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On a bitterly cold January day in 1988, some wicked individual dumped a tiny orange kitten into the book drop of the public library in Spencer, Iowa. Hours later, librarian Vicki Myron found the frostbitten bit of fluff, and the lives of that kitten, Myron and the entire town changed forever.

Named Dewey Readmore Books, the kitten grew into a cause célèbre and was a beloved inhabitant of the library for the next 19 years. After his death in 2007, Myron wrote a book about his life, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World. Almost overnight, the book became a sensation, spending months atop the bestseller lists. It also brought Myron thousands of letters from people wanting to tell her how touched they were by Dewey’s story and, more often than not, sharing reminiscences of their own cats. Myron was touched by many of these stories and felt others would be, too. So she and her co-author, Bret Witter, gathered a number of them into this latest book, Dewey’s Nine Lives.

One such story is that of Bill Bezanson, a Vietnam vet suffering from an undiagnosed case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Bezanson wouldn’t allow himself to get close to anyone or anything (he changed jobs, locations and acquaintances every few months) until an owl dropped a kitten on the roof of his car. The relationship he formed with that cat, named Spooky, helped Bezanson find his way back to the life he had shunned.

Dewey fans will be thrilled to know there are some additional stories about the small-town library cat, too, including what Myron believes is his spirit bringing romance back into her life after a 30-year hiatus. While not all readers may be convinced Dewey was responsible, certainly those who enjoyed the first book will rejoice in her happiness and in Dewey’s Nine Lives.

The gift of time

by bookpagedev

Biography

Biography

The darker side of an American sports icon

Review by bookpagedev

by Martin Brady

Many words have already been expended in striving to ascertain the truth about Mickey Mantle. The Mick was certainly a sports hero—the statistics and on-the-field achievements bear that out. His image was helped immeasurably by playing baseball in New York when television was becoming a huge force, and those factors also helped to ascribe to him the elements of tragedy and courage, soldiering on as he did through numerous injuries during an 18-year career. As for the evidence that Mantle was a profane, bumpkinish and usually drunken galoot, Jane Leavy’s new bio The Last Boy tends to back that up as well, though the ultimate effect of her generally serious effort is also to evoke pity for one of America’s most iconic public figures.

Smartly, Leavy uses Mantle’s games primarily as a framework for her investigations, but she finds newly fertile ground in researching his legendary home run, struck in 1953 in Washington, D.C., as well as the critical knee injury he suffered in the 1951 World Series, which is said to have changed the course of history, making a mere mortal out of a would-be god. This latter episode leaves the impression that if only Mantle had had access to more advanced surgery, he might have reclaimed most of his unearthly powers.

Leavy’s contradictory portrait of the personal Mantle compels: At once generous and caring to many, his behavior toward his long-suffering wife and sons was damaging and distant, much of his time off the field spent instead with buddies and booze and indulging other appetites. (Howard Cosell is quoted as calling Mantle a “whoremonger.”) Leavy also details Mick’s later years effectively, when he lent his name and image to casinos and corporate concerns, becoming a king of the sports memorabilia circuit. Those pursuits continued to earn him a good living, but Mantle’s personal life was an essential cipher, and he kept drinking until it was too late.

The big revelations here are about Mantle as the victim of childhood sexual abuse, plus Leavy’s tabloid account of her attempted 1983 interview with him, when Mick groped her and acted like a drunken fool. Though many will see Leavy as further besmirching Mantle’s image, she also evokes a sense of sadness about a life that might have been more but simply wasn’t.

Supersize your life

by bookpagedev

American History, History

History American History

Fame and fortune rides the rails

Review by bookpagedev

by John T. Slania

American schoolchildren are taught that the nation’s first transcontinental railroad was completed when the golden spike was driven on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. While it was a historic moment, the linking of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad was not the denouement of cross-country rail travel; rather it was the catalyst for further expansion. And the dreams, schemes and struggles to build more national rail lines are colorfully captured in Walter R. Borneman’s Rival Rails.

The first transcontinental railroad wasn’t necessarily the best. This inaugural line from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Sacramento, California, was over long miles and rough, snowy terrain, but another, shorter route with milder weather existed between Chicago and Los Angeles. Thus, the race was on to be the first to complete the line through America’s Southwest, with the promised prize of fame and fortune.

Borneman’s telling of this story is admirable foremost because of its detail and historical accuracy; his extensive research is put to good use. But he also is a gifted storyteller, and he introduces his readers to an array of characters who are part of this transcontinental treasure hunt. They include Wall Street bankers, robber barons, land speculators and outright thieves who stop at nothing to build their fortunes. Borneman details unscrupulous land deals, in which Native Americans were paid a pittance for their land, with railroad executives reselling it for huge profits. He tells of unseemly businessmen who bribed politicians, created phony railroad charters and sold stock in shell companies. The race even prompted some to build flimsy railroad lines and bridges, placing their passengers in grave danger.

Rival Rails also includes its share of heroes, such as Edward Payson Ripley, the executive who saved the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe from bankruptcy and the entire rail industry from financial collapse, and Mary Jane Colter, an architect who muscled her way into a male-dominated world to design a series of landmark buildings at Grand Canyon National Park. Borneman’s book is an enjoyable read for railroad buffs, Old West aficionados, serious-minded historians and anyone who finds romance in the sound of a train whistle in the night.

