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Great Women Sculptors

The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLGBTQ+

American Teenager

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
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Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

irst steps on the career path “Not making a decision IS a decision,” says a friend. He should know. After graduating from a fine law school he lounged for two months on a sofa in his parents’ basement watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and all forms of daytime TV in his bathrobe. Was he afraid of work? No, he was avoiding the inevitable decision of what to do with his law degree. Not making a decision about a job meant he didn’t have to face the fact that he didn’t want to work for the traditional large law firm.

No time is more uncertain for college or professional school graduates than the summer they’re about to enter. Fortunately, recent career books offer valuable advice for making a smooth transition from school to work. Most experts recognize that step one in getting a job is defining what you really want to do with your career.

What’s Your Type of Career? Unlock the Secrets of Your Personality to Find Your Perfect Career Path by Donna Dunning utilizes a personality approach to finding the perfect career for you. Worksheets help you determine your personality type (analyzer? visionary? explorer?), then Dunning guides the novice through the options for each type. Don’t be embarrassed if you’re an introvert. Dunning highlights the usefulness of that personality type in the healing arts (not to mention writing) and outlines why some outgoing people may be drawn to certain careers. No Parachute Required: Translating Your Passion into a Paycheck and a Career by Jeff Gunhus is a soup-to-nuts career book with a twist. Hip and aware, Gunhus offers the traditional “How to Prepare for Your Job Search” stuff, but also starts and ends his book with the unconventional caveat that “it makes sense to do your soul-searching now, at the beginning of your career, and start on the right path the first time out of the gate.” A chapter on your inevitable and upcoming “Prelife Crisis” is priceless. Gunhus, 28, has experienced these feelings of angst and doubt up-close and personally, not to mention, recently. I loved his exercises to help weed parental expectations from your garden of experience (“My Tommy has always wanted to be a Doctor!”) and wish I had read this book before I filled my college course load with chemistry classes.

Rick Nelles, author of Proof of Performance: How to Build a Career Portfolio to Land a Great New Job, is a professional recruiter with 20 years of experience, but his book is about the times, right after college, when he made all his mistakes. Looking back, he says he waited until the last quarter of college to job search, winged it going into interviews (“thinking they would hire me on my good looks and great personality”) and didn’t even know what he wanted to do. In this book, he shows recent grads how to land a job by documenting their job skills and showing proof of their performance. Build Your Own Life Brand! by Stedman Graham is an atypical career book. The long-time companion of Oprah Winfrey, Graham owns a successful management and marketing consulting company. He shares his philosophy that “each of us has a unique blend of talents, knowledge and other personal assets” called a Life Brand. Borrowing from marketing strategy, Graham says “you create a method for sharing your gifts and putting them to their highest use” when you build the brand that is You. Above all, Graham advises, remember that transforming your talents, values and passions into your career will help to ensure that your work will be meaningful.

So how did my friend fare? He finally got off the couch and became a public defender. Later he took a job as the child advocate for a five-county court system. Recently, after soul-searching, he moved to a small law firm he loves. Life Brand, perfect personality matching, whatever you call it, with careful planning the right career choice lies just ahead.

irst steps on the career path “Not making a decision IS a decision,” says a friend. He should know. After graduating from a fine law school he lounged for two months on a sofa in his parents’ basement watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and all forms of daytime TV in his bathrobe. Was he afraid of […]
Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

t steps on the career path “Not making a decision IS a decision,” says a friend. He should know. After graduating from a fine law school he lounged for two months on a sofa in his parents’ basement watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and all forms of daytime TV in his bathrobe. Was he afraid of work? No, he was avoiding the inevitable decision of what to do with his law degree. Not making a decision about a job meant he didn’t have to face the fact that he didn’t want to work for the traditional large law firm.

No time is more uncertain for college or professional school graduates than the summer they’re about to enter. Fortunately, recent career books offer valuable advice for making a smooth transition from school to work. Most experts recognize that step one in getting a job is defining what you really want to do with your career.

