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NonfictionMemoirBiography

A grand slam for baseball books

Feature by John C. Williams

There are certain years that trigger immediate associations in any baseball fan’s mind. 1903: the first World Series. 1927: Murderer’s Row. 1961: Mantle and Maris. 1994: the players’ strike. Whether 2014 will produce such a season is yet to be written, but a tremendous crop of baseball books guarantees this year to be one for the publishing annals.

Is there any more complicated figure in the modern baseball era than Pete Rose? Consider the brief of Kostya Kennedy, author of the magnificent new biography Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. Those with even casual baseball knowledge are familiar with the outline: “Charlie Hustle,” Cincinnati Reds stalwart, the man who always slid headfirst and who attained the Major League record for base hits, is evicted from the game—as well as from eligibility for the Hall of Fame—for betting on those Reds while serving as their manager. Kennedy takes that familiar story and delves deeper, presenting an artful portrait of the blue-collar world Rose came from, the dream world he ascended to and the bizarre world he slipped into after his banishment.

In doing so, Kennedy touches on a theme well beyond baseball: the inherent contradictions of human nature. How could someone who willed himself to the top of his profession with such clarity of purpose throw away his legacy with such singular dissipation? The tragic element of Rose’s life—his ability to bend circumstances to his will in one context yet to lose all sense of rationality in another—is stuff worthy of Shakespeare. Kennedy handles it just fine, though. For the market, the book is pitched as a re-evaluation of Rose’s fate now that baseball has suffered though steroids, arguably a graver sin than gambling. Kennedy doesn’t break new factual ground or suggest “answers” so much as refocus the question. And he presents a compelling case that whether Rose deserves his lifetime suspension should be evaluated separately from whether he should be eligible for the Hall. It’s interesting enough material for the baseball reader, but the appeal of this book goes further. With writing of such quality and a subject of such complexity, it deserves to be read by anyone who appreciates good biography.

HARD-BOILED BASEBALL
No baseball book in recent memory has been as uproarious as They Called Me God, written by legendary umpire Doug Harvey with an assist from longtime sportswriter Peter Golenbock. Harvey, one of only nine umpires in the Hall of Fame and considered by many—including himself—to be one of the best of all time, worked the National League from 1962 to 1992. Stylistically, the book is a marvel, particularly while recounting Harvey’s origins. Its staccato style and fatalistic tone are on par with classic noir. Take, for example, this setup: “The regulars had been drinking, I’d had a few myself, and I was sitting there wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life.” Or this meditation on his professional plight: “There was just one perfect umpire, and they put him on the cross.” I won’t spoil any more gems.

The book is billed as a tell-all. No kidding. Man, does Harvey settle some scores. His first wife, coaches who disrespected him, cheating pitchers and the league officials who enabled them—no one, it seems, is safe. But the book is written with such good humor and honest feeling that you can hardly begrudge Harvey these takedowns. Harvey only blows one call, so to speak, by including a painfully awkward story about the late umpire Eric Gregg that should not have seen the printed page. That aside, the book offers refreshing insight into an umpire’s world, and with considerable panache.

FROM THE FRIENDLY CONFINES
About 20 years ago, the band the Mountain Goats produced a tune called “Cubs in Five.” The title was a joke—the song is about stuff that is unlikely to happen—but it encapsulates nicely the futility of rooting for Chicago’s National League squad. Even if renowned columnist and Bunts author George F. Will hasn’t heard the song, he gets the sentiment, as is apparent from his latest baseball foray, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred.

Appropriately for a topic as inherently funny as the Cubs, Will takes a droll approach. In about the amount of time it takes to soak in a ballgame, the reader is treated to a romp through Cubs history, from the origins of Wrigley Field up to the Steve Bartman debacle. As this is George Will, there’s a dollop of evolutionary psychology and economics on the side, though nothing much heavier than an Old Style. 

About that field. The title evokes it, and it is the focus of the book’s thesis: that the beauty of the ballpark is in large part responsible for the consistently poor quality of the product on the diamond. Will has discovered, through the work of some authors he cites, that ticket sales at Wrigley bear a smaller-than-normal correlation to the team’s record and actually are more sensitive to the price of a beer in the stadium than the cost of admission. By providing a good place to watch baseball, Will hypothesizes, management has relieved itself of the need to provide a good baseball team. At least the theory has the virtue of explaining the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon that is the Cubs.

BACK TO THE MINORS
Every kid dreams of hitting a game-winning homer in the World Series. No kid dreams of hitting anything at all for the Montgomery Biscuits. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, a thorough and enjoyable profile of the players, coaches, umpires, radio announcers and pretty much everyone else besides the peanut vendors who are associated with minor league baseball. By focusing on eight different people over the course of the 2012 season, Feinstein ably shows how the tantalizing promise of working in the bigs—not to mention the attendant compensation and creature comforts—shapes the lives of those who are still down on the farm. The book has a nice pace: casual and a little rambling, though a bit repetitive at times and with lags here and there. Not so different, come to think of it, than a midsummer Double-A tilt.

There are certain years that trigger immediate associations in any baseball fan’s mind. 1903: the first World Series. 1927: Murderer’s Row. 1961: Mantle and Maris. 1994: the players’ strike. Whether 2014 will produce such a season is yet to be written, but a tremendous crop of baseball books guarantees this year to be one for the publishing annals.

NonfictionMusicMemoirBiography

That’s what makes the jukebox spin

Feature by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

This fall, music keeps playing around in our heads thanks to a crop of books by and about some of rock's most elusive artists, as well as its most treasured songs. 

WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN’
Over a two-year period, maverick Southern author Rick Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin’) sat down with Jerry Lee Lewis and let the Killer walk “day after day through the past and come back, sometimes bloody, with the stories in this book.” Not simply an “as-told-to” memoir, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story is a harmonious blend, with Lewis providing the details of his life and Bragg weaving a narrative around them to add historical and cultural context. “He did not want to do a first-person book,” Bragg writes, “and I had no interest in trying to pretend to be him. Instead, this is one man talking of a remarkable life and another man writing it down and shaping it into a life story so rich that, if I had not been there, I would have wondered if it was real.”

And Lewis’ story is definitely remarkable: Full of life from birth—“I come out jumpin’, an’ I been jumpin’ ever since”—Lewis discovered his “reason for being born” when he saw a piano in his aunt’s house as a child. He knew he wanted to be a star, so he pursued his dream relentlessly, appearing in clubs when he was 14 and lying about his age. Lewis burned down many roadhouses with his raucous style, rising to fame with songs such as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” and leaving in his wake broken marriages and mangled friendships. The book candidly catalogs his problems with drugs, alcohol, taxes and women (his seven marriages included a union with his 13-year-old second cousin that caused an international scandal). Lewis also acknowledges his fear that he may have led people astray with his music, but confesses that music was the purest part of his life. Lewis tells his story here for the first time, and it’s every bit as frantic, ugly, joyful and searing as you’d expect from the Killer.

