A biography of Emma Jung is by necessity also a biography of her husband, famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By placing the focus on Emma, however, Catrine Clay comes up with a fresh and compelling take on the story of Jung’s relationship with Freud and the early days of psychoanalysis.

Wealthy, educated Emma refused Carl when the penniless doctor first proposed, but with her mother’s encouragement, Carl asked and was accepted the second time around. In part, the attraction was intellectual: At the time, an educated woman was more likely to find mental satisfaction in her husband than through her own career. And Carl’s work as a resident doctor at Burghölzli, an asylum treating patients with a range of mental illnesses, was certainly fascinating. While Emma may have hoped to help Carl with his work, pregnancy and domestic cares soon preoccupied her. 

The young couple traveled to Vienna to meet Carl’s hero, the eminent Dr. Sigmund Freud, and the two men developed an intense attachment that was to shape the developing field of psychoanalysis until their infamous split a decade later. Here Emma also discovered Carl’s predisposition to infatuation with smart women. Throughout their marriage, Emma would have to grapple with the numerous frustrated, intelligent women who clustered around her husband, ultimately accepting one of them, Toni Wolff, into the household. 

Labyrinths does a fine job portraying the tightrope Emma walked to manage her husband’s health. Carl was haunted by a “second self,” an emanation from his unconscious that heard voices and saw visions. As much as Emma struggled with her husband’s flirtatiousness, she was also integral to his well-being, and they succeeded in building a long and solid marriage. Perhaps most happily, once her children were grown, Emma was able to write psychological essays, finally stepping into the limelight on her own.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, November 2016

As we are constantly reminded, all those quarter-pounders from McDonald’s add up—to billions and billions served. Not as well known but just as importantly, millions and millions in McDonald’s profits were doled out to charities by Joan Kroc, widow of longtime Chairman Ray Kroc, during her lifetime and beyond. Ray & Joan is Lisa Napoli’s highly readable account of the Krocs’ romance and marriage, the growth of the McDonald’s fast-food empire and how all that money came to be given away.

It wasn’t exactly a storybook relationship under the arches. Ray and Joan were married to others when they first met and later left their spouses to be together, with Ray detouring into yet another marriage before he finally tied the knot with Joan. Once they were wed, Ray’s volatile personality and persistent drinking ensured conflicts, and the couple flirted with divorce. They stuck it out, though, and upon Ray’s death in 1984, Joan was suddenly in control of a fortune estimated at $1.7 billion and growing. 

The Krocs were no strangers to philanthropy before Ray’s death, but Joan kicked things into high gear while still managing to live lavishly and patronize her favorite gambling casinos. Chief beneficiaries included Operation Cork (alcoholism education), the Salvation Army and National Public Radio (which Joan listened to only occasionally), with additional millions doled out as she wished. Pet causes such as nuclear disarmament got the full “St. Joan of the Arches” treatment as well.

Part corporate success story, part soap opera, this tale has a lot of territory to cover, and Napoli recounts it all in a breezy, amusing style. She’s at her best on the subject of Ray and Joan’s complicated relationship, but the backstories—Ray’s rise from milkshake machine salesman to titan of commerce and Joan’s journey from a difficult childhood to beloved philanthropist—are just as riveting.

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

There have been earlier accounts of Eleanor Roosevelt’s long friendship with and romantic attachment to former Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok. But in Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady, author Susan Quinn draws on the more than 3,300 letters the two women wrote each other, delving deeper into their intimacy. The book also presents an inside look at the mechanics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency as he deals with the ravages of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II.

Assigned to cover Mrs. Roosevelt during her husband’s first run for the White House in 1932, Hickok quickly became enamored of her subject’s fierce independence and generally warm personality. Theirs was not an obvious match. Eleanor, who by this time had given birth to six children, was the patrician niece of former President Teddy Roosevelt—rich, educated abroad and sure of her place in the social firmament. Hickok—or “Hick,” as she was commonly called—had grown up impoverished and insecure in a dysfunctional family in small-town South Dakota. She had worked as a maid before finding her way into journalism and inching her way up to national prominence in that rough-and-tumble trade. Nonetheless, the two women soon found common ground—so much so that Hick resigned as a reporter, joined the new Roosevelt administration and became a semi-permanent fixture in the White House until FDR’s death in 1945.

