“Rough sleepers” are homeless people who mostly choose to sleep on the streets rather than in indoor shelters. Their death rates are staggering, their health needs endless, their fates often in the hands of people who struggle to know what to do with them. However, there are some people whose mission is to care for rough sleepers, doing work that is both lifesaving and extremely frustrating. With a straightforward scrutiny that somehow sees, describes and reveals without flinching or judging, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder offers a long, hard look at the lives of people without housing in Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.
As a writer, Kidder is intensely immersive. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, he traveled with Dr. Paul Farmer to observe groundbreaking health care work around the world. In Rough Sleepers, Kidder documents the three years he spent with the team that cares for Boston’s homeless population, making rounds with Dr. Jim O’Connell in his van late into the night. They treated people on the street or got them into hospitals and clinics to receive care. They offered blankets and food. They listened. Kidder was given deep access to their world—to the shelters, clinics, emergency rooms, hidden hangouts—and to the life of the man leading these efforts, fondly known by his many patients as Dr. Jim.
Readers also meet some of the people who live without homes in Boston in Rough Sleepers. There’s Tony Colombo, who spends his days at a respite house helping residents and staff and his nights on the street getting into trouble. Tony’s friend BJ, having lost both legs, needs constant help keeping upright in his wheelchair. Joanne Guarino is maintaining her sobriety after 30 years on the street and remains a regular guest speaker at Harvard Medical School, where she compels students to treat homeless people with compassion.
Dr. Jim and his team are the inspiring center of Kidder’s book. Now in his 70s, the Harvard-trained physician is still the city’s “street doctor,” sustaining and nurturing relationships with society’s most marginalized and vulnerable people. He realizes his work has come at the cost of his own family life and wryly compares himself to Sisyphus. His colleagues also grapple with the personal toll such vigilant care takes. Still, they see themselves as merely necessary, not heroic. In Rough Sleepers, Kidder begs to differ.
With a straightforward scrutiny that reveals without judging, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder offers a long, hard look at the lives of homeless people.
Documentary filmmaker and historian Ken Burns believes that photographs are portals “not just to a different time and space but also to dimensions and possibilities within myself.” Through photographs and illustrations, these books are guaranteed to transport you.
★ Apollo Remastered
Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record is a weighty, large-format coffee table book that beams readers right into its cosmic world. The original NASA film from the Apollo missions (which includes some 35,000 images) has been safely secured inside a frozen vault at the Johnson Space Center, but new technology has allowed digital restoration expert Andy Saunders to painstakingly remaster this treasure trove of photographs, many of which have never been published. The results are pure magic, full of clarity, sharpness and color that make readers feel like part of the team—a far cry from those grainy images that were broadcast on TV at the time.
During their spaceflights, many astronauts were shocked by how moved they felt looking back at Earth, and readers will see why. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell notes, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.” Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweickart recommends reading this book at night, surrounded by darkness and silence, to allow the gleaming spacecraft and spacesuits to shimmer and shine.
★ Our America
In the tradition of Walker Evans’ groundbreaking 1938 book, American Photographs, Ken Burns has assembled a collection of his favorite images in Our America: A Photographic History. “I’ve needed forty-five years of telling stories in American history, of diving deep into lives and moments, places and huge events, to accrue the visual vocabulary to embark on this book,” he writes in his introduction.
These black-and-white photographs are arranged chronologically from 1839 to 2019, with only one on each page for full visual impact. They’re labeled by date and place (at least one for each state), with fuller explanations at the back of the book, and they are mesmerizing, drawing on a multitude of personalities, emotions and events. The images depict the brutally scarred back of an enslaved man, decomposing bodies at Gettysburg, frozen Niagara Falls, a 1909 game of alley baseball in Boston, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Elvis onstage and, finally, a stunning portrait of Congressman John Lewis from 2019.
Illustrated Black History
For Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen, artist, designer and creative director George McCalman created 145 original portraits spotlighting Black pioneers in many fields, each accompanied by a short biographical essay. Moving alphabetically from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to cinematographer Bradford Young, McCalman uses a bold array of acrylics, watercolors, pen and ink and colored pencils, to capture each personality in an individualized way. “I document body language, I document exuberance, I document pain,” he writes. “I draw like a reporter because I am a reporter.”
