Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

NonfictionHistory

Marooned in the ice

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, August 2014

On July 8, 1879, cheering throngs watched as the USS Jeannette set out from San Francisco and sailed off like a “long dark pencil of shadow standing straight up against the vivid sunset.” Under the command of officer George Washington De Long, the steamer and its crew were attempting to reach the North Pole and confirm a then–popular theory that the polar sea remained ice-free and open north of the Bering Strait. The expedition was funded by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the wealthy and eccentric owner of the New York Herald, who had also financed Stanley’s mission to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone.

Drawing on newly available letters, diaries, journals and other archives, crackerjack storyteller Hampton Sides (Hellhound on His Trail) vividly chronicles the tale of the Jeannette, the excitement and optimism surrounding the expedition, the contentious arguments regarding scientific theories about the Arctic and the fate of the ship and its crew.

The expedition’s great hope of sailing unimpeded by the ravages of ice floes is shattered when the Jeannette becomes trapped in ice, and the crew must spend long, lonely weeks in unending darkness jammed fast. Two years into the voyage, ice breaches the hull, the ship sinks, and the crew finds itself thousands of miles from land.

De Long leads a heroic march toward safety over unforgiving ice and in conditions that punish every crew member’s body. The tale of De Long’s struggle for survival is also the tale of his wife Emma’s struggle to maintain heroic hope during his absence. Weaving her letters to her husband—which he never received—through the narrative, Sides captures this gnawing anxiousness and stoic optimism.

Compulsively readable, In the Kingdom of Ice brilliantly recreates a world, invites us to enter it and to experience the isolation, fear and hope of the people in it, and leads us back to our worlds with a clearer understanding of what motivates those who undertake daunting but heroic challenges.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On July 8, 1879, cheering throngs watched as the USS Jeannette set out from San Francisco and sailed off like a “long dark pencil of shadow standing straight up against the vivid sunset.” Under the command of officer George Washington De Long, the steamer and its crew were attempting to reach the North Pole and confirm a then--popular theory that the polar sea remained ice-free and open north of the Bering Strait. The expedition was funded by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the wealthy and eccentric owner of the New York Herald, who had also financed Stanley’s mission to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone.
Nonfiction

The riddle of Harper Lee

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, July 2014

“In the summer of 2005, I was at a Burger King with Harper Lee.” With those tantalizing opening words, former Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills has us hooked. We want to know not just why the reclusive Harper Lee is talking to a journalist, but also why she and the novelist are sitting in a Burger King, of all places.

In The Mockingbird Next Door, a winning and affectionate account of her friendship with the noted author, Mills invites us to sit down on her front porch while she regales us with tales of Nelle Harper Lee and her sister, Alice, and the denizens of their hometown.

In 2001, Mills’ editor offered her what would turn out to be the assignment of a lifetime: Go to Monroeville, Alabama, and report on her experience of the town. Within a short time, she is chatting with Alice, and later Nelle, as she is known to family and friends, comes over to Mills’ motel room for a talk. A friendship eventually blossoms, and in 2004, Mills moves in next door to the Lees for almost two years.

Mills reveals no great secrets here, nor does she tell us more about the author than Lee herself wants to share. She offers no clues to solve the mystery of why Lee never wrote another novel after the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. As Alice Lee simply declares: “There were so many demands made on her. . . . People wanted her to speak to groups. She would be terrified to speak.”

What Mills’ portrait of the Lees does show is a pair of sisters who love feeding ducks at the local pond, who enjoy language and a good pun and who admire all things British. Nelle is spirited and can be impatient and suspicious, and Alice, who is still practicing law in her 90s, is the “steady, responsible, older sister.”

During her stay in Monroeville, Mills discovers a woman who is fiercely private yet willing to share her thoughts about the small-town South, her family and her writing life with a stranger whose own life has been deeply shaped by Lee’s famous novel. The Mockingbird Next Door offers a tender look at one of our most beloved and enigmatic writers, as well as the town that inspired her.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“In the summer of 2005, I was at a Burger King with Harper Lee.” With those tantalizing opening words, former Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills has us hooked. We want to know not just why the reclusive Harper Lee is talking to a journalist, but also why she and the novelist are sitting in a Burger King, of all places.
NonfictionMemoir

A lost boy’s spectacular true story of retraced footsteps

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Young Saroo loves his older brothers, especially Guddu, who at 14 is less and less at home. One night in 1986, Guddu comes back to his family’s poor village in India for about an hour, and 5-year-old Saroo can’t contain his excitement. When Guddu announces that he’s leaving, Saroo declares that he’s going off into the night with his older brother.

