John Leonard's Literary Picks

CBS News Sunday Morning's John Leonard has been wandering in the autumn books. While it's certainly not the best season ever for American literature, there are always wonderful exceptions. For instance:

• Elmore Leonard's Pagan Babies. in which the usual tough guy with his own moral code goes all the way to Africa. Pretending to be a priest, he will not only witness genocide in Rwanda but also do something about it, before returning to Detroit to get mixed up with organized crime and the wrong woman. What does he do? I quote: "They were sitting at a table in the beer lady's house drinking banana beer and I shot them with my housekeeper's pistol."
• Mary Karr's Cherry, the best book about American adolescence since Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to the poet's astonishing memoir of her East Texas childhood, The Liar's Club. The Liar's Club was about parents as scary as Greek gods. Cherry is about high school, sex, drugs, rock and roll and literature. "Kids in distressed families are great repositories of silence, says Mary Karr, "and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told. But she will tell them all.
  

  New Words For Fall Cosmopolitan's senior book editor John Searles provided his picks for The Early Show.

  
  
• James Atlas' long-awaited biography of Saul Bellow. Atlas knows everything about the novelist, and much of it dismays him. We shoot the rapids from Montreal to Chicago to the Nobel Prize with five wives, 18 books and a thousand cranky opinions. But always there are magic acts of language -- the long irony, the low laugh and the short fuse: "One of the nice things about Hamlet," said Bellow about a writer he didn't like, "is that Polonius gets stabbed."
• And next month at last, Too Far Afield, a huge novel about 400 years of German history and literature by Gunter Grass, the Bad Boy who grew up to be a Grand Old Man, but still throws stones. It's a danse macabre of high culture and secret police, of the writer and the spy. The Tin Drum himself shows up, the Berlin Wall falls down, and we are reminded at brilliant length that whose of us who forget erman history are doomed to have them do it to us all over again.

There's plenty more where these magic carpets came from. They may be the same size as videocassettes, but what a difference: Books are where we go to complicate ourselves.