McCalman began this project by challenging himself to paint one such portrait every day for a month, and the result overflows with energy and color. His choices are inspiring and well-rounded, running the gamut from Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin to activist Alicia Garza and food journalist Toni Tipton-Martin.
My Travels With Mrs. Kennedy
Despite the mountains of books already written about the Kennedys, I couldn’t put down My Travels With Mrs. Kennedy, a conversational memoir and very personal photo album by Clint Hill. A former Secret Service agent who served under five U.S. presidents, Hill was present during John F. Kennedy’s assassination and later assigned to the first lady and her children. He’s written other books about those experiences, including several with his wife and co-author, Lisa McCubbin Hill.
This book was sparked by the process of cleaning out the garage of Hill’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, going through boxes of memorabilia, including a forgotten steamer trunk. Dialogue between the co-authors makes the book immensely readable as they discuss their discoveries and Hill’s memories. Numerous photos bring each scene to life, capturing intimate moments that reveal the first family’s personalities, especially that of Jackie. Of their relationship, Hill writes, “It wasn’t romantic. But it was beyond friendship. We could communicate with a look or a nod.”
The Only Woman
The Only Woman is a unique gallery of group portraits that contain a lone female figure surrounded by men. There’s Marie Curie, for instance, with her head in her hand, looking downright bored among a group of suited scientists at a 1911 conference in Belgium. There’s 9-year-old Ab Hoffman, who earned a spot on a Canadian hockey team for one season in 1956 because her coaches hadn’t noticed her gender. In a 1982 photo, a white male U.S. Army Diver candidate sneers at Andrea Motley Crabtree, a Black woman who made the training cut when he didn’t. “Most of the men hated me being there,” Crabtree recalls. “He couldn’t understand how I was better than him.”
Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Immy Humes provides concise commentary throughout her collection, which spans from 1862 to 2020. She speaks to “the pleasure of spotting them, and then, most of all, the mystery of them: What was she doing there?”
Affinities
In need of some creative downtime? Curl up with the hefty Affinities: A Journey Through Images From the Public Domain Review and lose yourself in a delightfully imaginative, visionary game. The book’s 350-plus pages contain a miscellany of images arranged to showcase unexpected similarities. For example, one section features the shapes of outstretched arms as seen in a 16th-century drawing of a mechanical arm, an image of the Borghese Gladiator sculpture, a John Singleton Copley painting and—of all things—a photo of damage sustained to the bow of the HMS Broke during a World War I battle.
With images old and new from around the world, all selected from the archive of the Public Domain Review, this is a book designed for random perusal. Some images come with suggested paths to different pages, creating a sort of chutes-and-ladders effect. As explained in the introduction, the result is “a maze of rootlike cut-throughs that allow you to move through the book in different ways, to disrupt the sequence and carve through your own serpentine trajectory.”
The armchair historian’s wish list isn’t a tough nut to crack. Just give them a great book.
Reading One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank is like watching an artist piece together a mosaic. A splash of blue sea here. A mother’s song over there. The smell of Purim pastries. The flash of first love. But the mosaic is never completed. Instead, a terrible wind descends, leaving the artist to pick up the pieces as best she can and begin a new image.
Here, the artist is Stella Levi, a 99-year-old Jewish woman living in New York City. The mosaic is the Juderia, the main Jewish quarter on the island of Rhodes, where Levi was born in 1923. And the wind is the Holocaust, which reached the Juderia in the last months of World War II and scattered Levi’s parents, family, friends and community. One Hundred Saturdays is the story of that time and place, but it is also much more: a story of friendship, survival, reinvention and courage.
Frank, author of The Mighty Franks and What Is Missing and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, met Levi by chance—or perhaps serendipity—when he rushed in late to attend a lecture, and the elegant older woman in the chair next to him struck up a conversation. The following Saturday, he found himself in Levi’s Greenwich Village apartment, the first of 100 Saturdays that he would spend with her over the following six years. Over the course of those visits, Levi became both a friend and muse as she recounted the minutest details of her life, from its rich beginning to its remarkable present.
