Just in time for the release of the latest Star Wars movie, Brian Jay Jones (author of Jim Henson) offers a cinematic and engrossing look at the life of filmmaker George Lucas.  

From the start, Lucas wouldn’t bend to anyone else’s creative vision, whether it belonged to film school professors or the studios backing his movies. Early relationships with Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg shaped Lucas’ work and place in Hollywood—and foreshadowed what was to come.

When the book turns to the first Star Wars film, readers observe Lucas’ tortured creative process. He wrote treatments of the screenplay longhand in pencil and painstakingly edited snippets from other movies to show how he wanted Star Wars to look and feel. The result forever changed how Americans experience film.

For movie fans or anyone fascinated by the creative process, this is a well-researched and illuminating biography.

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

While thousands worked on the Manhattan Project, it is doubtful that e = mc² would have been translated into the atomic bomb without Enrico Fermi. Given his role in ushering in the Atomic Age, it is surprising that, until now, there has been no major biography of Fermi in English; The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, by husband and wife authors Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin, does an excellent job of filling that gap.

Although Fermi didn’t discover nuclear fission, he arguably made the greatest contributions towards harnessing its power. The first nuclear chain reaction took place in December 1942, at the University of Chicago, under his direct supervision. Afterward, he was a leader in the development of the atomic bomb.

The main problem for any biographer of Fermi is the nature of his work, which depended upon complex mathematical models, an intuitive understanding of the workings of the atomic nucleus, and intricate experimentation. Happily, the authors’ clear explanations ensure that the reader is not only able to follow Fermi’s contributions to science, but also understand their impact on his life story.

Segrè and Hoerlin both had family connections with Fermi: His uncle was one of Fermi’s closest colleagues, and her father worked with him on the Manhattan project. Together, they paint an affectionate and honest portrait of a man who was defined by his contradictions. Fermi, nicknamed “The Pope” for his infallibility, was both a theoretical and an experimental physicist, nearly a contradiction in terms. He was deeply apolitical, but politics nevertheless molded his life, from his increasingly uneasy relationship with Mussolini, which culminated in his arrival as a refugee to the United States, to his defense of Robert Oppenheimer during the McCarthy era. Unemotional, he inspired great love from his wife, friends and colleagues, and yet his own children suffered from his aloofness.

In all, this comprehensive and enjoyable biography is a valuable introduction to the life of Fermi. 

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the glory days of Al Capone—Scarface, Big Al, Public Enemy Number One—is how short they were: six years, from mid-level thug to big boss to jail. So why is he still the iconic American gangster, nearly 70 years after his death from the complications of syphilis? 

Well, he loved publicity. But because his legend was a creation of newshounds and Hollywood, much of what we think we know is wrong. Biographer Deirdre Bair tries to uncover the man behind the flamboyant image in Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend. It seems a surprising project for an author who has written about Samuel Beckett and Carl Jung. Bair fell into it by happenstance when she met a man who was trying to find out if he was related to Capone. Eventually, she was able to talk extensively with Capone descendants.

They mostly turn out to be private, law-abiding folks whose reminiscences are engrossing and sometimes touching. Capone’s Irish-American wife, Mae, is at the heart of their memories—a woman who was, in their eyes, decent, loyal and loving. Syphilis, likely contracted from a prostitute, destroyed Capone’s mind, but Mae never gave up on him.

Bair carefully tries to sort out truth from baloney. No one knows how many people Capone and his minions killed. But Bair can say with confidence that the federal income tax evasion case that sent him to prison would have fallen apart if he hadn’t had incompetent lawyers and a biased judge.

Bair is particularly good at putting the Capones in the context of the Italian immigrant culture that shaped them. Capone himself wouldn’t have liked that; he always stressed that he was American-born, not an Italian. But he would have gotten a huge kick out of his enduring fame.

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

In her exhaustively researched and beautifully written Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962, the concluding volume of her definitive biography, Blanche Wiesen Cook gives us a sympathetic but very human portrait of this “First Lady of the World.” 

Roosevelt’s public life was devoted to persuasion, and she used her many roles as president’s wife, newspaper columnist, author, public speaker, educator, presidential envoy and activist to influence events. In the midst of this work, she had to handle family matters and pursue private interests with many friends, whose rivalries and jealousies are detailed here. She admitted she “would never be any good in politics,” whereas her husband dealt capably with politicians and public opinion, which sometimes meant maneuvering through racial prejudice and anti-Semitism to reach a compromise or just inaction. Though she never overtly opposed FDR’s policies, a close reading of her columns reveals divergences. 

Two primary themes of this volume are Roosevelt’s civil rights work for African Americans and her efforts to rescue those fleeing the ravages of World War II in Europe. The depth of her involvement in these two efforts is one of the most compelling aspects of the book. Her sharp differences with her husband on these subjects contributed mightily to an already strained relationship between them. She had a significant influence on some of her husband’s decisions, although it is often difficult to trace. Both were keenly aware that it was politically unacceptable for her to appear to have influenced policy; her husband never publicly acknowledged “her role in his life.” Eleanor said they “argue about everything in the world,” but never tried to influence each other. Each would do, she said, what he or she “considered the right thing.” 

She was unanimously elected chair of the United Nations committee that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was to be “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” Since its passage in 1948, it continues to be the most important U.N. declaration on behalf of basic political freedoms, as well as economic and social rights. 

Anyone interested in the life of this towering figure in 20th-century history will want to read this book.

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

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.