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The Icon and the Idealist

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
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Drawing women into focus

The world of comics and graphic novels may hold stigma as a male-centric genre, but these four new books explore the pains of growing up, moving on and embracing the messy parts of life—all from the female point of view.
NonfictionMusicMemoirBiography

That’s what makes the jukebox spin

Feature by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

This fall, music keeps playing around in our heads thanks to a crop of books by and about some of rock's most elusive artists, as well as its most treasured songs. 

WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN’
Over a two-year period, maverick Southern author Rick Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin’) sat down with Jerry Lee Lewis and let the Killer walk “day after day through the past and come back, sometimes bloody, with the stories in this book.” Not simply an “as-told-to” memoir, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story is a harmonious blend, with Lewis providing the details of his life and Bragg weaving a narrative around them to add historical and cultural context. “He did not want to do a first-person book,” Bragg writes, “and I had no interest in trying to pretend to be him. Instead, this is one man talking of a remarkable life and another man writing it down and shaping it into a life story so rich that, if I had not been there, I would have wondered if it was real.”

And Lewis’ story is definitely remarkable: Full of life from birth—“I come out jumpin’, an’ I been jumpin’ ever since”—Lewis discovered his “reason for being born” when he saw a piano in his aunt’s house as a child. He knew he wanted to be a star, so he pursued his dream relentlessly, appearing in clubs when he was 14 and lying about his age. Lewis burned down many roadhouses with his raucous style, rising to fame with songs such as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” and leaving in his wake broken marriages and mangled friendships. The book candidly catalogs his problems with drugs, alcohol, taxes and women (his seven marriages included a union with his 13-year-old second cousin that caused an international scandal). Lewis also acknowledges his fear that he may have led people astray with his music, but confesses that music was the purest part of his life. Lewis tells his story here for the first time, and it’s every bit as frantic, ugly, joyful and searing as you’d expect from the Killer.

A NATURAL WOMAN
While Lewis hypnotized audiences with manic energy, Aretha Franklin grew up in the Detroit church where her father preached, playing soulful gospel piano and developing her unmistakable voice. Franklin collaborated with music writer David Ritz in 1999 on a less-than-revealing memoir, Aretha: From These Roots. As Ritz explains in his new book, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, Franklin asked him to work with her on a second volume, but he declined, citing her insistence on steering clear of certain topics. Instead, Ritz chose to write an independent biography, drawing on his earlier conversations with the singer, her friends and family to provide a full and frank account of the Queen of Soul’s career. Moving album by album, the book recounts her rise to the top of the soul charts in the late 1960s and her fall from the throne in the early 1970s. She struggled to find her style in the disco era, and reinvented herself in 1985 with the hit “Freeway of Love.” Franklin isolated herself for almost 20 years after the deaths of her father, sisters and brother, only to come out of the shadows once again in 2008 to sing at President Obama’s first inauguration. Franklin’s life is rarely pretty, however, and Respect is ultimately a poignant and disappointing tale of a singer who never reached the pinnacle for which she aimed.

SOUL SACRIFICE
In 1966, a young guitar player named Carlos Santana filled in one night at Bill Graham’s famous Fillmore West with an impromptu group of musicians; the rest, as they say, is history. Three years later, Santana and his band mesmerized the crowd at Woodstock, and soon after, the band’s first album climbed to #4 on the Billboard charts. Reaching this level of success wasn’t easy, as Santana reveals in his new memoir, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light, which he co-wrote with Ashley Kahn and Hal Miller. Although the book’s prose is sometimes flat and repetitive, the details of Santana’s story are nevertheless compelling. He traces his path from his childhood in the Mexican town of Autlán to his earliest gigs at El Convoy in Tijuana. Santana recounts his sometimes ragged family life and reveals for the first time the sexual abuse he suffered at age 11 at the hands of a man who took him to San Diego and molested him, leaving the boy with “an intense feeling of pleasure mixed with confusion, shame, and guilt for letting it happen.” Above all, however, Santana’s memoir recounts his spiritual quest to find the “story behind the stories, the music behind the music. . . . I call it the Universal Tone, and with it you realize you are not alone; you are connected to everyone.”

