bookpagedev

Memoir

Books of a lifetime

Review by bookpagedev

Author and bibliophile Wendy Werris is in passionate thrall to the words of others. Werris’ memoir, An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the Business of Books, reveals how a life spent in the book business granted her a life well-lived, because of the generosity of books, because of the grand life tour they have given me. For Werris, daughter of a flamboyant Brooklyn-born mother, Charlotte, and television comedy writer Snag Werris (veteran staff writer for Jackie Gleason and other comic greats), a bookish life began because of my weird genetic goulash and a quest for air conditioning. On a hot Los Angeles day, she took refuge in the illustrious (and air-cooled) Pickwick Bookshop. She exited two hours later with a job one that started a long career spent in bookstores, publishing houses (including Rolling Stone’s Straight Arrow imprint) and on the road, repping books and escorting famous touring authors.

Rakish humor is used liberally as Werris recounts the ups, downs, detours and inevitable speed bumps of her journey through the male-dominated world of bookselling. Nostalgic, funny and sometimes sad, An Alphabetical Life pays affectionate and insightful tribute to her family, chronicles strange and wondrous celebrity meetings (an odd one-night stand with Richard Brautigan and a beautiful dinner with George Harrison), peeks into the rich intellectual milieu of small book presses and the days of courtly book editors, and remembers a horrific experience of rape.

As she looks back upon decades of literary retailing, Werris makes many recommendations for good reads, inviting us to check out her favorites, from Rabbit Redux to 84, Charing Cross Road. Consistently illumining, her narrative is a staunch devotion to our rapidly vanishing independent bookstores, the intimate thrill of being alone with a fine book and the dogged notion that if ever she does retire, the sustaining effects of books will never leave me. Alison Hood is a Bay Area writer.

Author and bibliophile Wendy Werris is in passionate thrall to the words of others. Werris' memoir, An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the Business of Books, reveals how a life spent in the book business granted her a life well-lived, because of the generosity…
Self-HelpLifestyles

A guide to help you reach a personal peak this year

Review by bookpagedev

Remember the old adage: Good, better, best; never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best ? Well, here are four books that can show you how to move from mediocre to marvelous in 2005. Best-selling author Debbie Ford (The Dark Side of the Light) offers a guide to reaching out and grasping the life we have always dreamed about in The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It. Stop believing that the best year of your life exists somewhere off in the future, she admonishes. According to Ford, the time is here and now, and the choice is yours. As the title indicates, the book is divided into three sections. The Dream It section emphasizes the importance of dreams and desires, and how creating a powerful intent is the first step in creating your best self. The Plan It section offers a structured approach to defining and achieving goals which includes strategic exercises and straightforward examples, such as a 15-question checklist for taking charge of your life. Finally, the Live It section explains how to put those plans into action with zest, integrity and joy. Ford does not shirk from acknowledging that her plan requires effort, commitment and courage. But if you give 100 percent to the process, she ensures that having your best year yet will be more than a pipe dream; it will be your destiny. Linda Stankard continues to be her own work in progress.

Remember the old adage: Good, better, best; never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best ? Well, here are four books that can show you how to move from mediocre to marvelous in 2005. Best-selling author Debbie Ford (The…
History

The Yanks who joined Britain’s battle

Review by bookpagedev

<b>The Yanks who joined Britain’s battle</b> January, 1940. England would fall. Everyone in America knew it. The Germans were too powerful. Hitler’s Luftwaffe had too many planes, too many pilots and too many bombs. Besides, Hitler was Europe’s problem, not America’s Congress had passed the Neutrality Act; Americans were to stay out of the conflict, or else. But when the war began, eight American men decided that despite the odds, despite Congress and despite the isolationist public, they would join the fight. With the FBI on their trail, these men left America to become fighter pilots for the Royal Air Force. Before the year was out, they would be part of Churchill’s few, the handful of heroes who defended Great Britain against the overwhelming might of the Luftwaffe, and won.

