If ever there were a moment for Americans to fall in love with the incredible legacy of Franco-Belgian comics -- or la bande dessinée -- that time might be now, given the high profile of Steven Spielberg's forthcoming Tintin film. But the imperviousness of US audiences to Gallic funnybooks cannot be overestimated, given that they have already turned their collective nose up at so much, from Jacques Tardi to Lewis Trondheim to Asterix, all of which remain minority passions in this country. In further evidence, Luc Besson's 2010 film The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, adapted from Tardi, still has not been deemed release-worthy in the USA. Nevertheless, any hope at all of seducing new readers in America must rely on sheer availability of the texts, in attractive new translations, and no one is doing more along these lines than the publisher Fantagraphics.

Reading Tomatoland, Barry Estabrook's hypnotic account of the modern tomato agribusiness and its outliers, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Or, more precisely, alternating chapters provoke either tears or astonished guffaws. While we can chuckle at the thought of newly picked Franken-tomatoes falling off speeding trucks, hitting the pavement at 60 MPH and remaining pristine, accounts of hideous birth defects experienced by the children of migrant tomato-field workers exposed to dozens of toxic chemicals, and the slave-like conditions they labor under, is another meal of misery entirely.

Would you like to know the definition of an adventure story? A beautiful Sicilian princess of medieval times is sleeping on the deck of a ship--curtained from prying eyes, and surrounded by her drowsy, similarly beautiful handmaidens--when her ship is rammed by another vessel manned by traitors from her father's court intent on kidnapping her. Plunged into the sea, she swims for land, where she sets a trap for one of the pursuing conspirators. She kills the big man by snaring him and holding him underwater till he drowns. She steals his clothes and armor and sword, makes her way back to the remaining assailant's craft, rouses the surviving loyalists, disarms the second villain in a fair swordfight, declares a boastful victory, and heads for home.

Lee Child writes: "They say the past is another country, and in my case it really was: provincial England at the end of the fifties and the start of the sixties, the last gasp of the post-war era, before it surrendered to the tectonic shift sparked by the Beatles.  My family was neither rich nor poor, not that either condition had much meaning in a society with not much to buy and not much to lack.  We accumulated toys at the rate of two a year: one on our birthdays, and one at Christmas.  We had a big table radio (which we called "the wireless") in the dining room, and in the living room we had a black and white fishbowl television, full of glowing tubes, but there were only two channels, and they went off the air at ten in the evening, after playing the National Anthem, for which some families stood up, and sometimes we saw a double bill at the pictures on a Saturday morning, but apart from that we had no entertainment."

There's nothing like a good shot of clear-eyed, upbeat globalism to shatter the dreary national myopia and restore our sense of wonder about what really is an amazing contemporary world. Cyrus Farivar's new book provides just such an injection of multicultural journalistic insight. His thesis is remarkably simple and stated clearly in his captivating introduction: "The most fascinating examples of internet-related changes are not happening in Silicon Valley, but rather in far-off, forgotten or overlooked corners of the globe." To illustrate his point, Farivar fixes on four places: South Korea, Senegal, Estonia and Iran. And before you can say "optimized link state routing protocol with frame relay packet switching," he's off!

Like a valiant explorer setting out through wild uncharted jungles to uncover a long-lost Mayan ruin whose actual existence is only half verifiable, Lori Lee Wilson embarks boldly through a dense thicket of myth and legend in search of the facts surrounding Mexican-American folk hero Joaquín Murrieta, who was either "a light-skinned romantic Robin Hood or Zorro type; a dangerous criminal who died violently; [or] an 'avenging angel' and guerilla rebel chief at war with the Americans and their capitalist tendency to tread on others for the sake of a quick profit." She emerges from her archaeological expedition with the clearest portrait of the man seen in perhaps his whole long and colorful posthumous career, a depiction that weighs all the evidence with care before venturing a composite.

Lynne Tillman's stealthy stories exhibit a quiet, composed delicacy that conceals a titanium armature and a burning fusion reactor core. Her work reminds me of the sculptures of Charles Krafft: elegant porcelain representations of deadly hand grenades and pistols.

