bookpagedev

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

A tempting meal in the Havana Room

Review by bookpagedev

Colin Harrison, author of Afterburn and Manhattan Nocturne, is at it again in this provocative story about one man’s despair and his desire to maintain normalcy. The Havana Room, a delicious mystery that will keep you guessing, is perhaps Harrison’s most intriguing book yet.

The narrator is Bill Wyeth, a clever New York real estate attorney who finds his life upended after accidentally killing his son’s friend in a freak peanut oil accident. Wyeth’s life disintegrates before his eyes when he loses his job, his family and his sanity. Thrown into a pit of despair, Wyeth claws his way through Manhattan’s darkness, hoping for happiness but finding nothing. That is, until he visits an antique steak house managed by an emotionally complex young woman named Allison Sparks. Day after day, he soaks in his misery, eating at table 17 and idolizing the woman he knows nothing about. But that changes when he finds himself in the notorious Havana Room, a section of the restaurant known for its history and secrecy. Sparks asks Wyeth to provide late-night legal advice to her friend, business Jay Rainey. Stuck in a cruel world of what-ifs and social ironies, Wyeth reluctantly helps out. But before he knows what hit him, Wyeth is knee-deep in Rainey’s checkered past. Dodging Chilean businessmen and gun-toting goons, Wyeth removes himself from the situation before it costs him his life. The Havana Room is an obsessively detailed, tantalizing account of a man’s devotion to his family and his eagerness to both find, and hide, the truth. Harrison’s talent at creating quirky, well-structured characters is matched by his ability to interweave them into a plot riddled with fantastic twists and literary U-turns. All in all, The Havana Room is a gripping story about redemption and devotion that will have you rooting for the lonely underdog. Nicholas Addison Thomas is a writer in Fairfax, Virginia.

Colin Harrison, author of Afterburn and Manhattan Nocturne, is at it again in this provocative story about one man's despair and his desire to maintain normalcy. The Havana Room, a delicious mystery that will keep you guessing, is perhaps Harrison's most intriguing book yet.
Biography

Will in the World

Review by bookpagedev

Nominated for the National Book Award, this bio of the Bard was a surprise bestseller and a hit with critics. From the few facts indisputably known about Shakespeare, and from details picked out of the plays and sonnets, Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt constructs an insightful, highly readable narrative, bringing Elizabethan England its political conspiracies, religious conflicts and artistic developments to vivid life. Will in the World traces the course of Shakespeare’s career, examining his early years in Stratford-upon-Avon, his struggles as an aspiring author who lacked social advantages and financial resources, and his maturation as a playwright. Greenblatt’s account of this remarkable ascendancy is as entertaining as it is informative, and the Bard himself emerges as a sharply defined figure, one of the great geniuses of the age. Investigations into the life of Shakespeare’s father and how his presence might later have affected his son’s work are especially provocative. This smart, smoothly narrated volume also provides an accessible overview of the great writer’s plays. Greenblatt has succeeded in reinvigorating a much-researched topic, producing a delightful study of Shakespeare’s era and his art. A reading group guide is available online at www.wwnorton.com/rgguides.

Nominated for the National Book Award, this bio of the Bard was a surprise bestseller and a hit with critics. From the few facts indisputably known about Shakespeare, and from details picked out of the plays and sonnets, Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt constructs an…
Sports

Golf: It’s not just a sport, it’s an obsession

Review by bookpagedev

Mark Twain once famously remarked that "Golf is a good walk spoiled." Harsh words perhaps, but there’s no denying that, as sports go, this one is singularly exasperating. Nevertheless, each day people travel to their local greens in search of new adventures. According to the National Golf Foundation, over 26 million players took to nearly 17,000 courses last year. Instead of Mike, many people would rather "be like Tiger."

At the end of a vigorous round, golfers like nothing better than to gather at the clubhouse, the 19th hole, to regale each other with stories of their exploits on the course. Like fishermen, they compare gear, swap tall tales and continually try to one-up each other. If your favorite golfer needs material for these clubhouse confabs, the season’s best golf books offer many gift-giving possibilities.

