bookpagedev

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

If anyone can capture what makes Sunday afternoons and lives of quiet desperation so melancholy, it’s Anita Brookner. In Undue Influence, an isolating and wistful sorrow pervades the life of Claire Pitt, a young woman working in a dusty second-hand London bookshop run by two elderly spinsters with an undying devotion to their deceased father, a supposed man of letters. Claire edits St. John Collier’s writings in the tomb-like shop basement, an apt setting for her dormant self-esteem. Mostly she is distracted and saved from deadly boredom by a pile of moldering 1950s women’s magazines, feeding her fantasies of finding a satisfying female role in simplistic black and white. After her mother’s death, Claire becomes even more detached, believing herself to be less than she should be, and wanting more than she thinks she deserves. She walks the streets of London observing and analyzing others’ actions, removed from even the sound of her own footsteps. Then one day a rare customer enters the shop. He’s attractive and needy, with the weakness of character destined to dissipate Claire’s remaining motivation to define her life. Tragically, she blames herself for giving in to this psychological script by exerting undue influence over this grown man. Their affair meanders aimlessly, like its characters, until Claire manages to alter the direction of her life with the simplest of gestures. It’s easy to miss the epiphany, but not to be missed is Brookner’s courage in bringing solitude to the surface, with all its pain and terrors. Desperate, lonely thoughts make up this entire story, leaving room for insights so sharp their cuts are barely felt. Whittling an existence from indifferent fate, Brookner’s characters are courageous, not pitiable, and their slightest victories are set glittering against such austere lives.

Deanna Larson is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee.

If anyone can capture what makes Sunday afternoons and lives of quiet desperation so melancholy, it's Anita Brookner. In Undue Influence, an isolating and wistful sorrow pervades the life of Claire Pitt, a young woman working in a dusty second-hand London bookshop run by two…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Meet the older, wiser Douglas Coupland. His latest novel, Miss Wyoming, loses the flaws that mar his weaker novels too much style, not enough substance; pseudo-profound ramblings; and self-absorbed, unsympathetic characters. Instead, Miss Wyoming contains some of Coupland’s best writing witty, irreverent, and full of detailed characterizations and up-to-the-minute pop culture. In books such as Generation X and Microserfs, Coupland’s characters have shown us what it means to grow up in America at the end of the 20th century.

Their attempts at escape or reinvention were, more often than not, unsuccessful (Shampoo Planet, Polaroids from the Dead). Now, his characters have returned home, where they try to create more meaningful lives than the ones they ran away from. In her teens, Susan was a beauty queen turned ’80s sitcom star. By her mid-twenties, she was an unemployed has-been with a grim future. Then she walks away from a plane crash in the Midwest, the sole survivor (one of Coupland’s magical moments: her seat alone sits upright among the smoldering carnage in an Ohio field). Presumed dead, Susan disappears for a year. She emerges after a year to prevent her mother from capitalizing on her supposed death. You will cheer for the reborn Susan as she remakes her life on her own terms. John is no less driven than Susan, and just as alienated. He produces multimillion dollar blockbuster movies with his best friend. After his decadent lifestyle leads to a breakdown, John sells everything he owns and walks away from his life. He believes seeing America from the road will be a poetic and healing journey, but he nearly dies in the desert. His partying lifestyle was empty, his walkabout was a flop. Lacking direction or purpose, he is not as admirable as Susan, but he is endearingly earnest. Susan and John, both smart and strong, have survived Hollywood’s cruelty and capriciousness. They ran away and returned changed, determined to make something solid and lasting out of their lives. When they meet, it feels like destiny. And although Susan and John live in Hollywood, the most difficult place in America to do anything with integrity or substance, by the novel’s end they have embarked upon something noble and honest.

Surprisingly for Coupland’s readers, Miss Wyoming is satisfying in traditional ways: the right couples pair up, and families are repaired. Most importantly, the end of the book feels like the beginning of something good.