 

Paul McCartney added psychedelic illustrations to his handwritten lyrics for “The Word,” a song on 1965’s Rubber Soul album. 
From The Beatles Lyrics, reprinted with permission. Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

 

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Although the life stories of musicians continue to fascinate us, we’re just as intrigued and perplexed by the lyrics of popular songs. Few songs have been as scrutinized as those by the Beatles, and in his new book, The Beatles Lyrics, Beatles biographer Hunter Davies not only probes the meanings of the Fab Four’s songs but also gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at their writing process. For John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting could happen anywhere—songs might begin as a scribble on the back of an envelope or on hotel stationery. “Strawberry Fields,” for example, was written by Lennon when he was in Spain, far from home and thinking back on his childhood in Liverpool. This stunning collection explores the stories behind all the Beatles’ classics and includes more than 100 original handwritten manuscripts.

CRYING, WAITING, HOPING
The hallways of rock ’n’ roll history are littered with volumes that move mechanically through a year-by-year chronicle of important events. Noted cultural critic Greil Marcus wasn’t interested in writing a typical history of the genre, however. His provocative The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs chronicles the music through an exploration of 10 songs recorded between 1956 and 2008. In his typical gnostic style, Marcus examines the ways in which each song transcends its era, gathering meaning as it is recorded by artists in completely new times and places. For example, he observes that the Teddy Bears’ 1958 hit, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” took 48 years to find its voice. “When Amy Winehouse sang it in 2006, her music curled around Phil Spector’s [who wrote the song], his curled around her, until she found her way back to the beginning of his career, and redeemed it.”

Marcus’ unconventional history captures the unruly, unpredictable nature of rock ’n’ roll.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

This fall, music keeps playing around in our heads thanks to a crop of books by and about some of rock's most elusive artists, as well as its most treasured songs.
FashionBiography

The frivolous and the familiar

Feature by Cat Acree

Though it evolves constantly, fashion would grow stagnant without personal flourishes like a favorite pair of lived-in jeans. “The best things in life are free,” Chanel famously said. “The second best are very expensive.”

TASTEMAKERS
Fashion can be considered trivial or superficial, and in many ways this is true. But at its best, fashion can incite, even disturb, the imagination. Between the pages of W magazine, with its commitment to pushing boundaries and fostering the art of long-form photography, it thrives. Editor-in-Chief Stefano Tonchi collects 10 of the magazine’s finest productions from the past two decades in W: Stories, allowing an unexpected peek behind these remarkable, avant-garde editorials with outtakes, inspiration boards and brief essays from photographers, designers and more. Steven Meisel’s first shoot with W raised questions of beauty and gender with aggressive, androgynous models sprawling up and down half-lit urban alleys. Actress Tilda Swinton recalls her and photographer Tim Walker’s pilgrimage to Iceland, where they shot alien, forbidding images that at times look like stills from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Photographer Alex Prager describes assembling a lovely and gloomy cast of characters to portray a Hitchcockian day at the races. This is fashion at its most provocative, a necessary book for minds that require a little disturbance.

Tilda Swinton in W magazine, August 2011. From W: Stories, reprinted with permission.

CLOTHES HORSE
From fantasy we move to reality, and no book better captures the relationship between real women and their clothing than Women in Clothes. The truly stylish—or even those who have given the slightest thought to their style—aren’t taking their every cue from glossy magazine spreads, so editors Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton set out to discover just what women think about when they put themselves together. The result is a truly all-encompassing (but never overwhelming), contemporary “philosophy of style,” a collection of interviews and surveys of more than 600 artists, writers and other women. It’s like a massive conference call with all your friends and everyone else’s friends, too. As Heti writes, “The most compelling women are the ones who are distinctive, who are most like themselves and least like other women.” It’s nice to feel that your idiosyncracies and influences can be considered as important as good tailoring, and you may find yourself polling your friends, looking at other women differently or at least feeling a little better about owning 10 gray sweatshirts.

