics than in finding out who killed the man in the alley. And Deaver lets us get to know Ernst, the man intended for Schumann's gun sights. We meet his wife and his children; his chief competitor for favor, Hermann Goring; and his boss, Adolf Hitler. It's all part of Deaver's mastery.
He gives his readers at least something to like about each of the three major players in this story Schumann, Kohl and Ernst before making it clear where the real evil is hiding. whistled for a taxi. "One whistled for dogs and horses. But to summon taxi this way would demean the driver. Did this suggest that the suspect was a foreigner? Or merely rude? He jotted the observation into his notebook." Soon it is a race between Schumann and Kohl.
Schumann wants to ice Ernst and get out of town; Kohl wants to find the killer of the mysterious body. DE Indian BAY we ping a. on JIM Press file photo subplots cloud search for memories That lemon tree dream had led rating the story. Among the irony her best friend, Fitz, to do a little is the "lost" daughter and the kiddigging. He discovers that a girl, napper father who entertains with Bethany Matthews, had been kid- a magician's disappearing act.
napped years ago in Arizona, and Perhaps the most deeply emthat at about the same time, an- bedded subplot is the childhood other girl, Cordelia Hopkins, and her father had died in St. Louis. friendship of Delia, Eric and Fitz. Delia doesn't know who she is a that has grown into twisted love triangle. Though Delia and Eric anymore.
extradited have a daughter and are engaged, Andrew is to Ari- Fitz has never stopped pining for zona, where he must go on trial. Delia. Each time Eric does someDelia makes Eric, who is a lawyer, thing terrible, it is to Fitz that promise to get her father off. But Delia runs. That pattern repeats itin that hot desert sun, Delia must self in Arizona.
confront a forgotten past and a mother she barely remembers be- Then there is Andrew's time in fore forging a new future. prison while he is on trial, which As in the bestselling "My Sis- Picoult uses to examine society ter's Keeper," Picoult raises behind bars. She goes beyond huhave miliating strip searches and atprovocative questions that no clear answers. In "Vanishing tempted rape to explore prison Acts," she explores whether it is gangs, racial tensions even and ever right for a parent to steal a setting up a meth operation. The child.
"In my shoes," Andrew says, of much this would deletion of "how do you know you wouldn't not have harmed the narrative. have done the same thing?" Throughout, Delia recovers Unfortunately, her examina- more lost memories and discovers tion of such a charged topic is her mother could never be the bogged down by contrived coinci- one she had imagined. Beyond dences, weighty subplots and the the lemon tree lie clues to a rudistracting gimmick of using a dif- ined life that may justify a reinferent font for each character nar- vented one. A delicious book on Southern funerals "Being Dead is No Excuse for Store- Bought Mayonnaise: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral" by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hayes, Hyperion, $19.95 BY TISH WELLS Knight Ridder Newspapers Cookbooks come, cookbooks go. Here, death is the excuse to gather a number of Southern Delta traditions and recipes, dress them in salted pecans, ham mousse and avocado mayonnaise, and serve: them at the wake.
Gayden Metcalfe, a lifelong resident of Greenville, has teamed up with writer Charlotte Hayes to produce a short, entertaining cookbook, "Being Dead is No Excuse." It aims at educating. readers on the proper Southern funeral traditions. It is a guide to choosing the appropriate flowers, using the proper language in the obituary (to gloss over the de- Death in Venice brings dire turns of intrigue Donna con Leon, "Blood Atlantic From a Monthly Stone" Press, by 276 Donna by the This tale, Financial the latest Police. in a series of has case files orders and from Rome information to give to a all napages, $23 Brunetti adventures by the Venice- tional agency. Brunetti is done.
BY FRANCIS MOUL based author, is about a new phe- But, of course, he doesn't quit and For the Lincoln Journal Star nomenon in Venice young the episode soon takes on strange African men who make a precari- and dire turns of international inIn Venice, Italy, honest cops ofresort to subterfuge, ous living selling counterfeit de- trigue. ten have to code words and undercover tac- signer handbags on the plazas. It The author is very good at pretics against their own police is just before Christmas when sud- senting the city of Venice, upper structure. Commissario Guido denly five shots phftt out of two si- middle class family life as we learn OOh cops, Brunetti and is he one has of a those short string honest of po lenced San guns Stefano, on the instantly crowded killing Cam- two about the children, and Commissario's even their wife culi- and trusted fellow officers who, gasp, one of the Africans in front of a nary habits. Details about family solve crimes.
This group of American tourists. meals and grocery shopping are actually usual want behavior in a Brunetti is called in to handle welcome tidbits to the action. to is not where everybody corrupt avoids the case and quickly runs into Francis Moul, Ph.D., is an environmental country paying taxes and fears discovery problems with his superior who historian who lives in Lincoln. ceased's indiscretions), and finally making sure you spend eternity BEING DEAD among your rel- is No Excuse atives in the century-old Mayonnaise family graveyard after being glowingly eulo- 10 LOTSA gized at a wellattended fu- neral. At a certain METCALFE point you wonder if the authors are pulling your leg.
The dry, arch comments in cozy Southern tones make it sound like a parody of "Gone With the Wind." "There are people in the Delta who are greatly admired because they always do or say the right thing. One such paragon is Mrs. Lassiter Pierce. We always say how much we admire her because she always holds her head up high, even though her mother ran away with the lion tamer in for a traveling circus." "Being Dead" is a lot of fun to read. Important at a wake are the "dainty pimento cheese sandwiches on whole-wheat bread with the crusts cut off," and "stuffed eggs and delicious cakes that can last for the hours it may take to eulogize the dead." Among the recipes is Bland's Crabmeat dish that starts with a pound of fresh jumbo lump crabmeat, homemade mayonnaise, and admonishes you to use the proper capers, "the smaller, more delicate ones." Just never admit to your dinner guests that you got the recipe for your delicious cake from a book on regional funeral customs.
"Big Weather" BIG Mark Svenvold WEATHER Storm chasers and tornadoes of the Midwest, CHASING HEART OF TORNADOES AMERICA IN 1 THE including coverage of the recent Hallam tornado. Book Talk Signing Saturday, May 21, Edgewood Center, 56th Hwy 2. MARK SVENVOLD 420-1919 to reserve your signed copy. Books Mailed www.leebooksellers.com Anywhere! Lee BOOKSELLERS.