And so begins Saroo Brierley’s great misadventure and his 25-year search for home, which he recounts dramatically in A Long Way Home. That night, young Saroo becomes separated from his brother and begins several days of searching, begging and riding the rails in an attempt to find his brother or get back home.

Saroo eventually lands in Calcutta, where he joins the teeming masses of children scavenging for food, running from bullies and searching for a safe place to sleep through one more night. Turned over to the police by a kind teenage boy, he lands in an orphanage, where, for the first time in months, he has food and a clean bed.

It’s not long before a family adopts Saroo, and on September 25, 1987, he flies to Australia to meet the Brierleys and begin his new life in a faraway land. He thrives as Saroo Brierley, excelling in sports and academics. Yet, several questions haunt him: Is his mother still alive in India? What about Guddu? How can he find his way back to his village, since he can’t remember the name of the place or where it’s located?

In a development that made headlines around the world in 2012, Saroo is eventually able to locate his village, principally by poring over satellite images on Google Earth. He reunites with his family in India, yet never abandons his adoptive family in Australia. Instead, he writes that he “is not conflicted about who I am or where to call home. I now have two families, not two identities.”

Though Brierley’s prose lacks polish, his story is undeniably moving and will appeal to any reader captivated by the pursuit of a dream that won’t die.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Young Saroo loves his older brothers, especially Guddu, who at 14 is less and less at home. One night in 1986, Guddu comes back to his family’s poor village in India for about an hour, and 5-year-old Saroo can’t contain his excitement. When Guddu announces that he’s leaving, Saroo declares that he’s going off into the night with his older brother.

NonfictionMemoir

When singing becomes life itself

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

As a little girl in Augusta, Georgia, Jessye Norman absorbed the lessons of preparing to do a task well. Every Monday morning as she set off for school, her father would ask her if she had her poem ready to recite, and her mother would exhort Jessye to “stand up straight.” Norman discovered in those years that the act of standing in front of crowds and performing came as naturally to her as “passing around the Ritz crackers with pimento cheese at the end of a program.”

In the same soaring voice that has made her one of the world’s most beloved opera singers, Norman delivers an inspiring memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing!, in which she reveals her deep love for her family and community and the many ways that music is the thread woven through all aspects of her, and our, lives.

Growing up, she scarcely imagined that she would become a singer; in childhood, she wanted to play the games the boys were playing, like baseball and basketball, and by the time she was in junior high, she had set her sights on a career in medicine. Whatever she does, Norman credits her mother Janie for her strength: “My sense of self was inspired by Janie Norman, her mother, her sister, and the women who came before them—the people of whom I am wonderfully and fearfully made. . . . It is my legacy as a ‘little Norman’—a legacy of strength. A reverence for honesty and a will to speak to inequity when it rears its head.”

Norman profusely thanks her teachers for recognizing a gift that she herself had not acknowledged, and she gratefully recalls Mrs. Sanders, her middle school choral director, and her high school principal, Lloyd Reese, for encouraging and supporting her to participate in the Marian Anderson Vocal Competition in Philadelphia. Although Norman did not win that contest, Sanders took the opportunity to introduce Norman to Dean Mark Fax and music professor Carolyn V. Grant at Howard University, both of whom saw Norman’s tremendous potential and offered her a full scholarship.

Norman plainly and forthrightly shares the struggles she has faced as a black woman singing opera around the world, but it’s her joy that echoes gloriously throughout her book: “Singing gives me many rewards and blessings for all the hard work it requires and on which it depends,” she writes. “Singing, for me, is actually life itself. It is communication, person to person and soul to soul, a physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual expression carried by the breath. Life!”

In the same soaring voice that has made her one of the world’s most beloved opera singers, Norman delivers an inspiring memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing!, in which she reveals her deep love for her family and community and the many ways that music is the thread woven through all aspects of her, and our, lives.
NonfictionBiography

The definitive biography of General Lee

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

From the Duke boys’ car named the General Lee on the “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show to his appearance on a U.S. postage stamp, Robert E. Lee has come to “embody and glorify a defeated cause,” Michael Korda asserts in a monumental new biography, Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee.