A NATURAL WOMAN
While Lewis hypnotized audiences with manic energy, Aretha Franklin grew up in the Detroit church where her father preached, playing soulful gospel piano and developing her unmistakable voice. Franklin collaborated with music writer David Ritz in 1999 on a less-than-revealing memoir, Aretha: From These Roots. As Ritz explains in his new book, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, Franklin asked him to work with her on a second volume, but he declined, citing her insistence on steering clear of certain topics. Instead, Ritz chose to write an independent biography, drawing on his earlier conversations with the singer, her friends and family to provide a full and frank account of the Queen of Soul’s career. Moving album by album, the book recounts her rise to the top of the soul charts in the late 1960s and her fall from the throne in the early 1970s. She struggled to find her style in the disco era, and reinvented herself in 1985 with the hit “Freeway of Love.” Franklin isolated herself for almost 20 years after the deaths of her father, sisters and brother, only to come out of the shadows once again in 2008 to sing at President Obama’s first inauguration. Franklin’s life is rarely pretty, however, and Respect is ultimately a poignant and disappointing tale of a singer who never reached the pinnacle for which she aimed.

SOUL SACRIFICE
In 1966, a young guitar player named Carlos Santana filled in one night at Bill Graham’s famous Fillmore West with an impromptu group of musicians; the rest, as they say, is history. Three years later, Santana and his band mesmerized the crowd at Woodstock, and soon after, the band’s first album climbed to #4 on the Billboard charts. Reaching this level of success wasn’t easy, as Santana reveals in his new memoir, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light, which he co-wrote with Ashley Kahn and Hal Miller. Although the book’s prose is sometimes flat and repetitive, the details of Santana’s story are nevertheless compelling. He traces his path from his childhood in the Mexican town of Autlán to his earliest gigs at El Convoy in Tijuana. Santana recounts his sometimes ragged family life and reveals for the first time the sexual abuse he suffered at age 11 at the hands of a man who took him to San Diego and molested him, leaving the boy with “an intense feeling of pleasure mixed with confusion, shame, and guilt for letting it happen.” Above all, however, Santana’s memoir recounts his spiritual quest to find the “story behind the stories, the music behind the music. . . . I call it the Universal Tone, and with it you realize you are not alone; you are connected to everyone.”

 

Paul McCartney added psychedelic illustrations to his handwritten lyrics for “The Word,” a song on 1965’s Rubber Soul album. 
From The Beatles Lyrics, reprinted with permission. Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

 

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Although the life stories of musicians continue to fascinate us, we’re just as intrigued and perplexed by the lyrics of popular songs. Few songs have been as scrutinized as those by the Beatles, and in his new book, The Beatles Lyrics, Beatles biographer Hunter Davies not only probes the meanings of the Fab Four’s songs but also gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at their writing process. For John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting could happen anywhere—songs might begin as a scribble on the back of an envelope or on hotel stationery. “Strawberry Fields,” for example, was written by Lennon when he was in Spain, far from home and thinking back on his childhood in Liverpool. This stunning collection explores the stories behind all the Beatles’ classics and includes more than 100 original handwritten manuscripts.

CRYING, WAITING, HOPING
The hallways of rock ’n’ roll history are littered with volumes that move mechanically through a year-by-year chronicle of important events. Noted cultural critic Greil Marcus wasn’t interested in writing a typical history of the genre, however. His provocative The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs chronicles the music through an exploration of 10 songs recorded between 1956 and 2008. In his typical gnostic style, Marcus examines the ways in which each song transcends its era, gathering meaning as it is recorded by artists in completely new times and places. For example, he observes that the Teddy Bears’ 1958 hit, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” took 48 years to find its voice. “When Amy Winehouse sang it in 2006, her music curled around Phil Spector’s [who wrote the song], his curled around her, until she found her way back to the beginning of his career, and redeemed it.”

Marcus’ unconventional history captures the unruly, unpredictable nature of rock ’n’ roll.

 

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

This fall, music keeps playing around in our heads thanks to a crop of books by and about some of rock's most elusive artists, as well as its most treasured songs.
FashionBiography

The frivolous and the familiar

Feature by Cat Acree

Though it evolves constantly, fashion would grow stagnant without personal flourishes like a favorite pair of lived-in jeans. “The best things in life are free,” Chanel famously said. “The second best are very expensive.”

TASTEMAKERS
Fashion can be considered trivial or superficial, and in many ways this is true. But at its best, fashion can incite, even disturb, the imagination. Between the pages of W magazine, with its commitment to pushing boundaries and fostering the art of long-form photography, it thrives. Editor-in-Chief Stefano Tonchi collects 10 of the magazine’s finest productions from the past two decades in W: Stories, allowing an unexpected peek behind these remarkable, avant-garde editorials with outtakes, inspiration boards and brief essays from photographers, designers and more. Steven Meisel’s first shoot with W raised questions of beauty and gender with aggressive, androgynous models sprawling up and down half-lit urban alleys. Actress Tilda Swinton recalls her and photographer Tim Walker’s pilgrimage to Iceland, where they shot alien, forbidding images that at times look like stills from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Photographer Alex Prager describes assembling a lovely and gloomy cast of characters to portray a Hitchcockian day at the races. This is fashion at its most provocative, a necessary book for minds that require a little disturbance.

Tilda Swinton in W magazine, August 2011. From W: Stories, reprinted with permission.

CLOTHES HORSE
From fantasy we move to reality, and no book better captures the relationship between real women and their clothing than Women in Clothes. The truly stylish—or even those who have given the slightest thought to their style—aren’t taking their every cue from glossy magazine spreads, so editors Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton set out to discover just what women think about when they put themselves together. The result is a truly all-encompassing (but never overwhelming), contemporary “philosophy of style,” a collection of interviews and surveys of more than 600 artists, writers and other women. It’s like a massive conference call with all your friends and everyone else’s friends, too. As Heti writes, “The most compelling women are the ones who are distinctive, who are most like themselves and least like other women.” It’s nice to feel that your idiosyncracies and influences can be considered as important as good tailoring, and you may find yourself polling your friends, looking at other women differently or at least feeling a little better about owning 10 gray sweatshirts.

Or perhaps you have 12 pairs of red shoes or too many wrap dresses—no judgment either way. That being said, you’re likely to have one pair of red flats you love more than any other. Based on Emily Spivack’s blog of the same name, Worn Stories eschews the beautiful side of fashion for the pricelessness and singularity of that one favorite thing. More than 60 cultural figures and celebs, many of whom reside in New York, reveal their personal connections to just one item of clothing, from fashion designer and self-declared “total dork” Cynthia Rowley’s Girl Scout sash to John Hodgman’s Ayn Rand dress. One piece of clothing can tell quite a story, and this book is delightful proof of that.

PEARLS AND FLATS
Time and time again we return to Coco Chanel (1883-1971), the patron saint of classic, feminine style and a cultural force unlike any before or since. Though we recreate her image with our cardigans and taupe flats, biographers who have attempted to capture Chanel are more often than not thwarted by their own subject. Chanel notoriously tried to block anyone from writing her story and repeatedly obfuscated fact with fiction. According to Rhonda K. Garelick, author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, the gaps in Chanel’s story are as essential to her persona as her stylistic revolution. So rather than “pinning down a ghost,” this new bio explores Chanel’s story (as we know it) in relationship to the vast theater of European history. Garelick—who was granted unrestricted access to the Chanel Archives in Paris and to the diaries of Chanel’s lover, Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov—has produced an epic, well-researched balance of historical resonance and breathless admiration.