Passionate at first and strong to the end, Eleanor and Hick’s relationship cooled gradually as the tireless first lady embraced new and more demanding reform projects and widened her circle of interesting friends. Nonetheless, Hick remained a strong influence on Eleanor, encouraging her as a writer and aiding her in her programs to help the poor and disenfranchised. Both worked valiantly to improve the lot of women and engage them in self-liberating politics. But quite apart from chronicling a beautiful and complex friendship, the author also makes a strong case here that Eleanor Roosevelt was the most politically significant first lady America has ever had.

When Shirley Jackson's now-classic story "The Lottery" appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, readers wrote in to the magazine decrying the story as "outrageous," "shocking," "gruesome" and "utterly pointless." In spite of such responses, within a year the story was included in Prize Stories of 1949 and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, acknowledging the power of Jackson's storytelling craft and introducing very widely a writer whose first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), had disappointing sales but cannily and hauntingly depicted the humorous, horrific and sometimes macabre irony of suburban life.

Ruth Franklin's elegant Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life now provides what has long been missing: a sensitive, incisive, thoroughly detailed reading of Jackson's stories and novels as they issue from the writer’s never-very-happy life. In an almost year-by-year examination, Franklin draws on letters, journals and Jackson's writings to narrate the days of a young woman whose own conventional mother was disappointed, and even horrified, that her daughter was not very conventional: "Geraldine wanted a pretty little girl, and what she got was a lumpish redhead."

Franklin nimbly guides us through Jackson's childhood in California, where she was always writing, and her family's move to Rochester, New York, in her senior year of high school. While attending Syracuse University, she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and published her first story, "Janice," in the school's literary magazine. The book also chronicles her difficult, tumultuous marriage to Hyman, a professor and prominent literary critic, and her devotion to her four children.

Franklin provides sparkling readings of Jackson's writing, including the challenges she faced with each novel or story, ranging from her less well-known novel, Hangsaman, to her more familiar tales of urban chill, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as autobiographical collections such as Life Among the Savages. All of her writings dwell on the tension of inhabiting the roles of housewife and mother and bestselling author.

This luminous critical biography reveals a writer who thought her task—much like Hawthorne and Poe—was to pull back the curtain on the darkness of the human heart. Franklin smartly succeeds in drawing so colorful a portrait of the author that we’re encouraged to pick up one of her stories or novels and read Jackson all over again.

In The French Chef in America, Julia Child’s great-nephew, journalist Alex Prud’homme, treats Child’s “second act” like a carefully crafted menu. He pays exquisite attention to the details without ever losing sight of the overall experience.

The effervescent Child is alive and well in these pages, which include scenes from her hit TV show, “The French Chef,” as well as an intimate look at her boundless relationship with her husband, Paul, and the often prickly partnership with her co-writer, Simone “Simca” Beck. The depth of Prud’homme’s research is evident in the particulars: He never tells us about one of Child’s escapades without taking us right to the scene. Learning about how frog legs are cooked, for instance, takes us into a tiny kitchen where Child relentlessly questions the chef even as the cameraman worries about melting his equipment in the intense heat. 

Prud’homme follows Child from her roots in Escoffier’s grand cuisine through the trying transition to Gault’s nouvelle cuisine. The shift wasn’t easy on Child, but she navigated the changing culinary scene with a combination of stubbornness and grace. We see the gleam in Child’s eye, but also her need to stick her head into every pot to see exactly what was going on in there. Her nephew applies the same good humor and insistent analysis to his topic, serving us a nuanced dish we feel compelled to linger over.

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

Looking for some appropriate piano accompaniment to that multi-part documentary on the Cold War you’re planning? It’s an easy call—just check out the musical archives of Van Cliburn, who became synonymous with the saber-rattling U.S.-Soviet Union standoff when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. 

