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AIRPLANE READ OF THE MONTH
Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock (Random House $25. www.beautifulchildren.net) is a sprawling, deviant exploration of contemporary Las Vegas, a pop portrait of a city (and of American culture) that uses the story of a missing teenager as the springboard for a collage of dazzling character studies. After awkward, comic-book crazed Newell Ewing disappears from a late night desert rave, we meet everyone whose lives touch his—from his anguished parents, a convention sales manager and a former showgirl, to the gay friend who will be plagued by guilt over Newell’s disappearance for the rest of his life, to seedy porn moguls and ambisexual punk runaways. Vegas itself is perhaps the book’s most vivid character, and a well-rounded, kaleidoscopic character at that; unlike many fictional glosses on Sin City, Beautiful Children takes us into the bowels of the glittering machinery. Making the likes of Oceans 11 look like mere kiddie pools, Beautiful Children dives deep, comes up dirty, and burns into your mind like a neon sign.

Is your job sapping your soul? Your partner driving you crazy? Your thirst for adventure going unquenched? Your inner child desperate to get out? The recently published second edition of Rosanne Knorr’s The Grown-Up’s Guide to Running Away from Home (Ten Speed Press. $11.95. www.tenspeed.com) offers inspiration, and practical advice, for making major life changes and moving abroad. Whether you’re contemplating a sojourn of several months to a year in a foreign country, or you’re considering an expatriate retirement, this plainspoken handbook can simultaneously fuel your fantasy and provide essential reality checks, helping you come up with a viable plan. Knorr, a Floridian who moved to a village in France for a time, draws on personal experience, interviews with other expatriates, and extensive research to lay out details on the major elements involved in a major relocation. Highlights include: estimating cost-of-living expenses, healthcare coverage options and considerations, handling bank accounts, and choosing where to make your new home base. As valuable as Knorr’s book may prove, it’s important to note that additional research is critical for potential gay expats. Knorr writes about the more than a million Americans who’ve retired in Mexico, where, in some cities, you can actually cover the cost of living on U.S. Social Security payments. She also touts Panama as an emerging retirement hot spot. The Grown-Up’s Guide, however, was written with straight audiences in mind, so it doesn’t tell you that while the Mexican national constitution was amended in 2001 to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, Panama, despite a recent surge in activism, remains rife with institutionalized prejudice. GLBT people there are not allowed on the police force, and they can be fired from a job for being gay or lesbian. Nonetheless, while GLBT people considering a move abroad owe themselves additional due diligence, The Grown-Up’s Guide remains a great way to kick start your contemplation (It’s also a deliciously passive-aggressive prop to leave in plain view of a frustrating boss or boyfriend!).

Popular visual images of Manhattan tend to focus on the glamorous and the gritty: high-sheen, hard edges, aggressive, anonymous crowds, and idiosyncratic individuals. So the surprise, and pleasure, of Robert L. Bowden’s paintings, collected in Manhattan in Detail: An Intimate Portrait in Watercolor (Universe Publishing. $17.95. www.rizzoliusa.com), is how gentle, warm, and approachable they render this often overwhelming island. Bowden’s technique and images provide a healthy reminder that there’s more than one “New York state of mind.” Basking in the play of light on architecture and streetscapes, focusing on stillness rather than motion, these paintings invite viewers to pause, take a deep breath, and reconsider the city. Here’s the intersection of tiny, tucked-away Commerce and Barrow Streets in the West Village, the rusty color of a brownstone townhouse flirting with a pair of bright red STOP signs and the plastic flowers woven into the basket of a bicycle. And here’s the entrance to the main branch of the New York Public Library on a green spring day, the famous sculpted lions seemingly at ease beneath a leafy canopy. Even the congested, enervating bustle of Times Square at night is transformed into a lush mosaic of Kandinsky color. Part of the charm of Bowden’s images is that the overwhelming throngs of people found everywhere in real-life New York have been removed or minimized. Bowden effectively turns Broadway’s hometown into a beautiful empty set, ready for the viewer’s imagination to play upon.

Paintings swirl together with words in another recent transporting art book, The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman (The Penguin Press. $29.95. http://us.penguingroup.com), which collects the monthly illustrated columns Kalman created for a New York Times blog in 2007 (http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com). This quirky, free-associative travelogue finds Kalman wandering the streets of Manhattan, the twisty corridors of her memory, and cities from Paris to Moscow to Tunis. Kalman paints vibrant, funny pictures of souvenirs she’s gathered from around the world: chocolates, hats, a collection of kitchen sponges! She paints snapshots of people she’s met, people she’s dreamed about, and people she’s secretly stalked. A simple peek at the book’s index suggests the delicious mishmash offered up in its pages: “Bathtub…Bauhaus building…Bausch, Pina…Bed, pink…Birthday party…Black stripes…Bobby pins…” This is playful, poetic fun. Browse it anytime for a lovely mental vacation.

[Published: August, 2008]