Elyse Graham’s thrilling history of how scholars and librarians helped the U.S. outsmart the Nazis is a pulpy delight.

Lifestyles, Nonfiction, Social Science

Eerie Legends

Bold, offbeat illustrations by Ricardo Diseño lead the way in the spooky-fun Eerie Legends.

Essays, Nature, Nonfiction

This Is How a Robin Drinks

Naturalist Joanna Brichetto uncovers the beauty of urban landscapes in her wonder-inducing debut, This Is How a Robin Drinks.

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Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin But, age before beauty: Mae West, known for her body language (a knowing tilt of the head, a carefully raised eyebrow) as well as her suggestive wisecracks, is studiously depicted in Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin. Simon Louvish, biographer of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, had access to West’s archives, a treasure trove consisting of 2,000 pages of West-penned jokes and gags, as well as various drafts of plays, screenplays and treatments. All this written by the woman who famously uttered, Come up and see me sometime. The former Mary Jane West worked her way up in vaudeville, then became a Broadway legend in part due to the notoriety of the 1926 play, Sex. West wrote and starred in the play, which was deemed immoral in a headline-making trial. Sentenced to prison for 10 days, West quipped to a reporter, Give my regards to Broadway. No wonder Hollywood beckoned.

Hard to believe, but she was 40 years old when she began making movies, and history, with her umming and oohing and sexual insinuations. She drove the censors nuts, delighted audiences and became the highest-paid performer in the country. Her screen reign lasted just seven years, but she went on to wow audiences in Vegas, and to star in several ’70s-era cult pics, including the campy Myra Breckinridge. When she died at 87 she was living with a much-younger former body-builder, giving credence to her line, a hard man is good to find. Los Angeles-based writer Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of biographies of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

Class Acts

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Art meets science

Review by bookpagedev

by Lynn Hamilton

Art history professor Martin Kemp (The Oxford History of Art) previously examined Leonardo da Vinci’s life in 2004’s Leonardo; now he concentrates on the artist’s notebooks in Leonardo Da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, and Design. Kemp speculates that da Vinci brainstormed and doodled as a way of thinking out loud; remarkably, his seemingly three-dimensional drawings are so complex, they continue to intrigue and baffle even today’s most scientific minds. Particularly interesting is Kemp’s documentation of recent scientific efforts to build Leonardo’s fantastic flying machines. In 2000, Adrian Nicholas successfully launched himself from a 3,000-foot height using a parachute modeled after a da Vinci drawing. Earlier, James Wink of Tetra Associates and Kemp collaborated on an ornithopter which mimicked another, more birdlike da Vinci flying machine.

Art history professor Martin Kemp (The Oxford History of Art) previously examined Leonardo da Vinci’s life in 2004’s Leonardo; now he concentrates on the artist’s notebooks in Leonardo Da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, and Design. Kemp speculates that da Vinci brainstormed and doodled as a way of thinking out loud; remarkably, his seemingly three-dimensional drawings are […]

Thoughts on food

by bookpagedev

Biography

Biography

The magic behind the kingdom

Review by bookpagedev

by Pat H. Broeske

He was a perfectionist who lived for his work which would profoundly permeate all our lives. The man who turned animation into an art form, and amusement parks into family-friendly theme parks, also impacted our collective psyche. Do you believe dreams can come true? Ever wish upon a star? You have Walt Disney to thank, says cultural historian Neal Gabler in his heavily researched and, at 800-plus pages, just plain heavy, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

Over the years there have been myriad Disney tomes, some of them pretty harsh toward Uncle Walt (Marc Eliot’s Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince) and toward his cultural legacy (Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney). It didn’t help that the Disney empire has long guarded its vaults and has a thuggish reputation among the press. Now lowering the drawbridge, they coughed up the keys to the kingdom for Gabler, who enjoyed complete access to the Disney Archives.

The resulting work, seven years in the making, is a revelatory portrait of a visionary who would create one of the world’s most powerful business enterprises. Though, as Gabler ably illustrates, Disney never set out to get rich. To him, money was a means to further his next venture, and the next. To pursue his then-ground-breaking efforts (the endless list includes Snow White and Fantasia), Disney was forever juggling finances. It was only with Disneyland, and the park’s synergistic ties to TV (which also enshrined the movies and merchandising) that he became wealthy.

From a hard times childhood, that nonetheless left him with idyllic, lasting memories he would recreate in his nostalgic live-action movies and at his park (especially via Main Street, U.S.

A.), to his adventures in animation (including the bumpy business side of movie-making), to the development of his studio and theme park kingdoms, Disney examines its subject with a balance of insight, awe and empathy.