Maira Kalman’s illustrations, heavily influenced by Matisse with their deceptive simplicity, rich colors and delicate textures, are perfect complements to Levi’s story, portraying vanished scenes from life on Rhodes before the Holocaust. Together with the text of Frank’s beautiful book, they create a sensitive portrait of an extraordinary woman. Fiercely independent, keenly intelligent and remorselessly honest, Levi refuses to be defined solely by the tragedy of her youth. Her life has been a constant evolution, and her final years are being lived with the same vitality as her earliest ones.
One Hundred Saturdays is the story of a Jewish community before the Holocaust, but it is also much more: a story of friendship, survival, reinvention and courage.
Mark Twain wrote that “Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.” Gould’s fellow Gilded Age robber barons were more positive. Cornelius Vanderbilt called him “the smartest man in America,” and John D. Rockefeller said Gould had the “best head for business” of anyone. In American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune, Greg Steinmetz briskly tells financier and railroad leader Gould’s rags-to-riches story and gives a nuanced view of this man of contradictions and why he matters.
Gould originally made his money through various ventures in New York. However, when the Civil War ended, railroads became the most important and powerful industry in the country, and thus the focus of Gould’s business dealings. By investing in various railroads, Gould did as much as anyone at the time to generate economic growth and steer the country toward becoming a world power. As the owner and manager of multiple railroads, Gould was one of the largest employers in the country and made rail travel faster, safer and more comfortable. At the same time, he bribed politicians and used deception to ruthlessly manipulate competitors.
The qualities Gould demonstrated in taking control of the Erie Railroad illustrate his strengths throughout his career: “his brilliance as a financial strategist, his deep understanding of law, a surprising grasp of human nature, and a mastery of political reality,” as Steinmetz writes. Above all, Gould was a pragmatist. He could be a visionary, but only when it didn’t clash with his primary objective, which was to make as much money as he could for himself.
Outside of work, Gould seemed to be less ruthless. Most evenings, he left his office to have dinner with his wife and six children and to read in his library. He did not drink alcohol. He loved flowers, owned the largest greenhouse in the country and cultivated a new breed of orchids. Despite their wealth, he and his family were not part of the city’s social aristocracy. “I have the disadvantage of not being sociable,” he once said.
Steinmetz’s fast-moving and eminently readable biography shows how Gould thrived within the context of his times but also that his greed led to necessary reforms for the health of the country’s economy.
In American Rascal, Greg Steinmetz tells robber baron Jay Gould’s rags-to-riches story and gives a nuanced view of why he matters to American history.
“As a writer, I love change,” the award-winning journalist Eve Fairbanks notes on her website. It’s a good thing, because as the author of The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning, which outlines the depth and breadth of upheaval in South Africa in recent decades, there’s plenty of change to explore. By interviewing the people who were most affected when South Africa dismantled its white supremacist institutions, Fairbanks marries the overarching story the country’s turbulent apartheid history with Black and white individuals’ intimate experiences before and after 1994, when so much—and so little—changed.
Dipuo grew up in Soweto, a treeless, impoverished township of Johannesburg. It was strictly segregated during the years of white-minority rule but became increasingly politically active during the 1970s, as did Dipuo. “We were always told: Freedom first,” she remembers. Her daughter, Malaika, was 2 years old when their world became racially integrated. Malaika started going to a formerly white school, which Dipuo told her was so she could be “empowered, loose, and free” when she grew up.
Christo is the son of a successful white farmer. He joined the South African military at a young age, becoming one of the last fighters for apartheid even as it crumbled. When the laws around security force engagements changed, he simply wasn’t told. So when he shot and killed a Black man during a reconnaissance mission, he suddenly found himself charged with murder.
Unable to find work in Johannesburg, Elliott became a chicken farmer. The farm’s former white owner had left it in ruins, overrun by antelopes, but Elliott strove to succeed against impossible odds, inspired to prove that Black Africans could be farmers, too, in a country where most land was owned and farmed by white people.
