bookpagedev

Audrey Hepburn never wrote her autobiography, despite pleas from friends and agents, fearing her life was too "plain" to make for good reading. But in Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit her son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, makes clear that Hepburn’s larger-than-life life was begging to be recounted. Written in graceful, honest prose, Ferrer’s book traces Hepburn’s life starting with her childhood in war-torn Netherlands, then moving onto her career in show business, and later, her extensive work for UNICEF. Ferrer does not shy away from the personal, recalling private memories of late-night chats with his mother. "Whenever she had to go to a dinner or a cocktail party, she would always say, Oh, if only I could stay home and eat in the kitchen with you,’" he writes. He also writes candidly about her health problems, including multiple miscarriages and the cancer that ultimately killed her.

In fact, Ferrer seemingly shares everything, from Hepburn’s favorite recipe spaghetti al pomodoro to dozens of lovely photos from every phase of her life. The pictures of her visits to refugees in Somalia are powerful, and the shots of her from various movie sets wearing her famous Givenchy clothes are gorgeous.

For all that Ferrer shares, this private glimpse never feels exploitative. His book will appeal to anyone who wants to read an account of a simultaneously modest private life and a huge role on the world stage.

All Amy Scribner wants from Santa is less traffic on the Washington, D.C., Beltway.

While not intended as a sequel to his National Book Award-winning volume Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball’s latest work, The Sweet Hell Inside, takes a look at many of the same themes: race, class, prejudice and sex. Beginning with the razor-sharp memories of 84-year-old Edwina Harleston Whitlock, Ball sets out to uncover the legacy of the Harlestons, an African-American clan whose blood ties he shares. Whitlock, a nonwhite descendant of the Balls, provided the author with documents that convinced him they were cousins as a result of the interracial coupling so common during the slavery and Reconstruction eras. The book opens with a detailed look at William Harleston, the owner of a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, that housed about 60 slaves, including Kate Wilson, who became the mother of his children. The pair maintained a forbidden sexual relationship for 35 years, causing Harleston to be shunned by friends and family alike.

From William and Kate, a prestigious bloodline began, one that would produce a family of African Americans unwilling to submit to the rigid demands of Jim Crow and segregation laws. The Harlestons endured their share of accomplishments as well as tragedies, but many members of the clan went on to succeed in business, civic affairs and the arts. Ball tells each of their triumphant stories with an exquisite sense of detail and insight.

Of the many tales told here, none are as fascinating as those of Harleston descendants Ella and Teddy. Ella, ravished by a prominent minister, later teamed with him to mold a small army of homeless black children into first-rate entertainers who took Broadway and Europe by storm. Her brother Teddy struggled to become an artist in Harlem, where he found himself surrounded by the high energy of the black creative world. Eventually, his efforts paid off, and he landed lucrative commissions, including a prize catch a request to paint noted industrialist Pierre DuPont.

These are just two of the many narratives Ball recounts with care and style in a wonderfully crafted volume that offers an in-depth look at black culture and history. In many respects, The Sweet Hell Inside is an even better book than Ball’s first, and that is quite a feat in itself.

Former U.S. Commission on Civil Rights chair and author Mary Frances Berry’s new book My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations provides vital information on an overlooked name in American history, Nashville’s Callie House. A former slave turned crusading advocate, House’s pioneering work on behalf of African Americans was not only met with hostility by the government, but also ridiculed by some key figures in the black community.

Berry’s volume traces the establishment and evolution of House’s Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, a pioneering organization created to deliver fiscal justice to former slaves. House based her efforts on the pensions given Union soldiers, arguing that former slaves deserved a similar reward from a nation that had supposedly fought to end their bondage. This movement inspired thousands of impoverished blacks, while simultaneously alarming many Southern legislatures and white politicians.

But Berry’s book also details vigorous opposition to House’s actions from such influential African-American figures as Congressmen John Mercer Langston, Thomas E. Miller and H.P. Cheatham. They used their legislative forums against House’s campaign, with Langston unsuccessfully trying instead to marshal support for bills expanding educational opportunities and voting rights. Still, House’s determination, along with her effectiveness as a fundraiser, temporarily made the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association a success. Her bid for slave pensions was eventually defeated, largely due to governmental pressure and interference. These actions included a dubious accusation of mail fraud under the 1873 Comstock law and finally a conviction, despite specious and inconclusive evidence, from an all-white male jury in 1917. Ironically, House was imprisoned in the same place as another maverick woman crusader, anti-war activist Emma Goldman. Upon her release, House returned to South Nashville, where she witnessed the city’s emerging black business boom during the ’20s. House died in 1928, but her efforts helped lay the groundwork for the African-American cultural, economic and political activism that flowered in the decades that followed. Berry’s important work should bring new attention to the contributions of Callie House.

Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and several other publications.

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was America’s most influential literary critic from the early 1920s through the 1950s. During those decades, his reviews and essays in such publications as Vanity Fair, the New Republic and especially the New Yorker introduced readers to many new writers. For example, Wilson encouraged his good friend and former fellow Princeton student F. Scott Fitzgerald and personally rekindled Fitzgerald’s literary reputation with a series of essays after the author’s early death. Wilson was the first in the U.S. to review Ernest Hemingway’s work, the first to consider Yeats the great modern poet and the critic who helped to introduce the work of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton to a general audience. In later years, Wilson praised the work of his friends W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov and promoted the work of Israeli author S.Y. Agnon before that author received the Nobel Prize in literature.

But Wilson was concerned with more than literature. His wide-ranging intellectual curiosity led him to report on the U.S. during the Depression and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He explored the literature of the Civil War and religious ceremonies of Native Americans. He also shared his travel experiences in Stalin’s Russia of the 1930s, Europe after World War II and other places. Lewis M. Dabney’s Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature brings the tempestuous private life of its subject including his four marriages, the third to another prominent literary figure, Mary McCarthy and his incredibly productive writing life into sharp focus. Wilson wrote much about himself, and his journals and correspondence have long been available. Dabney uses these sources, but he has gone far beyond them to talk with Wilson’s friends and to do other research for a more balanced perspective. Perhaps Dabney’s greatest accomplishment is to demonstrate the depth of Wilson’s achievement and why it was and remains important.

Dabney describes Wilson as the last great critic in the English line. What led to his pre-eminence, Dabney says, was that Readers respond to what Auden called the unassertive elegance of his prose, to his vigorous narrative rhythm, his reserve of apt and forceful imagery, and his art of quotation. As a critic he correlates the writing of others with their personalities, and in all his work sympathy is matched to relentless analysis. Dabney relates in fascinating detail how Wilson’s body of work, which also includes fiction, poetry and plays, came into being and points out strengths as well as weaknesses in certain works.

Not long after Wilson’s graduation from college, his father asked Don’t you think you ought to concentrate on something? Wilson replied, Father, what I want to do is to try to get to know something about all the main departments of human thought. He probably did not reach that objective, but he certainly got further along than many of us. Even those who have never heard of or read Wilson may have been touched by him: he was the prime mover behind what we know today as The Library of America, uniform editions of the works of major U.S. authors, even though publication of that series did not begin until after his death. And contemporary writers continue to be influenced by him. Perhaps the most prominent example is Louis Menand, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club was inspired by Wilson’s To the Finland Station. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.