At the top of every golfer’s wish list is the blockbuster golf book of the year, Tiger Woods’ How I Play Golf. With help from the editors of Golf Digest, Woods has compiled a thorough treatise on the basic aspects of the game, from putting to smoking the driver. As all duffers know, half the game is mental, so Woods also offers tips on how to handle problems, how to stay in control and how to practice winning psychology. Woods is known for his tireless approach to training, and he shares insights on that subject as well. The volume is loaded with helpful step-by-step color photographs of Tiger’s techniques and text that is neither too technical nor too patronizing.

The problem with books written by sports superstars is the false expectation that reading them might actually make one as good as the author. But keeping the title in mind how Tiger plays golf will help maintain a sense of perspective about the benefits of reading this excellent guide.

A different kind of instruction can be found in The Golfer’s Guide to the Meaning of Life: Lessons I’ve Learned from My Life on the Links by Gary Player. Rather than micro-managing your game by telling you how to stand or grip the clubs, Player, one of the troika of golf greats that included Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, discusses issues that usually receive less consideration: success, gratitude, fear, sportsmanship, motivation, goals and change.

Player is a firm believer in doing things the right way. He recalls a time when he could have gotten away with a minor rules infraction. Instead, he reported his innocent error and was disqualified from a tournament he easily could have won. "If I had not turned myself in, I would have had to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had cheated. . . . Much better is the feeling I have today that even though I left a trophy and check behind . . . I still have my dignity and honor."

Player’s focus isn’t on learning the techniques of the game, but rather on what the game has taught him about life. "[Golf] leaves us no choice but to accept the good with the bad and to move on to the next shot. . . . That’s the way life is, and the grand old game of golf will never let you forget it."

While Player has been around the course a time or two, Darren Kilfara is a relative rookie. A student at Harvard, he somehow convinced the history department that a year in Scotland, the birthplace of golf, would be beneficial to his studies. They fell for it, and Kilfara was off to St. Andrews. His sports-driven coming-of-age story is told with appealing style and insight in A Golfer’s Education.

It’s easy to see how readers might find themselves a bit jealous of Kilfara, who uses his year abroad to play as much golf as he can while earning academic credit. Along the way he manages to learn life lessons from the everyday people he meets in the quaint towns of Scotland (including a new love interest). Part travelogue and part memoir, Kilfara’s book paints such a charming picture of his temporary home that some readers might be tempted to book their own passage to play a few rounds on the bonnie shores.

Ron Kaplan is a freelance writer who lives a good "drive" away from the Montclair Country Club in New Jersey.

Mark Twain once famously remarked that "Golf is a good walk spoiled." Harsh words perhaps, but there's no denying that, as sports go, this one is singularly exasperating. Nevertheless, each day people travel to their local greens in search of new adventures. According to…

FictionWorld Fiction

The world of Muslim women

Review by bookpagedev

Muslim women are much spoken of, seldom heard from, unless in the almost obligatory television scenes of bereaved Palestinian mothers or veiled Afghani daughters. Perhaps no other group is so misunderstood. But this is changing. Witness the timely Madras on Rainy Days, by Indian-American Muslim author Samina Ali.

Despite its title, the novel is set mostly in Hyderabad, an Indian bastion of Islam. Layla, an Indian-American woman, has come to India in order to marry Sameer. Unfortunately, Layla has already become pregnant by an American. Following a sloppy and incomplete abortion, she awaits the wrath of a community expecting wives to be “pure” before marriage.

Layla and Sameer represent two common types: the American nostalgic about an imaginary India, and the Indian bedazzled by an equally imaginary America. After her arrival in India, Layla becomes more religious, learning Arabic and reciting the Koran. But both eventually perceive the flaws in their philosophies: she realizes that religion is often a cause of violence, while Sameer discovers that prejudice exists in America as well.

