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From 1926 to 1941, Sweden’s famed export made 24 Holly-wood films, all of which are detailed in Mark A. Vieira’s Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy. Featuring 250 photos, many never before seen (including an unretouched portrait of Garbo at 36), the book utilizes newly available MGM documents and articles of the day to examine the career that enshrined Hollywood’s ultimate woman of mystery.
When not writing about movies, Los Angeles-based journalist Pat H. Broeske likes to watch them.
Still selling out stadiums, arenas and small halls after more than 30 years, Bruce Springsteen continues, night after night and album after album, to deliver rollicking performances and straight-ahead rock and roll, as well as biting songs that both celebrate the glory of being born in the USA and indict our misguided political and social policies.
Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair as you travel with Peter Ames Carlin down Springsteen’s thunder roads in Bruce, his captivating biography of The Boss. Drawing extensively on interviews with Springsteen himself and his family and friends—including the final interview with his beloved friend and saxophonist Clarence Clemons—Carlin chronicles Springsteen’s life from the day he got his first guitar to the teenage Bruce’s conversion to rock and roll the night he sat spellbound watching Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1957.
As a teenager, Springsteen had already developed into a hard-working rock guitarist, driving his bands to play tighter and tighter sets. His doggedness paid off when one of his early bands, the Castiles, snagged a semi-regular gig at Cafe Wha?, New York’s famous rock venue. Carlin moves rhythmically from these formative years through Springsteen’s glory days, when he moved from the shadows of Asbury Park to the light of international fame, and into Springsteen’s latest tour and his new album, Wrecking Ball.
Carlin also plumbs Springsteen’s darker moods, his craving for a better understanding of his father, whose vacant stares during Springsteen’s youth troubled him more than his father’s lectures or criticisms, his deep passion for music and his desire to give his fans the very best performances he can give them.
Because this admiring, yet unflinchingly honest portrait of The Boss allows Springsteen to speak in his own words and convey his own ideas about music and life, this definitive biography leaves all other Springsteen books in the dust of its roaring engines, taking us into the shadows of the man that rock critic Jon Landau once called “the future of rock and roll.”
Still selling out stadiums, arenas and small halls after more than 30 years, Bruce Springsteen continues, night after night and album after album, to deliver rollicking performances and straight-ahead rock and roll, as well as biting songs that both celebrate the glory of being born…
In one of the most disturbing scenes in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the saintly Marmee says to her daughter Jo, “I have been angry nearly every day of my life.” Eve LaPlante’s new biography of the “real” Marmee—Louisa’s mother, Abigail May Alcott—provides ample reason for her fictional counterpart’s daily rage.
LaPlante, herself a descendant from the Alcott family tree, traces Abigail May Alcott’s life from early childhood through death. We hear about Abigail’s relationships with her siblings, including her older brother, who would become a famous progressive (it is because of him that women were admitted into Cornell, for example). We learn about Abigail’s love of writing, her chronic bad health and her love match with philosopher A. Bronson Alcott. The last of these was, in LaPlante’s view, the cause of much of the trouble in Abigail’s life.
The Alcotts were perpetually in debt and moved more than 30 times. LaPlante’s chapter titles, often pulled from Abigail’s writing, reveal her subject’s despair: “Sacrifices Must Be Made,” “A Dead Decaying Thing,” “Left to Dig or Die.” Into this disheartening scene came Louisa, a daughter LaPlante convincingly argues had much in common with her beleaguered mother. Louisa vowed early on to become rich, pay off her family’s debts and give her mother a comfortable room. The strain between Louisa’s parents very much shaped her passion to write for money, which was why she wrote Little Women in the first place.
The narrative about Marmee’s life will be of interest to anyone who enjoys mother/daughter stories, American history or literary studies. Readers of the last category, however, may find that in fact, this “untold story” is already familiar, and may take issue with some of the author’s interpretations, particularly her obvious distaste for her subject’s husband. Still, the long and vital quotations from primary documents (some of them newly uncovered) and LaPlante’s careful research more than compensate for the book’s limitations. Especially as we move into the winter season, when many of us will cue our DVD players to the opening scene of Little Women, Marmee & Louisa is well worth a read.
In one of the most disturbing scenes in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the saintly Marmee says to her daughter Jo, “I have been angry nearly every day of my life.” Eve LaPlante’s new biography of the “real” Marmee—Louisa’s mother, Abigail May Alcott—provides ample reason…
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, many of his fans and friends mourned the loss of the brilliant writer, whose fiction and essays wove filaments of energetic, staccato and sometimes lumbering prose around clever and piercing insights about contemporary society. As the details of his death began to emerge and critics began to publish studies of his life and writing, so did details of Wallace's life-long battle with depression, mental illness, addiction and self-abnegation.