In <b>The Few: The American Knights of the Air Who Risked Everything to Fight in the Battle of Britain</b>, Alex Kershaw tells the story of these brave men, delving into the American pilots’ letters, journals and memoirs, as well as the remembrances of families and friends, to reveal the acts of heroism and personal sacrifice they made to fight an evil their nation was not yet willing to acknowledge.

Kershaw’s account is fascinating, moving at a rapid pace, particularly in the harrowing combat scenes. Yet for all the action, Kershaw does not sacrifice the factual record; his combat passages are derived from pilots’ reports, with results that are both compelling and uncompromisingly real. Kershaw skillfully moves between the danger in the sky and the strategy in the rooms of state, giving the reader an excellent feel for the precarious situation, both for the pilots and the world.

The Few is a record of both heroism and loss only one of the American volunteers would survive the war. Yet their courage helped convince a reluctant American public that the fight could be won, and that America had a part to play in the battle. <i>Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.</i>

<b>The Yanks who joined Britain's battle</b> January, 1940. England would fall. Everyone in America knew it. The Germans were too powerful. Hitler's Luftwaffe had too many planes, too many pilots and too many bombs. Besides, Hitler was Europe's problem, not America's Congress had passed the…

Lifestyles

Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe: Silver hell

Review by bookpagedev

Editor’s note: Each month we see lots of books. Some of the curiouser arrivals are featured in this space.
J. Shimon and J. Lindemann grew up in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, home of Aluminum Specialty, the company that manufactured that stalwart of hipster holidays, the aluminum Christmas tree. Shimon and Lindemann, both professional photographers, celebrate the tinsel icons of their youth in Season’s Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree. "Although they can be viewed solely as aesthetically stunning objects," the duo write of their subjects, "their existence will always be informed by each viewer’s holiday baggage."

Right. Aluminum trees played a large role in the holidays of my quintessentially 1970s childhood. Sticking all of those branches covered in potentially blinding strips of metal into the tree’s wooden base was a time-consuming chore, only slightly less annoying than maneuvering them back into their sheaths at the end of the season. And who can forget the ordeal of having to rethread limbs that became detached from their silver fringe?

Still, the trees are retro-cool in a future-past, Jetsons kind of way, which is why Shimon and Lindemann quietly prowled yard sales and sneaked into attics and basements, eventually collecting 40 trees. Season’s Gleamings isn’t a decorating guide or history of the trees (though it does include a little background); it’s merely an homage to a space-age ideal.

Editor's note: Each month we see lots of books. Some of the curiouser arrivals are featured in this space.
J. Shimon and J. Lindemann grew up in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, home of Aluminum Specialty, the company that manufactured that stalwart of hipster holidays, the…

Tracing the route of a deadly epidemic

Review by bookpagedev

In his latest book, The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good for You) examines a 10-day cholera plague in London in the late summer of 1854 to demonstrate, among other things, how science progresses through close observation and collaboration and how cities grow and protect themselves. Prior to its publication, Johnson described The Ghost Map to BookPage as almost like a medical thriller with a lot of big ideas wrapped around it. That remains a fair description.

The cholera outbreak, it would later be discovered, was caused by tainted water from a public well on Soho’s crowded Broad Street. At the time, however, the prevailing scientific opinion was that such diseases originated from miasma foul air. It remained for an inquisitive physician, John Snow, a demographer, William Farr, and a clergyman, Henry Whitehead all working independently at the beginning to collect and apply the data that would reveal the source of the epidemic. The ghost map of the title refers to an increasingly detailed series of maps of the affected neighborhood that Snow drew to show precisely where people had died from cholera, in what numbers and what their patterns of activity were. In telling his stories, Johnson also relates how matters of health escalated from being a private matter to a public concern. On the most dramatic level, Johnson gives us a day-to-day story of a community in crisis, of babies dying and entire families being decimated while public officials try to head off even greater calamities. More substantially, though, he portrays London not just as a political and geographical entity but also as a living organism that must nourish and renew itself to survive. He enlivens what might have been dry-as-dust science reporting with vividly drawn characters and copious literary references. Better still, he allows his own enthusiasm for such flashes of human ingenuity to shine through. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