For Ali, Islam appears to be in disarray. Sameer describes himself as “lapsed”; Layla’s father, rather than taking the permitted second wife, instead divorces his first. And then there is Layla herself, who has been changed irrevocably by her youth in America. Brought to the country by the sword, Islam in India is now threatened by a brazenly pro-Hindu government. Layla’s Muslim family is constantly vigilant, especially in the book’s closing scenes, when the Hindu festival of Ganpati falls in the Muslim month of Muhar’ram, during which the faithful stage processions involving self-flagellation. Obviously nothing good can from this convergence of fervent and mutually hateful mobs. Although like many contemporary American novelists Ali is given to long-windedness, she successfully pinpoints the critical issues facing her characters as they attempt to reconcile Islam with modernity. The book’s outcome suggests, however, that such a reconciliation is increasingly unlikely. Kenneth Champeon writes from Thailand.

Muslim women are much spoken of, seldom heard from, unless in the almost obligatory television scenes of bereaved Palestinian mothers or veiled Afghani daughters. Perhaps no other group is so misunderstood. But this is changing. Witness the timely Madras on Rainy Days, by Indian-American Muslim…
Sports

Golf: It’s not just a sport, it’s an obsession

Review by bookpagedev

Mark Twain once famously remarked that "Golf is a good walk spoiled." Harsh words perhaps, but there’s no denying that, as sports go, this one is singularly exasperating. Nevertheless, each day people travel to their local greens in search of new adventures. According to the National Golf Foundation, over 26 million players took to nearly 17,000 courses last year. Instead of Mike, many people would rather "be like Tiger."

At the end of a vigorous round, golfers like nothing better than to gather at the clubhouse, the 19th hole, to regale each other with stories of their exploits on the course. Like fishermen, they compare gear, swap tall tales and continually try to one-up each other. If your favorite golfer needs material for these clubhouse confabs, the season’s best golf books offer many gift-giving possibilities.

At the top of every golfer’s wish list is the blockbuster golf book of the year, Tiger Woods’ How I Play Golf. With help from the editors of Golf Digest, Woods has compiled a thorough treatise on the basic aspects of the game, from putting to smoking the driver. As all duffers know, half the game is mental, so Woods also offers tips on how to handle problems, how to stay in control and how to practice winning psychology. Woods is known for his tireless approach to training, and he shares insights on that subject as well. The volume is loaded with helpful step-by-step color photographs of Tiger’s techniques and text that is neither too technical nor too patronizing.

The problem with books written by sports superstars is the false expectation that reading them might actually make one as good as the author. But keeping the title in mind how Tiger plays golf will help maintain a sense of perspective about the benefits of reading this excellent guide.

A different kind of instruction can be found in The Golfer’s Guide to the Meaning of Life: Lessons I’ve Learned from My Life on the Links by Gary Player. Rather than micro-managing your game by telling you how to stand or grip the clubs, Player, one of the troika of golf greats that included Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, discusses issues that usually receive less consideration: success, gratitude, fear, sportsmanship, motivation, goals and change.

Player is a firm believer in doing things the right way. He recalls a time when he could have gotten away with a minor rules infraction. Instead, he reported his innocent error and was disqualified from a tournament he easily could have won. "If I had not turned myself in, I would have had to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had cheated. . . . Much better is the feeling I have today that even though I left a trophy and check behind . . . I still have my dignity and honor."

Player’s focus isn’t on learning the techniques of the game, but rather on what the game has taught him about life. "[Golf] leaves us no choice but to accept the good with the bad and to move on to the next shot. . . . That’s the way life is, and the grand old game of golf will never let you forget it."

While Player has been around the course a time or two, Darren Kilfara is a relative rookie. A student at Harvard, he somehow convinced the history department that a year in Scotland, the birthplace of golf, would be beneficial to his studies. They fell for it, and Kilfara was off to St. Andrews. His sports-driven coming-of-age story is told with appealing style and insight in A Golfer’s Education.