Korda, a former publishing executive and author of many books, including a popular biography of U.S. Grant, exhaustively explores Lee’s life and times, probing the Southern general’s personality, his political and religious views, and the brilliant military strategies that catapulted him into the position of commander of the Confederate armies. The book traces Lee’s life from his relationship with his father, the famous light cavalry leader, Light Horse Harry Lee, to his college days at West Point—where he graduated as one of the top three in his class. When the Civil War began, his early battles in the Virginia mountains showed Lee how difficult the coming war would be and how to put into practice the lessons he learned from studying Napoleon at West Point.

Accompanied by 30 maps of battles and dozens of illustrations, Korda’s deftly painted portrait depicts a man whose strength of conviction established him as a great leader just as it caused him to make painful decisions. When Virginia seceded, Lee resigned his commission as Colonel of the 1st Regt. Of Cavalry, painfully bringing to an end his 36-year career, because he “would not participate in any Union attack against the South.” Korda illustrates Lee’s complexity as a Southerner who disagreed with secession and disliked slavery, but would fight to defend his beloved state of Virginia.

Lee emerges from Korda’s biography as a “fallible human being whose strengths were courage, his sense of duty, his religious belief, his military genius, his constant search to do right, and his natural and instinctive courtesy.”

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From the Duke boys’ car named the General Lee on the “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show to his appearance on a U.S. postage stamp, Robert E. Lee has come to “embody and glorify a defeated cause,” Michael Korda asserts in a monumental new biography, Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee.

NonfictionMusicBiography

A music star’s rough path from the pinnacle

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Twenty years after he recorded “The Letter” at the age of 16—a song that became a mega-hit for the Memphis-based Box Tops—Alex Chilton mused: “I guess my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record I’ll ever have.”

Chilton went on to record more hits with the Box Tops, though none as famous or memorable or covered by other artists as “The Letter.” He put together and fronted one of the most influential power pop bands of the ’70s, Big Star, and re-emerged as a significant solo artist in the ’80s. His song “In the Street” became familiar to millions as the theme song of the television comedy “That ‘70s Show.”

Chilton’s powerful musical legacy shaped bands as diverse as R.E.M. and the dB’s, yet his remarkable life story has never been the subject of a biography—until now. In A Man Called Destruction, music critic Holly George-Warren (The Road to Woodstock)—whose band, Clambake, Chilton produced in 1985—vividly narrates Chilton’s rise to early fame, his genius in developing new musical directions and his precipitous decline from the musical pinnacle to an untimely death at the age of 59.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with his family, friends and bandmates, she traces Chilton’s life from his childhood and youth in Mississippi and Memphis, including the tragic death of his older brother, Reid, and its effect on the entire family. His early musical tastes were eclectic—Jimmy Smith, Mose Allison, Jackie Wilson, Elvis—and he was recruited to join his first band, the Devilles, while still in high school. George-Warren recounts his early recording sessions with famed songwriters and producers Chips Moman and Dan Penn and the meeting with singer-songwriter Chris Bell that eventually resulted in the formation of Big Star. Throughout his long career, which included a stint as a solo artist and a hiatus from the music business, Chilton showed an appetite for self-destruction that seemed to grow as much from his creative genius as from his thirst for alcohol and drugs.

As George-Warren points out, “music was Alex’s life—but what he loved more than making music was doing it on his own terms.”

“As in life,” she observes, “Alex liked traveling the byways, even if it meant getting lost sometimes. It wasn’t an easy road—but it took him where he wanted to go.” In this colorful and compulsively readable biography, she takes readers along for the ride.

Twenty years after he recorded “The Letter” at the age of 16—a song that became a mega-hit for the Memphis-based Box Tops—Alex Chilton mused: “I guess my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record I’ll ever have." Alex Chilton’s powerful musical legacy shaped bands as diverse as R.E.M. and the dB’s, yet his remarkable life story has never been the subject of a biography—until now. In A Man Called Destruction, music critic Holly George-Warren (The Road to Woodstock) vividly narrates Chilton’s rise to early fame.
NonfictionMemoir

A daughter’s search for her father’s legacy

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

On October 29, 1971, Duane Allman, the soulful lead guitarist who wove expressive and fluid guitar solos into the music of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, King Curtis, Derek and the Dominoes and the Allman Brothers Band, died in a motorcycle crash near Macon, Georgia. He left behind an already remarkable musical legacy, a young wife and a 2-year-old daughter named Galadrielle.