In his latest book, The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good for You) examines a 10-day cholera plague in London in the late summer of 1854 to demonstrate, among other things, how science progresses through close observation and collaboration and how cities grow…
Memoir

Dead man laughing

Review by bookpagedev

It’s enough to make you want to dig up Art Buchwald as soon as he finally reaches the grave and beat him with his own shin bone (to paraphrase Mark Twain). Though dying of kidney disease, the irascible Buchwald still manages to tickle in his new memoir Too Soon to Say Goodbye. After suffering kidney failure and refusing to undergo dialysis, Buchwald enters a hospice with less than a month to live. But his body isn’t quite ready to take the dirt nap. While the rabbi, mystified doctors and weeping relatives wait, Buchwald dictates his living will (cremation, ashes scattered on Martha’s Vineyard), plans his memorial service (Carly Simon sings I’ll Be Seeing You, Tom Brokaw and Ken Starr deliver eulogies), and pens this book about the dying experience, set in the Requiem typeface, no less. I never knew how many perks were involved, he writes of his nine-months-and-counting death experience. I’ve enjoyed every moment of it. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist shamelessly drops the names of an endless parade of dignitaries and celebrities who come to visit (Walter Cronkite, Ethel Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, Mike Wallace) and observes the greeting card industry from a unique vantage point apparently Hallmark hasn’t found a hospice equivalent to Get Well. Buchwald is at his best dissecting world events with his surgically precise humor, and in suitably brief vignettes revisiting his childhood in foster care, his career in journalism and his marriage.

As readers hold one long collective breath (the acute kidney disease is now simply chronic) Buchwald also teaches, in true Buchwald fashion, that you should talk to people in hospice like they’re really there, and when one person brings a dish you like, ask for the recipe so someone else can make it for you, too.

It's enough to make you want to dig up Art Buchwald as soon as he finally reaches the grave and beat him with his own shin bone (to paraphrase Mark Twain). Though dying of kidney disease, the irascible Buchwald still manages to tickle in…
LiteratureArts & Culture

Nothing but the truth

Review by bookpagedev

Public attention has focused in recent years on charges of professional misconduct by four prominent historians, all authors of best-selling and award-winning books. Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose were accused of plagiarism. Joseph Ellis was charged with lying about his personal experience during the Vietnam/civil rights era. Michael Bellesiles was said to have falsified research data for his Arming America. In the enlightening Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin, University of Georgia historian Peter Charles Hoffer, who has advised in cases of similar charges against other historians, helps nonhistorians understand these episodes.

Hoffer examines each of the four recent situations in detail. He acknowledges that both Ambrose, who died in 2002, and Goodwin are “superb storytellers” and that pinpointing plagiarism in earlier trade history books would be difficult. Many of those books had virtually no reference apparatus at all. The case of Ellis was personal and while Hoffer does not condone what Ellis did, he does think that these personal fictions “seemed to work wonders for Ellis’s powers of historical description and insight into the character of his subjects.” The Bellesiles case involved “serious deviations from accepted practices in carrying out [and] reporting results from research,” as stated in one official report.

Hoffer writes that when the 19th century ended, historians portrayed the U.S. as “one people, forming one nation, with one history.” This view “embraced profound fictions,” for the most part excluding women, people of color, and slavery. Significant changes came in the 1960s with the “new history.” But this also brought a demand for “methodological sophistication that . . . widened the divide between academic and popular history.” Hoffer says this led the profession to fail to provide what had made consensus history so compelling: “proof that American history could inspire and delight.” Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and frequent contributor to BookPage.

