Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in Everything Is Tuberculosis.
Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in Everything Is Tuberculosis.
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Amy Bloom is known for examining the dynamics of intimacy in her fiction, but she has never gotten closer to the flame than in this memoir of her marriage.
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If Jorge Luis Borges had equipped one of his realer-than-real alternate universes with a 16-screen megaplex cinema, the marquee would doubtless look something like the index of Chris Gore’s The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made. To read Gore’s litany of failed movie projects is to enter a Bizarro World of film history, in which Orson Welles is as prolific as Spielberg, and Disney and Dali are comrades in cartoons.

Ever since the Medved brothers compiled their Golden Turkey books in the 1980s, an entire subgenre has evolved on the subject of bad and bizarre movies that actually got made. Gore’s book is the flipside: movie ideas that were shelved before or during production. Some are legendary, like the aborted Marilyn Monroe vehicle Something’s Gotta Give. Others may have been canned for good reason for instance, Swirlee, about a mob boss with an ice-cream cone for a head. All are tantalizing glimpses of a movie heritage that never was.

Most tantalizing are the unrealized projects of cinema giants. On hand are such celluloid phantoms as Josef von Sternberg’s unfinished Roman epic I, Claudius, in which Charles Laughton reputedly gave the performance of his career; and Sergei Eisenstein’s adaptation of An American Tragedy. From these early follies Gore progresses to amazing what-ifs such as the Alfred Hitchcock-James Stewart thriller The Blind Man, an Ingmar Bergman Merry Widow, and a Stanley Kubrick Napoleon that would’ve starred you guessed it Jack Nicholson.

Not that all the projects the book cites are so lofty. If you’ve ever longed for a cinematic death match between the acid-blooded Alien and the armor-plated Predator, you can read Gore’s book and dream. Comic-book yarns, movie parodies, a Roger Rabbit sequel set in wartime the author greets each with enthusiasm and a movie nut’s righteous indignation that he’ll never get to see them.

The founder of Film Threat magazine and a burr in Hollywood’s side for the better part of a decade, Gore uses his premise as a platform for diatribes against tight-fisted moneymen, studio philistines, and a cookie-cutter production process that crushes creativity. In some cases say, a senior citizens’ Animal House directed by Jerry Lewis it’s hard not to side with the suits. And one project Gore describes, a movie about Orson Welles’s famed pro-union stage production The Cradle Will Rock, has indeed been filmed by director Tim Robbins for release this year by a major studio, at that. If a similar fate were to befall every wildcat project listed in The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made, film history would be a lot more interesting.

Jim Ridley writes about movies for the Nashville Scene.

If Jorge Luis Borges had equipped one of his realer-than-real alternate universes with a 16-screen megaplex cinema, the marquee would doubtless look something like the index of Chris Gore's The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made. To read Gore's litany of failed movie projects is to…

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In a society where many men are reluctant to show emotion, bonding activities between fathers and sons can be few. One place to find common ground is baseball. Cleveland sportswriter Terry Pluto and his father Tom shared a love of the Cleveland Indians, which became increasingly important in the last few years after the elder Pluto suffered a stroke, as detailed in Our Tribe.

To say the Cleveland Indians are a star-crossed franchise is a vast understatement. In 1954, the Indians won 111 games (an American-league record that stood until last year), but the Indians would not play another playoff game until 1995. Inept management, lopsided trades, injury, and just plain bad luck conspired to keep the Tribe in or near the basement of the American league for more than four decades. Pluto highlights some of the more painfully entertaining seasons in Cleveland’s history, and his anecdotes make the reader root for the Indians no matter who their favorite team is. Baseball fans learn much about the franchise, including its original association with a player currently banned for life from baseball, its steps to become the first American League team to sign an African American, and its decision to let a 24-year-old star shortstop manage the team.