With the same musical emotion that her father spun into the songs he played, Allman’s daughter Galadrielle spins a poignant and illuminating portrait of a father she never knew in Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman. The book is part memoir and part biography, as she chronicles not only Duane’s life, but also her own search to discover and appreciate her late father.

Duane named his daughter for Galadriel, the princess of the elves in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, his favorite book. But after her father’s death, Galadrielle’s mother rarely shared stories about Duane, and her only contact with his musical legacy was an annual trip to an Allman Brothers concert. “I didn’t have his clothing or trinkets to treasure and cling to,” she writes. “Most of our pictures of him were the same publicity stills reprinted in the press.”

As she searches for a fuller portrait of her father, Galadrielle gathers stories from her family, Duane’s bandmates (including his brother Gregg) and friends. Her quest reveals a man so immersed in music that his hands played guitar notes even in his sleep.

From her father’s brief life (he was only 24 when he was killed), Galadrielle gleans “bits of wisdom” that she chooses to embrace: “Do what you love and own who you are. Time is precious and death is real. So is Art: it defies them both.”

In the end, writing this book simultaneously opens and closes a chapter in her life. “I want to believe you will stay close to me. I tell myself you live in my blood and bones and you will come when I need you. I will stop seeking you constantly now. I will know you are in me and not out in the world,” she writes. “We are tied together as surely as a string is wound tightly through the tuning peg of a guitar. The connection between us is physical, actual, real.”

Galadrielle Allman’s sweet song to her father brings Duane Allman to life in a way that no other biography will ever be able to do.

With the same musical emotion that her father spun into the songs he played, Allman’s daughter Galadrielle spins a poignant and illuminating portrait of a father she never knew in Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman. The book is part memoir and part biography, as she chronicles not only Duane’s life, but also her own search to discover and appreciate her late father.

NonfictionHistory

A Boston Harbor diving mission gone wrong

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

On July 21, 1999, a crane lowered experienced construction diver DJ Gillis and four other men down a 420-foot shaft to the opening of an almost 10-mile tunnel beneath Deer Island in Boston Harbor. At the end of the day, only three men would return alive.

In a compelling tale of corporate and public mismanagement, Boston Globe Magazine writer Neil Swidey tells the gripping stories of courage, deceit and devastating loss that emerged from the Deer Island debacle in Trapped Under the Sea.

After Boston Harbor was rated one of the most polluted in the nation, public officials launched a $300 million project in the early 1990s to pipe wastewater through a tunnel to the ocean. In spite of significant early progress, work on the tunnel eventually bogged down. By the time Gillis and his co-workers were hired to unplug a series of smaller pipes, the companies that built the tunnel had all but abandoned it, raising many questions. “How could this idea of sending divers to a place as remote as the moon, asking them to entrust their lives to an improvised, untested breathing system, have ever made sense to sensible people?” Swidey asks. “The answer,” he points out, “lies in the dangerous cocktail of time, money, stubbornness, and frustration near the end of the over-budget, long delayed job.”

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Swidey pulls us into the lives of the divers and the aftermath of the perfect storm of forces that led to the deaths of two of them. He chronicles the psychological trauma into which the three surviving divers spiral, emphasizing that no matter how the tunnel project was successfully completed, “no one came out of this feeling like a winner.”

In this compelling page-turner, Swidey grabs us as soon as we enter that narrow elevator shaft and never lets up as we accompany the men on their sad and frightening journey.

On July 21, 1999, a crane lowered experienced construction diver DJ Gillis and four other men down a 420-foot shaft to the opening of an almost 10-mile tunnel beneath Deer Island in Boston Harbor. At the end of the day, only three men would return alive.

NonfictionTechnology

Full steam ahead

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Grab your tickets and climb aboard Train, Tom Zoellner's full-steam-ahead, rollicking express ride on the great trains of the world. Part memoir and part history of the railroads in several countries, Zoellner's chronicle of days and nights spent crammed in crowded coaches or sleeper cars, chatting with crossing guards at remote outposts in India, or marveling at the engineering of formerly grand stations now in disrepair recalls both the romance and the risk of riding the rails.