TIMELESS ARCHIVES
Fashion on its grandest scale lies within the pages of Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute. The Met’s Costume Institute (reopened this year as the Anna Wintour Costume Center) houses more than 35,000 costumes and accessories from the 15th century on, and has been funded since 1948 by the yearly Costume Institute Benefit, an evening of pretty people dressed in pretty things. This book looks back on the exhibitions and galas of the 21st century, beginning with 2001’s “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years” and ending with the architectural feats of high-glamour ball gowns in 2014’s “Charles James: Beyond Fashion.” Featuring Vogue editorials and essays by Hamish Bowles, this is where art, fashion and history collide, where creativity meets—and manipulates—our culture. It might be frivolous, but it’s far from trivial.

 

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

Though it evolves constantly, fashion would grow stagnant without personal flourishes like a favorite pair of lived-in jeans. “The best things in life are free,” Chanel famously said. “The second best are very expensive.”
NonfictionBiography

Jackie as first lady, wife and mother

Feature by Pat H. Broeske

The Kennedys continue their reign as the royal family of publishing. One year after the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy set off an avalanche of new titles examining his death and presidency, it is the former first lady who is under the microscope in a pair of new biographies with differing agendas.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story has a traditional birth-to-death arc, but midway through, the focus is on Jackie’s behavior after the assassination of her husband. Author Barbara Leaming makes a strong argument, based on original research, that Jackie suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at a time before the condition had been diagnosed.

“I am a living wound,” said Jackie, who self-medicated with vodka and cigarettes. Guilt-ridden that she hadn’t been able to yank her husband out of the way of the fatal gunshot, Jack’s widow talked incessantly to friends—whether or not they wanted to hear—about that dark day in Dallas. To a priest she knew well, she revealed she was contemplating suicide.

While she had no interest in the investigation into JFK’s murder, she was contentiously obsessed with his legacy. After concocting the notion—for an enthusiastically complicit Life magazine—of Camelot as the theme of the JFK presidency, she battled writers whose views differed from hers. Her dispute with historian William Manchester, whom she commissioned to write The Death of a President, was so bitter and protracted that, in time, public sentiment turned against her.

The 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, just three months apart, had Jackie believing that she and/or her children would be next. It was in part to escape what she called “the outside world” that she married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The public was appalled—as was the media. (“Jack Kennedy Dies Today for a Second Time” proclaimed one headline.)

According to Leaming, whose previous subjects include Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, the Ari-Jackie marriage was stronger (for awhile) than most people realize. He “rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed in shadows,” she once said. Onassis was also a good stepfather to Caroline and John.

The marriage to JFK had come about, at least on his part, largely for political reasons; the young senator required a wife to counter his playboy image. Jacqueline Bouvier, the product of a respected finishing school and a former debutante—who once said her life’s ambition was “not to be a housewife”—wasn’t nearly as pretty as the girls JFK typically  squired, but shared his passion for reading and the arts. To Jackie, he was reminiscent of her bad boy-father (John “Black Jack” Bouvier), whose infidelities led to her parents’ divorce.

JFK had not exactly been the ideal husband—his infidelities were legend. But as his wife, and eventual First Lady, Jackie sculpted a legend of her own. To this day she remains the supreme White House style icon. (Sorry, Michelle.) Her credentials as a tastemaker contributed to her reinvention, in her latter years, as a book editor and outspoken advocate for historic preservation. As for her greatest achievement, she once opined, “I think it is that, after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane.”

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and her children, Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., in John’s nursery, following a joint birthday party for the children at the White House in 1962.

A SON’S TRAGIC LEGACY
The Good Son: JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved mines some of the same sources utilized in the Leaming book, but the emphasis is on Jackie’s close relationship with John Jr., and the tone is more tabloid-ish than refined.

Christopher Andersen, who has written a slew of celeb titles including a number of Kennedy tomes (among them, Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot and Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage), bookends the mother-son saga with the tragic death of John Jr. 15 years ago.

Reflecting on his celebrated childhood, the adult John couldn’t distinguish between personal reminiscences and public images captured by the cameras. (Of his famed salute at his father’s funeral, he admitted, “I’d like to say I remember that moment. But I don’t.”) Andersen tells us about Jackie’s efforts, in the aftermath of JFK’s death, to provide her son with a strong masculine role model. Robert F. Kennedy fit the bill. Indeed, Peter Lawford told his wife that RFK filled in for JFK “in all departments”—including as a lover to Jackie.

Aristotle Onassis would be an especially vivid and helpful father figure, a status Andersen depicts while simultaneously throwing in allegations that Onassis was a cross-dresser (using the name “Arianna”) who enjoyed himself with young Greek males. As is now widely known, he also continued seeing his former mistress, the opera great Maria Callas (whose nickname for Jackie was “the False Lady”).

Yeah, it’s got lots of dish, including plenty about the hunky John’s never-boring love life. There are myriad celebrity girlfriends, including Sharon Stone and Madonna (“a sexual dynamo,” according to John). He and Daryl Hannah were on-again/off-again for years; at one point they even got a marriage license—and she bought a wedding gown at a flea market.

Jackie, who was none too pleased with John-John’s Madonna hookup, and who took to shunning actress Hannah, passed away of non-Hodgkins lymphoma before getting to meet Carolyn Bessette. Tall, slim and elegant, the young woman who became John’s wife had many qualities similar to Jackie—and in contrast to John. She was orderly and tidy; he was haphazard and sloppy. She was coolly detached; he was warm and ingratiating. Their marriage would have probably ended in divorce, per their various friends’ accounts (toward the end they were constantly fighting), had they not died, along with Carolyn’s sister, in a plane crash off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999.

Andersen sees John’s legacy as one of unfulfilled promise. As delivered here, cleverly intertwined with Jackie’s story, it’s also one for the books.

 
Photo credit: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
The Kennedys continue their reign as the royal family of publishing. One year after the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy set off an avalanche of new titles examining his death and presidency, it is the former first lady who is under the microscope in a pair of new biographies with differing agendas.
NonfictionMemoirLiteratureBiographyArt

The season’s best picks for serious readers

Feature by Julie Hale

If you’re shopping for a book-obsessed guy or gal who geeks out over all things literary, then you’ve turned to the right page. The holiday selections featured below offer the sort of author anecdotes, book-related trivia and top-notch storytelling that bibliophiles are wild about. 

LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE
Countless young readers have warmed to the novel form thanks to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Images from Ingalls-family lore—silent Indians, swarming locusts, interminable wagon journeys with Jack the bulldog trotting behind—are now part of America’s collective literary consciousness. Followers of Wilder’s prairie adventures have something new to look forward to with the release of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Wilder wrote this factual account of her life in 1929-30, and when publisher after publisher passed on it, she repurposed it for the Little House books, using it as the foundation for her fiction. The newly released manuscript displays the forthright style and easy grace associated with the Wilder name and delivers an unsentimental look at the reality behind her novelized life. In a compelling introduction to the book, editor Pamela Smith Hill examines the evolution of the manuscript and offers insights into Wilder’s development as a writer. Maps, photos and other memorabilia make this a must-have for the beloved author’s many fans.
RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Pamela Smith Hill on Pioneer Girl. 