Historian and journalist Nigel Cliff takes us back to the ’50s to recount that triumph, then follows Cliburn’s remarkable career through the ensuing decades against the backdrop of tension, relative calm and eventual empire breakup. (Coincidentally, when Cliburn died in 2013, tensions were entering another chilly period that persists today.) 

Cliff devotes half of Moscow Nights to the piano competition itself, and rightfully so. Many baby boomers got their first exposure to classical music (not counting  Warner Bros. cartoons) from the breathless media coverage of Cliburn’s triumph in Moscow, where the fix was presumably in for a Soviet pianist to win. With ordinary Muscovites and contest judges alike smitten with the 23-year-old Texan, Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself signed off on the winner. Such a musical high note was difficult to sustain, and Cliff pulls no punches in chronicling the professional and personal highs and lows that accompanied Cliburn for the rest of his career, inextricably tied to Cold War diplomacy.

That’s good news for the reader, as Cliff deftly weaves in such iconic moments as the pre-competition Sputnik launch, Khrushchev’s shoe-banging visit to the United Nations and the U-2 spy plane incident. Through it all, Cliburn maintains his place in popular culture even as his playing skills stagnate and eventually decline.

Part musical biography, part nostalgic look at the hula-hoop era and part Cold War history, Moscow Nights strikes the right chord in all respects.

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

You don’t have to be an opera fan to enjoy Sing for Your Life, but if you are, prepare for a feast. Daniel Bergner seats you in the front row of the Metropolitan Opera, and his larger-than life subject, African-American singer Ryan Speedo Green, keeps you there. A study in discipline and artistry, musical agility, opera itself and the role that race has played in all of it, this would be an enlightening read even without Green. His story makes it unforgettable.

Bergner tracks Green’s rise from an impoverished, shattered family to a career as a globally acclaimed bass-baritone, alternating past and present dramas with scenes of the daunting work going on backstage at one of the world’s iconic opera houses. Green’s mother is a constant, mostly malevolent force. His father leaves, his brother goes to prison and 12-year-old Green falls apart at a juvenile detention facility.

How Green grows from there is as captivating as any opera. There’s the teacher who saves his sanity and the facility staffer who gives him a radio; the football coach who makes his players take a music class; the principal who gives Green a chance at his school for the arts, even if he can’t sing; and YouTube, where Green mimics opera stars singing in Italian and German, though he doesn’t understand a word.

Always backlit by racial prejudice—its hazy history in opera and the shadow it continues to cast—the story has moments that bristle, as when Green is expected to sing “Ol’ Man River” at a party hosted by Met benefactors. He feels “reduced, confined, simplified, compressed, concealed” by the expectation the he will “sing woefully about the oppression of black people while taking care not to make white people uncomfortable.” Yet finally, recalling Paul Robeson, who “insisted on adding dignity” by changing some of the words, he sings “with almost enough beauty to crack the wall in front of him and make it disintegrate.” You can almost hear it happen.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, October 2016

Winston Churchill looms large over the last century, a vivid player—for better or worse—in conflicts and crises almost everywhere in the British Empire. Controversial and complex, he became, as prime minister of the United Kingdom during World War II’s darkest days, beloved. In Hero of the Empire, bestselling author Candice Millard (The River of Doubt, Destiny of the Republic) offers a revealing portrait of the much younger man, smarting from his first political defeat and hungry for the fame he had yet to achieve. She explores the roots of Churchill’s grit and obstinacy, and the sheer luck that frequently saved his life. 

Churchill’s contemporaries also come vividly to life in Millard’s narrative: his American mother, Jennie, and her lovers; his father, Lord Randolph, disgraced by mental decline; fellow correspondents and fearless co-conspirators; and his first love, the opportunistic Pamela. The whiskey and cigars are here, too, right alongside rats that eat his pillow, constant hunger and many close brushes with death. While it is now hard to imagine world history without Churchill, Millard’s absorbing tale of his role in the Boer War manages to be a cliffhanger—his story came very close to ending when it had barely begun.