 

Public attention has focused in recent years on charges of professional misconduct by four prominent historians, all authors of best-selling and award-winning books. Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose were accused of plagiarism. Joseph Ellis was charged with lying about his personal…

History

The man who followed Lincoln

Review by bookpagedev

American history will probably never produce a thornier personality than Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s misunderstood presidential successor and the overseer of a misshapen Reconstruction. Johnson’s legacy is tainted even those who know little about him presume he was possibly our worst chief executive ever. Howard Means’ The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation is not designed to right Johnson’s reputation, but this surprisingly important, sometimes powerfully crafted volume puts his strengths and flaws into context.

Means offers solid biographical background and explains why Johnson was impeached and nearly thrown out of office in 1868, the final year of a term made problematic from its outset by Lincoln’s assassination. Yet the bulk of this book focuses on the six weeks following Lincoln’s death, when Johnson, an anti-secession Democrat and former governor and U.S. senator from Tennessee, was thrust into unlikely power on the heels of his scandalous public inebriation on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865. Fortunately, Johnson, as Lincoln knew for certain, was not a drunk. From beginnings even humbler than Honest Abe’s, Johnson a tailor originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, and later hardscrabble East Tennessee proved antagonistic toward aristocrats and particularly Southern plantation owners, believed in spending public monies in service to the common man, and, in fact, because of his own determined rise from poverty, was blessedly incorruptible.

Alas, he was also lacking vision, stubborn as a mule, and a somewhat reluctant pragmatist when it came to the slave question, a position that earned him the enmity of powerful Republican Radicals who sought a more punitive approach to the makers of the Southern rebellion. Once he took office, Johnson turned out to be flexible enough to adhere to Lincoln’s own with malice toward none credo. But without Lincoln’s people skills and great imaginative wisdom, Johnson ran afoul of those both to his left and right. Means’ contribution to the Johnson record is a fascinating portrait of a complex man chosen by fate to tackle possibly the toughest assignment in U.S. political history save maybe for Lincoln’s own.

American history will probably never produce a thornier personality than Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln's misunderstood presidential successor and the overseer of a misshapen Reconstruction. Johnson's legacy is tainted even those who know little about him presume he was possibly our worst chief executive ever.…
Pop CultureArts & Culture

Such a strange vibration

Review by bookpagedev

You would expect a book about hippies to be visually exciting, titillating even. After all, hippies were on the experimental edge of a ’60s youth culture that rejected the black-and-white world of the ’50s. Hippies came in colors everywhere. They danced naked in the streets. They took their trips on LSD. They launched a rock ‘n’ roll revolution. And they created vibrant, colorful, sometimes disorienting photographic and graphical styles to represent their experiences.

So it’s no real surprise that Barry Miles’ excellent book Hippie with its wealth of photographs, psychedelic album-cover art and exotic typefaces captures the dynamic visual energy of the youth culture of the ’60s, an energy that continues to influence the way we see things to this day. What is a surprise is that Hippie is so readable, so interesting and, for the most part, so good humored. Miles begins his look at hippie youth culture in 1965, "the first year in which a discernible youth movement began to emerge," and ends in 1971, the year "Jim Morrison joined Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix in the roll call of rock ‘n’ roll superhero deaths." Going year by year, Miles employs brief, sharply drawn vignettes to cover everything from the summer of love (which he wryly notes is now copyrighted by Bill Graham Enterprises) to the Manson family, from Timothy Leary’s LSD trips to George Harrison’s strange walk through Haight Ashbury, from the rise of the Grateful Dead to the end of the Beatles.

Miles dedicates his book "to all the old freaks and hippies everywhere." Yet the book seems remarkably free of nostalgia. Hippie winds up being a refreshing book that is not just for old freaks or young freaks, but rather for any reader with an interest in the look, the feel, the history of a special era.

 

You would expect a book about hippies to be visually exciting, titillating even. After all, hippies were on the experimental edge of a '60s youth culture that rejected the black-and-white world of the '50s. Hippies came in colors everywhere. They danced naked in the…

Biography

A true renaissance man

Review by bookpagedev

Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code did not single-handedly ignite a resurgence of interest in Leonardo Da Vinci, but it certainly fanned the flames of one already in progress. The evidence is everywhere. Leonardo’s own fascinating and well-written notebooks are available in various editions. There have been numerous documentaries and books about him in recent years, including Sherwin Nuland’s excellent entry in the Penguin Lives series. The Da Vinci Code has done history fans a favor by encouraging publishers to provide more nonfiction about this fascinating and mysterious figure.