A taste for the good life

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History

Fancy meeting you here

Review by Edward Morris

by Edward Morris

Famous people cross each other’s paths all the time and end up exchanging views on various topics. No surprise there. What is surprising about Craig Brown’s Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings is how artfully he strings these meetings together into an unbroken chain. Brown begins with a 1931 traffic accident involving Adolf Hitler and British playboy John Scott-Ellis, then moves on to an earlier encounter between Scott-Ellis and Rudyard Kipling and from there to a meeting between Kipling and Mark Twain, who, in turn, grants a farewell audience to Helen Keller, and so on. Each account involves a person from the former one. By the time Brown writes his last vignette—reconstructing a 1937 tête-à-tête between the Duchess of Windsor and Hitler—he has completed the circle.

Brown, a London-based satirist, includes in this bounty of historic get-togethers such seemingly disparate pairings as Nancy Reagan and Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright and Marilyn Monroe, H.G. Wells and Josef Stalin, and Alfred Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler. He enlivens these brief accounts (each precisely 1,001 words long) with smirky asides and breezy footnotes.

In one such note, Brown quotes the Australian comedian Barry Humphries concerning his reaction to meeting playwright Arthur Miller: “When [he] shook my hand,” Humphries recalled, “I could only think that this was the hand that had once cupped the breasts of Marilyn Monroe.”

For the most part, it’s the incongruity of these one-on-ones that interests Brown—and the reader. Why does Groucho Marx persist in discussing King Lear when T.S. Eliot clearly prefers talking about the Marx Brothers movies? Is it conceivable that the 92-year-old philosopher Bertrand Russell is putting the moves on his 22-year-old neighbor, the budding actress Sarah Miles? (Short answer: Oh, yeah.)

There are many personalities chronicled here who won’t be familiar to an American audience, but that doesn’t matter. Brown makes them all come alive.

Famous people cross each other’s paths all the time and end up exchanging views on various topics. No surprise there. What is surprising about Craig Brown’s Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings is how artfully he strings these meetings together into an unbroken chain. Brown begins with a 1931 traffic accident involving […]

Investigating the snooze

by Heather Seggel

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Through the eyes of Churchill’s daughter

Review by Roger Bishop

by Roger Bishop

Winston Churchill played many roles during his extraordinary life. In addition to being one of the 20th century’s great leaders, he was also the father of five children. The youngest and only surviving child of Winston and Clementine Churchill, Mary Soames, now almost 90, takes us into their rarefied world and gives us an intimate view of her parents and their times in A Daughter’s Tale.

Soames describes in rich detail the “lovely life” of her childhood at Chartwell, the family home, where she kept many animals—cats, dogs, lambs and goats, among others. A highlight of those years were the elaborately staged Chartwell Christmases, which usually ran over into the new year. Prominent public figures were frequent visitors; one of Soames’ favorites was T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia).

Soames bonded with her father over their love of animals and the outdoors. But he was not deeply involved in what she calls the “small print” of her life. Her parents were often absent from home or otherwise engaged. Soames notes that there was a “tug-of-love”; Winston loved his children but always wanted Clementine to be with him. Still, the author demonstrates the love between parents and daughter in charming letters between them.

Instead of being presented at Court in 1941, as her mother had predicted, Soames enlisted in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She was involved in serious defense work and her father was proud of her for it.

This absorbing memoir gives us glimpses of Mary’s opinions about such public figures as Franklin Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle. But she also tells us a lot about people who were important to her but are lost to history. This wonderful memoir would be of interest not only to those who want to learn more about the Churchills, but to anyone who wants to read an engaging memoir about an impressive young woman.

A voice for endangered rhinos

by Anne Bartlett

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Beating the system

Review by Heather Seggel

by Heather Seggel

Shon Hopwood was basically a good kid whose life became a case study in bad decisions. As a young man, he was so bored that when a friend drunkenly suggested a bank heist, “[T]he world was newly framed in that instant,” and off they went. They didn’t stop at one bank, robbing five before his eventual arrest. Sentenced to a dozen years in federal prison at only 23 years old, he worked out relentlessly and worked hard at his job in the prison law library. Knowledge is power, and Hopwood became useful to fellow inmates by helping them with legal questions. When asked to file a petition with the Supreme Court—a hail Mary move for a trained lawyer, much less a prisoner—the results changed his life course forever.

Law Man is a prison memoir and a story of redemption, and Hopwood would be the first to point out how seldom those two things combine. While his own story moves from bleak to fairy-tale fantastic so swiftly you half-expect the inmates to line up and start singing “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” behind him, he notes in a sobering aside that the system’s initial goal of rehabilitation has been abandoned. Prison is now a multi-billion dollar business with a dirt-cheap labor force that is overwhelmingly African-American. That his legal help shortened a few of their sentences is small comfort, but Hopwood’s own transformation is both moving and inspiring.

The courage of two sisters

by bookpagedev

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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.