Disease wants to be information--specifically, visual, spatial information. That's the best way our brains can ingest the scientific facts and reach fresh conclusions. Whether it be the symptoms afflicting an individual projected onto the schematic of a single body (such as we see in the groundbreaking work of Vesalius, with his De Humani Corporis Fabrica), or the agglomerated cases of a rampant disease charted across a geographical region, the most efficient and useful way to comprehend, control, and forecast sickness is to establish a relation between biology and cartography. Such is the thesis of Tom Koch's Disease Maps, a fascinating historical study of how humanity has come to understand epidemics in terms of maps.

Alex Toth was no Jack Kirby. He never achieved fame through the creation of world-renowned superheroes. No legion of fanboys ever followed his byline. He was no fount of cosmic ideas. He disdained most publicity, and was more prone to morbidly dwell on what he saw as his failures, rather than boast of any triumphs. And he was not a team player or a happy camper when he felt slighted or misunderstood, which happened more and more often as he aged.

Ah, the faithful and grateful audience of a beloved author of books for young readers! The favorite books of childhood remain part of our souls forever, unlike those respectable tomes we amuse ourselves with as adults. And the deaths of YA creators can hit hard. Notice of the death of YA fantasist Brian Jacques (he died in February 2011 at age 71) evoked remarkably emotional responses, unanimous in their praise and shared sense of anguished loss.

That we are technologically impoverished when it comes to the aggression of nature in general – and the Mississippi River specifically – is a cautionary thematic in American life.  Our relative helplessness in the face of today’s cresting is a reminder of that, and – as far as this column is concerned – is also a call to explore some books and music that capture our fraught relationship to the river’s duality of prelapsarian calm and hellish ferocity.  With some works related to the region’s non-fluid history, and the future of climate changed, tossed in for good measure.



With this stimulating, surprising, meticulously researched book, Alexis Madrigal confers on the green technology movement the valuable gift of historical perspective, a roadmap of past failures and triumphs that can help our society today to form a sensible prospectus for our future survival and escape from eco-apocalypse. Digging deep into the record of alternate energy schemes and projects extending as far back as the 1830s, Madrigal lays down a saga of visionary inventors, enthusiastic or fickle citizens, millionaire robber-baron investors, self-serving charlatans, far-seeing or short-sighted bureaucrats, hardy pioneers, altruistic saviors, and starry-eyed philosophers, all of whom played a part at one time or another in striving to deliver new and improved sources of power to the species and liberate us from drudgery--while hopefully getting rich in the meantime.

The author photo of Ken Babbs on the dust jacket of his first solo novel, Who Shot the Water Buffalo?, depicts a jovial, burly, silver-maned fellow wearing an insignia-laden Armed Forces leather jacket. He looks like anybody's unassuming Foxy Grandpa, ready for a night out with his bowling league or a BBQ at the AmVets. But of course, Babbs is operating undercover. One of the original Merry Pranksters, a true Child of the Sixties, legatee of the Ken Kesey canon, Babbs is more Holy Goof than AARP resident of Florida-as-God's-Waiting-Room. Now he's chosen to return to his fabled past--specifically, his Vietnam War service in the early 1960s--in order to deliver a novel based on his firsthand experiences of that grim and absurd conflict, with an emphasis on the absurdity.

A utopian fantasy: If I were a billionaire, I would purchase one copy of The New Cool for every politician in the United States, from Podunk town council member to POTUS.  Then, employing the arcane superpowers which Glenn Beck imagines George Soros possesses, I would force each politico to put aside any and all tasks, no matter how vital, until they had read and deeply internalized Bascomb's inspiring narrative.

At nearly 400 pages, Duncan the Wonder Dog, the debut graphic novel by self-taught wunderkind Adam Hines is merely the opening salvo in what the artist forecasts will be a 2600-page epic in nine volumes, to be completed over the next twenty-five years,  all about the fate of sentient beasts in an alternate timeline (otherwise resembling our own era) where "animal rights" means arguing with a weeping cow about why it needs to die for the benefit of its human overlords.  Not since Dave Sim launched Cerebus on its three- decades-long road to completion has a creator embarked on such an ambitious and perhaps foolishly grandiose project.  But judging by the obsessive meticulousness, craft and talent on display in Duncan, Hines stands a good chance of fulfilling his vision, barring a chance mortal encounter with a rogue pitbull objecting to any of his sentiments.