As Fairbanks vividly demonstrates, South Africa’s complicated past continues to define the lives of Black Africans, white Afrikaners and immigrants from formerly colonized African countries such as Mozambique and Angola. The Inheritors covers a lot of ground, capturing Black heroes like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, as well as castigated white politicians like Frederik Willem de Klerk. She also examines how the rest of the world has handled racism and colonialism before and after 1994, including Angola’s own liberation in 1975 and the ongoing turmoil in 21st-century America. Glimmering throughout is the humanity she manages to find in all of it.
For the inheritors of these seismic changes, distrust and guilt can go unburied, and hope, progress and mutual respect can prove elusive. There are lessons here for readers the world over, especially as South Africa joins the global marketplace and as the U.S. continues to grapple with the human cost of racism. Fairbanks compels us to pay attention, learn and, above all, care.
Humanity glimmers throughout Eve Fairbanks' portrait of South Africa's turbulent apartheid history.
A driven perfectionist, choreographer-director Jerome Robbins was startlingly prolific. But in pushing at the creative boundaries of ballet and Broadway, he was also maddeningly cruel a maestro of insult and innuendo. Complex and colorful, he snares the biographical spotlight in Dance with Demons. Written by Greg Lawrence, who knows his way around the dance floor (he teamed with ballerina Gelsey Kirkland for her memoir Dancing on My Grave), this is the first account of his professional triumphs and off-stage travails. Robbins, who died in 1998 at age 79, grew up loving dance, taking lessons as a child (to the irritation of his father). As a teenager, he was influenced by the pioneering modern dance artists of the 1930s, who explored political and social themes. Then came a project under choreographer Antony Tudor, whose ballet rehearsals resembled psychodramas, complete with Stanislavski acting techniques and Freudian insight. Robbins’ own ballets would reverberate with Tudor’s influence. One of Robbins’ most famous works, West Side Story, was also one of his most audacious. He once talked of doing a Jewish-Catholic take on Romeo and Juliet, but after reading headlines about juvenile delinquency, Robbins turned West Side Storyinto the saga of the Sharks and the Jets, and Tony and Maria. From the night of its 1957 premiere, West Side Story was a monster hit. Thanks to his troublesome behavior during the making of the West Side Story movie, Hollywood eluded the man whose work on Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof and The King and I garnered him five Tonys and two Academy Awards. Robbins was further hampered by his personal relationships. In an era in which homosexuality was taboo, he was involved with men as well as women. Dance with Demons is full of fascinating quotes from Robbins’ associates and wonderful minutiae about the ballet world. Hundreds of the choreographer’s colleagues spoke with Greg Lawrence for this book, and the interviews help flesh out his lively portrait of Robbins. An engaging biography of a complex man, Dance with Demons brings Jerome Robbins center stage right where he belongs.
Pat Broeske writes from California.
A driven perfectionist, choreographer-director Jerome Robbins was startlingly prolific. But in pushing at the creative boundaries of ballet and Broadway, he was also maddeningly cruel a maestro of insult and innuendo. Complex and colorful, he snares the biographical spotlight in Dance with Demons. Written by…
In the audiobook recording of The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—the Truth and the Turmoil (18 hours), English author and journalist Tina Brown gives an energetic and engrossing performance as she shares juicy details about the strife and scandal that have surrounded the British monarchy for decades. Even before Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles’ sordid phone conversation, before Princess Diana won the hearts of people around the world, the royal family had long been the subject of rumors and shocking news, such as the abdication of King Edward VIII following his love affair with American divorc’e Wallis Simpson. As Brown explains, after the public’s obsession with Diana, the royal family sought to ensure that no family member would ever garner such superstar status again. And then came Meghan Markle.
In this scintillating listening experience, Brown tempers her ironic, scathing observations with straightforward, reverent tones. Anglophiles will easily succumb to this fascinating book, which is ideal for readers who enjoyed Diana: Her True Story—in Her Own Words by Andrew Morton and Meghan and Harry: The Real Story by Lady Colin Campbell.