Or perhaps you have 12 pairs of red shoes or too many wrap dresses—no judgment either way. That being said, you’re likely to have one pair of red flats you love more than any other. Based on Emily Spivack’s blog of the same name, Worn Stories eschews the beautiful side of fashion for the pricelessness and singularity of that one favorite thing. More than 60 cultural figures and celebs, many of whom reside in New York, reveal their personal connections to just one item of clothing, from fashion designer and self-declared “total dork” Cynthia Rowley’s Girl Scout sash to John Hodgman’s Ayn Rand dress. One piece of clothing can tell quite a story, and this book is delightful proof of that.

PEARLS AND FLATS
Time and time again we return to Coco Chanel (1883-1971), the patron saint of classic, feminine style and a cultural force unlike any before or since. Though we recreate her image with our cardigans and taupe flats, biographers who have attempted to capture Chanel are more often than not thwarted by their own subject. Chanel notoriously tried to block anyone from writing her story and repeatedly obfuscated fact with fiction. According to Rhonda K. Garelick, author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, the gaps in Chanel’s story are as essential to her persona as her stylistic revolution. So rather than “pinning down a ghost,” this new bio explores Chanel’s story (as we know it) in relationship to the vast theater of European history. Garelick—who was granted unrestricted access to the Chanel Archives in Paris and to the diaries of Chanel’s lover, Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov—has produced an epic, well-researched balance of historical resonance and breathless admiration.

TIMELESS ARCHIVES
Fashion on its grandest scale lies within the pages of Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute. The Met’s Costume Institute (reopened this year as the Anna Wintour Costume Center) houses more than 35,000 costumes and accessories from the 15th century on, and has been funded since 1948 by the yearly Costume Institute Benefit, an evening of pretty people dressed in pretty things. This book looks back on the exhibitions and galas of the 21st century, beginning with 2001’s “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years” and ending with the architectural feats of high-glamour ball gowns in 2014’s “Charles James: Beyond Fashion.” Featuring Vogue editorials and essays by Hamish Bowles, this is where art, fashion and history collide, where creativity meets—and manipulates—our culture. It might be frivolous, but it’s far from trivial.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Though it evolves constantly, fashion would grow stagnant without personal flourishes like a favorite pair of lived-in jeans. “The best things in life are free,” Chanel famously said. “The second best are very expensive.”

Jackie as first lady, wife and mother

The Kennedys continue their reign as the royal family of publishing. One year after the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy set off an avalanche of new titles examining his death and presidency, it is the former first lady who is under the microscope in a pair of new biographies with differing agendas.
PhotographyArt

Expand your visual frontiers

Feature by Alice Cary

Whether you prefer classic design, historic photography, performance art or up-and-coming modern artists, you’ll find something in these five books to whet your appetite.

THE ART OF THE BOOK
Books represent one of my favorite forms of artistic expression, and The Thing The Book: A Monument to the Book as Object takes a truly novel approach to the subject. Creators Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan (publishers of THE THING Quarterly) decided to make a book into what they call an “exhibition space.” They invited a variety of artists and illustrators to celebrate the physical nature of books, and the result is certainly an unusual conglomeration of creativity. Sam Green, for example, writes a colophon describing, in pictures and words, the phone book entries of a San Francisco man named Zachary Zzzzzzzzzra from 1963 through 1986. Mark Dion presents a wonderful photo essay called “Cover Life,” which simply depicts the covers of more than 50 well-worn books, ranging from the classic children’s book A Hole Is to Dig to a tattered Ulysses paperback. His montage is a thoughtful way to examine how books influence a life. With varied entries like this, the result is pure fun and oddly compelling. Everything is worth examining (there’s even a naughty errata slip), including the bookplate, bookmark ribbon and index.

IN FOCUS
More typical in layout and structure is the massive Photography: The Definitive Visual History. Photography expert Tom Ang has compiled this comprehensive look at the subject, beginning with inventions such as the camera obscura and continuing through today’s digital age.

This well-organized volume contains sections that examine historical trends, such as “Diversity and Conflict” from 1960 to 1979. There’s also an A-to-Z list of photographers, along with short profiles. You’ll see much that is familiar, but you’re also bound to discover new treats, such as Dutch photographer Frans Lanting’s “Dead Camelthorn Trees.” This striking image, taken in a national park in Namibia, is otherworldly, reminiscent of an exceptional illustration from a children’s book. Each historical discussion examines a variety of topics, such as the Polaroid camera, photography in space and the advent of the iPhone 3GS. Certain photographers are profiled in detail, such as Walker Evans and Cindy Sherman. Noteworthy photos are explored as well, including Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.”