Robin Taylor manages Web projects for an IT company in Washington, D.

C.

Meet the older, wiser Douglas Coupland. His latest novel, Miss Wyoming, loses the flaws that mar his weaker novels too much style, not enough substance; pseudo-profound ramblings; and self-absorbed, unsympathetic characters. Instead, Miss Wyoming contains some of Coupland's best writing witty, irreverent, and full of…

Fiction

Former environmentalist cares for a motley menagerie in Boyle’s futuristic comedy

Review by bookpagedev

T.C. Boyle writes with grace, skill, humor, and agility. From one sentence to the next, he can make a reader think, puzzle over an an unexpected plot development, and laugh out loud. His imagination blooms in every paragraph, leaving the reader invigorated. Boyle’s previous books have demonstrated that he can enlighten, entertain, and exhilarate, and he delivers once again with his latest novel, A Friend of the Earth.

The best-selling author of Riven Rock and Budding Prospect, T. Coraghessan Boyle is best known for The Road to Wellville, a wild story about Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake. With A Friend of the Earth, Boyle takes us to the future, 2025 to be exact. In Santa Ynez, California, the estate of a faded rock star includes a private menagerie of creatures no one else would want warthogs, hyenas, sad-looking lions. Tyrone O’Shaughnessy Tierwater, former radical environmentalist, manages these creatures. What has happened to the all the other creatures of the Earth? Well, they’re all extinct. Mammals, birds, reptiles, fish most of them are wiped out. The biosphere has crumbled.

And now Andrea, his former wife, comes to see Tyrone. He’s 75, his militant tree-hugging days behind him. The two begin a relationship again, and their involvement leads to a story only Boyle can tell. Were Salvador Dali still alive, he’d appreciate Boyle’s novels. They’re surreal, comical, and tragic. Beneath Boyle’s luxuriant canvas of vibrant colors are deeper explorations of social issues. In A Friend of the Earth the issue is concern for the environment and for what humans have done, not only to the world we live in and share, but also to ourselves. The folly of our ways is tragic, but it’s also funny and makes for good reading. A Friend of the Earth should add to Boyle’s well-deserved and growing reputation as a talented novelist.

Jonathan Shipley is the publications coordinator for a Seattle company.



T.C. Boyle writes with grace, skill, humor, and agility. From one sentence to the next, he can make a reader think, puzzle over an an unexpected plot development, and laugh out loud. His imagination blooms in every paragraph, leaving the reader invigorated. Boyle's previous books…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Mr. Spaceman has sprung from one of the funniest and most poignant stories in Butler’s last collection, Tabloid Dreams. In Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover, lonely Edna Bradshaw told of falling in love with Desi, an alien being, in the parking lot of an Alabama Wal-Mart. Now Butler has picked up Desi and Edna’s story at a later point. Married and hovering above the earth at the end of the year 2000, they’re entertaining an entire busload of Texans bound for a Louisiana casino. Desi has beamed both bus and passengers up to his spaceship so he can continue his research into the nature of human beings.

This is to prepare him to reveal himself and his spaceship to earth media on New Year’s Eve. With down-home hospitality, Edna offers cheese straws and sausage balls to the abducted bus passengers who can’t help noticing Desi’s eight fingers on each hand, all ending in little sucker disks. But he’s simple and wise by turns, lacing his conversation with earthly advertising slogans and song titles.

I’m a friendly guy, he says. There Is a Kind of Hush All Over the World Tonight. I Would Like to Teach the World to Sing. I Would Like to Buy the World a Coke. Eventually Desi learns the life stories of individual passengers through his empathic powers. Though these often moving monologues from the heart compose a kind of cross-section of American humanity, many have the familiar ring of characters met too often in recent fiction. None is as engaging or original as Desi himself. His visit to an American supermarket, dressed in zoot suit and hat, is one of the most hilarious scenes in the book. Butler’s blend of humor and insight, along with his ability to examine the human condition, is on display here, as it was in Tabloid Dreams and Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Mr.