It’s easy to see how readers might find themselves a bit jealous of Kilfara, who uses his year abroad to play as much golf as he can while earning academic credit. Along the way he manages to learn life lessons from the everyday people he meets in the quaint towns of Scotland (including a new love interest). Part travelogue and part memoir, Kilfara’s book paints such a charming picture of his temporary home that some readers might be tempted to book their own passage to play a few rounds on the bonnie shores.

Ron Kaplan is a freelance writer who lives a good "drive" away from the Montclair Country Club in New Jersey.

 

Mark Twain once famously remarked that "Golf is a good walk spoiled." Harsh words perhaps, but there's no denying that, as sports go, this one is singularly exasperating. Nevertheless, each day people travel to their local greens in search of new adventures. According to the…

Fiction

A pool shark makes her move

Review by bookpagedev

Haven Kimmel is nothing if not versatile. She proved she could be intensely funny in her best-selling memoir A Girl Named Zippy. She followed that up with the sweetly poignant novel, The Solace of Leaving Early. Her latest novel, Something Rising (Light and Swift) is a stunner of a story that continues Kimmel’s tradition of mixing page-turning narrative with heartbreaking honesty.

Cassie Claiborne spent her childhood sitting on her porch in rural Indiana, waiting for her mostly absent father to make an appearance. In Something Rising, we watch as Cassie grows from a morose little girl into a quiet woman whose only pleasure is her housebound sister, her offbeat friends and pool. She’ll beat the tar out of anyone who dares challenge her, and she doesn’t mind taking their money.

But Cassie’s friends and family know she needs more to her life than taking care of her sister and hanging around the smoky pool halls of Indiana. When her mother dies, and Cassie is given the chance to travel to New Orleans on family business, she’s urged to take the trip. What she discovers there both about herself and her family history can’t help but change her.

Kimmel’s novel offers a rich collection of complicated, nuanced people. Her dialogue, especially, always rings true and honest; in Kimmel’s sure hands, even the most stoic of characters is compelling and eloquent. Cassie’s mother, who rarely talked in life, leaves a heart-rending note when she dies, telling her daughters to take care of each other, that she is tired of the banalities of life, of “flossing, of hand lotion, of the food pyramid.” With this third effort, it’s safe to say Kimmel is a master of making these very details the stuff of everyday life endlessly readable. Amy Scribner recently completed a cross-country move to Olympia, Washington.

Haven Kimmel is nothing if not versatile. She proved she could be intensely funny in her best-selling memoir A Girl Named Zippy. She followed that up with the sweetly poignant novel, The Solace of Leaving Early. Her latest novel, Something Rising (Light and Swift) is…
LiteratureArts & Culture

The case of the perpetual teen

Review by bookpagedev

Melanie Rehak’s Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her is a witty, tell-all narrative that unmasks the origins of the popular young detective. Sixteen-year-old Nancy Drew burst onto the scene 75 years ago, the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the prolific Stratemeyer Syndicate. Stratemeyer mined cultural and literary marketplace trends to invent characters and plotlines (including the Bobbsey Twins and Ruth Fielding stories), then delegated the writing to ghostwriters. After the success of his Hardy Boys series in 1927, he created a feminine character: blond, blue-eyed Nancy, beloved daughter of widower attorney Carson Drew. Plucky and capable, she wore smart tweeds, drove a blue roadster, dated the devoted Ned Nickerson and solved mysteries that were "Robin Hood scenarios with a little bit of danger thrown in."
 
Stratemeyer’s series outline sold the character immediately to publisher Grosset & Dunlap, but it took two strong-minded and talented women to fully develop Nancy: Stratemeyer’s daughter, Harriet Adams (who ran the syndicate after Stratemeyer’s death in late 1930), and journalist/ghostwriter Mildred Benson, who wrote nearly all the books under the name Carolyn Keene. Both women were hard-working, intelligent and headstrong, and had been college-educated in the early 1900s—Adams at rarified Wellesley College, Benson at Iowa State University. Adams directed Benson closely in writing the Drew character and plots, once stating that, "had Nancy ever gone to college, she would have been a Wellesley girl." But Benson put her indelible stamp on the intrepid sleuth, rendering her—often to Adam’s displeasure—in her own, self-described likeness as an "impudent pup" and "an individualist."
 