Even if you’re not a camera buff, this book is nothing short of fascinating.

DISAPPEARING ACT
Chinese artist Liu Bolin is known as “The Invisible Man,” and Liu Bolin presents a captivating retrospective of his politically charged work, complete with 200 color photographs. Bolin’s well-known Hiding in the City series began in 2005, after the Chinese police destroyed the artists’ village where he had been working. His signature style then emerged when he painted his entire body to blend into the background of the demolished village. Bolin went on to photograph himself in painted camouflage all over Beijing, and later in places like New York and Venice.

In the book’s introduction, Sorbonne art professor Philippe Dagen writes that Bolin “composes images that at first attract, then surprise and disturb, and finally imprint themselves on the memory. He uses a unique artistic form with a rare effectiveness that is perfectly in sync with the modern times.” Bolin’s images are indeed mesmerizing, managing to be compelling to everyone from a preschooler to the most sophisticated art critic. Watch him appear and disappear in front of a tropical fruit stand, a locomotive, racks of magazines, a toy shop or in the midst of a Venice street scene. This volume is a worthy tribute to this artist’s singular accomplishments.

DESIGN LEGENDS
Eames: Beautiful Details is just the visually arresting package one would expect from two of the greatest designers of the 20th century. Encased in a bold, colorful slipcase, this hefty compendium is a very personal look at the work of husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames, renowned for their work in architecture, furniture, textile, film, photography and graphic design. After marrying in 1941, the couple was commissioned by the U.S. Navy during World War II to produce molded plywood splints, stretchers and more. One art critic called their molded plywood chair “the chair of the century.” Another creation, the Eames lounge chair, is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The fact that this couple was creative on so many different fronts means that this book is a particularly rich edition, full of family photos and personal memories, as well as reminisces describing the designers’ process and design philosophies. Charles summed up his and Ray’s life perfectly by saying, “At all times love and discipline have led to a beautiful environment and a good life.”

MODERN ART SAMPLER
What’s happening in modern art? The 21st-Century Art Book will bring you up to speed. This alphabetical overview takes a look at contemporary art since 2000, including paintings, photography, sculpture, performance art, video and digital art and more. The pleasing layout makes for easy browsing, with each page containing a photograph and a short write-up about an artist. Some entries will likely be familiar, such as the 110-ton Chicago “Bean” sculpture, more properly known as Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate.” Many entries document the ever-expanding criteria of what defines modern art, such as a video and sound installation by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat that depicts a funeral procession on a beach. British artist Michael Landy catalogued everything he owned (7,277 items) and then placed them on a conveyor belt to be destroyed by a machine. Regardless of your opinions about such works, all are thought provoking and likely to lead art lovers to new discoveries.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Whether you prefer classic design, historic photography, performance art or up-and-coming modern artists, you’ll find something in these five books to whet your appetite.

A season of magic and redemption

The Christmas season is full of touchstones: Santa with the Rockettes at Radio City, small kindnesses from strangers and boisterous shouts of, “God bless us, every one!” These new books pair nicely with a crackling fire on a frosty night.
PhotographyNature

Up close and personal

Feature by Sheila M. Trask

If you’ve seen one book of nature photography, you might think you’ve seen them all. Think again. Get ready to see everything from anemones to elephants in a whole new light.

BACK TO NATURE
Portraitists are known to spend a lot of time working with their subjects to get just the right shot. Acclaimed photographer Susan Middleton does just that, but her subjects are an unusual lot. We’re used to seeing evocative human portraits and even animal portraits, but invertebrate marine life?  Jellyfish, maybe. But flatworms? Slugs? Middleton collects all these animals and many more, and sits with them for hours, waiting to take what can only be called their portraits. The results in Spineless: Portraits of Marine Invertebrates, the Backbone of Life are nothing short of spectacular. Set against a stark backdrop of plain white or black, each image seems full of life and movement, as if set to music. Middleton shares some of her techniques as well as the impetus behind her work: giving a face to the invertebrates that make up 98 percent of our ocean’s animal life, at a time when their environment faces unprecedented challenges.

