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Wright Thompson’s ‘The Barn’ chronicles the fight to preserve the memory of Emmett Till

Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.
Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.
NonfictionMemoir

Connie

With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.
With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.
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NonfictionEssays

Myriad musings from John Updike, an American master

Review by Roger Bishop

John Updike is one of America's most renowned men of letters. Best known for his prize-winning novels and short stories, he is also an accomplished poet, an author of children's books, memoirs and a play, and one of our finest literary critics and essayists. In his new collection, Due Considerations, he shares work of the last eight years or so and dazzles us once again.

These essays are general considerations, with sections on American and English fiction, along with novels from other parts of the world; art (Updike once aspired to be a graphic artist); literary biography; appreciations and considerations of writers and others; and Updike's contribution to the NPR series This I Believe. The key part of the collection is Updike's literary criticism. He is perceptive and insightful, generous with praise, but very specific about reservations he may have. He is also keenly aware of his limitations. As he looked over the reviews included in the book, he says he wondered if their customary geniality, almost effusive in the presence of a foreign writer or a factual topic, didn't somewhat sour when faced with a novel by a fellow-countryman. But, he concludes, a book reviewer must write what is felt at the time, when impressions are still warm and malleable, and leave second thoughts to prefaces. Over the years Updike has been asked to comment on his childhood reading. He had forgotten an account he wrote for the New York Times in 1965 until it reappeared on the Times website in 1997. He included it here because, he says, it rings truer than any of the too-numerous later attempts of mine to describe my childhood reading. His earliest literary memory is of his fear of the spidery, shadowy, monstrous illustrations in a large deluxe edition of Alice in Wonderland in his family's collection.

He is a copious reader and careful researcher, exhibiting familiarity with other works by and about the author whose work he is discussing. He also spends a lot of time describing what happens in the book at hand. It would be fair to say of Updike what he writes of Frank Kermode, whom he considers the best of English book reviewers: decent devotion to literary merit and a humble and tenacious will to explicate the best examples of it. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Updike writes with authority about such literary legends as E.B. and Katharine White, William Shawn and William Maxwell. He does not hesitate to say that a biographer of John O'Hara does not, it seemed to me, get The New Yorker exactly right. He proceeds to set the record straight on facts and interpretation, including, for example, a previously unpublished tribute to Tina Brown, when she abruptly left as editor of The New Yorker in 1998. He notes that she made the magazine more woman-friendly and celebrity-friendly, that she brought fun into the production process, into the publicity process, and decreed a party atmosphere. He continues, Her party in these offices is over, but its brave vibrations linger into the new dawn. This cornucopia of writing by a master will delight many readers.

 

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

John Updike is one of America's most renowned men of letters. Best known for his prize-winning novels and short stories, he is also an accomplished poet, an author of children's books, memoirs and a play, and one of our finest literary critics and essayists. In his new collection, Due Considerations, he shares work of the […]
Sports

Hitler goes for the gold

Review by bookpagedev

In the long and sometimes tortured history of the Olympic movement, no Olympiad has been co-opted more completely by the host country than the 1936 games. From the start, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime set out to use the Olympics to reassure the world that Germany was a civilized society that embraced sport as an essential element in developing strong citizens. They downplayed their mistreatment of unruly elements Jews, blacks, gypsies and others by subtly appealing to the innate prejudices of the aristocratic leaders of the international sports community and hiding outright abuses as the games approached. Hitler was so successful in feigning goodwill during the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen that no nation protested when he boldly moved troops into the demilitarized Rhineland a few weeks later. In Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream, British novelist Guy Walters has written a meticulously researched work of nonfiction. Readers will find familiar accounts of Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals were an affront to Hitler’s racist beliefs, and Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, two runners who were replaced by Owens and another black athlete in the relay finals, seemingly to spare Hitler the embarrassment of seeing Jews on the medal podium. But readers will also learn about lesser-known athletes including German wrestler Werner Seelenbinder, a communist who hoped to win his event so he could denounce Nazism on a live radio broadcast.

Berlin Games is a worthy addition to the literature of the Olympics. By shining the spotlight on the Nazis’ takeover of the games, Walters gives context to subsequent clashes of sports and politics that led to boycotts, bans (of South African athletes from 1964 through 1991), and the tragic murder of Israeli coaches and competitors by Palestinian terrorists in Munich in 1972. That year, International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage outraged many by insisting that the Games continue after only a one-day break, for the good of the Olympic movement. In Walters’ book, we see Brundage 36 years earlier, when, as president of the American Olympic Committee, he first put sport above humanitarianism as he fought attempts to boycott the Berlin Games. Sue Macy is the author of several nonfiction books for young readers, including Swifter, Higher, Stronger, a history of the Summer Olympics, and Freeze Frame, about the Winter Games.