WRITERS ON THE ROAD
The armchair escapist on your gift list will love An Innocent Abroad: Life-Changing Trips from 35 Great Writers. A wide-ranging anthology that pays tribute to the transformative power of travel, the volume features contributions from an impressive lineup of literary celebs. Far from being savvy explorers, the authors in this globe-trotting collection confess their incompetence when it comes to crossing borders and cracking maps. Ann Patchett’s Paris sojourn contains a quintessential coming-of-age escapade: As a teenager made giddy by the City of Light, she toys with the idea of getting a cow (yes, cow) tattoo. Mary Karr’s Belize eco-tour results in personal growth, as she sheds her civilized self and becomes one with the jungle. Alas for Richard Ford—his hair-raising run-in with kief sellers on a remote road in Morocco demonstrates that danger is all too often the traveler’s companion. Yes, vicarious voyages are sometimes the best kind, and this travel-writing treasury offers an instant—and expedient—adventure fix.

AUSTEN IS AWESOME
Fans of Emma and Persuasion may OD on the eye candy contained in Margaret C. Sullivan’s Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Covers. A fascinating survey of the visual treatments Austen’s work has received over the centuries, this charming anthology opens with marble-boarded first editions of Sense and Sensibility from London publisher Thomas Egerton and ends with a roundup of foreign translations that range from old-fashioned to funky (a 1970 Spanish edition of Pride and Prejudice has a disembodied eye on its jacket). Sullivan, author of The Jane Austen Handbook, tracks how the presentations of the novels changed along with the publishing industry to reflect graphic design trends and technological advances. Austen’s many disciples will swoon over traditional covers from Penguin, Signet and the Modern Library but may cast a skeptical eye at graphic-novel and zombie editions of Austen’s work. It seems every company under the sun has done Austen, and this irresistible album provides an intriguing overview of their efforts.

THE MAN FROM HANNIBAL
Imagine it: Mark Twain on Twitter. With his carefully cultivated persona and gift for succinct verbal expression—it seems his every utterance was a perfect epigram—the author’s following would’ve been off the charts. Viewing the humorist through just such a contemporary lens, Mark Twain’s America: A Celebration in Words and Images proves that his voice and his work are as resonant today as they were in the 1800s. Harry L. Katz, a former Library of Congress curator, teamed with that institution to produce the book, which features a treasure trove of archival materials, including maps, photos, cartoons and correspondence that depict the rough-and-tumble America of Twain’s era. Documenting the many manifestations of Twain—gold prospector, riverboat pilot, newspaperman, novelist—this lavish volume provides a fascinating portrait of a multifaceted figure who was ahead of his time and whose influence, today, is everywhere. With a foreword by Lewis H. Lapham, former editor of Harper’s Magazine, this is a stunning appreciation of a true American original.

20 QUESTIONS
The arrival of the popular “By the Book” column in The New York Times Book Review is the peak of the week for many literature lovers. A writer-in-the-spotlight feature overseen by editor Pamela Paul, “By the Book” made its Review debut in 2012 (the first subject: David Sedaris). A new collection of Paul’s insightful interviews, By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review, contains Q&As with 65 writers, including Donna Tartt, Junot Díaz, Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman. In their candid conversations with Paul, the great writers come clean about their reading tastes, work habits and inspirations, the books that moved them and the ones that left them cold. Jillian Tamaki’s pencil portraits of the authors are a plus. (Test your writer-recognition skills using the grid of famous faces that graces the cover.) With a foreword by Scott Turow, this is a book that will give bibliophiles a buzz.

 

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

If you’re shopping for a book-obsessed guy or gal who geeks out over all things literary, then you’ve turned to the right page. The holiday selections featured below offer the sort of author anecdotes, book-related trivia and top-notch storytelling that bibliophiles are wild about.
NonfictionPhotographyBiographyArt

Tiny treasures for the stocking

Feature by Joanna Brichetto

Gift books sized right for stocking stuffers abound this season. Small in dimensions but big in style and content, they make ideal holiday gifts for any taste.

Horse and art lovers will appreciate the gorgeous equine celebration Horse: From Noble Steed to Beasts of Burden. A profusion of beautiful illustrations, paintings and sculptures each meticulously identified by captions accompanies short essays and quotes in a hefty hardcover volume. Horse is the latest addition to a charming Watson-Guptill series of mini-books that includes Dog, Cat and Zoo.

Other small and savory selections to slip into a stocking can be found in Abbeville Press' Tiny Folios series, which features subjects from pop culture to fine art. Just four inches square, each title combines text and art for a delightful peek at such topics as Elvis and American Art of the Twentieth Century. To score some points with the love of your life, choose Hugs & Kisses which features photos of touching and heartfelt embraces.

Brush up on your Bard with Fandex Shakespeare, a set of double-sided, die-cut cards attached at one end in a lively, colorful fan of facts. Background information and a summary of each play make for quick study. The Fandex Family Field Guide series has 13 other titles, too, like Mythology, Wildflowers and Civil War.

Holiday blues, winter blahs, sugar lows and bad hair days have a new remedy: The Blue Day Book: A Lesson in Cheering Yourself Up. Amusing animal photos are paired with inspiring, witty text designed to lift the spirits. Skip sending that well-intentioned e-card to a blue buddy, and give this charming antidote instead.

A Blue Dog day will cheer up fans of popular cajun artist George Rodrigue. A Blue Dog Christmas is a warm memoir of the artist's childhood holidays and canine companions. It features 19 new holiday prints, and a festive ornament that can be used year after year.

Another artist who happily refuses to grow up is Dan Price, author of The Moonlight Chronicles. Price describes himself as a hobo artist whose mission is to travel without a destination, observing and distilling the joys of simple living. His hand-written journal entries and charming sketches are full of wonder and gratitude. This is an unusual book in an unusual format, and well worth a look for its artwork, honesty, travel writing and journaling techniques.

For the simple joys of sophomoric humor, no one can outdo the usual gang of idiots from MAD Magazine. The MAD Bathroom Companion is a compilation of the magazine's best short pieces that can be read in one sitting. Enough said? The ideal gift for friends and family fond of infantile jokes, smug mockery and great cartooning.

If pearls of wisdom from MAD Magazine are not your style, the erudite gems from The Literary Book of Answers may be. The book is reminiscent of the time-honored practice of divination, where with closed eyes and an open book, a random finger pinpoints the answer. Here, readers are instructed to focus on a closed-ended question, touch the book just so and open to a seemingly random page containing a quotation from Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Sophocles or a host of other famous writers. It may sound corny, but the quotations are pithy, interesting and certainly more grammatical than advice given by friends and family. Should you quit your job? Move to Wisconsin? Have asparagus for dinner? Wait a little, advises Rudyard Kipling; That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, says Lewis Carroll; Enjoy it, all of it, Homer concludes. As a bonus, a truly literary-minded reader can seek out the source of a quote, find the context or discover a favorite new author.

Another new book has all the answers too, but to only one question: why aren't you married? Even God Is Single (So Stop Giving Me a Hard Time) by Karen Salmansohn delivers 26 good, snappy, single-girl comebacks to that dreaded question. This edgy little gift book also offers its philosophy of why it's better to hold out for a soulmate instead of settling for a cellmate.

