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.

When Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971, she was only 48 years old, and her career was on the climb. One of the foremost photographers of the 20th century, she had the remarkable ability to call up and capture the idiosyncrasies of just about anyone who submitted to her lens. As Arthur Lubow observes in Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, she “excavated the truth—or a truth” about her subjects.

In this new biography, which is brisk and accessible despite its 700-page length, Lubow tells the story of an artistically brilliant but emotionally fragile figure. During her relatively brief career, Arbus managed to capture with her camera a broad cross-section of humanity, including nudists, cross-dressers and the mentally handicapped. Born in 1923 into an affluent Jewish family (her brother was the poet Howard Nemerov), Arbus grew up in New York City. She received her first camera from her husband, Allan Arbus, with whom she started a successful fashion photography enterprise. Around 1956, she quit the business and began taking the forthright, unstaged portraits that made her famous, shooting in black and white the very young and the very old, mixed-race couples and nuclear families, millionaires, movie stars, bums, and sideshow freaks.

The book’s chronology is cued by her photographic output. In tracking the timeline of Arbus’ life through her art, Lubow brings to bear on the narrative a deep appreciation for her pictures and an impressive technical grasp of photography. An award-winning journalist, he explains the circumstances that shaped Arbus’ most iconic shots and—prompted by newly discovered letters and exclusive interviews—explores the controversy she courted by becoming close to some of her subjects. Bringing Arbus out from behind the lens, Lubow sheds new light on her genius and delivers a definitive portrait of the artist.

When Harry Crews died in 2012, the Southern Gothic tradition that started gathering steam when the “Dixie Limited,” William Faulkner, rolled down the tracks—picking up Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Larry Brown, James Dickey and Barry Hannah along the way—died with him.

Fortunately for readers, when he was a young reporter for the Gainesville Sun, Ted Geltner drew the assignment of interviewing Crews, whose 1973 novel, The Hawk is Dying, was being turned into a film. That initial conversation with the cantankerous novelist and University of Florida English professor eventually blossomed into a symbiotic relationship between the two, with Crews in his later years often calling on Geltner to drive him to pick up his medicine or his beer and Geltner absorbing the stories that he would later turn into a biography of Crews.

Geltner's Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews brings to colorful life the Georgia writer so driven by his craft that he once advised young writers, "If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told."

Crews was born in Bacon County, Georgia, on June 7, 1935, to poor tenant farmers; his father, Ray, died of a heart attack one night while the not-yet 2-year-old Harry was sleeping next to him in the bed. Life hurtled downhill from that moment, for his mother, Myrtice, married Ray's brother, Pascal, who turned violent and abusive when he was drunk. When he was 5, Crews had a bout with childhood polio, which left him with a limp the rest of his life. The following year, playing a game of "pop-the-whip," he was hurled into a vat of scalding water used to scald pigs; he survived only because his head stayed above water, but the damage was done: "[W]hen my shirt was taken off, my back came off with it." In his own autobiography, A Childhood (1978), Crews writes of his early days, "When something went wrong, it almost always brought something else with it. It was a world in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."

Very early, though, Crews fell in love with stories. There were only two books in the Crews' house: the Bible and the Sears Roebuck catalog. He and his friend, Willalee Bookatee, would spend hours making up stories about the models in the pages of the catalog.

When he was 17, Crews joined the Marines, where he started reading seriously, and when he was discharged, he used the G.I. Bill to matriculate at the University of Florida, where he decided to become a writer. There, he studied with the great Agrarian poet and novelist Andrew Lytle—who had also once taught Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey—with whom Crews would eventually develop an antagonistic relationship.

Geltner, now an associate professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, ranges carefully over these details of Crews' life, providing the outline on which he can arrange the real stories of Harry Crews: his fierce dedication to the craft of writing and his all-consuming fire to tell stories, his incessant womanizing and his bouts of relentless drinking and drug use, his attention to his writing students, and his often painful journey to understand his own suffering through telling the stories of a cast of characters scarred by the haunting, weird, and violent landscape of the South and their families.

Geltner richly chronicles each of Crews' novels, providing details of character and plot, situating them in the context of Crews' life, and sharing the growing critical praise for each one. Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer (1968), published while he was teaching at Broward Community College, opens in the jail cell in Enigma, Georgia, where Willalee Bookatee is being held for the murder and rape of MaryBeth Carter. Yet, as it turns out, it is likely a protégé of the Gospel Singer, "the midget with the largest foot in the world," who has returned to Enigma, and worshipped by the people in the town. It's a tale of unrequited evil set in a world where men masquerade as good, worship each other, elevating some among them to god-like status, and where conscience lies hidden from view. Critics compared Crews to Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams, and declared that his novel testified to "the inescapability of man's actions—or his inaction."