English author and journalist Tina Brown gives an energetic and engrossing performance as she shares juicy details about the strife and scandal that has surrounded the British monarchy for decades.
orce of Hobbit The upcoming release of the first feature film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy has sparked new interest in all things Tolkien. The Fellowship of the Ring doesn’t hit theaters until December 19, but anticipation is already building for the $270 million three-movie series starring Elijah Wood, Cate Blanchett and Sir Ian McKellan.
All three films (including the sequels The Two Towers and The Return of the King) were shot over the course of roughly one year in New Zealand, making it the first time an entire feature film trilogy was filmed concurrently with the same director and cast. Before you check out director Peter Jackson’s hobbits on the big screen, enter the Middle-earth as Tolkien envisioned it.
Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien’s U.S. publisher for more than 60 years, has produced a one-volume movie tie-in edition of The Lord of the Rings that packs all three books into a fat paperback. The inexpensive edition revisits the John Ronald Reuel Tolkien classic that has been heralded as the greatest book of the 20th century and credited with launching the fantasy genre.
A professor of languages at Oxford University, Tolkien often created stories to soothe his young son, Michael, who had nightmares. Always fascinated by legends and fairytales, one day while grading exam papers, Tolkien scribbled the line, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." From there came The Hobbit and the best-selling trilogy that followed. The writer who possessed a childlike sense of humor never thought his inventive creations would find their way into print; he was 62 when they were published.
Since the release of The Hobbit in 1938, eager readers have purchased more than 50 million copies of Tolkien’s books. Author Tom Shippey, who taught at Oxford with Tolkien, takes a critical look at the author’s continuing appeal in the just released biography, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Far from being accidental, Shippey attributes Tolkien’s success to his expertise as a linguist and his experiences as a combat veteran.
Whatever the reason for his popularity, readers are sure to line up for the first live-action take on The Lord of the Rings. With second and third sequels waiting in the wings for Holiday 2002 and 2003, it looks like a merry Christmas for fantasy and science fiction fans.
orce of Hobbit The upcoming release of the first feature film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy has sparked new interest in all things Tolkien. The Fellowship of the Ring doesn't hit theaters until December 19, but anticipation is already building for the $270…
They don’t make ’em like they used to. That feeling reverberates while reading the new biography of a screen iconoclast. Author Lee Server has written Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care in the hip, loose style of Mitchum’s decidedly debauched life and career, and if the result sometimes feels a bit hammy (after all, no one can outcool Mitchum), this is a comprehensive and satisfying look at Hollywood’s baddest bad boy.
Based on dozens of interviews mostly of professional colleagues as well as extensive print sources, this book underscores the Mitchum enigma. He went through women like booze, but enjoyed an enduring marriage. He delighted in his two-fisted image, but was also a closet intellectual who grew up writing sonnets and short stories. On the set he could be rude, insolent and downright vulgar (in language and behavior). Yet opposite fragile leading ladies like Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth, he was kindly, even protective. Mitchum got his start in Hopalong Cassidy programs, went on to etch memorable portraits in movies ranging from World War II sagas (notably, The Story of G.I. Joe) to thrillers. In several titles made at RKO under Howard Hughes’ reign he romanced Jane Russell; in Night of the Hunter (1955) he terrorized children; in Cape Fear (1962) he was a sadistic rapist and killer. He made 120 movies some of them just to get out of the house. Though he never won an Oscar, he was capable of Oscar-caliber work, beginning with an arena for which he was eerily suited. As Server notes, Mitchum’s "brooding bemusement and simmering violence" made him the perfect fit for the genre "of shadows and cynicism" that came to be known as film noir. Fittingly, the book derives its title from the 1947 noir classic, Out of the Past, in which wealthy criminal Kirk Douglas hires detective Mitchum to track down the no-good Jane Greer. After finding her, Mitchum falls for her. Ever cunning, she insists to him that she’s an innocent. Mitchum’s retort: "Baby, I don’t care." Pat H. Broeske interviewed Robert Mitchum over lunch in 1996. She still has the swizzle sticks.