These stories make the book fun to read for any baseball fan who wants to know more about the Indians, but the book is much more than a baseball guide. The relationship between Tom and Terry Pluto is highlighted, as Terry intertwines stories of the Indians’ rise and fall with the day-to-day of his father’s life. Readers come to identify with the trials the Indians suffer, and also with the struggles of the Plutos as they deal with Tom Pluto’s stroke.

Dean Miller is a reviewer in Carmel, Indiana.

In a society where many men are reluctant to show emotion, bonding activities between fathers and sons can be few. One place to find common ground is baseball. Cleveland sportswriter Terry Pluto and his father Tom shared a love of the Cleveland Indians, which became…

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With obvious enthusiasm and fascination, Diana Preston spins exhaustive research into a tight narrative in The Boxer Rebellion. There are grand themes, evil villains, bumbling bureaucrats, sickening cowards, and dashing heroes competing to fill each page with tension, danger, and history.

The Boxer Rebellion focuses on peasant unrest in China, primarily in the summer of 1900. Spreading like wildfire, the Boxer way of life attracted peasants from throughout the country. (Boxers were so named because their Chinese boxing was alleged to bestow magical powers.) The Boxers soon grew so powerful that the confused, outmoded Manchu government believed it could win a genocidal war against foreigners by sanctioning Boxer activities. In this setting, Preston weaves a fact-based story of people, perseverance, accomplishments, and shortcomings during a dreadful eight-week siege of Beijing’s diplomatic quarter and all foreign settlements throughout China. The characters, from glamorous Tzu Hsi, last empress of China, to na•ve American soldier Oscar Upham, are realistically depicted, providing needed personal perspective. One of the few disappointments was the absence of a consistent Boxer voice. Then, as now, the winners write the history books, and there is little genuine Chinese perspective. The reader will come away with the overwhelming sense of slipping into a story far larger than anticipated. The Rebellion initiated major changes in global politics, the results of which are still felt today, most obviously in the prevalence of multinational peace-keeping forces, the first of which occurred during the Boxer uprising. Subtly, Preston points to the key issues troubling the rescue army, helping to point out how many of these issues still divide modern nations.

Providing a needed perspective on history, couched in an accessible, thorough narrative, The Boxer Rebellion succeeds in painting intriguing history with modern colors. If you are willing to learn about the world we live in on a sociological, historical, governmental, or political level this is a great place, and a fascinating era, in which to begin.

Andrew Lis writes from New York.

With obvious enthusiasm and fascination, Diana Preston spins exhaustive research into a tight narrative in The Boxer Rebellion. There are grand themes, evil villains, bumbling bureaucrats, sickening cowards, and dashing heroes competing to fill each page with tension, danger, and history.

The Boxer…
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Growing up, Liz Scheier’s mother, Judith, insisted that all parties be held in their Upper West Side, rent-controlled apartment and nowhere else, because you simply couldn’t trust other people. At first, Scheier thought her schoolmates’ moms accompanied them to these parties because these women were friends with her mother. Only later did she understand that the women were there because they didn’t trust her mother, who frequently screamed at their children and raged at and battered her own daughter.

Even as Scheier began to doubt everything her mother said—Had her father really died in a car accident? How could the two of them afford to live in their apartment when Judith had no means of support? Was everything Judith said a lie?—she worshiped her mother. “I loved her smoky cackle and her jokes. . . . I loved that she adored me above everything else on earth,” she writes.

In her teens and 20s, Scheier tried to separate from her loving, controlling, raging, truth-shading mother. After college, during her first job in publishing, she learned that Judith had been concealing a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. This knowledge didn’t protect Scheier from her mother’s incessant, desperate phone calls, but it did force her onto a wobbly identity quest. Scheier tracked down information about her deceased father, with help from her first girlfriend’s aunt. She found jobs that took her away from New York. She drank to excess. She refused her mother’s calls. Still, when Judith was threatened with eviction, Scheier sold her eggs to a fertility clinic to pay back rent. Even after Scheier got married, moved to Washington, D.C., and had two children, there seemed to be no escape from her mother.