Crews' star continued to rise with the publication of Naked in Garden Hills (1969), This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven (1970), Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971), Car (1972), The Hawk is Dying (1973), The Gypsy's Curse (1974), and A Feast of Snakes (1976), which Geltner calls "a powerful and unique descent into the depths of human misery and angst." (212). Following A Feast of Snakes, Crews didn't publish another novel until 1987, All We Need of Hell, followed by three novels—The Knockout Artist (1988), Body (1990) and Scar Lover (1992)—fueled by his deep immersion in boxing and bodybuilding.

For a short period, Crews hung out with Madonna and her then-husband Sean Penn, and Madonna told Crews he was "definitely the coolest guy in the universe." Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth, enamored of Crews' writing and persona, formed a band called Harry Crews, releasing one album—a live album called Naked in Garden Hills—of songs made up of the names of Crews' novels.

Once, when Crews was asked what it took to become a real novelist, he shouted out, "Blood! . . . Bone! . . . Marrow!"

With the power of a spellbinding storyteller, Geltner splendidly captures Crews' blood, bone and marrow by leading us on a journey through all we need of Crews' hell, recognizing that without passing through this hellacious suffering, we can never truly understand him. Geltner's biography compels us to seek out Crews' novels to read, or re-read, and to discover the voices of a South just off the interstates and at the edges of its glittering urban centers.

Just as his 1981 book, Shout!, is considered by many to be the definitive history of the Beatles, so biographer Philip Norman’s Paul McCartney: The Life will be the once-for-all-time record of the lad from Liverpool whose song lyrics and boyish good looks broke hearts and whose career after the Beatles was almost as successful as his time with them.

Drawing on scores of interviews with McCartney’s family, friends and associates, Norman delivers a sprawling, year-by-year chronicle filled with details about McCartney’s personal and professional life that will be familiar to many devoted fans. The book ranges from McCartney’s childhood and the devastating death of his mother—after which, he said, “I learned to put a shell around me”—to his love of rock ’n’ roll and his early days with John and George in The Quarrymen. From a young age, McCartney capitalized on his considerable appeal to the opposite sex. “Ever since kindergarten, he’d been aware of his attractiveness to girls and the infallible effect of turning his brown eyes full on them,” Norman writes.

The author chronicles the Beatles’ apprenticeship in Hamburg, the acrimony that tore the band apart and the beginnings of Wings, as well as McCartney’s relationships with Linda Eastman, Heather Mills and Nancy Shevell.

Along with the biographical narrative, Norman weaves in analysis of McCartney’s music as it evolved. For example, Wings’ 1973 album, Band on the Run, appeared at first to be out of control, but the band, according to Norman, “made a courageous journey through unfriendly territory” to emerge with a record that garnered “reviews as ecstatic as those of his previous albums had been dismissive.” On Ram, McCartney includes an instrumental to please his father, Jim, a former big band musician in declining health when the album appeared in 1971.

The author paints a portrait of a musician driven constantly to reinvent himself and a perfectionist who still deeply loves the process of songwriting. While Norman never shies away from revealing McCartney’s shortcomings (“the inexhaustible geniality Paul showed the world was not always replicated in private,” for example) his enthusiasm for the artist turns this book into a sympathetic look at McCartney’s life and his deep contributions to music.

We can’t get enough of the Tudors. Despite the centuries that have passed, the clan that began with Henry VII and ended with Elizabeth I continues to command legions of loyal subjects, from BBC watchers and biography buffs to fans of historical fiction.

Those whose fealty lies with Elizabeth I (1533–1603) should procure John Guy’s new book anon. The first substantial narrative to deeply explore the latter decades of her reign, Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years zooms in on a critical period in Tudor history, providing a fascinating close-up of an aging queen taking her final turn upon the world stage. During this crucial, conclusive epoch in Elizabeth’s 44-year rule, many of her most trusted advisors died, and she faced a protracted war with Spain. She also reckoned uneasily with her own mortality, as her physical charms and health both waned.

In researching the book, Guy had access to a trove of largely unexplored archival material, and his narrative corrects a number of inaccuracies circulated by the queen’s previous chroniclers. The conception of Elizabeth as accessible and merciful—as “Good Queen Bess”—is one such fiction Guy deflates, noting that she lived in splendor while plague and a poor economy crippled her country, a state of affairs that aroused in her subjects resentment rather than adoration. Toward the end, Guy writes, to her people, Elizabeth was “a distant image or just a name.”

In her majesty’s orbit during these years were dashing, impetuous adventurers Walter Raleigh and Robert Devereux, who sought their fortunes at sea and in war. Their romanctic exploits during a time of political instability, when the question of Elizabeth’s successor was unresolved, make the book a bit of a nail-biter. 