A true gentleman, of course, never asks a woman why she is not married. He might however, ask guests to dinner without consulting A Gentleman Entertains, by John Bridges and Bryan Curtis. As this elegant manual proves, such an uneducated move could be a mistake. Single or not, a good host must know how to set a table, put guests at ease, have enough ice on hand, avoid disaster when the entree burns and other essential skills. Several likely social scenarios are covered, as well as a few klutz-proof recipes and tips galore.

Two chunky palm-sized books that will fit even the tiniest of stockings are Christmas Joy and A Treasury of Christmas. Irresistibly small, they are nonetheless packed with seasonal delights. The Treasury recounts several classic holiday stories, and Christmas Joy explores a variety of holiday themes such as charity, children and food. Need more books for folks on your holiday list? Euripides says "Go forward to your favorite bookstore," for "Yonder lies some more of the same sort" (Hans Christian Andersen). In other words, plenty of great new titles, big and small, await selection. "You may be sure of that" (Aeschylus).

 

Joanna Brichetto is a Nashville based writer who agrees that good things come in small packages.

Gift books sized right for stocking stuffers abound this season. Small in dimensions but big in style and content, they make ideal holiday gifts for any taste.

NonfictionMusicMemoirBiography

Following the beat of their own drummers

Feature by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The lives of musical greats continue to fascinate us, and this fall once again features biographies and memoirs of key players, from the producer credited with inventing rock ’n’ roll to a woman at the forefront of feminist rock.

On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash got together in Memphis’ Sun Studio for an impromptu jam session. Behind the console was Sam Phillips, the man who not only discovered Presley, Cash and Lewis, but who also dreamed of bringing together black and white voices in the studio in a deeply divided South. Peter Guralnick, the dean of rock historians, draws on extensive interviews from his 25-year friendship with Phillips in the epic, elegant and crisply told Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll. Guralnick charts Phillips’ path from his birth near Florence, Alabama, to the founding of Sun Records—and chronicles his enduring contributions to rock ’n’ roll. When he produced Rufus Thomas’ version of “Hound Dog,” for example, Phillips thought it didn’t live up to Big Mama Thornton’s original, but “Rufus carried off his performance with genuine conviction—the one unwavering test Sam applied to any material he let out of the studio.” In the end, as Guralnick points out, what drove Phillips was his dream of allowing the voices he had heard singing chants in the cotton fields to express themselves in their own way. “[M]usic was not confined to the drawing room . . . there was great art to be discovered in the experience of those who had been marginalized and written off because of their race, their class, or their lack of formal education.” 

LONG AS I CAN SEE THE LIGHT
John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival serves as a cracking good storyteller in Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music. Born in El Cerrito, California, in 1945, Fogerty sought music as both escape and solace after his parents’ divorce. He traces the early incarnations of Creedence and the band’s rise to the top of the charts in 1969 with “Proud Mary” and “Born on the Bayou.” He also offers backstory on his lyrics: “Bad Moon Rising,” for instance, grew out of hearing people talk in astrological lingo such as “I’m a Virgo with Libra rising.” Although Creedence was flying high in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the group soon descended into an inferno of contentious legal battles. Fogerty expresses his anger and disappointment with bandmates Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, and for the first time shares what he believes were the outlandish courtroom tactics of lawyers who knew nothing about music. After a period away from the public eye, he has immersed himself in songwriting once again—“all good songs engage you because they get you to feel something”—and emerged thankful for the journey, even the hard parts.

THE LOVE YOU SAVE
Rolling Stone writer Steve Knopper chronicles the King of Pop’s rise to fame in the compulsively readable MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson. Drawing on 400 interviews with friends, family and others, Knopper traces Jackson’s musical genius from his early days with the Jackson 5 through his out-of-this-world solo success with “Beat It” and “Thriller.” When Jackson met Quincy Jones in the mid-1970s, he saw Jones as a father figure who could take the place of the abusive Joe Jackson, and by the end of the ’70s, Jackson was working with Jones, moving toward a solo career and developing his signature dance moves. With the release of videos for “Billie Jean” and “Thriller,” he successfully “integrated radio and MTV,” Knopper writes. Through much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Jackson lived under the shadow of child sexual abuse charges, and he sank into oblivion from prescription drug use before his death in 2009. Still, for nearly three decades, he was “supernaturally graceful, the rare show-business Renaissance man who could sing, dance, and write songs.” 

PAINTED FROM MEMORY
Unlike most traditional memoirs, Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink eschews any narrative structure, moving freely out from his childhood in Liverpool and London, where he accompanied his father to dance halls, soaking up the chords and vibes. In school, he managed to talk a couple of friends out of an “unhealthy fascination with the music of Emerson, Lake & Palmer” and turn them on to the acoustic music then flowing out of Laurel Canyon. Costello mulls over his associations with musicians from Emmylou Harris to Kris Kristofferson, discussing the influence each has had on him. A prolific songwriter, he also shares insights into the composition of his songs. For “Allison,” which is based on the imagined life of a grocery checkout cashier, he writes, “I have no explanation for why I was able to stand outside reality and imagine such a scene as described in the song and to look so far into the future.” Costello’s aim is true in these peripatetic musings about his life and music.

MODERN GIRL
Guitarist Carrie Brownstein co-founded the group Sleater-Kinney, pushing the boundaries of punk and indie rock and emerging as a central figure of the riot grrrl movement. In Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, she probes her life with an honesty that is at once painful and spirited. Growing up in a suburb of Seattle, Brownstein attended her first concert—Madonna—in fifth grade, a “moment I’ll never forget, a total elation that momentarily erased any outline of darkness.” By the time she was in high school, she was alienated from her parents and immersed in Bikini Kill, whose music provided a haven from the turmoil of her teenage life. She and Corin Tucker eventually formed Sleater-Kinney and made a name for themselves in the Seattle scene and around the world. Brownstein bubbles over with fiercely blunt insights about the male-dominated music business: “[P]ersona for a man is equated with power; persona for a woman makes her less of a woman.” When Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006, Brownstein went on to co-write, produce and star in the television show “Portlandia.” She declares that, for her, performing and playing and living the life of a working artist constitutes her search for a home: “the unlit firecracker I carried around inside me in my youth . . . found a home in music.”

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The lives of musical greats continue to fascinate us, and this fall once again features biographies and memoirs of key players, from the producer credited with inventing rock ’n’ roll to a woman at the forefront of feminist rock.
NonfictionBiography

Supporting roles in history

Feature by Alice Cary

It’s been said that behind every great man, there’s a great woman, and that’s certainly the case with these three political wives and their well-known husbands. In fact, history might have turned out quite differently without them.

THE ORIGINAL FIRST LADY
Flora Fraser’s new biography, The Washingtons: George and Martha, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love”, is a dense but fascinating account of the nation’s first “first couple.” Using letters, journals, dispatches and a variety of authoritative texts, the British author documents George and Martha’s comings and goings as they managed his Mount Vernon estate and dealt with a host of relatives, friends and politicians. Both were in their 20s when they wed—she a wealthy, widowed mother of four. 