Seeking fame in the form of a medal, Churchill was an entitled aristocrat in search of any war that could provide one. When being a soldier for the far-flung British Empire at the close of the 19th century wasn’t producing results, he became a war correspondent in South Africa for London’s Morning Post—and then heroically saved soldiers’ lives when their train was attacked by fierce Boer forces. Taken prisoner, he would eventually escape, leaving behind the two men who planned to go with him and a thank-you note for the sympathetic warden. News of Churchill’s heroics and harrowing escape inspired jubilation back home and vaulted him into his first seat in Parliament. The rest, as they say, is history. 

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

Plenty has been written about our 32nd president, who guided our nation to the New Deal and through World War II. But rarely has Franklin Delano Roosevelt been portrayed with such steely-eyed insight as in former New York Times executive editor and Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Lelyveld’s His Final Battle. It is a deeply revealing look at a famously enigmatic president, inaccessible at times even to his closest advisors and his own children. (His son James once said, “Of what was inside him, what really drove him, Father talked with no one.”) It also is a portrait of a master of foreign and domestic relations.

Lelyveld focuses on FDR’s final year and a half, when despite his failing health, he proved to be the nation’s best wartime leader. Lelyveld toggles between FDR’s personal life and political efforts, describing his “confounding, sometimes dazzling, ability to operate simultaneously on several planes as visionary, opportunist, and political schemer, as well as his readiness to test a hypothesis in politics like a scientist in a lab or an entrepreneur with a risk business plan daring to make a deal.”

Roosevelt was a master at carefully crafting his own image. It’s hard to imagine in this time of tweeting presidential candidates and chaotic campaigns, but reporters covering FDR showed a tremendous amount of restraint, never showing him in a wheelchair, to which he was mostly confined after a bout with polio in his 40s. He carried on an affair with Eleanor’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who was with him in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he died. This fact, too, was omitted from reports of the president’s death.

His Final Battle is not by any means a World War II or FDR primer. Lelyveld clearly assumes his readers have some historical knowledge. He dives right in to FDR’s final years—from meetings with Stalin and Churchill to wrestling with whether to run for a fourth term—with little precursor. But it’s a masterful study of a masterful politician, a fresh look at one of the most beloved and complex of presidents.

Before anyone had ever heard of Katharine Graham, there was Alicia Patterson. She built a major newspaper out of a small-town gazette, hobnobbed with presidents, wrote about hotspots around the globe and was a close adviser to Adlai Stevenson, the dominant liberal politician of the 1950s. She was also his lover, despite the fact that both were married.

Patterson, the founding publisher of Newsday, died too young in 1963, at the age of 56, and she’s little remembered today. The Huntress, a biography by her fond but clear-eyed niece Alice Arlen, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, and her husband, Michael J. Arlen, a longtime New Yorker writer, revives her story.

Patterson was to-the-manor born near Chicago, with serious wealth on both sides of the family. Her father, Joe Patterson, was a scion of the colorful Medill publishing clan that ran the Chicago Tribune. Joe himself founded the New York Daily News. But his daughter did have much to overcome—she was regarded as a family disappointment, unwilling to settle down in placid upper-class matrimony. 

Patterson was a top horsewoman, pioneering aviator and big-game hunter, but she later dismissed those avocations as “pointless.” Luckily for her, her third marriage, to rich, influential Harry Guggenheim, took. Although they constantly clashed, he bankrolled Newsday.

Then came Stevenson, unhappily married, intellectual, ambitious, endlessly dithering about his future. He and Patterson were lovers on and off for years, and she helped push him to two presidential runs. He lost, but he was the era’s liberal icon. 

The Arlens have a breezy, witty writing style that would have pleased Patterson, an intrepid woman who finally found her true calling in journalism. Alice Arlen died earlier this year at 75; she left a buoyant tribute to the aunt who encouraged her own aspirations.

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

When it comes to book titles, it’s hard to think of one more ominous than Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939. The first of a two-volume project by German historian and journalist Volker Ullrich, this is a sprawling and ambitious attempt to explain how a man from humble beginnings with few accomplishments well into adulthood could morph into a ruthless dictator whose name has become a universal insult.

