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The Best of 1999/Books
Friday, December 31, 1999 By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor
It was a year of moderation in books, a year when the best novels were understated and the best nonfiction solid as granite.
In the region, 1999 was the busiest of the century as local authors cranked out mysteries and histories by the barge-load.
Michael Chabon's 1987 novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," anticipated the trend here in crime fiction. Mysteries were published by Tom Lipinski, Edie Claire, James Tucker, Trudy Lebovitz, Martin Smith, Karen Rose Cercone, Robert Aiello and K.C. Constantine.
Jane McCafferty and Randall Silvis published novels while Kathleen George, Lester Goran and Jim Daniels had short-story collections.
Poetry from academic presses was provided by Samuel Hazo and Lynn Emanuel and the University of Pittsburgh Press contributed a major work on Pittsburgh history, "Witness to The Fifties."
Nationally, the business of America dominated the nonfiction category as three of the year's best dealt with major companies and the people who ran them.
Jean Strouse's "Morgan," her massive study of financier J.P. Morgan, was an impressive work, followed closely by "The Trust," the story of the New York Times by Susan Tift and Alex Jones and "At Any Cost" by Thomas O'Boyle, an assistant managing editor at the Post-Gazette, who chronicled Jack Welch and General Electric.
United States' tragic involvement in Somalia made for powerful reading in Mark Bowden's "Blackhawk Down," the account of how American soldiers aboard a helicopter were killed. The images effectively hamstrung further U.S. military action in Africa.
Back home, journalist Tracy Kidder profiled the central Massachusetts town of Northampton with a novelist's eye for drama and character in "Home Town."
Historian Garry Wills took a broader view in "A Necessary Evil" in which he incisively analyzed how and why Americans have traditionally opposed the efforts of the federal government to assert itself.
Another historian, Briton John Keegan, also handled a massive subject with exacting thoroughness in "The First World War."
Three biographies round out the top 10: "Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2" by Blanche Weisen Cook, "Robert Frost" by Jay Parini and "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley" by Peter Guralnick.
The fiction list finds a nice blend of the familiar and the new, starting with another powerful novel from Scott Turow, "Personal Injuries," his philosophical look at the seamier side of the law, personal-injury attorneys.
Pittsburgh native Stewart O'Nan continued to write exciting and compelling fiction with "A Prayer for The Dying." It's a biblical tale of death on the Great Plains following the Civil War.
Bouncing back from her rambling novel "Accordion Crimes," Anne Proulx crafted a fine and moving collection of short stories in "Close Range." Her tales of modern cowboys grappling with an unforgiving landscape are her best writing.
Barry Unsworth is a novelist with incredible range who's never sat still. "Losing Nelson" is a gripping vision of what happens when illusion fades.
Unsworth's fellow Briton Pat Barker has been mining the psychological effects of war on the survivors in her "Ghost Road" trilogy. This time, she shifts to modern times in "Another World," but war remains at the novel's dark center.
South African J.M. Cotzee is another writer dealing with modern times, in this case, his nation after apartheid. "Disgrace," though just over 200 pages long, is a gripping account of contemporary South Africa.
It's back to the 19th century with Frederick Busch, whose "The Night Inspector" is a darkly delineated vision of America in the 1860s.
The top 10 list is capped by three new American women led by Lucy Honig and her short-story collection, "The Truly Needy." It won the Drue Heinz Prize conducted by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Melissa Banks caused a stir with "The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing," short stories on romance in Manhattan in the 1990s told in a funny, distinctive style.
A rural town slowly dying thanks to an underground mine fire is not fiction, as Pennsylvanians know, but the image becomes an effective metaphor for Lauren Wolk, whose first novel, "Those Who Favor Fire," is a moving story of second-chances.
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