Guy, winner of the Whitbread Award for Queen of Scots (2005), has produced a book in which Elizabeth’s royal presence is palpable. Tudorists, take heed: This fresh consideration of the queen—a woman by turns valiant and vulnerable, jealous and generous, unapproachable and compassionate—at the finis of her rule is a rousingly good read.

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

John Hay and Samuel Clemens were both rising writers when they met in the late 1860s. Hay, a poet, was one of two private secretaries to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Clemens, under the pen name Mark Twain, was known for his short stories and comic lectures. Both had grown up in small towns on the Mississippi River, and they admired each other’s work. Although never close friends (Hay’s wife disapproved of Clemens), in the late 1890s, the changing role of the U.S. in the world brought them back toward each other, on opposing sides.

In his absorbing The Statesman and the Storyteller, Mark Zwonitzer weaves their personal and public stories together as he explores the different responses of two very public figures to the complicated events of their time. Hay was a Republican in the original party sense: a strong believer in capitalism, wary of a shift of money to the working class and immigrants. Clemens considered himself a small-d democrat who was skeptical about government power and was an advocate for fairness in social, political and commercial matters. What continued to bind them were “unbreakable threads of affection and common experience” based on “a gut understanding of just how hard the other was running from desolate beginnings, and an admiration for how far the other man had traveled.”

During the period covered in the book, Clemens is deeply in debt and undertakes a world lecture tour to help right his financial ship, while Hay serves in the McKinley administration as ambassador to Great Britain. The supporting cast includes Clemens’ beloved wife, Livy, so important to her husband’s career that no manuscript ever left their home “without her signing off on every word and phrasing”; Hay’s best friend, Henry Adams, who knew all the influential political figures of the day; and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a major booster of America’s drive to become an imperial power. 

This book is so well written I did not want it to end. With exhaustive research and superlative descriptive skills, Zwonitzer is able to capture mood and tone, bringing his prolific and often-profiled subjects to life and leading the reader to consistently feel present in the moment. 

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

Maybe they made the wrong movie.

Or, at least, perhaps there should have been a sequel to Chariots of Fire, the 1981 historical drama that became an international hit and won four Academy Awards. That’s because, as British author Duncan Hamilton writes in For the Glory, Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell’s life was really just beginning when he won a gold medal in the 400 meters at the 1924 Summer Olympics after missing out on the 100-meter event by famously refusing to race on Sunday in accordance with his Christian beliefs.

As Hamilton depicts in this vivid and heartfelt narrative, Liddell went on to make a far more lasting mark in life than his athletic triumphs. A year after his Olympic glory in Paris, he began serving as a teacher and missionary in a remote region of China, where he was born the son of missionary parents. It was a difficult life in an environment already hostile to outsiders, and it became progressively more difficult as war clouds threatened. Ultimately, Liddell and other Westerners were sent to a Japanese work camp, where he died at age 43 from a brain tumor in 1945.

Hamilton’s passion for his subject shows through on every page as he recounts life in the camp, where Liddell worked tirelessly, gave up his meager rations and counseled despondent fellow internees. He also could be cajoled into the occasional footrace, never being beaten until near the end of his life.

Through it all, Liddell held to his beliefs and inspired countless others to follow in his footsteps. Hamilton makes it clear: His race became theirs, and the human race was the better for it.

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

In this engaging and well-researched biography, writer and historian Louisa Thomas rescues a former first lady from near obscurity—Louisa Catherine Johnson, wife of sixth president John Quincy Adams and the only presidential spouse born outside America.

Louisa Johnson met her future husband in London, where she was one of seven children of a patriotic American merchant and an elegant English mother. When John Quincy Adams began turning up for dinner in the fall of 1795, he was entranced by the six Johnson girls, whom he called “pretty and agreeable.” But which one was he actually courting? At a ball to celebrate her 21st birthday, much to her older sister Nancy’s dismay, it became clear that the prominent young American diplomat had chosen Louisa.

She had been educated to be married, and after leaving school at 15, Louisa focused on the ladylike pursuits of dancing, painting and embroidery. Yet John Quincy Adams did not marry a woman who, as she once put it, “only intended to play an echo.” Louisa was more adept than her husband at socializing, and she used those talents as she dutifully followed him to diplomatic postings in distant capitals from Prussia to St. Petersburg (once traveling almost 2,000 miles across Europe in winter with her young son to join her husband in Paris). But she also struggled with her role as first lady, with feelings of being an outsider and with family tragedy: Only one of her four children survived her.

Louisa is a fascinating portrait of a complex woman, her sometimes tumultuous marriage and the extraordinary era in which she lived. “She witnessed a world in transformation, and a country inventing itself,” writes Thomas, “and she played a role in that invention.”