With the millions of words that have been written about Hitler, why another biography? In his introduction, Ullrich notes that more than 15 years have passed since the last important work on Hitler, with much research occurring in the meantime on him and surrounding figures. Moreover, Ullrich contends, a wealth of new material has appeared, including newly public notes and speeches. And finally, Ullrich sets out to challenge conventional wisdom that Hitler was a man of “limited intellectual horizons and severely restricted social skills” and shed more light on his private life, including his relationships with women and his social interactions.

Ullrich aggressively makes his case, noting that Hitler devoured books on a wide variety of topics during his struggling artist years in Vienna and Munich and that he led a varied social life, albeit one intertwined with his political activities. (Friends such as Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner, had the added bonus of advancing his political interests.) As for Hitler’s relationships with women, including mistress Eva Braun, Ullrich valiantly attempts to sort fact from myth (and downright gossip) but stops short of lurid speculation. 

At more than 1,000 pages, with a readable translation by Jefferson Chase, Hitler: Ascent is no quick read. That’s for the best, as this is a book to be studied with one eye toward the past and the other toward the future—and Volume 2.

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

In Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream, journalist and food writer Karen Stabiner (Family Table) tells the captivating tale of the journey taken by rising chef Jonah Miller as he fulfills his childhood dream of opening a restaurant, the Spanish-themed Huertas, in the East Village section of New York City. Her behind-the-scenes view chronicles the restaurant’s debut year, providing a vivid look at the challenges faced by Miller and his team. Although it is Miller’s story, Stabiner provides insight from the different players involved, delivering a detailed, richly layered narrative. Their highs and lows feel intensely real, from a game-changing New York Times review to a delayed opening and the initial rejection of a full liquor license. 

Like many young chefs, Miller is an ambitious, passionate perfectionist. He “had a hunch that the city needed the kind of Spanish food he wanted to make” and wasn’t prepared to contemplate getting “lost in the shuffle” of the overflowing world of celebrity chefs. Stabiner meticulously chronicles his growth and maturity as he secures the restaurant’s necessary funding, navigates building codes and liquor license approvals, tackles management duties and personnel issues and gives in to customers’ odd culinary requests that alter the whole structure of his dishes. Smart and frugal in his launch planning, he helped cut tile for the kitchen and enlisted friends to help stain the dining room wainscoting. And in the typical French culinary method, he was determined to incorporate a “no-waste” policy into his menu, enjoying the “challenge of transforming what another chef might throw out.”

Generation Chef will fascinate those eager to devour everything food-related. Even foodies who are well aware of the difficulties faced by any restaurant starting out will find Stabiner’s inside peek into this fast-paced, often cutthroat world enlightening.

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

On June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson was preparing for 50 sold-out “This Is It” concerts when he stopped breathing at the Los Angeles mansion he was renting. His personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, who was administering medication intravenously to help him sleep, noticed that something was wrong at 11:51 a.m., and 83 minutes later, 50-year-old Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center. 

Drawing on court documents and other materials, 83 Minutes examines what happened during that time, along with the tragic factors that brought Jackson and Murray together, resulting in Jackson’s death and Murray’s imprisonment.

Despite his immense earnings and accomplishments, Jackson was facing financial ruin and was addicted to prescription drugs. He relied on the anesthetic Propofol, which he called “milk,” to help ease the rush of adrenaline after rehearsals and shows and allow him to sleep. Murray was in financial trouble as well, and all too happy to enable Jackson’s dependencies. 

Instead of carefully monitoring his patient, Murray likely had stepped out of Jackson’s bedroom/“medication room” to answer emails and make phone calls, likely not noticing when Jackson stopped breathing. He was on the phone with his mistress, in fact, when he abruptly ended the call, and the final chaos ensued.

Meanwhile, Jackson’s three children were playing in the den, under the care of their nanny, and his chef was preparing a Cobb salad for the family’s lunch.

Although 83 Minutes doesn’t deliver any bombshells, Jackson fans will find the book a sadly fascinating minute-by-minute account of the singer’s last days and hours.

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