Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Summer days filled with simmering titles

Friday, June 2, 2000 | 8:40 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

As always, the onset of summer swelter inspires indolent behavior. Sustained tasks are out of the question. The book columnist's fingers drum listlessly beside the keyboard, all motivation beaded up and evaporating from his damp forehead. His brain is double-parked in a no-loading zone -- the book columnist can barely handle a single thought, let alone a linked succession of enough of them to add up to a column.

Here, then, a miscellany of short items, a grab bag, a vigorous emptying of the notebook:

Perfect paperback: The cliche of summer reading is that it should be a pleasant diversion, lightweight entertainment, nothing more. Nothing, God forbid, educational or too intellectually demanding.

We here at Shelf Life never subscribed to that theory -- not completely, anyway, and certainly not where someone could overhear us. So we're always happy to find a book with the throwaway fun of the traditional beach read, yet garnished with just enough intellectual milieu to flatter our absurdly inflated sense of our own intelligence. Iain Pears' "Giotto's Hand" (Berkley Crime, $6.50) is the book we're looking for.

For one thing, it's a mass-market paperback mystery, so it has that lack of permanence essential to the summer book, but it's about art thievery, which is, you know, cultured. It's set in exotic Italy and not-particularly-exotic England, and features Italian art-theft investigator Flavia di Stefano and her boyfriend Jonathan Argyll. A minor investigation puts them on the trail of a fabled master art thief. Mischief and dead bodies ensue.

Pears, acclaimed for his historical mystery "An Instance of the Fingerpost," keeps the action moving and the twists twisting satisfactorily. If some of the writing seems rushed, in need of another pass through the word processor, the characters are at least cut from a thicker variety of cardboard than is usual in these affairs. The book is diverting and fun, plus you pick up a bit about art, which gives you a sunburned leg up on those Jackie Collins readers.

Two nonsummer summer books: July 11 will be a banner day here at Shelf Life, where we plan to read a few brainy books even as we pop paperbacks like candy. That's the scheduled release date for two nonfiction volumes we've been waiting for. One, Michael Paterniti's "Driving Mr. Albert" (Dial Press, price TBA), has been mentioned in this space before, but deserves another plug.

It's the true story of Paterniti's transcontinental road trip with the physician who -- we're not making this up -- kept Albert Einstein's brain after the great physicist's autopsy. It's in the trunk, burp-sealed in Tupperware. The two are delivering it to one of Einstein's descendants. Paterniti, a fine and lyrical journalist, uses the occasion to muse about life, science, belief, and, one hopes, the brain-carrying capabilities of household plasticware.

The other book is Ron Rosenbaum's "The Secret Parts of Fortune" (Random House, $27.95), a collection of his outstanding essays and journalism, including classic pieces on Yale's secretive Skull and Bones Society, early hackers, the curse of the Dead Sea Scrolls and, of course, "The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal." You'll want to mark July 11 on your calendar just to find out what that's all about.

Looking further ahead: Soon -- not soon enough -- the heat will subside a little, you'll be able to grip your steering wheel without asbestos driving gloves, and we'll know fall has arrived. And with it will come a fresh wave of big books.

We just happen to have a little list. And we do mean little; not much info is available yet. In some cases, we don't even have a title. Just enough to whet your appetite.

The great Barbara Kingsolver ("Animal Dreams," "The Bean Trees," "The Poisonwood Bible") is said to be readying a new novel for fall release, although we haven't been able to run down the particulars. Same goes for word that Margaret Salinger, daughter of "Catcher in the Rye" author J.D., will join the parade of Salinger tell-alls.

At least we know the title of Elmore Leonard's next wry crime adventure, slated to appear in September: "Pagan Babies." Sometime in the fall, Gore Vidal will release his latest, "The Golden Age."

Mary Karr, whose memoir "The Liar's Club" helped set off the memoir boom of the '90s, hopes to repeat in the '00s with "Cherry: A Memoir." And status chronicler Tom Wolfe, who gave us "radical chic," "the Me Decade" and "the right stuff," will gather a batch of his essays in "Hooking Up."

Sheep in Wolfe's white clothing: The aforementioned Wolfe appears paired with Mark Twain on the cover of the special Summer 2000 commemorative edition of Harper's, celebrating the magazine's 150th year. Impressive billing.

Last week I complained that I was having trouble finishing Wolfe's keynote address in this issue, "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists." I'm happy to say I finally bagged that summit. I'm sorry to say it was hardly worth the effort.

It seems Wolfe has a few things to get off his white-suited chest about ... Marxist academics and political correctness. (They're bad!) He blames them for the fact that no one seems excited that the world has gone from the American Century to, by golly, yet another American Century!

Wolfe mounts a stirring attack on Marxist academics, with their reflexive anti-capitalism and disdain for patriotism, and their determination to be indignant on behalf of oppressed ethnics, women, gays and so on. Such concerns have blinkered them to the true greatness of America, Wolfe says. It's not that he isn't persuasive. It's that he's Tommy Come Lately -- this issue has been hammered to death. I don't think I can choke down one more stirring attack on political correctness.

One expects better from Wolfe. Maybe the heat was getting to him, too.