Girl Sleuth is an enjoyable anecdote-packed read, as it tracks the myriad reinventions of a fictional character influenced by changing times, mores and tastes. (Rehak’s complex discussion of the Drew character as intertwined with the rise of the American women’s movement is informative, though perhaps better left to a separate book.) While our heroine’s roadster may now be equipped with a global positioning system, says Rehak, "she’s still our Nancy."

Melanie Rehak's Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her is a witty, tell-all narrative that unmasks the origins of the popular young detective. Sixteen-year-old Nancy Drew burst onto the scene 75 years ago, the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the…

FilmArts & Culture

Stars reveal secrets of Their First Time

Review by bookpagedev

We know what you’re thinking, but take a closer look at that title. This exposŽ bares all about the first performances of Hollywood’s stars in the movies. Remember The Cry Baby Killer? How about A Party at Kitty and Stud’s? Or Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hey! Just the inauspicious beginnings for Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone and Marilyn Monroe.

The road to fame is always filled with a few detours, and Their First Time in the Movies takes the biggest stars from every Hollywood era and reconstructs their rise to the top. Author Les Krantz captures the "it" factor for more than 70 actors, charting their intriguing family histories, hidden passions and goofy first gigs in bite-sized bits of information on two-page spreads. Filled with delicious movie arcana, it’s fascinating reading for film fans. Who knew that Robert Redford turned to acting after losing interest in a professional baseball career? Or that opera was Meryl Streep’s first love? Looking at the full-page, black and white photos from their early days, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see star quality in these gorgeous young thespians. A young John Wayne puts today’s heartbreakers to shame; although she was nicknamed "Sophia Toothpick," Ms. Loren radiates sensuality; a dewy Marilyn Monroe looks almost virginal.

After you’ve read the history on the big-screen-bound, pop in the companion video and DVD to see the actual footage of 30 of the top performers making their debut. Or head out to the local video store you might get a good laugh from a full viewing of Julia Roberts’ Blood Red, Harrison Ford’s Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round or Clint Eastwood’s Revenge of the Creature, the highly praised sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere!

 

We know what you're thinking, but take a closer look at that title. This exposŽ bares all about the first performances of Hollywood's stars in the movies. Remember The Cry Baby Killer? How about A Party at Kitty and Stud's? Or Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hey!…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Weaving fiction and history

Review by bookpagedev

In her vividly evocative fourth novel, The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier returns to the appealing blend of fiction and art history that she wove together so successfully in her luminous bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, recently adapted into a feature film. Just as that book so plausibly re-imagined the story behind the eponymous Vermeer painting, Chevalier’s latest does the same for the famed Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, which hang in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris. She transports us back to 15th-century France and into the richly textured, starkly contrasting worlds of the noble Le Viste family who commissioned the tapestries and the modest family of weavers whose looms brought them to life. Through shifting first-person narration, we witness both the extraordinary subjectivity of art and its power to transform and seduce.

While the cold and dismissive patriarch Jean Le Viste originally intends the tapestries to portray bloody and self-aggrandizing battle scenes, his long-suffering wife conspires to have them changed to show a peaceful tableau of unicorns and maidens. The womanizing and egotistical artist commissioned to design them, Nicholas des Innocents, depicts a story of the unicorn’s seduction as a surreptitious flirtation with the Le Viste’s daughter, with whom he shares a mutual attraction. But their passion is destined to be thwarted by their differing classes and the girl is sequestered in a convent while Nicholas is dispatched to Belgium to oversee the tapestries’ completion.

Nicholas’ time with the simple, industrious family of weavers and their wise blind daughter has a profoundly humanizing effect on him. Indeed by the novel’s end, each of the characters has changed markedly and their lives, loves and desires have become irrevocably intertwined in the tapestries’ threads, infusing the works with multiple layers of meaning that have kept art historians guessing for five centuries. The Lady and the Unicorn bears literary testament to the adage that art imitates life, and Chevalier has once again succeeded at creating a beguiling, incandescent portrait of a distant time and place. Joni Rendon is a writer in Hoboken, New Jersey.

