Year: 2006

Globalsecurity.org lists forty conflicts—uprisings and insurgencies, civil wars, and occupations—currently playing out around the world. Lori Grinker has spent the past fifteen years portraying their human costs, traveling among some thirty countries to document both the physical carnage and the psychological damage. The result is a kind of perverse twist on the legendary Family of Man exhibition from the 50s: Instead of promoting a universal understanding of shared humanity, it conveys the universality of human conflict. Portrayed through both large-scale color photographs and interviews, Grinker’s veterans include a British man still unable to talk about fighting in Korea, a female Bangladeshi student who fought as a man in the early 70s, and a Sri Lankan girl who was promised karate lessons if she joined up with the Tamil Tigers. 165 13th Ave, N.E., Minneapolis; 612-824-5500; www.mncp.org

You’d think the power of Dickens’ holiday workhorse would have been diluted by the ceaseless adaptations, knock-offs, and rip-offs it has inspired over the 163 years since it was published. Yet the irony of the Christmas Carol cottage industry is that despite so many crass, overblown, exploitative (or just plain lazy) versions that risk sabotaging the message of Dickens’ story, none has managed to dent its essential magic. Dickens’ combination of a compelling story, an indelible sense of place, terrifically drawn characters, joy, and redemption makes A Christmas Carol worth returning to year after year for fresh rewards and familiar pleasures. And while there have been scads of excellent illustrated versions over the years, P. J. Lynch’s watercolor-and-gouache spreads (at right) in this handsome new edition are both splendid and subtle: alternately teeming and forlorn, with just the right balance of darkness and light.

“I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a ferris wheel,” the incomparable E. B. White once wrote. This was the man who gave us the little girl named Fern, Wilbur the pig, Templeton the rat, and Charlotte, a spider who happens to be one of the most wondrous creations in all of fiction. No home should be without a copy of White’s Charlotte’s Web. There’s a new movie adaptation coming out, but skip it and read this beautiful new edition that’s tied to the movie release. Or buy it for someone you love. Read it and weep: “The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.”

Who better to host a holiday show than a man who looks like Santa? The bearded and barrel-chested Bill Holm explores holiday phenomena with MPR’s Heather McElhatton and a collection of other guests, including musician Charlie Parr and writer R. D. Zimmerman. From the small town of Minneota, Minnesota, Holm is all homegrown wholesomeness, except for those stints in China, Africa, and Iceland, and that tenure at a historically black college. And then there are those radical leftist rants … but politics aside, Holm’s writings, such as The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth and Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays, explore the themes of place and heritage, telling his ancestors’ stories and reflecting on different cultures. His cosmopolitan bent and deep sense of tradition should make Holm’s commentary more than the usual tree-and-menorah nostalgia. 651-290-1200; www.fitzgeraldtheater.org

Having won the Pulitzer Prize by focusing on the miniscule in his phenomenal book The Ants, Wilson turns to the macro with The Creation. Long interested in the intersection of humans and nature, Wilson made a name for himself in 1975 with Sociobiology, a foundational text on evolutionary psychology that got him branded by some as a Nazi and racist; however, he has since regained public acceptance as a champion of biodiversity. A respected scientist who is also an accomplished writer is a rare species, indeed, and with The Creation, Wilson tackles the survival of his chosen subject. Written as a series of letters to a Southern Baptist pastor, the book ardently celebrates nature’s complexity and calls humankind to fight for, rather than about, creation.

It’s been a banner year for what highbrows call sequential art, what with a new volume of the splendid and absolutely sui generis Kramer’s Ergot and Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. The biggest revelation of all, though, might be Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time, a beautifully designed collection of mind-blowing work by assorted whackos and obscurities. Most of the strips and panels Nadel has assembled have never been reprinted before, and some date from the earliest days of the twentieth century; in a few cases, he got his hands on the only surviving copies. While the majority of the artists in Art Out of Time will be unknown to casual and even hardcore fans, there’s a consistently freewheeling aesthetic at work here, and a formal daring that’s light-years ahead of its time.

Here’s one of those big, fat books that seem designed to either shame you or make you feel daunted, if not entirely stupid. The title is a scold, really, masquerading as a title—is that “Must” truly necessary? And an idiot can do the math: Are you realistically going to find the time to read 1,001 books before you die, let alone these 1,001 books? But book geeks are, of course, entirely helpless to resist such challenges—particularly when the list includes some doorstops (The Man Without Qualities), some dogs (American Psycho), and some books no sane person should have even heard of (The Albigenses). Still, that’s all part of the fun, and at the very least, the entries for each selection provide intellectual fake-book fodder for cocktail-party boors and dilettantes of every stripe.

Another holiday story comes loping in on its donkey—this one obviously hoping to reap a box-office triumph similar to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ but without that movie’s politics or gore (or big-name director). Shooting in many of the same locales as Passion, The Nativity Story seeks to tell the simple tale of Mary and Joseph come to Nazareth to deliver the baby Jesus—and show the world that you can praise the Lord without whips and nails. Director Catherine Hardwicke’s previous work has been limited to well-regarded explorations of the world of troubled teens (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown), a résumé that could make her the ideal choice for this story about a young woman impregnated (and no doubt tormented) by God.

Touchstone execs are hoping you’ll ignore Mel Gibson’s recent spate of troubles and concentrate instead on his newest fusion of religion and bloodletting. A heartwarming adventure timed to a holiday release, it’s the tale of a young warrior’s quest to save his family … all the while being tortured and mutilated (kind of like Christ). The Aussie madman’s on record as suggesting that his film is a parable about the decline of major civilizations, like one that “send[s] guys off to Iraq for no reason.” Of course, it’s now public knowledge that the people whom a drunken Gibson blames for said decline are not the gentiles in the White House.

In 1976, the Maysles brothers followed Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie around their dilapidated mansion, listening to these cousins of Jackie Kennedy Onassis ramble on about everything from fashion to philosophy to the vermin infesting their home. The resulting footage became Grey Gardens, a film whose status has ballooned from peripheral culthood into a Broadway musical and, soon, a major motion picture starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. The Beales of Grey Gardens is a sequel of sorts, cobbling together some of the footage edited out of the original—further odd and often funny gems of wisdom from the two sages.