DISCOVERIES

MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA

By James McBride

Riverhead Books: 288 pp., $24.95

“Miracle at St. Anna,” by the author of “The Color of Water,” is set in Tuscany, Italy, during World War II. It is the story of four members of G Company, in the all-black 92nd Division, nicknamed the Buffalo Soldiers. They are stationed in the Apuane Alps.

Hector Negron, the radioman, is a 21-year-old Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem. Bishop Cummings is a minister from Kansas City whose main gift is the power of speech: Watching him preach is like “watching a steam pump sucking coal on a hot July day.” Second Lt. Aubrey Stamps, skin the “color of chestnuts,” is a champion swimmer back home in Arlington, Va. Sam Train, from North Carolina, is 6 feet 6 and weighs 275 pounds. The men in his company call him “Diesel” or “Sniper Bait” because he is all heart and not too brainy.

On Train’s first day in Florence, he finds a marble head that the Germans shot off a statue on the Ponte Santa Trinita. Commissioned in 1590, the statue has seen its share of miracles. Train carries the head in a net bag on his hip and rubs it for good luck. He believes that it is the head that makes him invisible to the German soldiers. He is knocked out by an explosion while crossing a canal on foot, and Bishop sweet-talks him back to consciousness (Train, after all, owes Bishop $1,400 from poker games).

Regaining consciousness, Train spots a 6-year-old Italian boy hiding in a barn. When they are attacked and a beam falls on the boy, Train runs into the barn and lifts the beam off the boy, who opens his eyes and thinks he has seen a “chocolate giant.” For his part, Train believes the boy is an angel and carries him, accompanied by the three other soldiers, to St. Anna, where they take refuge in the home of some villagers, awaiting orders from their captain while 12,000 German troops make their way toward the village.

The war in central Italy, McBride writes, was fought “by Gurkhas, Italians, Brazilians, British, Africans, even Russian defectors, and most of all, by American Negroes, who were convinced that the white man [American and German] was trying to kill them.” The novel is full of miracles, of friendship, of salvation and survival. But mostly, “Miracle at St. Anna” is about the love Train and the boy have for each other. Both are blessed, and for all their differences, they recognize each other.

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HELL’S BOTTOM, COLORADO

By Laura Pritchett

Milkweed Editions: 142 pp., $14.95

In almost all of Laura Pritchett’s stories in this collection about a family of ranchers in Colorado, there is a wounded animal: a horse with its back legs shot off, a stillborn calf, a pigeon with string caught around its legs. Pritchett portrays human cruelty on the margins of decency and, conversely, human kindness on the margins of survival: Each story pivots on one of these points.

Renny and Ben are divorced but still friends. Their children, Caroline and Rachel, each have two children. Rachel’s husband, Ray, is a no-account violent loser who is cruel to her children and murders Rachel in front of her parents. The legacy of this murder is lifted out of sequence, told as if it were told in retrospect and fractured by the memories of the characters. The interlocking stories allow a reader to see incidents from many angles. They ricochet like bullets off Renny and Ben’s family tree. They are jarring, deeply violent; the fates they hold seem unavoidable.

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MARS & VENUS IN THE WORKPLACE

A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting Results at Work

By John Gray

Harper Collins: 320 pp., $24.95

It’s a little dated, this “Mars and Venus” thing. To benefit from John Gray’s advice, you have to agree with Gray’s assertion that men and women are completely different: that women are relaters and men are avoiders, that women want to be cared for and men demand trust, that women love to communicate and men shut down whenever possible. The workplace Gray describes also seems dated. It is a competitive, bottom-line, eat or be eaten environment where it is inappropriate to cry or show emotion. “A woman’s challenge in the workplace is much greater than a man’s,” Gray writes, primarily because she is hobbled by her self-effacing insistence on the importance of relationships over successful outcomes. The most we can do is try to earn each other’s respect.

Trouble is, I wouldn’t want the respect of the men Gray describes. One can’t use too many words talking to these Martians because first they lose interest, then they lose respect. To offer advice is to insult them. Other specious assertions: Women care more about relationships than money? Women must promote themselves more and advertise their accomplishments? I don’t recognize any of these people. Do you? Perhaps they inhabit a different galaxy.