They don't make 'em like they used to. That feeling reverberates while reading the new biography of a screen iconoclast. Author Lee Server has written Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care in the hip, loose style of Mitchum's decidedly debauched life and career, and if…
Moss Hart loved the theater from the day he was whisked away from his grade school studies by a demented aunt to attend a production at the Bronx Opera House. In the shows he would later write and direct, he never strayed far from the theater for his subject matter. Born into an impoverished and largely dysfunctional family in 1904, Hart dropped out of school just before his 15th birthday. By the time he was 20, he had co-written and acted in his first professional production.
In his fascinating new biography Dazzler, Steven Bach, author of Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend takes the reader on a virtual week-by-week journey through Hart’s busy and glamorous life. In the process, he adds details, corrects errors and provides alternative interpretations to the events Hart described in his best-selling 1959 autobiography, Act One. Without drawing more sweeping conclusions than he can document, Bach points out what he sees as Hart’s conflicting sexual urges, a matter that appears to have been resolved when, at the age of 41, he married actress Kitty Carlisle. Bach also sheds light on the writer/director’s bouts with depression, which, while severe, never seemed to sideline him for long. Throughout his adult life, Hart sought the counsel of psychotherapists, a habit Bach meticulously chronicles.
Although Dazzler covers every known play and screenplay Hart wrote or directed, the book is especially valuable for its descriptions of the often arduous creation of such cultural gems as The Man Who Came to Dinner, which Hart wrote with George S. Kaufman, and the stage versions of My Fair Lady and Camelot, both of which Hart directed. In constructing these tales, Bach draws amusing sketches of dozens of famous folk, among them Cole Porter, Rex Harrison, George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin and Julie Andrews.
"Your last play shows up in your next electrocardiogram," Hart once said in a moment of grim whimsy. In December 1961, just a few months after he had finally whipped Camelot into champion shape, he suffered his third heart attack and died.
Hart’s widow declined to be interviewed for this book, and many of his closest friends and collaborators were dead by the time Bach began his project. Yet his book is thorough, and what he does exceedingly well is bring to life Broadway’s Golden Age and many of the giants who made it shine so brightly.
Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.
Moss Hart loved the theater from the day he was whisked away from his grade school studies by a demented aunt to attend a production at the Bronx Opera House. In the shows he would later write and direct, he never strayed far from the…
Families separate for many reasons, but when war rips them apart, their longing for one another can be especially acute. Sometimes family members completely lose contact with each other, never knowing if the other is living or dead. In her riveting Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, Zhuqing Li narrates the dual biographies of her aunts, who were separated by the Chinese Civil War.
At the center of Li’s story is the Flower Fragrant Garden, the idyllic setting where sisters Jun and Hong grew up in relative security in the early 20th century. Li writes that the compound was “one of Fuzhou’s biggest and richest homes. . . . The main building was a grand, two-story red-brick Western-style house rising from the lush greenery of the rolling grounds. A winding path dipped under the canopy of green, linking smaller buildings like beads on a necklace.”
In 1937, during Japan’s war with China, the sisters were forced into exile and left their garden behind. Then, in the political turmoil that followed the war with Japan, Jun and Hong followed different paths, separated by the Nationalist-Communist divide that erupted after the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949. Jun moved to the Nationalist stronghold of Taiwan, where she became a successful teacher and later a businesswoman whose acumen brought her to America. Hong became a prominent physician on China’s mainland, “famous as a pioneer in bringing medical care to China’s remote countryside, and later the Ôgrandma of IVF babies,’ in vitro fertilization, in Fujian Province.”
Hong left her family behind completely as she embraced her life in the new People’s Republic of China, but Jun longed to reunite with her sister. In 1982, the two met again for the first time in 33 years, and through their conversations, Jun began to understand the reasons Hong had to pledge her unwavering support to the Communist party in order to survive. After that, the two sisters never met again. Jun died at 92 in 2014 in her home in Maryland, and in 2020, where the book ends, Hong was still seeing patients in China at the age of 95.
In Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, Li eloquently tells a moving story of her aunts and their resilience throughout one of China’s most fraught centuries.