This is just the beginning of the tense and heart-rending story Scheier tells in Never Simple, her memoir of growing up with her ”petite, stylish, sardonic mother.” In relating this story, Scheier is sometimes as sardonic as her mother, as well as funny and frequently clever. (For example, she titles the chapter describing her hookup with the man who became her husband “Switching Teams.”) The narrative sometimes feels undercooked, but ultimately Never Simple writhes with the sorrow and guilt only a deep and complicated love can arouse.

Liz Scheier’s memoir of growing up with her loving, controlling, raging mother writhes with the sorrow and guilt only a deep, complicated love can arouse.
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Hemingway: The Final Years is the final installment in a multi-volume biography that has occupied Michael Reynolds for the last 20 years. This volume follows the writer’s life from 1940 through 1961. It is a superb account of Hemingway’s rise to literary stardom and public success contrasted against his private weaknesses and volatile relationships with women. This biography is such a well-crafted story that it seems more like a novel than nonfiction. Every chapter takes the reader deeper into the psyche of Ernest Hemingway, following his personal decline until his suicide in 1961 at the age of 62. Reynolds uncovers some of Hemingway’s lesser known activities as a journalist who briefly joined the French Resistance in World War II, as a civilian patrolling the waters around Cuba scouting for Nazi submarines, and other political acts that were kept secret until years later. His love of danger and espionage are a foreshadowing of his obsession with death. Reynolds notes, Part of Hemingway wanted to be the warrior he imagined himself as a young boy part of him was half in love with an honorable death, not one that he sought, but one that found him. Yet another part of him simply no longer cared if he lived or died. A major focus of the book, however, is his intense emotional relationships with his third and fourth wives, Martha and Mary. Reynolds skillfully exposes the dichotomy in Hemingway’s character, revealing how he could be a controlling bully and a vulnerable, insecure man at the same time. Hemingway was drawn to strong, career-minded women, yet he wanted them to submit themselves to him and leave their personal pursuits once they became involved with him. As soon as a passionate woman became his wife and mother to his children, he began to feel trapped; but should that woman leave him alone for longer than a week, he became morose, vulnerable, and began to speak of his own death. In his final years, as his depression worsened, Hemingway’s reputation and accolades increased. He became, as the biographer states, a man pursued, a writer not able to outrun his demons. Complementary to Reynolds’s biography of Hemingway, the writer and the man, is a smaller book focusing on the places he visited and made famous. In A Hemingway Odyssey: Special Places in His Life (Cumberland House, $12.95, 1581820240), H. Lea Lawrence creates a kind of travelogue, revisiting Hemingway’s favorite fishing and hunting spots in Michigan, Idaho, and Wyoming, as well as other vacation areas and homesteads in Europe and the Caribbean. It’s no surprise that the author has written articles for various fishing and wildlife magazines. His descriptions of Hemingway’s old stomping grounds could make any reader want to take up fly fishing. Lawrence’s biography is a unique approach to revealing how Hemingway’s favorite places and interests shaped the man and his writing. You don’t have to be an outdoorsman to appreciate this biography, but it may inspire you to become one.

Kim Spilker is a writer in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hemingway: The Final Years is the final installment in a multi-volume biography that has occupied Michael Reynolds for the last 20 years. This volume follows the writer's life from 1940 through 1961. It is a superb account of Hemingway's rise to literary stardom and public…

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The artists and writers of the American cultural and literary movement known as the Beat Generation are popularly credited in the U.S. for having laid the groundwork for the explosion of personal freedom and expression that culminated in the 1960s. While the movement had a worldwide impact, most of the Beat artists’ works had a distinctly American flavor. However, like many eccentric American exiles and expatriate artists of the early 20th century Modernist Movement, a handful of the Beat’s luminaries Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and company made their homes in a small dive on the Left Bank in Paris. From 1957

The artists and writers of the American cultural and literary movement known as the Beat Generation are popularly credited in the U.S. for having laid the groundwork for the explosion of personal freedom and expression that culminated in the 1960s. While the movement had a…

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