In her vividly evocative fourth novel, The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier returns to the appealing blend of fiction and art history that she wove together so successfully in her luminous bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, recently adapted into a feature film. Just…
Biography

Rediscovering an overlooked historian

Review by bookpagedev

Henry Adams, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were both U.S. presidents, is best remembered today for writing The Education of Henry Adams, a fascinating, unusual and very selective account of his life. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills believes, however, that Adams’ multi-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison, published between 1889 and 1891, “is the non-fiction prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America.” Adams devoted more years of his life to these volumes than to any other project.

In Henry Adams and the Making of America, Wills pays tribute to Adams and his work, enlightening readers with abundant detail and quoting generously from the histories. The books were revolutionary in their time for their use of extensive archival research here and abroad, and for their portrayal of diplomatic, military, political and economic history in a worldwide context. Although written in a consistently insightful, lively and engaging style, these volumes have been overlooked or misinterpreted by some of our most distinguished historians. Contrary to previous interpretations, Wills demonstrates that Adams did not use the volumes to praise the Federalists or his prominent forebears, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Henry Adams criticized all politicians, including those he especially admired, such as Jefferson and Albert Gallatin, when he thought they were wrong. With a remarkable cast of historical figures, including Touissant l’Ouverture and Tecumseh, Adams brilliantly brought the crucial early years of the country to life. With this latest book, Garry Wills now helps us rediscover a little-read American treasure. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Henry Adams, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were both U.S. presidents, is best remembered today for writing The Education of Henry Adams, a fascinating, unusual and very selective account of his life. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills believes, however, that Adams' multi-volume History of the United…
FictionPoetry

Timeless literary treasures

Review by bookpagedev

Nothing inspires fear in the hearts of readers quite the way poetry can. The hoary literary category is something most of us attend to only in school. But this holiday season, poetry gets a lift from the literature lovers at Sourcebooks, who have designed a beguiling gift around the most overlooked genre in the publishing industry. Poetry Speaks, a trio of audio CDs accompanied by an impressive anthology, offers a star-studded lineup of authors reading their own classic poems aloud. Hear the prize winners and the poet laureates, the writers who nursed their verse to near-perfection modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; confessionalists Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. Beginning with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose 1888 reading from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is offered here on audio for the first time, Poetry Speaks spans more than a century and presents the recordings of 42 writers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay’s crisp, prim delivery of "I Shall Forget You" and a sonorous reading of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" from William Butler Yeats. Crackling with age, Walt Whitman’s recitation from "America" is ghostly, and T. S. Eliot’s alert to his audience as he prepares to read "Prufrock" is priceless: "I must warn you, it takes a little time always to warm up the engine." The Poetry Speaks companion volume includes photos of the writers and selections of their work. Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand and other luminaries contributed biographies and essays on each author. From symbolism to imagism, free verse to blank verse, Poetry Speaks offers a quick literary fix to those who’d rather listen than read.

Gorey details One of the most singular figures in American letters is celebrated in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, which collects a quarter-century’s worth of interviews with the inimitable artist and author, who died last year. Organized chronologically and drawn from sources like The New York Times and The New Yorker, these pieces reveal their subject’s wide-ranging tastes and unmatchable intellect. Gorey, who had no formal art training, attended Harvard in the 1940s. He eventually wound up in New York, where launching a 40-year literary career he devised the demise of many an innocent in wonderfully whimsical, slightly disturbing books like The Gashlycrumb Tinies ("K is for Kate who was struck with an ax, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks," so the story goes) and The Chinese Obelisks. Gorey’s trademarks the furtive figures, the violence set to verse initially gave him a cult following until he gained the wider audience he deserved. Over the course of countless books, he did for cats what James Thurber did for canines. His lanky dancers jetŽd their way across the pages of a ballet book called The Lavender Leotard. In Ascending Pecularity, he discusses his influences the choreography of Balanchine, the paintings of Balthus, the stories of Borges an artistic assimilation that fed his singular style. With abundant photos of the artist as well as samples of his work, Ascending Pecularity reveals what made Gorey, the ultimate eccentric, tick.