ALL BUG-EYED
Where Middleton’s jellyfish glide gently across the page, John Hallmén’s magnified images of insects stare boldly out at the viewer. The Swedish nature photographer uses the latest digital technology to create startling color images of beetles, mites, flies and more. Bugs Up Close: A Magnified Look at the Incredible World of Insects features full-page pictures that bring out every detail in these diverse creatures, with extreme close-ups of compound eyes and enlarged pictures of ants that show their individual hairs. Some images are a challenge to understand at first glance, such as the incredibly detailed image of the mouthparts of a tick, but Lars-Åke Janzon’s text offers ample explanation. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief natural history of the insect, along with their common and scientific names. It’s easy to get caught up in the patterns Hallmén highlights in his subjects’ bodies, hair and eyes, but true-sized silhouettes of each insect appear nearby as well, reminding us that these larger-than-life images are just that.

Amazon river dolphins, copyright © 2014 Art Wolfe. From Earth Is My Witness, reprinted with permission from Earth Aware Editions. 

WHOLE WIDE WORLD
At first glance, Art Wolfe’s nature photography feels more familiar than either Middleton’s or Hallmén’s. The sweeping vistas and colorful tribal portraits remind us of National Geographic magazine, and in fact the collection of photographs in Earth Is My Witness: The Photography of Art Wolfe is narrated by the National Geographic Society’s Wade Davis. Wolfe’s body of work, presented here in large format and spanning more than 50 years, truly celebrates photojournalism as an art form. The sheer scope of Wolfe’s work is a bit overwhelming: He has worked on every continent and hundreds of locations around the globe. This collection takes us on some of those journeys, which Wolfe makes accessible with his attention to color, pattern and atmosphere. He captures the geometry of Namibian sand dunes and Ethiopian tribal scarification patterns, as well as the vibrant red clothing of Kenyan Maasai tribesmen and the dazzling, bejeweled headscarves of Rajasthani women in India. Seemingly infinite landscapes pour over two-page spreads and often require additional page folds to hold the wealth of the world that Wolfe observes.

AND I MUST GO
Scaling back to North America, the scenery is no less majestic in America’s Great Hiking Trails, a comprehensive photographic pilgrimage that traverses each of America’s 11 national scenic trails. Photographer and avid hiker Bart Smith was the first person to hike all of these trails—from the Appalachian to the Pacific Crest and all those in between—and he documented every step. Smith’s mostly unpeopled photographs, accompanied by Karen Berger’s informative writing, convey the unique atmosphere of each trail, from the incredibly green, lush swamps of the Florida Trail to the dusty, dry deserts of the Arizona Trail. Smith captures the grandeur and intimacy of walking these trails with images of breathtaking mountaintop vistas and human-sized footpaths across otherwise untouched meadows. Through this contrast, he illustrates humanity’s effect on nature as clearly as nature’s effect on humanity.

CUTTING EDGE
Most books of nature photography are content to illustrate the known world, albeit in new ways. The images selected for William A. Ewing’s new collection, Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography, take that one step further, as the featured artists ask what might have been or what might yet be. Abstract chapter categorizations such as “Sublime,” “Pastoral,” “Rupture,” “Hallucination” and “Reverie” reveal humanity’s hand in the development of the world’s landscapes. Philippe Chancel illustrates the truly skyscraping modern construction in Dubai, and Simon Norfolk’s provocative series depicts one military tank in four seasons in Afghanistan. These contrast with Didier Massard’s otherworldly “Aurora Borealis” and “Mangrove,” which reveal the haunting beauty of the planet, as well as indoor landscapes by Robert Polidori. Ewing’s selections show art’s power not only to observe and document nature, but also to imagine its future.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you’ve seen one book of nature photography, you might think you’ve seen them all. Think again. Get ready to see everything from anemones to elephants in a whole new light.