In the first biography of Wallace, New Yorker writer Max (The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery) exhaustingly chronicles the details of Wallace's life from his happy and ordinary childhood in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where his father taught philosophy and his mother taught English, his love of, almost addiction to, television, his tennis successes in high school and his terror at leaving home to enter Amherst—which he decided to attend so he wouldn't have to face any more college interviews—to his on-again and off-again college career, interrupted by episodes of depression, and his faltering rise to success and recognition as a writer.
Max points out that as a high school junior Wallace experienced an unforgettable moment when "he clearly saw the danger of a mind unhinged, of the danger of thinking responsive only to itself . . . . [H]e would derive a lifelong fear of the consequences of mental and, eventually, emotional isolation." In spite of the flashes of brilliance in his writing, Wallace could never grow beyond the menace and threat of his own restless, anxious mind, and even the novel for which he is most praised, Infinite Jest, baffles readers with the labyrinthine excess of a soul lost in the funhouse. Although it rose quickly on the bestseller lists, the novel received a mixed response from critics; the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani famously called Wallace's novel a "big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, reminiscences and footnotes . . . arbitrary and self-indulgent." Much the same could be said of Max’s bloated and uneven biography.
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story offers unsatisfying readings of Wallace's own writing, but Max provides a sympathetic portrait of a writer who struggled to show the world what it meant to be a human being—though he never managed to live up to his own expectations for the task.
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, many of his fans and friends mourned the loss of the brilliant writer, whose fiction and essays wove filaments of energetic, staccato and sometimes lumbering prose around clever and piercing insights about contemporary society. As the…
In 1825, when John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States, he appeared to be as well prepared for the job as anyone could be. A son of the nation’s second president, he was well educated at Harvard; as secretary of state, he wrote what became known as the Monroe Doctrine; and as a U.S. senator, he broke with his party and supported the Louisiana Purchase. Despite this illustrious background, he proved to be the most ineffective president in early American history.
His presidency failed in part because of his own missteps (his inability to relate to the ordinary citizen) and partly by the efforts of his political opponents (primarily supporters of Andrew Jackson). Still, his independence and political courage were remarkable, especially his post-presidential opposition to slavery. Harlow Giles Unger captures the many sides of Adams and his era in the superb John Quincy Adams. A key source is the diary that Adams kept from the age of 10 until his late 70s—14,000 pages in all.
First elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1802, Adams was regarded as such a nuisance in his home state that his colleagues elected him to the U.S. Senate to get rid of him for at least six years. Instead, Unger writes, Adams began to shock “the nation’s entire political establishment with what became a courageous, lifelong crusade against injustice.”
On his first day in the House of Representatives (the only president who went on to serve in that body), Adams presented 15 petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. It was a stunning breach of decorum in a body forbidden by its rules to speak of abolition. In a famous case, he later defended 36 Africans who had been prisoners on the slave ship Amistad.
Eloquent, irritating and fiercely committed to his work, John Quincy Adams lived an extraordinary life, and Unger tells his story convincingly in this compelling narrative.
In 1825, when John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States, he appeared to be as well prepared for the job as anyone could be. A son of the nation’s second president, he was well educated at Harvard; as secretary of state,…
In his acclaimed biography, The Beatles, Bob Spitz delivered an intimate and enduring portrait of four rock stars who changed the course of popular culture. Now, timed to coincide with Julia Child’s 100th birthday, Spitz offers an admiring portrait of the woman who became a rock star in her own world, changing forever the way Americans think about food and cooking.
Drawing deeply on Child’s diaries and letters, Dearie exhaustively—and exhaustingly—chronicles her life from her rambunctious childhood and her socially active days at Smith to her early adult life in government service, her whirlwind romance with Paul Child, and her rapid rise to becoming the television star without whom the Food Network and the passion for celebrity chefs might never have developed.
As Spitz points out, Julia Child wasn’t a natural when it came to the kitchen. In November 1948, an extraordinary meal in Paris changed her life, and she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, gaining the skills she needed to prepare everything from sauces to soups to soufflés. In 1961, she published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and though critics called it a monumental work, it was not until Child promoted the book on the “Today” show that it began flying out of bookstores and ended up on kitchen counters around the country. In 1962, Child’s energetic personality and her love of teaching landed her before the camera for her groundbreaking public television show, “The French Chef,” where she cultivated an audience with her down-to-earth ways, her off-color humor, her lack of concern for perfection and her devotion to making sure that everyone—even the unskilled—could cook the dishes she prepared.