In the long and sometimes tortured history of the Olympic movement, no Olympiad has been co-opted more completely by the host country than the 1936 games. From the start, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime set out to use the Olympics to reassure the world that Germany was a civilized society that embraced sport as […]
NonfictionPolitics

Other people’s money

Review by bookpagedev

<B>Other people’s money</B> Peter G. Peterson, who served as secretary of commerce under President Nixon and is the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, states his position clearly in the subtitle to his new book <B>Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It</B>. Peterson’s message is simple: the federal government is spending and promising to spend trillions of dollars more than it is taking in, a practice that is saddling coming generations with debts they cannot possibly pay. Politicians spend so extravagantly because it wins them votes without forcing them to deal with long-term consequences. "During the Vietnam War," Petersen observes, "conservatives relentlessly pilloried Lyndon Johnson for his fiscal irresponsibility. He only wanted guns and butter. Today, so-called conservatives are outpandering LBJ. They must have it all: guns, butter, <I>and</I> tax cuts. . . . [T]he tax cuts pushed by both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did not, as promised, pay for themselves, but led to an explosion of government debt." We can do a U-turn on this road to ruin, Peterson says, by such common-sense and relatively painless approaches as indexing Social Security payments to rises in prices rather than wages, mandating personal savings accounts for retirement and bringing more candor and clarity to the way the government budgets its money.

<I>Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.</I>

<B>Other people’s money</B> Peter G. Peterson, who served as secretary of commerce under President Nixon and is the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, states his position clearly in the subtitle to his new book <B>Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans […]
Pop CultureMusicMemoirBiographyArts & Culture

Behind the music

Review by Ron Wynn

There won't be many more honest and revealing works this year than Clapton: The Autobiography. The man often termed a guitar god and considered an icon by many music fans isn't interested in affirming that notion. Instead he repeatedly cites his flaws and failures, doing so in graphic detail and without offering excuses for his lapses in judgment and behavior. Clapton writes about his drug and alcohol problems, his adultery and depression in spare, unflinching prose. He's determined to let readers know that not only is he human, but that he's paid a heavy price to reach the top. There's also a full discussion of his interaction, romance and ultimate failed relationship with Pattie Boyd, who was married to Clapton's good friend George Harrison when he began pursuing her. Particularly painful is Clapton's account of the death of his four-year-old son Conor, who fell to his death in 1991 from a New York high-rise.

Yet the book also has plenty of rich musical detail, from his description of being awed by first hearing Jimi Hendrix to accounts of playing with the Rolling Stones and Beatles, teaming with longtime idol B.B. King, and reshaping the classic blues and soul he adored into a more personalized and individual sound.

DREAM WEAVERS

As a staff photographer for Rolling Stone, Robert Altman visually documented the changes that rocked the '60s with a scope and clarity no one has surpassed. His remarkable photographs comprise the bulk of the compelling new collection, The Sixties. Whether you were there or not doesn't really matter, Altman writes in an author's note, maintaining that these pictures do the talking in recapturing the excitement of Woodstock, be-ins and the Summer of Love. Whether in funny (and sometimes frightening) crowd shots of anonymous war protesters or intense individual portraits of such famous '60s figures as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jane Fonda, Grace Slick and Joni Mitchell, Altman brings it all back in unforgettable style. Journalist Ben Fong-Torres adds perspective with a brief introduction and Q&A with Altman.

Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is a companion work to the documentary film by Peter Bogdanovich, and it contains comprehensive and candid interviews with Petty and company on such subjects as life on the road, the music business, the failures of contemporary radio and Petty's devotion to the classic rock and soul that shaped his heartland sound. His determination not to let trends affect or influence his work is noteworthy, and there's also enough levity and humor to balance out some spots where his disillusionment at changes in the landscape becomes evident.

THE CHAIRMAN AND THE KING

Both Charles Pignone's Frank Sinatra: The Family Album and George Klein's Elvis Presley: The Family Album are loving insiders' collections rather than probing investigative surveys or detached evaluations. Pignone was a close Sinatra friend and is now the family archivist, while Klein was a high school classmate of Presley, and even had the King serve as his best man. Both books are full of warm remembrances, rare photographs and views of the family side of these performers. You won't get any outlandish tales of excessive behavior here, but there are interviews with family members and associates who've never talked about their relationships before, plus detailed accounts from Pignone and Klein that emphasize the character and generosity of both these superstars.

For those interested in why we enjoy listening to music, there's Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by neurologist Oliver Sacks, best known for books that recount some of his highly unusual cases (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, etc.). In Musicophilia, Sacks investigates the medical effects positive and negative of listening to music. He does so in a manner somewhere between scholarly and weird, using amazing stories to validate his theories and illustrate how important music appreciation can be. Whether talking about a disabled man who has memorized 2,000 operas or children whose ability to learn Mandarin Chinese has given them perfect pitch, Sacks offers tales that will fascinate any music lover.