Pearls of hard-won wisdom

How much of an understatement is it to say that we need inspiration in this day and age? When the world is riven with war, pestilence and those other horsemen of the Apocalypse, a bit of hopefulness is just the thing.
NonfictionMemoirLiteratureBiographyArt

The season’s best picks for serious readers

Feature by Julie Hale

If you’re shopping for a book-obsessed guy or gal who geeks out over all things literary, then you’ve turned to the right page. The holiday selections featured below offer the sort of author anecdotes, book-related trivia and top-notch storytelling that bibliophiles are wild about. 

LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE
Countless young readers have warmed to the novel form thanks to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Images from Ingalls-family lore—silent Indians, swarming locusts, interminable wagon journeys with Jack the bulldog trotting behind—are now part of America’s collective literary consciousness. Followers of Wilder’s prairie adventures have something new to look forward to with the release of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Wilder wrote this factual account of her life in 1929-30, and when publisher after publisher passed on it, she repurposed it for the Little House books, using it as the foundation for her fiction. The newly released manuscript displays the forthright style and easy grace associated with the Wilder name and delivers an unsentimental look at the reality behind her novelized life. In a compelling introduction to the book, editor Pamela Smith Hill examines the evolution of the manuscript and offers insights into Wilder’s development as a writer. Maps, photos and other memorabilia make this a must-have for the beloved author’s many fans.
RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Pamela Smith Hill on Pioneer Girl. 

WRITERS ON THE ROAD
The armchair escapist on your gift list will love An Innocent Abroad: Life-Changing Trips from 35 Great Writers. A wide-ranging anthology that pays tribute to the transformative power of travel, the volume features contributions from an impressive lineup of literary celebs. Far from being savvy explorers, the authors in this globe-trotting collection confess their incompetence when it comes to crossing borders and cracking maps. Ann Patchett’s Paris sojourn contains a quintessential coming-of-age escapade: As a teenager made giddy by the City of Light, she toys with the idea of getting a cow (yes, cow) tattoo. Mary Karr’s Belize eco-tour results in personal growth, as she sheds her civilized self and becomes one with the jungle. Alas for Richard Ford—his hair-raising run-in with kief sellers on a remote road in Morocco demonstrates that danger is all too often the traveler’s companion. Yes, vicarious voyages are sometimes the best kind, and this travel-writing treasury offers an instant—and expedient—adventure fix.

AUSTEN IS AWESOME
Fans of Emma and Persuasion may OD on the eye candy contained in Margaret C. Sullivan’s Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Covers. A fascinating survey of the visual treatments Austen’s work has received over the centuries, this charming anthology opens with marble-boarded first editions of Sense and Sensibility from London publisher Thomas Egerton and ends with a roundup of foreign translations that range from old-fashioned to funky (a 1970 Spanish edition of Pride and Prejudice has a disembodied eye on its jacket). Sullivan, author of The Jane Austen Handbook, tracks how the presentations of the novels changed along with the publishing industry to reflect graphic design trends and technological advances. Austen’s many disciples will swoon over traditional covers from Penguin, Signet and the Modern Library but may cast a skeptical eye at graphic-novel and zombie editions of Austen’s work. It seems every company under the sun has done Austen, and this irresistible album provides an intriguing overview of their efforts.

THE MAN FROM HANNIBAL
Imagine it: Mark Twain on Twitter. With his carefully cultivated persona and gift for succinct verbal expression—it seems his every utterance was a perfect epigram—the author’s following would’ve been off the charts. Viewing the humorist through just such a contemporary lens, Mark Twain’s America: A Celebration in Words and Images proves that his voice and his work are as resonant today as they were in the 1800s. Harry L. Katz, a former Library of Congress curator, teamed with that institution to produce the book, which features a treasure trove of archival materials, including maps, photos, cartoons and correspondence that depict the rough-and-tumble America of Twain’s era. Documenting the many manifestations of Twain—gold prospector, riverboat pilot, newspaperman, novelist—this lavish volume provides a fascinating portrait of a multifaceted figure who was ahead of his time and whose influence, today, is everywhere. With a foreword by Lewis H. Lapham, former editor of Harper’s Magazine, this is a stunning appreciation of a true American original.