As Spitz so cannily observes, Child was determined to stand at the center of her own world. The story of her emancipation runs parallel to the struggles of post-war American women who were frustrated that the demands of being a perfect hostess and a perfect wife kept them from pursuing other dreams and desires. In Julia Child, these women had not only a role model who steered them from beans-and-franks casseroles to Sole Meunière but also a fiercely independent woman who lived above the rules of both the kitchen and culture.
In his acclaimed biography, The Beatles, Bob Spitz delivered an intimate and enduring portrait of four rock stars who changed the course of popular culture. Now, timed to coincide with Julia Child’s 100th birthday, Spitz offers an admiring portrait of the woman who became a…
The advance buzz for Barack Obama centers on the diary entries kept by Genevieve Cook, who was the one-time girlfriend of the man who would become the 44th president of the United States. Obama was 22 at the time, a recent graduate of Columbia University, living in New York and searching for his place in life. The diary entries, excerpted in Vanity Fair prior to the book’s publication, are intriguing because they reinforce the image of Obama being cool and aloof. Indeed, the 18-month relationship collapses under the weight of inertia as Obama decides to move to Chicago to become a community organizer. The rest, as they say, is history.
While Cook’s often-whiny diary entries are juicy, they represent only a fraction of what makes Barack Obama a great book. Author David Maraniss, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, uses his skills as a journalist to uncover new details about Obama and his ancestors. The book traces the Obama family tree back to his great-grandparents in Kansas and in Kenya. It follows Obama as a young boy as he hopscotches across the globe from Hawaii to Indonesia, and then as a young man attending college in Los Angeles, and later New York. The chronicles of this circuitous journey only reinforce how remarkable a story it is that Obama ended up in the White House.
Barack Obama fills in the blanks of Obama’s own memoir, Dreams from My Father, because Maraniss is such a thorough reporter and researcher. The author of a memoir has a singular perspective, and can be selective with the particulars, while a biographer strives to find all the facts. Obama’s book creates the frame for the portrait. Maraniss’ book connects the dots.
What is fascinating about Barack Obama is that it ends before Obama enters politics. In fact, the protagonist doesn’t appear until the seventh chapter. Maraniss explains that he took this approach to delve deeply into Obama’s background and discover what shaped his character: Growing up as a biracial child with no father and a mother who was often gone; raised by white grandparents who struggled with their prejudices, the future president faced many challenges. “It helped explain his caution, his tendency to hold back and survey life like a chessboard,” Maraniss writes. As Obama finishes his fourth year in office, some say he is even more of an enigma. Barack Obama is a book guaranteed to bring more clarity to his story.
The advance buzz for Barack Obama centers on the diary entries kept by Genevieve Cook, who was the one-time girlfriend of the man who would become the 44th president of the United States. Obama was 22 at the time, a recent graduate of Columbia University,…
In the same way that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan recognized and used the power of folk music to prophesize about matters of economic and social injustice, Bruce Springsteen has used rock and roll to urge us to transform our cultural and political landscape. In the words of his song, “Thunder Road,” he’s “got this guitar, and he’s learned how to make it talk.”
In Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Marc Dolan’s fan notes trace the conversation that Springsteen’s guitar has carried on with rock and roll from the moment The Boss first picked up the instrument to his latest album, 2012’s Wrecking Ball. Not a conventional biography, Dolan’s compelling book follows Springsteen’s development as a rock and roll musician song by song, album by album and concert by concert as a way of telling the cultural history of our times. Springsteen has famously said that his role is “to be here now,” and Dolan demonstrates in exhaustive detail how Springsteen’s music has been the soundtrack of our lives from the defaulting of Manhattan in the early 1970s, to the shame and hope of Ronald Reagan’s U.S.A., to the shaky good fortune of Bill Clinton’s America, to the haunting days after 9/11 and the culturally estranged home front of the Second Gulf War.
Springsteen’s glory days began in 1957 when his mother let him stay up to watch Elvis Presley on “The Ed Sullivan Show”; he immediately wanted to play the guitar, and the first song he learned to play was “Twist and Shout.” In 1964, his mother bought him an electric guitar and amp for Christmas, and practicing harder than ever before, Springsteen started his journey down the highway littered with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive. Over the course of the next decade, Springsteen played in several bands around New Jersey and New York, honing his guitar riffs and songwriting licks as well as the canny leadership skills that led to the formation of the E Street Band. Springsteen emerged in an era dominated by introspective songwriters such as Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell, but although many of his songs were covertly autobiographical, what made Springsteen’s songs “personal” was not so much their specific autobiographical detail or insights as the vision that they communicated of the observed world.