There won't be many more honest and revealing works this year than Clapton: The Autobiography. The man often termed a guitar god and considered an icon by many music fans isn't interested in affirming that notion. Instead he repeatedly cites his flaws and failures, doing so in graphic detail and without offering excuses for his […]
Biography

The name that hid a startling secret

Review by bookpagedev

It was common in the 19th century for a woman to adopt a male nom de plume in order to be taken more seriously as a writer or to preserve her privacy. By the 20th century, though, women had come into their own in literary terms, and a practice that had well served such writers as George Eliot, George Sand and the Bront‘s became passŽ. So it was surprising in the late 1970s when acclaimed science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., was outed as a woman, not least of all because Tiptree had been heralded as a notably masculine writer, albeit one who played fast and lose with gender issues in his stories.

Tiptree, the world learned, was really Alice Bradley Sheldon, a then 60-something woman living a quiet life in the rural exurbs of Washington, D.C. But as Julie Phillips demonstrates in her impressively detailed and engaging biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, much of Sheldon’s earlier life had been anything but quiet. Before becoming a science fiction writer when she was in her 50s, this gifted woman had been a painter, a WAAC officer during World War II, a CIA agent, a research psychologist and even a chicken farmer. Extraordinarily bright and beautiful, Allie Sheldon did many things well, but spent much of her life struggling with identity issues, a struggle that kept her from leaving her mark in any one field until she rediscovered science fiction in middle age.

Reading Phillips’ incisive and sympathetic account of Sheldon’s life, it seems inevitable that this woman would have an unconventional life. She was born to a world of privilege, her father a Chicago lawyer and her mother, Mary Bradley, an extremely successful writer of popular fiction and adventure travel. The Bradleys were atypical by any measure, leading numerous expeditions to the African interior and taking young Alice along with them from the time she was six. A childhood spent hunting elephants and learning Swahili left the girl with a restless sense of adventure that she would never tame, saddling her with aspirations that pushed beyond the circumscribed parameters for women of her generation. More often than not, these unfulfilled aspirations led to frustration and unhappiness.

Sheldon dabbled in colleges Sarah Lawrence, Berkeley, NYU never quite finishing what she began, and at painting, even studying with Ashcan School painter John Sloan. She weathered an impulsive and disastrous early marriage and had strong emotional and casual sexual attachments to a number of women (Phillips suggests that Sheldon’s true sexual disposition was lesbian, but she never had the courage to embrace that life). Twenty-six when America entered World War II, Sheldon enlisted, enjoying her work in the photo intelligence division, and ultimately marrying her boss, Col. Huntington Ting Sheldon. After the war, the Sheldons tried their hands at running a chicken hatchery in New Jersey before returning to Washington where they both took positions with the nascent CIA.

Ting stayed with the Agency, though Allie left after just three years, frustrated by its glass ceiling. She tried a bit of freelance writing, then finally knuckled down academically, earning a Ph.D. in psychology. She ultimately applied her fascination with theories of perception to her fiction, and that fiction, Phillips shows, would borrow heavily from Sheldon’s extraordinary experiences and her lifelong personal conflicts about sexuality and gender roles. In 1987, Sheldon shot Ting while he slept, then turned the gun on herself, carrying out a suicide pact the two had made.

The limited output of James Tiptree, Jr., is not well known outside the world of science fiction, but Phillips’ appealing, authoritative biography is meant for readers well beyond the limits of the genre. Sheldon’s secret identity and the issues she explored in her fiction are interesting, true, but her life story proves fascinating in its own right, unique in its particulars, and emblematic of the constricting reality that intelligent, accomplished women routinely faced before the women’s movement made it possible for them to be masters of their own destiny. Robert Weibezahl is the author of the novel The Wicked and the Dead.

 

It was common in the 19th century for a woman to adopt a male nom de plume in order to be taken more seriously as a writer or to preserve her privacy. By the 20th century, though, women had come into their own in literary terms, and a practice that had well served such writers […]
Pop CultureBiographyArts & Culture

Silver screen books

Review by Pat H. Broeske

Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture, is an illuminating celebration by Peter Kobel and the Library of Congress. With a foreword by passionate film preservationist Martin Scorsese, and an introduction by noted film historian Kevin Brownlow, this lavish book also boasts more than 400 images some never before seen in print. Writing with accessible scholarship, Kobel explores historic milestones (the French get credit for first projecting films publicly, but Americans turned the new art form into a business), technical triumphs, the great films and their filmmakers and the dawn of the star system. The big names are here Garbo, Pickford, Valentino as well as some you may not know/remember, including child star Baby Peggy and even Rin-Tin-Tin. (At the height of his fame, the Dog Wonder of the Screen received 10,000 fan letters a week.) Kobel also reveals how the various genres took shape (for instance, earliest depictions of American Indians showed them to be tragic heroes) and looks at often bypassed arenas, such as animation, the so-called race movies and even (who knew?) silent experimental films. An impressive work, the book has been published in tandem with a traveling film series of restored silent titles. Pass the popcorn, please.