Spaceman is a tour de force, a flight of fancy which lands in the heart.

James William Brown is the author of Blood Dance (Harcourt Brace). He teaches fiction writing in Boston.

Mr. Spaceman has sprung from one of the funniest and most poignant stories in Butler's last collection, Tabloid Dreams. In Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover, lonely Edna Bradshaw told of falling in love with Desi, an alien being, in the parking lot of an…

HistoryAmerican History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.

S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest, Vegas is also a magnet for the imagination. Inevitably the authors focus on the four-mile stretch of casinos called the Strip, but along the way they address many other aspects of the Industry as Las Vegas residents refer to gambling including entertainment, prostitution, organized crime, and law enforcement.

Let’s move from the narrowest focus to the broadest. Pete Earley, the investigative reporter who wrote The Hot House about Leavenworth, and also published exposes about the Aldrich Ames and John Walker spy cases, has a new book, Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas (Bantam, $26.95, 0553095021). He explores everything from legendary Las Vegas promoters such as Bugsy Siegel and Howard Hughes to the astonishing success of recent family-oriented entertainment facilities.

Several of Earley’s stories demonstrate the hypnotic pull the city exerts on residents who try to escape. One security guard tells the story of his experiences during the tragic fire that raged through the MGM Grand Hotel in 1980. Afterward, traumatized, he and his wife moved to Florida to flee the memories, but finally they returned because they missed the twenty-four-hour excitement. Andres Martinez covers some of the same territory from a completely different point of view in 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas (Villard, $25, 0375501819). Martinez gave himself a month to lose the $50,000 his publisher had given him to chronicle a gambling spree. Along the way he wrote a vivid, you-are-there account of his adventures, one day per chapter. Like Paul Theroux, Martinez seems part fascinated anthropologist and part happy-go-lucky adventurer. It’s an appealing combination, and makes for a personal take on an impersonal town. Unlike the other Vegas books described here, 24/7 is also extremely amusing.

Inevitably, the most varied of these volumes is an anthology, The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip (Oxford, $30, 0195130707), edited by journalism professor David Littlejohn. Fourteen vivid chapters by as many writers explore such topics as gambling, organized crime, the real estate boom, and locals who decry their home town’s reputation. For example, the chapter Law and Disorder details the countless scam artists who trail the nouveau riche foolish enough to flaunt their wealth. Skin City follows a limo driver who caters to whorehouse clients and acts as surrogate uncle to the prostitutes themselves; then it explores the strip joints of the city.

Broader still in scope is David Thomson’s new book, In Nevada, which bears the ambitious subtitle The Land, the People, God, and Chance. You’ll recognize Thomson’s name from his several previous books, including Rosebud, his biography of Orson Welles, and Beneath Mulholland, a lively tour of Hollywood history. From early nuclear testing to recent theological battles, he prowls his self-assigned turf with scrupulous attention. He refutes those who consider Vegas hell on Earth: Hell is rebuke, torture, and eternal punishment for those who have sinned. Las Vegas may be founded on a paradox, or a trick, but the idea that you will play and strive and then lose is not hellish. For many of us, it’s a profound and absorbing metaphor for life. Thomson mentions that, because he normally writes about film, people couldn’t understand why he was writing about Nevada. If I sometimes seem to concentrate on film, why, really, it’s just a way into life, and words, and wondering what you can believe. For Thomson, as for the authors of these four books, that is precisely what Las Vegas is a way into many other things that seem to converge in the near-mythical city that rises from the desert like a neon mirage.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.

S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As…

Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have…

Travel

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest, Vegas is also a magnet for the imagination. Inevitably the authors focus on the four-mile stretch of casinos called the Strip, but along the way they address many other aspects of the Industry as Las Vegas residents refer to gambling including entertainment, prostitution, organized crime, and law enforcement.