Before Martha, George loved but didn’t marry the wealthy Sally Cary Fairfax, and also remained close to Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel. Fraser wonders about one encounter with Powel late in George’s life: “Had she or Washington or both declared or acted on a feeling for the other that was forbidden, given his marriage to Martha?”

Regardless of what may or may not have happened, it’s clear that everyone adored Martha. Abigail Adams described her as “one of those unassuming characters which creates Love & Esteem.” During the Revolution, Martha endured winter encampments with Washington and was welcomed by officers who found that she brightened the general’s mood. Fraser concludes that the marriage was “the making” of George Washington, boosting not only his wealth but his confidence. 

When he died, Martha said, “All is now over, I shall soon follow him!” She never entered their bedroom again, sleeping instead in the attic.

LBJ’S SECRET DEPENDENCY
Betty Boyd Caroli uses a wealth of primary sources to explore the marriage of Lady Bird and Lyndon. She shapes the Johnsons’ story nimbly, beginning with a telling scene from their daughter Lynda’s White House wedding, explaining why Lady Bird remained so devoted to her brash, womanizing husband.

The glue that kept this presidential couple together, Caroli writes, is that LBJ was “insecure and needy” from the start, and when “faced with a huge problem or disappointment, he would go to bed and pull the covers over his head.” His wife was the only one who knew how to draw him out of these funks, so in that sense she was his savior, time and time again. Lady Bird was also a savvy businesswoman and a highly successful campaigner throughout her life.

Caroli skillfully weaves the couple’s personal lives together with the tumultuous political situations they faced. Her narrative is a soulful account that details the pair’s widely divergent family backgrounds and acknowledges that LBJ was indeed the “human puzzle” that one journalist called him, but also “head over heels” in love with his wife.

The feeling was mutual. Caroli shows that repeatedly, when deciding between her husband’s needs and those of her daughters, Lady Bird chose her husband. One secretary described Lynda and Lucy as “almost orphans in a sense.” 

Lady Bird acknowledged that LBJ humiliated her at times, but said, “he made me someone bigger and better than I would have been.”

CHURCHILL'S ADVISOR
Might the Allies have lost World War II if Winston Churchill hadn’t married his wife, Clementine? Winston himself claimed victory would have been “impossible without her.” The story of this behind-the-scenes pillar of strength is absorbingly told by British biographer Sonia Purnell in Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill.

Clementine was Winston’s closest and most influential political advisor, Purnell argues, and her role has been largely overlooked—not even discussed in Churchill’s own six-volume account of the war.

Purnell describes this tall, stunning, athletic woman as a fashionable trendsetter, “a precursor to Jackie Onassis.” She built a close friendship with another political wife of her day, Eleanor Roosevelt. Their relationship lasted for years, although, interestingly, neither liked the other’s husband.

Winston and Clementine’s relationship was not without its trials. Heated arguments weren’t uncommon, and Winston sometimes called his wife “She-whose-commands-must-be-obeyed.” The couple was devastated when daughter Marigold died of septicemia at age 2, sending Clementine into a deep depression. And in what Purnell calls Clementine’s most courageous act of the war, in 1943 she refused to tell Winston how serious his heart condition was, fearing the knowledge would impede his ability to conduct the war.

Purnell recounts a mesmerizing period from a never-before-seen vantage point, and readers will be spellbound from start to finish.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s been said that behind every great man, there’s a great woman, and that’s certainly the case with these three political wives and their well-known husbands. In fact, history might have turned out quite differently without them.
NonfictionBiography

The presidency’s last gentleman

Feature by Lynn Green

Almost 25 years after President George H.W. Bush left office, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham examines the life and career of a figure who seems almost “quaint” by today’s politically polarized standards. 

Bush believed in compromise, worked to secure support on both sides of the aisle “and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price,” Meacham writes in Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. “Quaint, yes: But it happened, in America, only a quarter century ago.”

Meacham’s penetrating biography goes beyond the events of Bush’s presidency, as monumental as they might be—the liberation of Kuwait, the end of the Cold War—to offer an absorbing look at what made the man, from his privileged childhood to his hyper-competitive spirit, which Meacham characterizes as a “hunger for power” that was evident from a young age. 

“[T]hat is what drove George H.W. Bush, relentlessly and perennially: a hunger to determine the destinies of others, to command respect, to shape great events,” the author writes. Bush was willing to veer off the well-trod path to achieve those ends, whether that meant bypassing a lucrative job in finance to move to the Texas oil fields or running for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 1964 as a political neophyte. (He lost but won a seat in the House two years later.)

Bush was born in Massachusetts in 1924, the second son of a marriage that combined two old-line wealthy families. His Walker forebears shine somewhat more brightly than his Bush relatives in Meacham’s telling, with his grandfather and namesake George Herbert (Bert) Walker standing out as a particularly bold character. (“Temperamental, imperious, and impatient, he thrived on conflict,” Meacham writes. One of Walker’s sons described him as “a real son of a bitch.”)

Meacham has a flair for setting a scene with cinematic effect, from the World War II air battle where Bush almost lost his life to the night of the 1992 election when the solitary and anguished president reflected on his loss to Bill Clinton.

The biography is enriched immeasurably by Meacham’s 10 years of interviews with the former president, from 2006 to 2015, as well as material from Bush’s personal diaries, which he dictated into a handheld recorder during his years as vice president and president. “He would speak into the machine quietly, often late at night or early in the morning. Taken all together, the diaries enable us, in effect, to sit with Bush as he muses about life at the highest levels,” Meacham writes.

A former editor of Newsweek, Meacham won the Pulitzer Prize for American Lion, his 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson. His masterful new portrait of Bush is both authoritative and highly readable, a treat for history buffs and general readers alike.

Almost 25 years after President George H.W. Bush left office, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham examines the life and career of a figure who seems almost “quaint” by today’s politically polarized standards.
NonfictionMemoirCookbooksBiography

Books for the well-read gentleman

Feature by Martin Brady

Sports heroes, military giants, one handsome movie star and savory recipes to satisfy even the burliest man’s appetite—these are the hooks that drive this holiday season’s selection of gift books for guys.

INTO THE WAR ROOM
Best known for his novel Forrest Gump, Winston Groom is also a well-published historian. His latest project, The Generals: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II, is a multi-tiered yet wholly accessible examination of the intertwined careers of three brilliant American soldiers: George Marshall, George Patton and Douglas MacArthur. All three were born in the 1880s, gained critical experience in World War I and became key players in World War II. Groom outlines each man’s personal life and military exploits with special focus on the Second World War, where Marshall excelled as an army administrator, Patton as a fiery commander of forces on the European front and MacArthur as an inspirational leader in the Pacific theater. Groom balances the strictly biographical data with well-researched historical accounts, and along the way he offers invaluable perspectives on the world politics that critically influenced his subjects’ lives.

PIGGING OUT
Accomplished author and competitive hunter Jennifer L.S. Pearsall serves up Praise the Pig: Loin to Belly, Shoulder to Ham—Pork-​Inspired Recipes for Every Meal, a comprehensive collection of more than 50 pork recipes. Pearsall’s culinary celebration begins with a thorough overview of pork cuts and styles of preparation and cooking (roasting, smoking, etc.), plus an excellent discussion of bacon brands and pork-savvy kitchen tips. Then come the recipes, with inviting full-color photos, starting with Chili-Rubbed, Salsa-Braised Chops with Spiced Rice, moving to Roasted Pork Tenderloin Chili and ending with Connecticut Clam Chowder. In between are hearty sandwiches, soups (porkestrone!), breakfast dishes, puddings, mac and cheese variations and appetizers to die for, including a Bacon and Roasted Corn Salsa that demands the immediate gathering of ingredients. No self-respecting pork lover could ever refuse this book of porcine delights.