Now comes Leonardo by Martin Kemp, an art history professor at Oxford and the esteemed author of The Oxford History of Western Art. He understands Leonardo, his works, his context and his influence. Kemp’s book is relatively short and quite reader-friendly. It includes a helpful chronology and an annotated gallery of Leonardo’s paintings, which comprise perhaps a third of the book’s 60 handsome illustrations. Kemp doesn’t waste time pasting together yet another biography. Instead, he has written a scholarly but passionate essay. He wants to try to understand Leonardo’s mind, the way his imagination united art and science and brought them to bear upon each other. Kemp has an excellent chapter called “Looking” that examines Leonardo’s scientific notions about the eye and vision alongside his conception of the artistic imagination. Other chapters explore his related ideas about the body and machinery and his use of the ancient parallel between the human body and the body of the earth. A final chapter surveys Leonardo’s posthumous fame, from the 16th-century biography by Vasari to, inevitably, The Da Vinci Code. Michael Sims ranges from Leonardo to Louis Armstrong in his most recent book, Adam’s Navel, now in paperback from Penguin.

Dan Brown's blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code did not single-handedly ignite a resurgence of interest in Leonardo Da Vinci, but it certainly fanned the flames of one already in progress. The evidence is everywhere. Leonardo's own fascinating and well-written notebooks are available in various…
Fiction

War and betrayal in Beirut

Review by bookpagedev

There’s an old literary bromide that says you can’t pile enough problems onto your protagonist the tougher things are, the better. As Margaret Lowrie Robertson makes her transition from CNN international correspondent to novelist in Season of Betrayal, we can be sure of one thing: She paid attention to that piece of advice.

Consider the plight of Robertson’s lead character, Lara McCauley. It is 1983 in Beirut. Ravaged by civil war, this chaotically dangerous region has witnessed enough violence and sadness to shock even veteran correspondents. Lara has come to Beirut to join her husband, Mac, a globe-trotting journalist and danger junkie one of the good old boys among his colleagues at the hotel bar. But as a husband, he’s boorish and downright cruel a man not shy about humiliating Lara in public or getting abusive with her in private.

Problems? Lara’s just getting started. She meets the enigmatic Thomas, the son of a Polish engineer father and a Brazilian poet mother. Thomas is fluent in many languages and possesses a deep understanding of Middle Eastern culture. And he treats Lara with the attention and respect she’s missing from Mac. The relationship begins as a friendship, but innuendo and cultural misperception can quickly morph into reality. Season of Betrayal provides enough dramatic tension in the Lara-Mac-Thomas triad to satisfy most readers, but Robertson’s singular accomplishment is weaving fact with fiction. The novel manages to be entertaining as well as enlightening, and helps the reader hack through the web of cultures and beliefs that make up the complex tapestry of the Middle East.

Which brings us to yet another literary chestnut that says fiction can be more instructive than facts. Season of Betrayal reinforces that notion while managing to supply readers with enough twists and turns to keep them rapidly turning the pages. Michael Lee is literary editor of The Cape Cod Voice and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

There's an old literary bromide that says you can't pile enough problems onto your protagonist the tougher things are, the better. As Margaret Lowrie Robertson makes her transition from CNN international correspondent to novelist in Season of Betrayal, we can be sure of one thing:…
NonfictionEssays

Love’s labors found

Review by bookpagedev

<B>Love’s labors found</B> The saying "all the world loves a lover" has never rung truer than in the case of that famous, ill-fated couple, Heloise and Abelard. Their tumultuous story, which has been chronicled intriguingly but briefly in the lovers’ eight letters, is one of history’s most scrutinized romances, the subject of countless books, articles, films, plays, paintings and poems. Now, British author and newspaper columnist James Burge has added to the mix with <B>Heloise and Abelard: A New Biography of History’s Great Lovers</B>.

