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Brittle Joints

In beautifully colored and evocative frames, Brittle Joints shares illustrator Maria Sweeney’s experiences living with a rare disability.
In beautifully colored and evocative frames, Brittle Joints shares illustrator Maria Sweeney’s experiences living with a rare disability.
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Following Dante through the stark reality of mourning

Joseph Luzzi’s new memoir, In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love, transforms unthinkable tragedy into literary gold. In November 2007, while Luzzi was teaching at Bard College, his beloved pregnant wife Katherine was in a car accident: She died later that morning at the hospital, shortly after their daughter Isabel was born. In the space of a single morning, Joseph Luzzi became both a father and widower.
NonfictionBiography

Forging a life outside of the Kremlin

Review by Trisha Ping

Given the endless parade of biographies of Founding Fathers and Tudor monarchs, one might be forgiven for wondering whether there are any fresh candidates for a lengthy life study left. Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan (Villa Air-Bel) proves the answer is yes with Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the masterfully told and meticulously researched story of a truly remarkable life.

Born in 1926 and raised in luxury in Moscow, the only daughter of Russia’s all-powerful leader Joseph Stalin, Svetlana Iosifovna Stalina (who later took her mother’s name of Alliluyeva) was beautiful, intelligent and privileged. But not even Stalin’s favorite child was exempt from the terror that his reign ushered in. Before her father’s death in 1953, Alliluyeva would suffer the loss of her mother, two brothers, numerous aunts and uncles and even her first love to death or deportation. Her father’s role in their fates was something she spent her entire life struggling to reconcile.

If that were all that ever happened to Alliluyeva, her story would still be worth reading. But life had much more in store for this proud, passionate and impulsive woman. After Stalin’s death, she was alternately lauded, spied on and reviled, depending on the prevailing politics of the day. She married three times and bore three children, two of whom she left behind in the Soviet Union after she took the remarkable step of defecting during the height of the Cold War, at the age of 41. It was a desperate attempt to escape her father’s shadow, but Alliluyeva was not able to put the past completely behind her—in fact, she shaped her writing career around it, beginning with a best-selling memoir that made her a millionaire. By the time of her death in 2011, Alliluyeva was living in near poverty in Wisconsin—an anything but predictable end for a Kremlin princess.

Sullivan weaves Svetlana’s fascinating story with cinematic grace, bringing settings as diverse as Moscow, India, England and the United States to life with equal ease. She also sustains a surprising amount of suspense—Alliluyeva’s defection in 1967 in particular has the tension of a spy thriller or an episode of “The Americans.” Combining archival research with journal excerpts and testimony from friends and family, most notably Alliluyeva’s youngest daughter, Olga, Stalin’s Daughter is an intimate portrait of a complicated woman who was a symbol to many but truly known by only a few.

 

Given the endless parade of biographies of Founding Fathers and Tudor monarchs, one might be forgiven for wondering whether there are any fresh candidates for a lengthy life study left. Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan (Villa Air-Bel) proves the answer is yes with Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the masterfully told and meticulously researched story of a truly remarkable life.

The long road from the Midwest to mega-success

Blonde, svelte, former Miss America, musical prodigy, successful news anchor on national network with a hot husband: I was, quite honestly, prepared to hate (or at least strongly resent) Gretchen Carlson. But darn it if she didn’t charm me from the first page of Getting Real, her memoir of growing up wholesome in Minnesota.
NonfictionHistory

Soviet history worthy of a soap opera

Review by Anne Bartlett

Hard as it might be to imagine, readers of Ben Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russia could find themselves feeling a certain sympathy for Vladimir Putin. Sure, the new Russian president was trying to seize control of the news media in 2000 when he forced television magnate Boris Berezovsky to sell his business. But Berezovsky was, to put it mildly, a handful. 

In the gunslinger-capitalism years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, he had risen from mathematician to software guy to billionaire TV tycoon by running down everyone in his path. He and his oligarch buddies essentially bought the 1996 presidential election for Boris Yeltsin, and he was instrumental in the choice of Putin as Yeltsin’s successor. But he badly underestimated Putin and ended up in bitter exile.

Mezrich, best-selling author of The Accidental Billionaires, which depicted the rise of Facebook, is now writing about a world far more dangerous than Silicon Valley. He explores the evolution of post-Soviet Russia through the improbable stories of Berezovsky and his cohorts, primarily protégé-turned-rival Roman Abramovich (engineering school dropout to aluminium titan) and Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB man who died in a bizarre polonium poisoning in 2006.

Using what he calls “re-created dialogue” based on interviews and court documents, Mezrich unfolds the drama in cinematic vignettes. Among them: Berezovsky survives a car bombing; Putin lays down the law to the oligarchs in Stalin’s old dacha; Abramovich lands by helicopter at an Alpine resort and agrees to pay $1.3 billion to Berezovsky to dissolve their partnership; Berezovsky chases Abramovich into a Hermès store in London to serve him a subpoena as he sues him for $5.6 billion. Surreal as it seems, it was all quite real.