FIGHTING THE SYSTEM
Ever wonder why certain folks became great stars, while others, equally talented, slipped through the shiny Hollywood cracks? In The Star Machine, film historian Jeanine Basinger examines the glory days of the studio system, from the 1930s to the beginning of the '50s. Through anecdotes and insight she depicts the creation and manipulation of stars including Errol Flynn, Lana Turner, Deanna Durbin, Loretta Young, Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power. Like trained ponies, they were expected to do as they were told and to keep prancing. Some balked; some misbehaved. Basinger looks at the consequences, and goes on to compare then and now, by deconstructing contemporary stars who've sought to take control of their own destinies.

CLAWS AND KITTEN
When it came to fighting control, and railing against authority, few bested Bette Davis. There have already been a number of Davis bios and she wrote several books of her own but Ed Sikov manages to bring fresh insight to Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis. The author of works on filmmaker Billy Wilder and actor Peter Sellers, Sikov is unapologetic about Davis' take-no-prisoners personality, matter-of-factly relating that she may have been a borderline personality. But, he reminds us, she was also a force of nature, a blazing talent [who] defined and sustained stardom for over half a century. She worked like a dog. Sikov goes behind the scenes, focusing on Davis' work, to probe her psyche. From her earliest roles to her lasting screen depictions (Jezebel, All About Eve and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? among them), he goes on to underscore her perseverance during darker days. A perpetual single mother (since all four marriages crashed), she once took out an industry trade ad that read, Situation Wanted, Women. She wasn't kidding: Davis went on to do episodic TV, talk shows and appeared on the lecture circuit. And though her latter years were marked by indignities, including health woes and a cruel tell-all by her daughter, Davis hung in there. Even after a debilitating stroke, and while battling breast cancer, she managed to complete three-and-a-half more films. Though Davis was not always likeable, there was no denying the legend.

Legendary sex goddess Marilyn Monroe has spawned a virtual cottage publishing industry, with the latest title coinciding with a merchandising line including fashions that celebrates icons of the Fox studio. Thus, Marilyn Monroe: Platinum Fox, is all about the movies not her tangled personal life, scandals, death theories, etc. Written by Cindy De La Hoz (author of the recent Lucy at the Movies: The Complete Films of Lucille Ball) this is a gorgeous coffee-table book that couldn't have happened without access to the Fox archives. Serving to underscore Monroe's unsurpassed incandescence are reproductions of rare photos, lobby cards and posters including one from the film Niagara, which breathlessly promised a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can't control. Hey, it was the '50s and Marilyn was a big reason the decade was so fabulous.

ON THE SMALL SCREEN
Fans of the long-running Bravo series Inside the Actors Studio will be especially taken with Inside Inside, a memoir by the show's effusive host (and executive producer and writer), James Lipton. Founder and dean of New York's Actors Studio Drama School, Lipton infuses his own colorful industry background and unfettered passion for the craft with anecdotes and interview highlights of performers as disparate as Tom Cruise, Hugh Grant, Paul Newman, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore and countless others.

So well known that he's become the subject of lampoons Will Ferrell's is especially dead-on Lipton has a can-do spirit that gives an inspirational lift to this look at his life's journey. A former student of Stella Adler, he also trained for a career in ballet and once contemplated working in the circus. He's been a radio actor, and he worked in TV (he played Dr. Dick Grant in that CBS chestnut, The Guiding Light, and produced Bob Hope specials). He made movies, wrote hit Broadway shows even a novel. And, he had the savvy to put together a televised program that entices big names to reveal (nearly) all to an auditorium filled with acting students. Briefly, Lipton cites Harrison Ford's thoughts about celebrity vs. private life, the personal woes of Billy Bob Thornton, and details Melanie Griffith's appearance as she struggled with rehab, and Michael J. Fox's as he fought the tremors of Parkinson's. And he remarks on the one that got away: despite all best efforts, he never got that interview with Marlon Brando.

Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture, is an illuminating celebration by Peter Kobel and the Library of Congress. With a foreword by passionate film preservationist Martin Scorsese, and an introduction by noted film historian Kevin Brownlow, this lavish book also boasts more than 400 images some never before seen […]

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