Springsteen fans may disagree with many of Dolan’s readings of his lyrics, but they’ll likely agree that The Boss is a remarkable performer who can shape an audience’s perception, just as a remarkable audience can shape a performer’s perception, and that together they can shape and be shaped by the moment itself. After all, that’s what rock and roll is all about.
In the same way that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan recognized and used the power of folk music to prophesize about matters of economic and social injustice, Bruce Springsteen has used rock and roll to urge us to transform our cultural and political landscape. In…
Cary Grant was the embodiment of grace and perfection. And, my, but he looked good. But beneath the suave demeanor was a man of darkly troubled complexities. As Cary Grant: The Biography details, the former Archibald Leach was forever haunted by his English childhood and his relationship with the mother who wound up in an asylum. Marc Eliot, who previously penned the musical sagas of Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles, relies largely on previously published books and articles for source material. He makes good use of Grant’s own interviews and the memories he shared on the lecture circuit. And Dyan Cannon’s divorce testimony is an eye-opener. Wife number four, Cannon was 35 years younger than Grant who ruled the roost as if he were, well, her daddy. (He once locked her in her room to keep her from wearing a short skirt in public.) Less convincing, but no less entertaining, are recycled accounts of Grant’s alleged relationship with western star Randolph Scott. If this really happened, Grant truly should have won the Oscar he craved. Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of Howard Hughes: The Untold Story, which would also make a terrific holiday gift.
According to author Rich Cohen, a corporation “tends to have a life span, tends to age and die.” Remember United Fruit, which at one point controlled 70 percent of America’s banana market? It was the U.S. Steel of easily bruised produce.
The man behind its success was Samuel Zemurray, a Russian immigrant who turned $150 worth of bananas into a $30 million fortune. He was one of the most powerful men in America, the embodiment of immigrant industriousness. Zemurray has since fallen into irrelevance, but in The Fish That Ate the Whale, Cohen resurrects the memory of America’s Banana King in a rollicking, colorful tale that proceeds with a spy novel’s pace. You swallow the prose in big, greedy gulps.
That partly has to do with Zemurray’s life, a mixture of hustle, power and philanthropy. His hands-on approach—he planted banana fields in Honduras, he loved the rhythms of the docks—helped turn his company into a model of efficiency.
When shifts in government policy in Honduras and Guatemala threatened United Fruit, Zemurray helped stage government overthrows. But he also donated to Tulane University, founded an agricultural school in Honduras and was instrumental in securing votes to partition Israel.
Cohen, displaying the rhythm and keen introspection that made his Sweet and Low so good, knows when to delve into Zemurray’s psyche. His stylistic touches enhance the story of a man propelled by “righteous anger.” Zemurray may be fading from the country’s entrepreneurial lore, but Cohen says America would be wise to follow his example: “As long as you’re breathing,” Cohen says, “the end remains to be written.”
According to author Rich Cohen, a corporation “tends to have a life span, tends to age and die.” Remember United Fruit, which at one point controlled 70 percent of America’s banana market? It was the U.S. Steel of easily bruised produce.
The man behind its success…
When Lyndon Johnson was a teenager, in a family of modest means, he predicted that some day he was going to be president of the United States. In the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s superlative multi-volume biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, this one titled The Passage of Power, Johnson reaches that office but only because of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Caro’s narrative grabs us from the beginning and, with his meticulous research and insight, shows how the two hugely ambitious and competitive politicians dealt with each other in a town where gaining and using power is the name of the game. Although there are forays into other areas, the author tells essentially two stories. The first story deals with the period from late 1958, when Johnson began to think seriously about gaining the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination for himself, and ends when President Kennedy is killed. LBJ agreed to be JFK’s running mate, although, pragmatist that he was, he remained on the ballot in Texas as a candidate for his Senate seat. He endured three years of humiliation and embarrassment as vice president. The second story begins when Johnson masterfully takes charge and details his presidential leadership, including very significant legislative achievements, in particular a historic civil rights bill, during the first seven weeks after he became president. The period covered in this volume is no doubt one of the high points of Johnson’s career.
Political biography doesn’t get any better than what Caro does. When I interviewed him for BookPage in 1990 on the occasion of the publication of the second of his LBJ volumes, Means of Ascent, he said he would cover his subject in four volumes. But as his research, including interviews with many participants, has continued, Caro has uncovered important details that make his books indispensable to anyone interested in how LBJ gained and used political power, and he wants to share them with his readers. With the rest of the 1961-1965 presidential term to be completed, the 1964 presidential election triumph, the Vietnam War and his decision to not run again, there may be more than one additional volume to be written.