A medieval classic It’s no surprise that one of Gorey’s favorite reads was the 11th century Japanese classic The Tale of Genji. (He frequently named his cats after the story’s characters.) Considered by many to be the world’s first novel, Genji, a narrative of intrigue, romance and manners set in medieval Japan, remains a hallmark of world literature more than 1,000 years after its debut. Written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese courtier, the novel follows the beautiful prince Genji through a series of stormy love affairs and risky political ventures, introducing along the way a large cast of characters, both good and evil. The story spans 75 years and given the fiery nature of its protagonist contains plot twists aplenty. Royall Tyler’s fresh, lyrical translation of the novel, heralded as a literary event comparable to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, sets a new standard for approaching the narrative. Tyler, a renowned Japanese scholar, compiled glossaries, notes and a list of characters for this distinctive, two-volume boxed edition. Delicately illustrated with black-and-white reproductions from medieval scrolls and texts, this new, world-class version of Genji brings ancient Asian culture to life the way few literary works can. Truly a timeless tale.

 

Nothing inspires fear in the hearts of readers quite the way poetry can. The hoary literary category is something most of us attend to only in school. But this holiday season, poetry gets a lift from the literature lovers at Sourcebooks, who have designed a…

Memoir

Dying for publicity

Review by bookpagedev

Last September, I was scheduled to appear on National Public Radio (NPR) to promote my new memoir, I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets, in a back-to-school-themed show. But minutes before airtime, the NPR producer told me that country music legend Johnny Cash had died and my segment had been bumped for an obituary.

Unlike Hillary Clinton or J.K. Rowling, I didn’t have marketing or PR machines to launch me into the media matrix. This was to be my big break the equivalent of an obscure comic landing on The Tonight Show and in a final act of one-upsmanship, Johnny Cash stole my microphone.

Cash’s swan song forced me to e-mail more than 200 people the embarrassing update of my un-appearance. My Amazon sales ranking marooned itself at 10,023, moving neither up nor down, a perfect symbol of my public-relations purgatory.

This spell of self-pity lasted for a month, until Willie Shoemaker, the famous jockey, died. I realized that somewhere, in a cramped and airless radio studio, another first-time author was getting booted to make time for a treacly homage by Bob Costas or some other yellow-jacketed pontificator.

Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. And every time a celebrity dies, a struggling author gets kicked back down into the shallow grave of obscurity. To see my life’s work pre-empted by the inconveniently timed deaths of the media-friendly had a terrible side effect: I stopped enjoying the obituaries.

In my 40s, I began to read the obituaries before the movie reviews the obits were more dramatic, revealing and instructive and now this simple pleasure had been ruined. When John Ritter died, instead of lingering over my teen memories of Three’s Company, I imagined hundreds of pasty-faced authors returning to their jobs at engineering magazines and Blockbuster stores, endless years of labor washed away so Rex Reed could prattle through six commercial breaks on Larry King.

Fall turned to winter and many fascinating people exited the world, stage left. I skimmed their obituaries with mounting irritation. By some small miracle (perhaps Willie Shoemaker rode to my rescue?), I was rebooked on NPR in early November. I prayed that any washed-up tennis pro or self-exiled Broadway composer who felt the need to shuffle off this mortal coil would exercise the common decency to yield until I was on the air. Frankly, though, I remained anxious. Celebrities dedicated their lives to hogging the spotlight. Why should they be any more charitable in death? As it turned out, terrorists bombed a Saudi Arabian compound the night before my appearance, bumping me again. The NPR producer rebooked me for Monday, one week before Thanksgiving. “Providing Saddam Hussein isn’t killed,” I joked. The producer laughed uncomfortably at my bizarre bad luck.