It’s Wolf Hall on the Moskva: Litvinenko was murdered. Berezovsky died a broken man. Abramovich is worth an estimated $9 billion and owns England’s Chelsea Football Club. And Putin still runs Russia.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Hard as it might be to imagine, readers of Ben Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russia could find themselves feeling a certain sympathy for Vladimir Putin. Sure, the new Russian president was trying to seize control of the news media in 2000 when he forced television magnate Boris Berezovsky to sell his business. But Berezovsky was, to put it mildly, a handful.

Getting honest about getting over stage fright

In her new book about stage fright, journalist Sara Solovitch describes her earliest memories of the affliction in physical terms. Like many people who struggle with similar fears, she felt that her mind and body betrayed her every time she took the stage to perform her piano pieces, no matter how arduously she practiced. Even playing for a few friends in her own home was traumatic.
Social Science

Navigating the jungles of the Upper East Side

Review by Keith Herrell

Any population is fair game for anthropological research, so why not the super-rich, super-thin and oh-so-well-dressed mothers of New York’s Upper East Side? That’s the reasoning of author Wednesday Martin, and she puts it to the test in Primates of Park Avenue, her account of six years as a wife and mother in Manhattan’s toniest neighborhood.

Sorry, make that Wednesday Martin, Ph.D.: Martin does have a doctorate in cultural studies. So she brings some gravitas to the project, and she’s not shy about rolling it out. But not to worry—there are plenty of laugh lines and arch observations as Martin surveys the scene of exclusive preschools, lavish fundraisers and second homes in the Hamptons. The result is illuminating and fun to read.

Martin is not exactly parachuting in from grad school at Berkeley, brushing granola crumbs off her work shirt. It’s obvious that her husband makes plenty of money, and they move from Greenwich Village to the East Side by choice (family reasons, you know). So in a way she fits in, and in a way she doesn’t, and that contributes to the book’s dynamics.

She pushes back, for example, against some of the tribe’s most established customs, such as signing infants up for nursery school (she “totally forgot” this step in the path to Harvard). But she also goes native, deciding that she absolutely must have a Hermès Birkin bag.  

Primates of Park Avenue isn’t all snide comments and wry asides. Martin experiences a personal tragedy, bringing her closer to the neighborhood’s team of rivals. And finally, a simple declaration: “We moved across town” to the West Side (family reasons again). Given Martin’s skills in observation, we can hope to look forward to Primates of Columbus Avenue.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Any population is fair game for anthropological research, so why not the super-rich, super-thin and oh-so-well-dressed mothers of New York’s Upper East Side? That’s the reasoning of author Wednesday Martin, and she puts it to the test in Primates of Park Avenue, her account of six years as a wife and mother in Manhattan’s toniest neighborhood.

A blunt and brutal memoir of fleeing North Korea

Many of us think of North Korea as a nation of automatons, blindly following Dear Leader over the cliff. If nothing else, Joseph Kim’s memoir of his harrowing childhood during the famine that devastated North Korea in the 1990s will complicate that view.
NonfictionNature

The fierce devastation of a forest fire

Review by Edward Morris

Few forces of nature are as terrifying and unpredictable as forest fires, particularly those in America’s arid West and Southwest. Depending on size, such a fire can create its own shifting weather patterns, each posing a new danger, a different path of destruction. That’s what happened in Yarnell, Arizona, on June 30, 2013, when 19 of the 20 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighting team were burned to death in a blaze sparked by lightning. 

A former firefighter himself, Kyle Dickman first focuses on the history of the Granite Mountain unit and then delves into the background and personalities of its individual members, each of whom had to undergo grueling physical training and considerable hazing to win a place on the team. Most of the men were in their 20s, often at loose ends professionally but caught up in the gung-ho spirit of their jobs. Dickman recounts in such detail their love affairs, marriages, divorces, children, aspirations and resentments that by the time they die, the reader is quite likely to feel a sense of personal loss. Dickman varies his account by quoting many of the text messages the doomed Hotshots sent to and received from their loved ones during the final hours.

The most vivid parts of his reporting, however, are his close-ups of the fire as it invades the town of Yarnell. “Bob [a 94-year-old resident fleeing with his 89-year-old wife] couldn’t see through the smoke. He kept bumping into the trees and brush on the sides of their driveway. Then he put the truck’s right wheel into a ditch. The tire exploded. Around them, dozens of propane tanks sent columns of flames shooting into the air like fires off an oil derrick.” 