Caro always shows us the many sides of LBJ. He could be “crude, coarse, ruthless, often cruel” and had a penchant for deception and secrecy. But he could also be cool and decisive under pressure, as he demonstrated in the weeks following the assassination. He was definitely a political genius, a legislative strategist and tactician of the highest order. This book is filled with examples of his mastery in this regard, but it is especially shown by LBJ’s approaches to senators Harry Byrd and Everett Dirksen when he needed their help in moving legislation forward. While Caro is well aware of how power can corrupt, he also believes it is equally true that power reveals a politician’s deepest commitments. In LBJ’s case, this led, despite his friendship with Southern senators who were opposed, to his vigorous effort to pass the 1964 civil rights bill. LBJ went on to introduce other groundbreaking progressive legislation, including the War on Poverty.
After Johnson retired from the presidency, he said, “The one thing I feared from the first day of my presidency” was that Robert Kennedy would announce “his intention to reclaim the throne in memory of his brother.” Caro details the LBJ-RFK relationship, based on mutual distrust, disdain and hatred. The author notes the opposition by some liberal groups and their disappointment at the 1960 Democratic convention to Johnson’s nomination as JFK’s vice presidential choice. But he discounts Robert’s contention that his brother did not really want Johnson on the ticket. JFK’s close aide and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen acknowledged that Kennedy had “gambled” on LBJ and the “gamble paid off.” The presidential race was so close that, without Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy would have lost the election to Richard Nixon.
Caro concludes that in the seven weeks after assuming the presidency, Johnson did much more than give the country continuity and reassurance. He achieved those objectives masterfully. But in addition, he used the momentum brought on by JFK’s death to launch what he envisioned as the transformation of American society, a pivotal moment in the history of the United States, a time to launch a crusade for social justice on a grand new scale.
There is much more to come. We eagerly look forward to Caro’s next volume.
When Lyndon Johnson was a teenager, in a family of modest means, he predicted that some day he was going to be president of the United States. In the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s superlative multi-volume biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, this one titled…
Yes, Virginia, there really was a man named Birdseye behind the Birds Eye® frozen food brand.
Clarence Birdseye, who was born in Brooklyn at the end of 1886, did not originate the idea of fast-freezing food—he always credited the Inuit for the concept. But as Mark Kurlansky points out in this charming biography, Birdseye “changed our civilization. He created an industry by modernizing the process of food preservation and in so doing nationalized and then internationalized food distribution.”
Locavores certainly won’t think that’s such a great legacy. Fresh food is definitely better than frozen, but Kurlansky notes that at the time, many people, especially the urban poor and middle classes, were eating canned food of inferior quality. Before Birdseye began tinkering with food-freezing processes in 1923, attempts to freeze fish, meat and vegetables often turned to rancid mush. As a result, consumers were extremely skeptical about frozen foods. So Birdseye pushed relentlessly for a high-quality product, which he marketed with energetic creativity. Just before the 1929 stock market crash, Birdseye sold his company to what would soon become General Foods for the astonishing sum of $23.5 million. He stayed on with the new company as an executive, and later as a consultant, continuing to invent new products and processes.
Birdseye was 37 years old when he began trying to preserve food by freezing it. Before that his life seemed to be an almost random assortment of efforts, beset by failure. He liked to tinker and invent. He liked to hunt and was always interested in food. He was insatiably curious and eager for adventure—first in the territories of the western U.S. (where he often worked in life-threatening circumstances as a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher) and later in the iced-in reaches of Labrador (where he tried and eventually failed to build a fox-farming business). He believed in taking risks; rather than being defeated by failures, he culled from them the lessons he needed to bring his grandest project to fruition.
In Kurlansky’s telling, Birdseye was both ahead of and a product of his era. A prodigious inventor/marketer, he rarely recorded anything about his personal thoughts or inner life. He wore a necktie while gardening, for heaven’s sake. But the prolific Kurlansky, whose marvelous bestsellers Salt and Cod demonstrate a knack for discovering the vibrant details that bring a subject to life, manages to correct many of the myths that have accreted to the Birdseye story. And while he does not solve all the mysteries of Clarence Birdseye’s personality, he offers an account of his life and accomplishments that is sympathetic, informative and eye-opening.
Yes, Virginia, there really was a man named Birdseye behind the Birds Eye® frozen food brand.
Clarence Birdseye, who was born in Brooklyn at the end of 1886, did not originate the idea of fast-freezing food—he always credited the Inuit for the concept. But as Mark…
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