|
 
|
| ||||
|
Reprinted with permission from Minnesota Monthly magazine.
| ||||||
|
| BY NOW YOU'VE PROBABLY SEEN ENOUGH ROUNDUPS of 1997's best books to get you through any number of cocktail parties and impromptu coffeehouse chats. We're here to perform a more important public service-helping you steer clear of the least distinguished works to have issued from the laptops and scratch pads of our fair state's wordsmiths in 1997. For your added convenience, we've listed our choices by category: NONFICTION: The Swedish Patient, by Marge Glack, R.N. (RubberGlove Editions, Fridley; hardcover, 354 pages, $12.95). Not a harrowing portrait of life in wartime, nor a spellbinding saga of love and redemption, nor a majestic chronicle of mystery, mayhem, and miracles. In fact, it's a textbook. Nurse Glack, who is pictured on the dust jacket standing in front of a door marked "Pathology," has evidently had dealings with a great many patients of Swedish heritage in her 40-plus years as a caregiver. "Being as I have done all of my nursing in the Minnesota area," she writes in her preface, "it has just seemed to work out that way." Chapter titles include "Where Does It Hurt (It's All Right to Tell Me)," "Interpreting the Wince," and "You Don't Have Anything I Haven't Seen Before, Einar." FICTION: Midnight in the Rooftop Garden of Good and Evil: A Channel 4000 Mystery, by Colleen Shelbarolli (TelePrompt Press, Minneapolis; paperback, 86 pages, $10.95). Women are disappearing from a local TV newsroom-first a perky anchor, then a perky meteorologist. Is it murder, or just a sleazy sweeps-month stunt? The cover of this slender whodunit is festooned with breathless blurbs and lurid come-ons promising nonstop thrills and plot developments that could shake any hometown to its very foundations. However, the text is ponderous, unfocused, ungrammatical, and poorly spelled. Most people will stop watching-er, reading-long before the inconclusive dénouement. MEMOIR: Say Cheese, Hubert! True Confessions of a Minnesota Paparazzo, by Milo "Hitch" Twitchell (BlueDot Books, Edina; paperback, 183 pages, $13). First published in 1982 under the title My Life as a Shutterbug, this genial, meandering memoir has been shamelessly repackaged by the publisher in the wake of Princess Diana's death and the ensuing paparazzi furor. As most Minnesotans over 50 know, Twitchell-who was nicknamed Hitch during his early days as a wedding photographer-was never a paparazzo; indeed, his legendary "Salad Daze?" photo, which ran in papers from coast to coast, was one he was not particularly proud of. As he tells it, The whole thing was an accident. It was at a DFL picnic in '67, when HHH was VP. Old Hubert was shaking hands and kissing babies and eating potato salad, and I guess that salad had been out in the sun too long. I was standing there snapping pictures, and I could see him getting real green around the gills. All at once you could see he needed a receptacle of some kind, so he just grabbed this lady's hat and let rip, and instinctively I kept right on shooting. ... I've always felt bad about that photograph, because I think it may have cost him the presidency.BUSINESS: Don't Get Your Tongue Stuck to the Pump Handle If You Want to Have Spicy Food for Lunch, by Marvy McHey (BizBuzz Books, North Oaks; hardcover, 202 pages, $27.95). Yet another compendium of warmed-over platitudes and borrowed pearls of dubious wisdom from the indefatigable McHey, whose St. Paul-based company, Eyelet One Enterprises, is, according to Forbes, "the world's leading producer of eyelets, grommets, and other cord-guidance systems." If you've read any of McHey's previous books-such as Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Choir: Singing for Your Supper in a Tone-Deaf World or Don't Cramp My Smile! and Other Marvy McHey Marketing Mantras or McHey While the Sun Shines or No Man Is an Eyelet-well, let's just say you can safely skip this one. POETRY: Love Me, Love My Smelt, by Ferrol Gauffre (MythBucket Press, Stillwater; hardcover, 42 pages, $16). Did you think the "Wild Man" movement was passé? Not hardly, as Ferrol Gauffre might say. Gauffre's poems-sporting misbegotten influences that range from Robert Bly to ZZ Top, from Walt Whitman to Hugh Hefner-represent the nadir of the genre (or perhaps the apotheosis, depending on your point of view). We quote the title poem here in its entirety; it's our way of saying "Better luck next time" to Minnesota writers and readers alike. Love me, love my smelt;
| ||||
 © Copyright 1997, Minnesota Public Radio. | ||||||