Zhuqing Li tells the moving story of her aunts, separated by the Chinese Civil War, and their resilience throughout one of China’s most fraught centuries.
lives have garnered more interest or received more scrutiny than Elvis Presley’s. Over 600,000 tourists visit Graceland each year, and the King continues to be one of RCA’s top record sellers. Elvis’ life and death also contain a great deal of mystery, and perhaps no part remains more mysterious than his relationship with Colonel Tom Parker. Parker managed Presley’s career, handling publicity, cutting deals and receiving commissions of 25 and later 50 percent. Although many argued that his commissions were too high and that he often failed to serve Elvis’ best interest, he remained his manager for 22 years. James L. Dickerson’s Colonel Tom Parker is a journey toward understanding the man who wielded power over Elvis and everyone else who fell into his orbit. Dickerson explores Parker’s mysterious origins and provides telling information about the early relationship between the Colonel and Elvis. Parker believed the singer’s charisma and ambition would take him far, so he slowly worked to usurp the duties of Elvis’ manager Bob Neal by ingratiating himself to Presley and his parents. Yet the Colonel’s shady deals and hard-nosed tactics were evident to many from the very beginning.
A great deal of disagreement remains over whether Parker mismanaged Elvis’ career, and many are critical of his failure to take a more proactive stance with Presley’s drug use. Colonel Tom Parker doesn’t try to defend the man from these charges. Instead, it explores his carnival background, addiction to gambling and fear of authority, providing information that clarifies why Parker behaved the way he did. Colonel Tom Parker is a brisk, enjoyable read, perfect for Elvis fans, serious or casual. Author of Goin’ Back to Memphis and Dixie Chicks, among other titles, Dickerson pulls the reader into the drama of the story. His insider knowledge of the music industry allows him to present his material in a lucid fashion. While the questions surrounding the perplexing relationship between an ex-carnival barker and a country boy who hit the big time may never be completely answered, Colonel Tom Parker leaves the reader with a provocative story and fresh insights.
Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr., is a writer in Appomattox, Virginia.
lives have garnered more interest or received more scrutiny than Elvis Presley's. Over 600,000 tourists visit Graceland each year, and the King continues to be one of RCA's top record sellers. Elvis' life and death also contain a great deal of mystery, and perhaps no…
We often identify authors by their most famous works and investigate no further. But a writer’s output is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Readers interested in delving into the life experiences that shape an author will delight in Jackie Wullschlager’s Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, a scholarly, detailed biography of one of the world’s most renowned writers. Born in Odense, Denmark, on April 2, 1805, in a small cottage in the poorest part of the village, Andersen spent his life trying to escape his humble origins. He once described his uneducated parents as "full of love" but "ignorant of life and of the world." His rise to fame removed him physically from Odense and placed him in the homes and palaces of the noblemen and royalty with whom he wished to identify, but the psychological scars of his true heritage created an identity crisis that remained throughout his life.
According to Wullschlager, Andersen’s fairy tales equal self-portraits. The triumphant Ugly Duckling, the loyal Little Mermaid, the steadfast Tin Soldier the stories of these characters show Andersen’s own ability to empathize with pain, sorrow and rejection.
Andersen’s life was significantly influenced by his travels, the patronage of royalty and wealthy friends and his association with other 19th century artists. Wullschlager includes fascinating stories, rich with historical detail, of his relationship with such notables as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Franz Listz and the Grimm brothers. The first to write fairy tales for adults as well as for children, Andersen composed narratives that compel readers to confront their innermost thoughts and fears. Soul-searching satires of humankind’s foibles and absurdities are woven into the fabric of his tales tales that, according to Wullschlager, reveal Andersen’s own inner conflict: a battle between achieving acceptance and success and rebelling against conventional constraints. Exploring the circumstances that contributed to the literary genius of Hans Christian Andersen and tracing those influences throughout his prolific works, Wullschlager has created a fascinating psychological profile of the legendary author.
Elizabeth Davis is a former marketing director for Turner Broadcasting System.
We often identify authors by their most famous works and investigate no further. But a writer's output is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Readers interested in delving into the life experiences that shape an author will delight in Jackie Wullschlager's Hans Christian…
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
In the author’s latest graphic novel, Oasis, two children seek comfort in a discarded AI robot, while their mother labors in a factory in order to give them a better life.