Recollections of a tearful young girl lost in a book he glimpsed on a train ride on a snowy Pennsylvania night some 20 years ago prompt Zoellner to recall that the railroads "summon forth a vision of past sweetness, a lost national togetherness." Throwing his belongings in a backpack and punching his tickets, he hops several trains for a close-up look at the marvel and the possibilities of the rails. He boards trains across the world, starting in Britain—where he rides from the northern shores of Scotland to a spot in the southwest near Cornwall called Land's End—and moving on through India, Russia—where he rides the famed Trans-Siberian Railway—China, Peru and Spain. Along the way, he chats with passengers, yearning for a glimpse of the ways that trains have formed and continue to influence their lives.

Although the sound of a faraway train whistle often stirs nostalgic longings, Zoellner reminds us that railroads were built on the backbones of many laborers who lost their lives in the effort to stretch gleaming tracks across a nation. In India, for example, the "Bhor Ghats became the deadliest stretch of railway construction in Asia where . . . the death rate was close to one-third due to gunpowder blasts, falls from cliffs, and cholera."

In the United States, millions ride commuter trains every morning, but Zoellner points out that, according to an Amtrak study, 98 percent of Americans have never taken a passenger train to travel to their destinations. Zoellner sits in on a rail conference in which politicians and others discuss the future of rail travel, especially high-speed rail travel in California, and while the participants bicker about policy, they nevertheless recognize the potential of the rails.

Zoellner keeps his narrative firmly on the rails in this absorbing round-the-world journey.

Grab your tickets and climb aboard Train, Tom Zoellner's full-steam-ahead, rollicking express ride on the great trains of the world. Part memoir and part history of the railroads in several countries, Zoellner's chronicle of days and nights spent crammed in crowded coaches or sleeper cars, chatting with crossing guards at remote outposts in India, or marveling at the engineering of formerly grand stations now in disrepair recalls both the romance and the risk of riding the rails.

NonfictionMemoir

Rejecting religion, finding faith in herself

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Leah Vincent is a good girl who loves her rabbi father. In her Yeshivish community—a sect within ultra-Orthodox Judaism—she’s a girl “who would never sneak a kosher candy bar that did not carry the extra strict cholov Yisroel certification.”

Vincent yearns for little more than to live devotedly the only life available to her: Follow Jewish laws strictly, marry the right man and have his children. When she leaves her home in Pittsburgh to attend high school in Manchester, England, she meets her best friend’s brother, Naftali. It’s not long before she’s not only aching with lust and love for him, but also beginning to question her religious teachings. She writes letters to Naftali filled with theological questions. When her aunt in Manchester discovers the letters, Vincent’s life spirals out of control, as her parents turn their backs on her because of her “immoral” action of writing letters to a boy. Overnight, she is on her own without any financial or emotional support. 

In Cut Me Loose, Vincent details her harrowing journey as she wanders through harmful relationships and destructive actions, such as cutting her body. As she hits bottom, Vincent realizes that the “life she is trying to craft is doomed to failure.” Although she eventually achieves a measure of redemption, she learns that too much freedom, like too much restriction, has its pitfalls.

Vincent’s compulsively readable memoir draws us into her fears, her few joys and her complete aloneness as she struggles to navigate the course of a new life.

Leah Vincent is a good girl who loves her rabbi father. In her Yeshivish community—a sect within ultra-Orthodox Judaism—she’s a girl “who would never sneak a kosher candy bar that did not carry the extra strict cholov Yisroel certification.”

Social Science

What it’s actually like to be blind

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

According to author Rosemary Mahoney, “the United States has the lowest rate of blindness in the world,” yet Americans fear blindness more than any other handicap. As she concedes in her riveting glance into the world of the blind, she was among those who palpably feared a world of darkness.

Yet, in her compulsively readable account, For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind, Mahoney reveals that the blind often embrace their affliction rather than wallowing in self-pity or searching for sympathy.

Mahoney (Down the Nile) travels to India to teach in a school for the blind run by Sabriye Tenberken, founder of Braille Without Borders. She admits that she chose the school because she had developed a strong curiosity about blindness and that “she wanted to meet blind people, to spend time with them, to get to know them . . . to see how they live in their world, and how they navigate.”

What she discovers is that the blind don’t let their sightlessness stand in the way of living their lives. Many of the students feel lucky to be blind, because, as they tell her, if “we were not blind, we would still be sitting in our countries only helping at home and doing nothing.” The blind individuals with whom she lives and works are “strong and happy and very capable . . . they’ve accepted their blindness; it can’t stand in their way.”

Mahoney’s beautifully written narrative opens our eyes to the experience of blindness and offers fresh insight into human resilience and the way we view the world.