MAN BEHIND THE MUSTACHE
Man’s man Burt Reynolds has had a hit-or-miss acting career. Yet his life has certainly been eventful, as his new memoir, But Enough About Me, clearly attests. Penned with veteran author Jon Winokur, Reynolds’ book is frankly revealing but rarely mean-spirited. For example, Burt’s short-lived marriages to Judy Carne and Loni Anderson were admittedly rocky, but he always takes the high road when he can. More enlightening are his reminiscences of his close friendships with Bette Davis and Dinah Shore, both women of substance whom Burt cherished. Coverage here is chronologically ordered, from Reynolds’ youthful days as a Florida football star to his early acting adventures in New York City to his arrival in California in the 1950s, where small television roles eventually led to feature films, including the critically acclaimed Deliverance (1972) and Boogie Nights (1997), for which he received an Oscar nomination. The enduring Reynolds turns 80 in February, and his surprisingly entertaining show-biz retrospective should find a wide audience.

HEAVYWEIGHT HERO
Journalist Davis Miller’s obsession with Muhammad Ali has spanned from his childhood to the present day, and his book Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts represents the culmination of that relationship. The heavyweight champ first inspired Miller when he was a sickly, depressed child. As a teen, Miller had an opportunity to spar with The Greatest, an event that spawned a short news account for Sports Illustrated and helped point him toward a writing career. In this latest testament to his hero, Miller blends new material on his more recent experiences with Ali with reworked excerpts from his previous writings, presenting what he believes to be “the all-time most intimate and quietly startling portrait of Ali’s day-by-day life, as well as the only deeply detailed look at his enormously rich years after boxing.” Ali, now 74 and courageously battling Parkinson’s disease, remains one of the great figures of 20th-century sports, and this profile finds the boxer’s playful good nature and magnanimous personal spirit intact.

TALLYING THE SCORE
Veteran sportswriter Gary Myers recounts the careers of the game’s marquee quarterbacks in Brady vs Manning: The Untold Story of the Rivalry That Transformed the NFL. Myers successfully achieves a dual biography of these iconic figures, focusing not only on what the pair have meant to the National Football League but also what they’ve meant to each other. The relationship between Tom Brady and Peyton Manning emerges here as one of keen mutual respect—both on and off the field—despite the differing nature of their media personas. When Myers isn’t connecting the dots of the Brady-Manning friendship, he serves up thorough profiles of their separate lives, including their college football careers and their arrival on the pro scene: Manning as the coveted #1 draft pick of the Indianapolis Colts in 1998 and Brady as an unheralded 6th-round pick of the New England Patriots in 2000. There are no shocking revelations here, just good information, solid quotes from important football folks and interesting viewpoints on two important athletes.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sports heroes, military giants, one handsome movie star and savory recipes to satisfy even the burliest man’s appetite—these are the hooks that drive this holiday season’s selection of gift books for guys.
NonfictionPop CulturePhotographyFilmDesignBiography

Heading to Hollywood for the holidays

Feature by Pat H. Broeske

An unstoppable film franchise. A luminous Golden Age star. A beloved oddball actor. This season’s standout entertainment-themed books run the gamut from design to drama, from stand-up to the stage. 

THE NAME'S BOND
Whatever your take on the Bond films—including the vastly differing opinions on which actor is the best Bond—the franchise’s production value is not up for debate. The large-format Bond by Design salutes the behind-the-scenes artists—including renowned production designers Ken Adam, Syd Cain and Peter Lamont—and features a copious display of artwork, sets, costumes and embellishments, making this hefty tome a must-have for 007 fans and devotees of production design. 

With many sections written by Meg Simmonds, the archivist for the Bond empire’s production company, the book moves film by film, featuring storyboard sequences, costume illustrations, gadgetry ruminations and more. Styles vary from artist to artist. Adam, whose Bond career dates back to the 1962 debut title, Dr. No, liked to work with a Flo-master felt tip pen. Jump ahead many decades, and the artists embrace digital design; what is consistent is the quality and attention to detail. No wonder Bond is the most successful franchise in film history, with the 24th entry, Spectre, now in theaters and thoroughly represented in this elaborate collection. 

A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND
Though she won three Academy Awards, Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman is best known for her role opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Published to commemorate the centenary of her birth, the lavish and loving Ingrid Bergman: A Life in Pictures takes readers on a journey through her career, including her downward spiral and triumphant encore. 

With daughter Isabella Rossellini serving as co-editor, this book boasts more than 350 photos—some from Bergman’s private collection—an introduction by her co-star and friend Liv Ullmann, a lengthy Bergman interview and texts by various acquaintances. 

Her highly controversial liaison with Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini is detailed alongside the image that sparked the media frenzy: Bergman and Rossellini, who were both married to other people, walking hand in hand on the Amalfi coast. Published by Life magazine, the photo established Bergman’s reputation as a loose woman. When she became pregnant with Rossellini’s child and delivered the baby prior to their marriage, she became a Hollywood pariah. 

Beauty, talent, choices and sacrifice—they’re all on display here in Bergman’s intriguing story, all of it captured by the camera.

THE CULT OF BILL
Whether he’s battling gophers, ghosts or zombies, Bill Murray is the quirky king of offbeat humor. As Robert Schnakenberg puts it in The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray, his on-screen persona is that of “the sardonic slacker-trickster who charms his way out of precarious situations.”

Topics are arranged alphabetically: Under “cats,” we learn that he’s allergic to them; under “Chase, Cornelius ‘Chevy,’ ” we hear about his rocky relationship with his fellow “Saturday Night Live” alum, including their fistfight prior to a February 1978 taping. His movies are all featured, as are the roles he turned down (like porn producer Jack Horner, subsequently played by Burt Reynolds, in Boogie Nights).  

As the book observes, the beloved Murray is a complicated guy. (See the listing under “Ramis, Harold,” about his two-decade estrangement from his former pal and director.) Comedians usually are. 


Photo of Bill Murray in Caddyshack from The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray, reprinted courtesy of the Everett Collection.

MAKE ’EM LAUGH
Speaking of comics, more than a century of stand-up gets the spotlight in The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy. Author Kliph Nesteroff, a former stand-up comic, conducted more than 200 interviews for a book that manages to be both encyclopedic and hugely entertaining. 

Did you know that the term “stand-up comic” was invented by the Mob, which owned the early clubs? Or that it was Redd Foxx, of TV’s “Sanford and Son,” who triggered the comedy album boom in the 1960s?  

Nesteroff takes us through the history of stand-up, with vivid stop-offs in burlesque, radio, early television, Vegas and the talk show circuit. Of course, comedy has a dark side. Nesteroff uses Robin Williams to remind us that the funniest guy in the room is sometimes hiding a world of pain. 