Let’s move from the narrowest focus to the broadest. Pete Earley, the investigative reporter who wrote The Hot House about Leavenworth, and also published exposes about the Aldrich Ames and John Walker spy cases, has a new book, Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas (Bantam, $26.95, 0553095021). He explores everything from legendary Las Vegas promoters such as Bugsy Siegel and Howard Hughes to the astonishing success of recent family-oriented entertainment facilities.

Several of Earley’s stories demonstrate the hypnotic pull the city exerts on residents who try to escape. One security guard tells the story of his experiences during the tragic fire that raged through the MGM Grand Hotel in 1980. Afterward, traumatized, he and his wife moved to Florida to flee the memories, but finally they returned because they missed the twenty-four-hour excitement. Andres Martinez covers some of the same territory from a completely different point of view in 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas (Villard, $25, 0375501819). Martinez gave himself a month to lose the $50,000 his publisher had given him to chronicle a gambling spree. Along the way he wrote a vivid, you-are-there account of his adventures, one day per chapter. Like Paul Theroux, Martinez seems part fascinated anthropologist and part happy-go-lucky adventurer. It’s an appealing combination, and makes for a personal take on an impersonal town. Unlike the other Vegas books described here, 24/7 is also extremely amusing.

Inevitably, the most varied of these volumes is an anthology, The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip, edited by journalism professor David Littlejohn. Fourteen vivid chapters by as many writers explore such topics as gambling, organized crime, the real estate boom, and locals who decry their home town’s reputation. For example, the chapter Law and Disorder details the countless scam artists who trail the nouveau riche foolish enough to flaunt their wealth. Skin City follows a limo driver who caters to whorehouse clients and acts as surrogate uncle to the prostitutes themselves; then it explores the strip joints of the city.

Broader still in scope is David Thomson’s new book, In Nevada, which bears the ambitious subtitle The Land, the People, God, and Chance (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50, 0679454861). You’ll recognize Thomson’s name from his several previous books, including Rosebud, his biography of Orson Welles, and Beneath Mulholland, a lively tour of Hollywood history. From early nuclear testing to recent theological battles, he prowls his self-assigned turf with scrupulous attention. He refutes those who consider Vegas hell on Earth: Hell is rebuke, torture, and eternal punishment for those who have sinned. Las Vegas may be founded on a paradox, or a trick, but the idea that you will play and strive and then lose is not hellish. For many of us, it’s a profound and absorbing metaphor for life. Thomson mentions that, because he normally writes about film, people couldn’t understand why he was writing about Nevada. If I sometimes seem to concentrate on film, why, really, it’s just a way into life, and words, and wondering what you can believe. For Thomson, as for the authors of these four books, that is precisely what Las Vegas is a way into many other things that seem to converge in the near-mythical city that rises from the desert like a neon mirage.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest,…

Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come…
Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have…

Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come…
History

The life of a remarkable woman

Review by bookpagedev

Painstaking scholarship produced Georgiana, Amanda Foreman’s biography of an 18th-century duchess, but the book transcends the academic, depicting a complex woman thoroughly and with style. Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. The story of her life provides a fitting prologue to that of her famous descendant, but more importantly stands on its own as a portrait of a politically and socially active woman who, as Foreman writes, possessed a single-minded determination to be the heroine of her own story.

Georgiana was a duchess and a mother, author and trendsetter, political authority and leader. She was involved in contemporary politics at their highest levels, and Foreman writes of her contributions that It was these innovations her own cult of celebrity and her democratic approach which differentiated Georgiana then and later as a female pioneer in electoral politics. In her personal life, Georgiana dealt with difficult situations including gambling debts, trouble bearing children, gossip, an unfaithful husband, and the gnarled male-female relationships of her class and station. The accounts of her struggles simultaneously demonstrate the paradoxical depths of both dependence and independence attained by the 18th-century noblewoman.