Surely you recall the trippy climax to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Astronaut Dave Bowman's psychedelic voyage through the hyperspace tunnel, and his awakening in a Louis XVI bedroom, aged and dying, only to be rejuvenated by the Monolith as a space fetus? Well, Blake Butler's There Is No Year, his first novel outside the small press realm, is pretty much that whole sequence replayed one hundred times in succession, occasionally slowed down to one frame per minute. But this analogy has to take into account the following highly distinctive changes.

Dave Bowman is now three generically named individuals, "mother," "father," and "son," a family of shamblers suffering from various teratomas, fluctuating body parts, mental lacunae, spastic tics, insatiable appetites, and catastrophic identity disorders.

One posthumous measure of a person's life is how often you imagine his impossible return to deal with some event he never lived to encounter. You picture his reactions, his advice, his sage commentary and humorous asides.  For instance, I think about Mark Twain's hypothetical take on current events several times a week. That's the legacy of Twain's achievements and character.

By this measure, I believe, famed physicist Richard Feynman still bulks large in the collective psyche of a certain segment of mankind. Nearly twenty-five years after his death, those who knew him personally and those who enjoyed only a book-based familiarity with the man are still imagining how he would react to new scientific discoveries, new headlines, and new cultural trends. How we could have used his irreverent insights into the Fukushima nuclear disaster, for instance.

Elaine Scarry, best known for her meditation on The Body in Pain, here offers a slim yet gravid essay that occupies a curious nexus.  It is partly a work of sociological analysis, on the order of Bowling Alone.  It is partly an appeal to the power of philosophy and rationality, akin to Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy.  It is partly a work of speculative neuroscience examing our thought processes, such as Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine.  It is partly a controlled rant (pardon the oxymoron) that seeks to speak truth and justice to power, along the lines of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.  And it is partly a dry-as-dust work from some federal agency like the Congressional Government Accountability Office, documenting with reams of precise statistics why we should all eat more vegetables.  Luckily for the reader, the other four passionate actors in the troupe sit heavily upon this bluenose lecturer and only let him get in an intermittent squeak or three.

Simone Muench is a Chicago poet by way of Louisiana. Her third book of poems, Orange Crush, sets its tone early with her opening lines: "Trouble came and trouble / brought greasy, ungenerous things." The tempting call in this poem, "Hex," evokes a depravity which sets the stage for Muench's central characters: London's seventeenth-century "orange girls," who sat outside theaters selling china oranges for six-pence each--or, more accurately, selling themselves to the audience, to the men, to the trouble to come.

If I might paraphrase Lady Macbeth, who mused sweetly upon one of her victims, "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him," I would suggest that a delighted reader's first reaction upon finishing Holly Tucker's captivating, enlightening and mildly horrifying Blood Work might be, "Yet who would have thought the history of blood transfusion to have had so much sheer entertainment in it."

Perhaps you recall the famous story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."  In that fable, the steady  accumulation of thickly detailed invented descriptions and faux encyclopedia entries relating to an imaginary place eventually results in the literal instantiation of the fictive world.  Well, in The Cardboard Valise, Ben Katchor's latest graphic novel, which consists of an intricately interwoven yet loosely collated collection of one-page strips (some of which do cohere to form more extended shaggy-dog narratives), artist and storyteller Katchor has achieved the goal Borges only imagined.

It's easy to see why Patrick Rothfuss's sumptuous, soft-spoken, understated debut novel caused a stir upon its appearance in 2007 and went on to become a fantasy bestseller and engender a passel of fans clamoring for the sequel, which arrives now in the form of The Wise Man's Fear.  Not only was it thoughtfully conceived, well-written and cleverly presented, but it also stood out thematically and stylistically from the competition, that crowd of hairy-chested, brawling, gore-splattered, epic-fantasy lager louts more at home on the battlefield and in decadent court chambers than in Rothfuss's chosen fresh-faced University setting.