Left unanswered, Dickman acknowledges, is the haunting question of why the 19 men left a zone of relative safety to descend into the cauldron that took their lives.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Few forces of nature are as terrifying and unpredictable as forest fires, particularly those in America’s arid West and Southwest. Depending on size, such a fire can create its own shifting weather patterns, each posing a new danger, a different path of destruction. That’s what happened in Yarnell, Arizona, on June 30, 2013, when 19 of the 20 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighting team were burned to death in a blaze sparked by lightning.

Growing up goth

There’s probably no place that’s ideal for a teenage boy to realize he’s gay, but among the truly suboptimal locations consider San Antonio, Texas. The heat melts all the product out of your hair, and there’s a good chance your classmates know your secret before you do and are prepared to start torturing you well in advance of your coming out. So it was for David Crabb.
NonfictionMemoir

One of America’s greatest reporters looks inward

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

From a bicycle trip through Chile and Argentina to a South African journey to report on Nelson Mandela’s final days, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw had no intention of slowing down as he celebrated his 73rd birthday in February 2013. What he didn’t count on was a cancer diagnosis a few months later that would transform the next 16 months of his life into one in which cancer became “the scrim through which all of life is viewed.”

Brokaw suffers from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow’s plasma cells that is treatable, but not curable. A Lucky Life Interrupted is the product of the journal Brokaw, ever the reporter, kept to document his experience. He frankly describes cancer’s physical and emotional toll as his treatment proceeded, but he leavens that often sobering account with vivid reminiscences from a career that helped earn him a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

With a loving family that includes an emergency room physician daughter as well as access to world-class specialists at leading hospitals, Brokaw realizes that his good fortune in health didn’t desert him in sickness. But even with those advantages, he takes some pointed shots at a health care system in which the efforts of his team of doctors were poorly coordinated at times and where a single chemotherapy pill cost $500.

“I’ve had a life rich in personal and professional rewards beyond what should be anyone’s even exaggerated expectations,” Brokaw writes. He’s clear-eyed about the challenges that lie ahead, but no doubt he’ll face them with a renewed appreciation for his good life and a determination to live whatever remains of it to the fullest.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From a bicycle trip through Chile and Argentina to a South African journey to report on Nelson Mandela’s final days, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw had no intention of slowing down as he celebrated his 73rd birthday in February 2013. What he didn’t count on was a cancer diagnosis a few months later that would transform the next 16 months of his life into one in which cancer became “the scrim through which all of life is viewed.”

Shuttering the schoolhouse door

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County, deftly interweaves the personal and the historical into a compelling narrative that leaves no stone unturned.
FictionHumor

A husband and wife take on a high-stakes legal case

Review by Thane Tierney

Every professional thrown in contact with the public has at least one client who’s, to put it charitably, challenging. But the husband-and-wife attorney team of Joe and Lisa Stone have managed, in “Petty Lettie” VanSandt, to have landed an international gold medal champion. Irascible, tattooed, litigious, paranoid, antisocial and capricious—and it goes downhill from there. Fortunately, Joe has a patient mien, which turns out to be both the source of affection and affliction in The Jezebel Remedy, the fourth novel from Virginia Circuit Court Judge Martin Clark.

As proven in his New York Times Notable debut, The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, Clark has a practiced ear for the subtlety and nuance of everyday existence. While the lawyer couple clearly have affection for one another, Joe’s wife is getting twitchy after 20 years of “community center Zumba classes, flannel, mismatched silver, lukewarm champagne and box steps every December 31, matted fleece bedroom slippers and sex so mission control she could count down the seconds between her husband biting her neck and squeezing her breast.”

When the Stones’ cantankerous client turns up dead just days after amending her will for the umpteenth time, both Joe’s unflappable demeanor and Lisa’s near occasion of adultery set the stage for a series of events that could find them disbarred, bankrupted or worse. It appears that a seemingly useless formula for a compound called “Wound Velvet,” left among the deceased woman’s estate, has more value than her executor (Joe) could possibly have known, to the degree that a multinational corporation is willing to do whatever it takes to secure the patent . . . even if they have to crush the Stones to do it.

Unlike many legal thrillers, The Jezebel Remedy doesn’t turn on high-tension courtroom theatrics to make its impact, though it’s plenty clear from the legal proceedings documented in its pages that Clark knows his way around the bench. Instead, he crafts a portrait of fine but flawed humans who find themselves unexpectedly thrust into the deep end of a system where the law can be either a life raft or a dead weight, depending on who gets to make the final judgment call.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Every professional thrown in contact with the public has at least one client who’s, to put it charitably, challenging. But the husband-and-wife attorney team of Joe and Lisa Stone managed to land an international gold medal champion in The Jezebel Remedy, the fourth novel from Virginia Circuit Court Judge Martin Clark.

The messy legacy of Andrew Jackson

The epic struggle between cultures and strong personalities is at the heart of Steve Inskeep’s fast-paced, extensively researched Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab.

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