The immediacy of Foreman’s book comes from her liberal use of Georgiana’s own words and those of her friends and family. Since the figures often speak for themselves, the language and concerns of the period stand out. Georgiana writes her dear friend Bess a poem letter which concludes, "Thy watchful affection I wait,/And hang with Delight on Thy voice;/And Dependance is softened by fate,/Since Dependance on Thee is my choice."  The elegant form and deep feeling this poem evinces illustrate Georgiana’s affection for her friend and the importance of even quotidian writing in her world.

These moments of authentic expression elevate Georgiana to more than a historical account. Instead, it is a thoroughly contextualized portrait of a fascinating woman. As Foreman writes of her own interest in her subject, I was struck by her voice, it was so strong, so clear, honest, and open, that she made everything I subsequently read seem dull by comparison.

Eliza R. L. McGraw teaches English at Vanderbilt University.

 

 

Painstaking scholarship produced Georgiana, Amanda Foreman's biography of an 18th-century duchess, but the book transcends the academic, depicting a complex woman thoroughly and with style. Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. The story of her life provides a fitting…

Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come…
Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Catch a rising star For a warp-speed career leap, it’s hard to surpass what’s happened to Ewan McGregor. He was known for his performances in iconoclastic cult films. Then came the role of the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the breathlessly awaited Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace. Suddenly, McGregor is being touted as the hottest Scottish import since Sean Connery. Certainly, he is an undeniably visible presence and not just on the screen. For McGregor is the subject of several recent and upcoming books. Aimed squarely at the actor’s fans, and those of the crowd-pleasing Star Wars franchise, the various books are odes to a performer distinguished by his determination to be an actor rather than a star. Of the tomes, Ewan McGregor: The Unauthorized Biography by Billy Adams takes honors for the most in-depth portrait. Based on interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, as well as existing materials, it details his road to success. Shooting Star: The Ewan McGregor Story (Ballantine, $5.99, 0345427246), by Janine Pourroy, moves film-by-film to explore McGregor’s emergence as the ultimate GenX icon. His life (29 years, so far) and career (15 movies in just five years) are also chronicled in titles including: Ewan McGregor by Chris Nickson (St. Martin’s, $5.99, 0312969104), Ewan McGregor: Rising to the Stars by James Hatfield (Penguin, $5.99, 0425169006), Ewan McGregor: An Unofficial Biography by Martin Noble, (DK/Funfax, $5.95, 0789446677, ages 4 and up), and Ewan McGregor: From Junkie to Jedi by Brian J. Robb (Plexus Publishing, $16.95, 0859652769). The latter title refers to McGregor’s rise to fame as the heroin-addicted central character of the off-beat film Trainspotting. McGregor will also be among the cast members of the various Phantom Menace tie-in books from Ballantine, to include Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Illustrated Screenplay by George Lucas, The Making of the Phantom Menace, and a novelization by popular fantasy author Terry Brooks. Books were the impetus for many of McGregor’s earlier films, including Trainspotting, based on the controversial Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, and Jane Austen’s Emma, for which McGregor donned period costumes. He bared all for The Pillow Book, the story of a writer who uses her boyfriend’s body on which to write the chapters of her book. The screenplay is included in The Pillow Book (Distributed Art Publishers), in which Peter Greenaway discusses his adaptation and reinterpretation of the Oriental classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (Columbia University Press), which examined life in 11th-century Japan. And next up for McGregor is an adaptation of the Marc Behm psycho-thriller, Eye of the Beholder, in which he’ll play a private eye stalking a serial killer. Let’s just hope The Force is with him.

Biographer Pat Broeske’s latest book is about Elvis Presley.

Catch a rising star For a warp-speed career leap, it's hard to surpass what's happened to Ewan McGregor. He was known for his performances in iconoclastic cult films. Then came the role of the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the breathlessly awaited Star Wars prequel, The…

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