Why are we the way we are? That simple question has bedevilled humanity since the dawn of recorded history, provoking various answers from philosophers, mystics, theologians, fabulists, humorists, cynics, politicians, and, only in the last 300 years or so, from naturalists and scientists.  The latest discipline that seeks to unriddle the mysteries of human behavior and mentality, abilities and customs, is that of evolutionary biology, or evolutionary anthropology.  Taking a thoroughly up-to-date Darwinism as their core set of tenets, these practitioners seek to tease out the formative influences from our hominid past—and beyond—that endowed us with ingrained behaviors and modes of thought that often translate directly into the institutions and cultural practices of our everyday lives.

Were you aware that William Burroughs wrote a young- adult novel starring Encyclopedia Brown back in 1976?  Or that, in their prime, the Firesign Theater produced a whole album involving an invasion by lizard-men from an invisible island?  Or that Roger Corman filmed, in only six days, a script by Roald Dahl based on a lost story by George MacDonald titled At the Beck of the Norse Whim?  No?  Oh, that's right:  you don't have access to those alternate timelines where such things are solid facts.  But apparently Daniel Pinkwater does.

"Their goal is to make old structures of feeling signify anew," wrote Robert Christgau last summer about Arcade Fire and their album The Suburbs. Sunday night the record picked up the Grammy for Album of the Year.  In "Maturity for Modern Kids"  Robert Christgau gives his take on why this "exceptionally principled" Montreal band is also capable of getting a jaded crowd to reach for the sky.

Eric Siblin's cleverly dovetailed and enticingly readable investigative account of the famous rediscovery of J. S. Bach's masterful scores for solo cello, at the hands of Pablo Casals in the late nineteenth century, and their subsequent elevation to the consensual apex of musical beauty, puts paid to the quip (supposedly first made by comedian Martin Mull) that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture."  The image of misguided critical futility inherent in Mull's comparison has no place with a writer like Siblin, who can charmingly and empathetically convey the sweet sounds of a live performance through the medium of black marks on a white page—which, ironically, is exactly how Bach's music was first conceived, transcribed and precariously transmitted down the centuries.

Our intrepid correspondent, Adam Hanft, enters the stacks and returns with some timely reading on Egypt past and present.

If you can read the succinct yet jam-packed teaser of an initial chapter in this first book-length biography of the painter Alice Neel, in which author Phoebe Hoban enticingly and zestily catalogues the highlights of Neel's career, and then still resist plunging immediately into the text that follows-well, you must be an unimaginative, unromantic Philistine of the grossest sort.  Neel's life in tantalizing outline -- born with the twentieth century, artistically active in every decade from the 1920s to the 1980s, stylistically adventuresome, uncompromisingly principled, mentally eccentric, bohemian by nature, acquainted with many famous fellow creators and colorful lowlife characters, adopted by feminists as a standard-bearer, finally endowed with elderly fame -- constitutes the archetypical painterly arc, a narrative of mythic proportions.  How could anyone with even a shred of imagination and joie de vivre fail to fall headfirst into this story?

Urgent health bulletins are issued, warning parents to beware of their children swallowing tiny magnets, which can lead to perforated bowels.  The internet becomes fascinated by tales of a pea sprouting and growing in a man's lung, or an aspirated piece of a plastic cup from Wendy's causing two years' worth of breathing trouble in an inattentive individual.  The x-ray of a dog with an enormous kitchen knife occupying almost the whole length of its innards mesmerizes the random web-surfer's eye.  A video of Michel Lotito, known as "Monsieur Mangetout," racks up a quarter-million views on YouTube.

In my later teenage years, my aspirations toward becoming a writer were crystallized in large part by viewing a feature in the surrepetitiously obtained, newly minted issue of Playboy for November 1971.  The article that struck me so forcefully was a profile of Henry Miller and his joyfully unrepentant and hedonistic lifestyle, earned after decades of hard knocks and bold prose, of which I then knew little and cared less.  The most striking, even surreal photograph of the whole piece showed a fully clothed Miller, aged eighty, playing ping pong with a naked woman, identified as one Candice Thayer.  Any hormone-stoked would-be male author could only dream of attaining such a vocational heaven, made all the more desirable by its supreme frivolity and the apparent absence of any actual writing chores.