20 QUESTIONS
The arrival of the popular “By the Book” column in The New York Times Book Review is the peak of the week for many literature lovers. A writer-in-the-spotlight feature overseen by editor Pamela Paul, “By the Book” made its Review debut in 2012 (the first subject: David Sedaris). A new collection of Paul’s insightful interviews, By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review, contains Q&As with 65 writers, including Donna Tartt, Junot Díaz, Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman. In their candid conversations with Paul, the great writers come clean about their reading tastes, work habits and inspirations, the books that moved them and the ones that left them cold. Jillian Tamaki’s pencil portraits of the authors are a plus. (Test your writer-recognition skills using the grid of famous faces that graces the cover.) With a foreword by Scott Turow, this is a book that will give bibliophiles a buzz.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you’re shopping for a book-obsessed guy or gal who geeks out over all things literary, then you’ve turned to the right page. The holiday selections featured below offer the sort of author anecdotes, book-related trivia and top-notch storytelling that bibliophiles are wild about.

Something for the well-rounded man

With every passing day, our world seems ever more gender-neutral. Nevertheless, some topics still fit pretty comfortably into the category of the “historical purview of men,” and some fine new publications have arrived to stake their claim as appropriate holiday gifts for special guys.
NonfictionCrafts, Hobbies & HomeArt

The strange and the wonderful

Feature by Linda M. Castellitto

Bibliophiles know books are the perfect gifts, rendering “they’re so hard to buy for” an empty lament. To wit, this trio of titles truly has something for everyone. All hail the curious mind!

TATTED UP
Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them takes a daring approach: There are no photos here. Instead, Wendy MacNaughton illustrates more than 60 tattoos, along with their hand-lettered origin stories curated by Isaac Fitzgerald. MacNaughton’s artfully rendered black-and-white line drawings of her subjects provide a neutral canvas for her full-color interpretations of their vibrant tattoos. Of course, the stories make these body-art vignettes whole: From sad to silly, emotional to eccentric, it’s fascinating to learn what can inspire such an everlasting form of self-expression. Chiming in are artists, professors, a naval officer, pizza aficionados and many more. This is a great gift for the tattooed, the tattoo considerers, art lovers and anyone curious about tattoo whys and wherefores but too shy to ask.

TANTALIZING TRIVIA
The explosive cover art for 1,339 Quite Interesting Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop is a reasonable facsimile of readers’ brains after they’ve experienced this compendium of wildly interesting, weirdly true facts. The authors are the masterminds of popular BBC quiz show “QI”: John Lloyd is creator, John Mitchinson is director of research, and James Harkin is senior researcher. They’re also the authors of 2013’s best-selling 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off, the creation of which led them right to this follow-up book. “Once you are in the Fact Zone, everywhere you look, astonishing new facts seem to wave and demand inclusion,” they explain. There are loads of facts here, on topics as varied as music, milk, Darwin, straitjackets and earlobes. For example: “There are only two sets of escalators in Wyoming,” and “A slug’s anus is on its head.” Now get out there and win on “Jeopardy!”

BEAUTIFUL CREATURES
Step aside, yarn-bombers and artisanal cheese-makers—the rogue taxidermists are here, and Robert Marbury leads the charge with Taxidermy Art: A Rogue’s Guide to the Work, the Culture, and How to Do It Yourself. The book shares taxidermy’s origins, as well as illustrated how-tos for the aspiring taxidermist. It’s also an illuminating look at those who practice the craft today, via page after page of disturbingly beautiful (or beautifully disturbing) works by artists worldwide. Chicago’s Jessica Joslin combines animal bones and intricate metalwork in pieces that are at once robotic and fluid; Julia deVille embellishes her taxidermy with jewels, thus “dazzling us with death”; and Marbury practices “vegan taxidermy” by using toy stuffed animals instead of formerly living creatures. Taxidermy Art is a truly interesting read, rife with intriguing history, talented artists, memorable images—and skull-bleaching instructions, too.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bibliophiles know books are the perfect gifts, rendering “they’re so hard to buy for” an empty lament. To wit, this trio of titles truly has something for everyone. All hail the curious mind!

Spread the holiday cheer

Give the jokester in your life something to laugh about this holiday season by wrapping up one of these hilarious books. Because what’s better than the gift of laughter?

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