I spent 20 years as a reporter and knew that the news was inherently unpredictable. As a self-absorbed writer, I also wondered if I was having some cosmological influence. What if my potential celebrity was like a pebble dropped into the pond of Fate, and I was seeing the ripples of my existential impact? Even as an example of negative megalomania, the possibility that God might rearrange world events to crush my success was a powerfully seductive idea. Maybe I could hire myself out to Fox News or CNN to create crises during slow news cycles. The book-writing was not paying my bills.

That weekend, I scanned the news hourly. I could literally feel the gravity of my bad karma pushing and pulling the news two helicopters downed in Iraq, bombings in Istanbul, anti-Bush protests in England. And then billionaire Larry Tisch died. His empire was built on real estate and media -an irresistible portfolio for media tastemakers. I was toast. And yet, on Monday, the NPR producer said Tisch’s death would only carve 10 minutes out of my 60-minute spot. Unless Saddam Hussein was killed in the next few hours, I was green-lighted. I rode the train into New York City and walked to the NPR studio in total silence, hoping that no news was, finally, good news. Bruce Stockler is a humorist and the author of I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets.

Last September, I was scheduled to appear on National Public Radio (NPR) to promote my new memoir, I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets, in a back-to-school-themed show. But minutes before airtime, the NPR producer told me that country music…
Biography

Hank Williams, old man of country music who died young

Review by bookpagedev

Fifty-two years after his death at the age of 29, Hank Williams remains the colossus of country music, as well as a pivotal figure in pop and rock ‘n’ roll. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961 and into the Rock ∧ Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. His recording and songwriting career flourished for a mere seven years from 1946 until 1953. Yet during that period he created such classics as "Cold Cold Heart," "Mansion on the Hill," "I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You)," "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Your Cheatin’ Heart" and "I Saw the Light." (In contrast, Irving Berlin, the grand old man of 20th-century pop music and clearly Williams’ equal in America’s respect and affection, lived to be 100.) Born into poverty in southern Alabama, Hiram Williams was inspired to music by the area’s churches, the Grand Ole Opry radio show and, particularly, by a black singer and guitar player named Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne, who taught him the rudiments of his trade.

Although he was headstrong, Williams’ life was shaped for both ill and good by three personalities as strong as his own: his domineering mother, Lillie; his fierce and ambitious first wife, Audrey; and his music publisher and lyrical collaborator, Fred Rose, the one man who knew what to do with all that raw talent. Never more than marginally healthy, Williams began drinking alcohol when he was still a kid, thereby establishing an addiction that would gnaw at his scrawny body and overactive mind until they both failed him one cold New Year’s night as he lay in the back of his chauffeured, powder-blue Cadillac convertible speeding along a narrow, winding road somewhere in West Virginia. He was mythic to the end.

Paul Hemphill, who established his country music credentials with The Nashville Sound (1970), offers little that is new about Williams, either in incident or character revelation, in Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams. But having grown up in Alabama at the time Williams was beginning to make a name for himself, Hemphill comes closer than most previous biographers to explaining the convoluted Southern culture that incubated Williams’ genius and provided him his most appreciative audiences. Winnowing through a wealth of biographical material, Hemphill provides eyewitness-like accounts of Williams’ daily struggles and triumphs, such as this note Rose sent in late 1947, reprimanding him for his profligate ways: "[My son] tells me you called this morning for more money, after me wiring you four hundred dollars just the day before yesterday. We have gone as far as we can go at this time and cannot send you any more. Hank, I have tried to be a friend of yours but you refuse to let me be one, and I feel that you are just using me for a good thing and this is where I quit." Fortunately for American music, Rose didn’t quit, and the wily, tormented young man lived to write and sing another day.

Formerly country music editor of Billboard magazine, Nashville-based Edward Morris is a reporter for CMT.com.

 

Fifty-two years after his death at the age of 29, Hank Williams remains the colossus of country music, as well as a pivotal figure in pop and rock 'n' roll. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961 and into…

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