Burge, with genial wit and a special sensitivity to the tenor of ecclesiastical 12th-century times, draws a new portrait of the lovers based upon New Zealand scholar Constant Mews’ recently discovered cache of Heloise and Abelard’s "lost" correspondence, a collection of 113 early letters between the philosopher-monk and his brilliant pupil. These missives reveal the origins of the lovers’ erotic, intellectual and spiritual passions. The large scope of this correspondence (an excerpted appendix is included in the book) allows Burge to render a meticulous, but always engaging, explication of each lover’s innermost desires, human foibles and, best of all, includes his sympathetic conjecture on how both Heloise and Abelard viewed their own characters and times.

Against the backdrop of 12th-century Paris and Europe, Burge gives an impressively researched account of the life and heresy trials of Peter Abelard, his pursuit of Heloise, their secret love affair and marriage, and the violent tragedy that would force the lovers to separate and pursue religious lives. His keen analysis of the new letters depicts Heloise as a strong-willed, exceptionally intelligent woman, fully equal to her lover in intellect and accomplishment. Abelard’s portrait, in comparison, pales a bit, but readers may forgive the philosopher’s often selfish, single-minded tendencies when he is seen through the light of Heloise’s powerful love: "For I often come with parched throat longing to be refreshed by the nectar of your delightful mouth and to drink thirstily the riches scattered in your heart. . . .

With God as my witness, I declare that there is no one in this world breathing life-giving air whom I desire to love more than you." <I>Alison Hood is a writer in San Rafael, California.</I>

<B>Love's labors found</B> The saying "all the world loves a lover" has never rung truer than in the case of that famous, ill-fated couple, Heloise and Abelard. Their tumultuous story, which has been chronicled intriguingly but briefly in the lovers' eight letters, is one of…

Sports

You’ll look sweet upon the seat

Review by bookpagedev

John Keats may have been a great poet but he wasn’t much of a seer. According to bicycle historian David Herlihy, the famous English Romantic poet dismissed a faddishly popular precursor of the modern-day bicycle as a fleeting novelty.

For a brief moment, as Herlihy’s comprehensive new book Bicycle: The History shows, Keats seemed to be right. In its earliest days, the bicycle was a plaything of the wealthy and the trendy. It was too expensive, too heavy (at more than 50 pounds) and too difficult to ride on the poor road systems in Europe and the U.S. to achieve widespread popularity. Only late in its development did it become the hoped-for utilitarian mode of transportation that sees something like a billion bicycles in use (or at least in garages) today.

Herlihy’s history follows the ebb and flow of bicycle popularity from the earliest days of invention, when an 1817 bike-precursor called the draisine was seen as an enhancement to walking, through the "boneshaker" and "high wheel" eras, through the development of the "safety bicycles" (so named because their lower height meant less serious injuries in crashes or falls), to the modern proliferation of specialized bicycles.

Bicycle is best as it approaches the modern age. Here Herlihy’s weave of anecdotes and analysis adds up to a fascinating social history. The bicycle contributed to women’s greater independent mobility, as well as practical changes in fashion. Bike clubs were effective advocates for better roads long before automobile drivers. And bike builders made essential contributions to the development of the motorcycle, the automobile and, of course, the airplane.

To Herlihy’s and our good fortune, the rise of the bicycle also coincided with the golden age of illustration. Herlihy and Yale University Press have taken full advantage of this fact. The author’s prose is brought to life by the extraordinary and plentiful period photographs and illustrations. Bicycle is a handsome and visually pleasing volume.

Alden Mudge rides his 1999 Lemond Buenos Aires more than 3,500 miles every year.

John Keats may have been a great poet but he wasn't much of a seer. According to bicycle historian David Herlihy, the famous English Romantic poet dismissed a faddishly popular precursor of the modern-day bicycle as a fleeting novelty.

For a brief…

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