According to author Rosemary Mahoney, “the United States has the lowest rate of blindness in the world,” yet Americans fear blindness more than any other handicap. As she concedes in her riveting glance into the world of the blind, she was among those who palpably…

NonfictionBiography

The comedy and the tragedy of Richard Pryor

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When he died in 2005—his body weakened by years of freebasing cocaine, as well as heart disease, multiple sclerosis and a freak accident with a cigarette lighter that had set him ablaze in 1990—Richard Pryor had already won one Emmy and five Grammys. Yet his position at number one on Comedy Central’s list of the all-time greatest comedians defines his enduring legacy more than any other award.

In this set of fans’ notes to Pryor, David Henry and Joe Henry—who talked with Pryor several times before his death—draw on conversations with his inner circle as well as their own and others’ memories of Pryor’s stand-up routines, his film roles and his television parts. The result is Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him, an intimate and riveting tribute.

One Friday night in 1973, the Henry brothers learned that Pryor would be hosting ABC’s “The Midnight Special,” so they taped his performance on a reel-to-reel player. Looking back, they wonder why two white teenagers raised in the South were so intent on listening to a black comedian who would have been making fun of them and their race. That night they discovered that Pryor was a “beacon that said, Take heart. Stay human. You are not alone.”

Following Pryor’s death, the Henrys set out to make sense of his contributions to comedy and our culture. With energetic storytelling, they chronicle Pryor’s life from his early childhood, when he was abandoned at 10 by his mother and raised by his grandmother, to his discovery of his talent after he dropped out of high school, to his difficult stint in the Army, the development of his gift on the Chitlin’ Circuit and his meteoric rise and tragic fall.

Because of his upbringing, Pryor remained emotionally distant and insecure all his life, often pushing away those who loved him most, even his children. While the Henrys celebrate Pryor’s comic genius in their page-turning tribute, they also reveal a sad and lonely clown always looking for his next routine and never happy with his success or his place in the world.

When he died in 2005—his body weakened by years of freebasing cocaine, as well as heart disease, multiple sclerosis and a freak accident with a cigarette lighter that had set him ablaze in 1990—Richard Pryor had already won one Emmy and five Grammys. Yet his…

Biography

A former friend tells all

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

For 30 years, Johnny Carson carried his comic monologues and acidly funny interview questions into America’s living rooms and bedrooms on “The Tonight Show.” Although at least two unauthorized biographies—Ronald L. Smith’s Johnny Carson (1987) and Paul Corkery’s Carson (1987)—appeared during his lifetime, the definitive or authorized biography has yet to be written.

In his rambling, haplessly written and arrogant memoir masquerading as a biography, Johnny Carson, Henry Bushkin offers a glimpse of only a small slice of Carson’s life, the 18 years that Bushkin served as Carson’s attorney. “I was his attorney, but more properly, I was his lawyer, counselor, partner, employee, business advisor, earpiece . . . enforcer, running buddy, drinking and dining companion, and foil.”

Using his unique vantage point, Bushkin reveals the Carson he knew while also defending himself and his decisions during his years with Carson. Carson emerges from Bushkin’s portrait as “witty and enormously fun to be around but he could also be the nastiest SOB on earth.” Bushkin chronicles Carson’s womanizing—”No matter to whom he was married, no matter how happily, when an alluring woman came within range, the instinct for new adventure was an instinct he saw little need to restrain”—his difficulties with his wives, his public battles with NBC over the show and his failure as a father. Bushkin recalls as well the many times that Carson mistreated him; after the Reagan inauguration, a livid Carson calls Bushkin, angry about his wife Joanna’s seats at the event; according to Bushkin, “Carson wanted a dog to kick, and every time he looked at me, he saw a Milk-Bone in my mouth.”

Yet this sensationalist book reveals more about Bushkin than Carson: “There are no feelings from that time I can compare with the sadness I feel over the pain I caused some of my friends and loved ones during the Carson years.” Although Bushkin claims that he’s written “a portrait of a man I loved,” he spends more time in his book dusting off his reputation and throwing dirt on Carson’s that this book would have been better titled, “My Years with Johnny Carson.”

For 30 years, Johnny Carson carried his comic monologues and acidly funny interview questions into America’s living rooms and bedrooms on “The Tonight Show.” Although at least two unauthorized biographies—Ronald L. Smith’s Johnny Carson (1987) and Paul Corkery’s Carson (1987)—appeared during his lifetime, the definitive…

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