Looking into memory’s mirror

by Alden Mudge

Memoir

Memoir

Rice’s success is firmly rooted in her childhood

Review by bookpagedev

by Amy Scribner

Looking for a blow-by-blow account of Condoleezza Rice’s years as George W. Bush’s secretary of state? You would do well to find one of the many Rice biographies already on the shelves. In this remarkably clear-eyed and candid autobiography, Rice focuses instead on her fascinating coming-of-age during the stormy civil rights years in Birmingham, Alabama.

Extraordinary, Ordinary People is Rice’s love letter to her fiercely proud and supportive parents. An only child, Rice grew up in an age and place where middle-class black children were told they had to be “twice as good” as their white peers to succeed. As a result, young Condi was an excellent student, a competition-level ice skater and a concert pianist. “Ironically, because Birmingham was so segregated, black parents were able, in large part, to control the environment in which they raised their children,” Rice writes. “They rigorously regulated the messages that we received and shielded us by imposing high expectations and a determined insistence on excellence.” But Rice did not escape some of the harsher reminders of Birmingham’s bitter racial struggles; as a child, she played with one of the girls later killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963.

The book ably chronicles Rice’s years of higher education and her first experience in Washington, D.C., when she worked on the National Security Council and met future mentors and colleagues Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft. Rice also relays her sometimes stormy tenure as Stanford provost with clarity and humor, though she avoids delving too deeply into her romantic life. She casually mentions a couple of boyfriends over the years, before dispensing with the entire subject in a single paragraph: “In the back of my mind, I had always assumed that I would get married and have kids. . . . But as I told (and still tell) my friends, you don’t get married in the abstract; you have to want to marry a particular person.”

Perhaps it speaks to Rice’s character that in this salacious age of celebrity tell-alls, she chooses to focus on her many public accomplishments. Extraordinary, Ordinary People is a rich, insightful examination of Rice’s successes and their deep roots in her childhood.

Little Rock, Arkansas, then and now

by bookpagedev

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Fearlessly tackling a taboo

Review by Heather Seggel

by Heather Seggel

Don’t censure the messenger; I can’t review Naomi Wolf’s latest book without mentioning the title, Vagina: A New Biography. It’s a poetic, scientific and completely fresh take on female sexuality and selfhood, and an absolute must-read.

Wolf’s interest in the topic was spurred by a personal medical crisis that raised a provocative question: Could there be a connection between the vagina and the brain, a link between sexual health and overall happiness, as well as creativity? To find answers, Wolf taps into neurobiology and explores the role of the vagina in literature and history. In many cases, notions that were only understood anecdotally, like the link between female orgasm and self-confidence, turn out to be supported by science. After making a strong case linking mental health to sexual security, Wolf offers a particularly frightening look at the use of rape in wartime.

While there’s much to grieve in any culture that denigrates women’s bodies, Vagina finds hope behind each instance of despair. Wolf, author of the groundbreaking bestseller The Beauty Myth, talks to healers whose dedication to reversing the effects of sexual trauma make a lasting difference in the lives of women. And she notes the evidence linking frequent female orgasms to increased libido and power with glee: “So the fear that patriarchy always had—that if you let women have sex and know how to like it, it will make them both increasingly libidinous and increasingly ungovernable—is actually biologically true!”

This book confines its focus to heterosexual women, meaning there’s more work to be done to assess the full spectrum of female sexuality, but what an opening salvo. Wolf is to be commended for following her curiosity where it led her and finding a cohesive tale to weave from the disparate details.

Don’t censure the messenger; I can’t review Naomi Wolf’s latest book without mentioning the title, Vagina: A New Biography. It’s a poetic, scientific and completely fresh take on female sexuality and selfhood, and an absolute must-read. Wolf’s interest in the topic was spurred by a personal medical crisis that raised a provocative question: Could there […]

Star implosion

by bookpagedev

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

A superior writer’s final words

Review by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

In his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens wrote of wanting “to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive”: to confront mortality with the same gimlet-eyed vision he’d brought to his musings on culture, politics and religion. A diagnosis of esophageal cancer while on a book tour for the memoir forced his hand, and in a series of essays for his longtime journalistic home at Vanity Fair, he documented his crossing into the “new land” of the unwell, now assembled into his final essay collection Mortality.

With characteristic brio, intelligence and dry wit, Hitchens engages with his illness and its inevitable outcome head-on, without the consolations of religion or a belief in an afterlife. Given his reputation as an outspoken atheist, Hitchens finds himself the focus of a national prayer campaign: “what if I pulled through, and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.” This tone of comic paradox, quintessentially Hitchens, becomes starkly brave in this context.

These essays explore the lessons and fears of mortal illness, and how this experience radically shifts a person’s identity: “I don’t have a body, I am a body.” Ultimately, the cancer begins to deprive Hitchens of his ability to speak, prompting some of the book’s most moving passages. “To a great degree, in public and private, I ‘was’ my voice,” he acknowledges, and when he thinks of what he wants most to wrest from the hands of death, it is his voice—“the freedom of speech”—that he longs to hold on to.

The literature of illness is marked by the struggle to translate pain into language; in Virginia Woolf’s words, the ill writer must take “his pain in one hand” and a “lump of pure sound in the other” and “crush” them together to create the new idiom of his or her experience. In Mortality, Hitchens has achieved just that, applying all his life’s talents to the challenge of giving voice to the approach of death. These essays are brave and fitting final words from a writer at the end of his journey.

In his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens wrote of wanting “to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive”: to confront mortality with the same gimlet-eyed vision he’d brought to his musings on culture, politics and religion. A diagnosis of esophageal cancer while on a book tour for the memoir forced his hand, and […]

Bring happiness home

by Amy Scribner

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