BROADWAY'S BEST
Celebratory and jam-packed with facts and great imagery, Musicals: The Definitive Illustrated Story focuses on more than 140 great musicals of stage and screen from the past century. The enduring classics are all accounted for, from Show Boat to The Phantom of the Opera, from Jesus Christ Superstar to Hair. Lush production photos, fascinating essays and facts about the genre’s geniuses, including Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, make this a choice coffee-table tome. There’s much to sing about here, in what could easily become a favored reference work.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

An unstoppable film franchise. A luminous Golden Age star. A beloved oddball actor. This season’s standout entertainment-themed books run the gamut from design to drama, from stand-up to the stage.
LiteratureBiography

Personal and political

Feature by Edward Morris

In Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott tries rather too hard to draw parallels between the early lives of Reagan and Thatcher when all he really needs to do to explain why they faced the world as a united front is focus on their remarkable correspondence, much of which is revealed here for the first time. The two bastions of conservatism chatted and flirted like teenagers. It's true that both leaders pulled themselves up by imagination and hard work. But they succeeded less by their own virtues than by cashing in on the manifest failings in some quarters of liberal politics, which, at the time of their triumphs, was basically running on theory, moral outrage and a sense of entitlement.

Although their gestures of respect and affection toward each other were clearly sincere and abiding, the two clashed on the Falklands War (Thatcher was unreservedly for it, Reagan against), the U.S. invasion of Grenada (Thatcher mildly objected, Reagan deemed it essential) and nuclear disarmament (Thatcher vehemently opposed it). It may not be all that instructive but it is surely thought-provoking to compare the dismal state of the left when Reagan and Thatcher ascended to office to the similarly shaky condition of the right today as it contends with its own Vietnam.

ON- AND OFF-CAMERA
Peter Jennings took over the anchor spot at ABC's World News Tonight early in the Reagan/Thatcher era and held that position until 2005. Friends, family members and colleagues of the late Canadian-born ABC-TV newscaster have combined their memorial statements and reminiscences into Peter Jennings: A Reporter's Life. As one would expect from such sources, the portrait that emerges is unwaveringly positive. Jennings is depicted as a fierce editor who demands both flair and substance from his reporters. But that's about as rough as it gets. By all accounts, Jennings had an insatiable curiosity, an urge to see for himself the world's hotspots and a genuine affection for the downtrodden. More than any other network anchor, his colleagues claim, he attempted to bring balance to his reports from the Middle East. The chief flaw here is that so many of the same tales and viewpoints are repeated that they end up sounding more like character references than personality sketches. Included are a list of contributors, a Jennings chronology and a selected list of his documentaries and news specials.

TELLING TODAY'S STORIES
Edited and introduced by public radio host Ira Glass, The New Kings of Nonfiction are united only by Glass' zeal for compelling narratives. [W]e're living in an age of great nonfiction writing, he asserts, in the same way that the 1920s and '30s were a golden age of American popular song. Giants walk among us. It's a big tent these giants occupy. Michael Lewis spotlights the Security and Exchange Commission's absurd war against a teenage stock trader. Gambler James McManus whisks the reader into his world of high-stakes poker. Mark Bowden presents a stomach-turning prewar glimpse into Saddam Hussein's mad and gratuitous cruelty. Gay activist Dan Savage chronicles his thwarted efforts to become a good Republican. On the frothier side, Coco Henson Scales tells what it's like to be the hostess for a trendy New York restaurant at which the customer is always wrong or at least made to feel so.

THE WAR 40 YEARS ON
Doyle D. Glass' Lions of Medina is a splendid piece of historical reporting. He traces a group of young men from their joining the Marines, through their basic training, to their week-long ordeal by fire in northern South Vietnam during a 1967 campaign labeled Operation Medina, to their less than glorious homecoming, either to be buried, hospitalized or to face the hostility of war protesters. Glass' battle descriptions are nerve-wracking. His account is richly illustrated with battleground maps and photos. There is also a helpful list of principal characters with identifications, a glossary and an index.

In Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott tries rather too hard to draw parallels between the early lives of Reagan and Thatcher when all he really needs to do to explain why they faced the world as a united front is…

NonfictionFictionBiography

Fresh stories from the Emerald Isle

Feature by Julie Hale

March is a lucky month for readers who love Ireland—a country with a rich narrative tradition, where stories and poems are considered everyday currency. Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re spotlighting three new titles that prove the country’s memorable characters and storytelling legacy live on.

AN ENDURING LEGACY
Timothy Egan, meticulous historian and crackerjack story-teller, offers a rousing biography of renegade leader Thomas Francis Meagher in The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero. 

Meagher, a native of Waterford, Ireland, who fought for the Union in the American Civil War, has a personal history of mythical proportions. At the age of 25, he spearheaded an unsuccessful revolt against the British and was exiled to a penal colony in Tasmania. Less than a year later, he resurfaced in New York, where he was celebrated as a hero, and he went on to command the Irish Brigade—a rag-tag crew of immigrants and outlaws—in some of the Civil War’s most cutthroat conflicts. He later served as territorial governor of Montana. Egan sheds new light on the indomitable Irishman’s final days in this fascinating and far-flung yarn. 

A self-described “lapsed” Irish American, Egan—winner of the National Book Award for his 2007 chronicle of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time—writes in a spirited style that’s perfectly matched to Meagher’s remarkable life. 

A NEW VOICE
Already a literary sensation overseas, Sara Baume, winner of the 2015 Hennessy New Irish Writer Award, delivers a remarkably accomplished debut in Spill Simmer Falter Wither, a captivating novel that features a man-redeemed-by-dog plotline. The book is narrated by an outsider named Ray, who, at the age of 57—“too old for starting over, too young for giving up”—is spurned by his neighbors after his father dies. Ray is something of a curmudgeon, and when he befriends a scruffy one-eyed terrier, he finds unexpected fulfillment in the relationship. But an unfortunate incident forces Ray to pull up roots and drift—canine by his side, of course. The novel chronicles a year in the life of the improbable pair, four seasons spent on the road that are rich with incident and gorgeously depicted through Baume’s precise, lapidary prose. 

The 31-year-old author, who lives in Cork with two dogs of her own, displays wisdom beyond her years in this compassionate tale.

IRRESISTABLE IRISH YARNS
A native of County Dublin and a longtime columnist for The Irish Times, Maeve Binchy was the author of more than 20 bestsellers, including the classic novel Circle of Friends (1990). Binchy, who died in 2012, had a heartfelt, unaffected storytelling style that made her a favorite at home and abroad. Her many fans will cheer the appearance of A Few of the Girls, a collection of 36 stories never published before in the United States. Exploring the complex nature of relationships in the melodic prose that became her trademark, Binchy charts the dynamics of romance, the politics of family and the stipulations of friendship. When it comes to capturing the caprices of the human heart, she’s unbeatable. Readers will recognize themselves in her nuanced portrayals of women and men whose goals and regrets, dreams and disappointments never feel less than true-to-life. There’s no better antidote to a raw March evening than a dose of vintage Binchy.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

March is a lucky month for readers who love Ireland—a country with a rich narrative tradition, where stories and poems are considered everyday currency. Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re spotlighting three new titles that prove the country’s memorable characters and storytelling legacy live on.

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