What’s Your Type of Career? Unlock the Secrets of Your Personality to Find Your Perfect Career Path by Donna Dunning utilizes a personality approach to finding the perfect career for you. Worksheets help you determine your personality type (analyzer? visionary? explorer?), then Dunning guides the novice through the options for each type. Don’t be embarrassed if you’re an introvert. Dunning highlights the usefulness of that personality type in the healing arts (not to mention writing) and outlines why some outgoing people may be drawn to certain careers. No Parachute Required: Translating Your Passion into a Paycheck and a Career by Jeff Gunhus is a soup-to-nuts career book with a twist. Hip and aware, Gunhus offers the traditional “How to Prepare for Your Job Search” stuff, but also starts and ends his book with the unconventional caveat that “it makes sense to do your soul-searching now, at the beginning of your career, and start on the right path the first time out of the gate.” A chapter on your inevitable and upcoming “Prelife Crisis” is priceless. Gunhus, 28, has experienced these feelings of angst and doubt up-close and personally, not to mention, recently. I loved his exercises to help weed parental expectations from your garden of experience (“My Tommy has always wanted to be a Doctor!”) and wish I had read this book before I filled my college course load with chemistry classes.

Rick Nelles, author of Proof of Performance: How to Build a Career Portfolio to Land a Great New Job, is a professional recruiter with 20 years of experience, but his book is about the times, right after college, when he made all his mistakes. Looking back, he says he waited until the last quarter of college to job search, winged it going into interviews (“thinking they would hire me on my good looks and great personality”) and didn’t even know what he wanted to do. In this book, he shows recent grads how to land a job by documenting their job skills and showing proof of their performance. Build Your Own Life Brand! by Stedman Graham is an atypical career book. The long-time companion of Oprah Winfrey, Graham owns a successful management and marketing consulting company. He shares his philosophy that “each of us has a unique blend of talents, knowledge and other personal assets” called a Life Brand. Borrowing from marketing strategy, Graham says “you create a method for sharing your gifts and putting them to their highest use” when you build the brand that is You. Above all, Graham advises, remember that transforming your talents, values and passions into your career will help to ensure that your work will be meaningful.

So how did my friend fare? He finally got off the couch and became a public defender. Later he took a job as the child advocate for a five-county court system. Recently, after soul-searching, he moved to a small law firm he loves. Life Brand, perfect personality matching, whatever you call it, with careful planning the right career choice lies just ahead.

t steps on the career path “Not making a decision IS a decision,” says a friend. He should know. After graduating from a fine law school he lounged for two months on a sofa in his parents’ basement watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and all forms of daytime TV in his bathrobe. Was he afraid of […]

Of Blood and Sweat

Some histories are so loaded with documents and statistics that they numb the reader, but Clyde W. Ford’s Of Blood and Sweat feels immediate and alive.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Review

Review by bookpagedev

n the trail of A Cold Case As decent and democratic and objective as you think yourself to be and probably are, when you watched the movie A Few Good Men and heard Jack Nicholson as the tough Marine colonel shout, “You can’t handle the truth!” you may have felt a small, silent, shameful twinge of agreement. We often want someone to make our problems go away without being told the truth about the messy, not-necessarily-legal ways they were dealt with.

An unspoken understanding of this nature forms part of the background of A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch, whose previous book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award. Gourevitch has produced another potential award-winner in this slim account of the solving of a 27-year-old double murder in New York City.

In relating his part of the story to the author, Andy Rosenzweig, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney, acknowledges without noticeable bitterness this flexible standard toward truth on the part of the public. However, people who know Rosenzweig tell the author that it was a message from another movie High Noon, in which an upright lawman is abandoned by a spineless citizenry that has most influenced the investigator: This is a twilight world in which the two sides of the law are not always distinct and for which Rosenzweig, though an honorable cop, always felt an affinity.

To call the murder in question here an unsolved crime is not totally accurate: Everyone knew who shot and killed Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn on February 18, 1970, at McGinn’s apartment after having tangled with the pair earlier in the evening at the restaurant McGinn owned. The murderer was Frankie Koehler, a man with an extensive criminal past, including an earlier homicide in 1945 when he was only 15 years old. After the slayings, Koehler simply disappeared.

Rosenzweig knew both victims and liked Glennon especially. He had not been in on the original investigation and was reminded of the case by a chance incident in January 1997. He began to look into it and discovered that somewhere along the line the case had been closed because Koehler had been presumed for no good reason, as it turns out dead.

Rosenzweig got permission to reopen the “cold case.” Gourevitch recounts some neat deduction and legwork until Koehler was tracked down in California, living under another name. The story has about it more than a whiff of Dashiell Hammett (a quotation from one of whose stories serves as an epigraph), the Hammett of the grim, relentless harshness of life.

It is not revealing too much to say that Koehler was captured on a return trip to New York, because half of the book is about Koehler’s confession and defense. In some respects this is the most fascinating part of the story. In the videotaped confession, which Gourevitch says “has come to be regarded at the D.

A.’s office as one of the classic portraits of a criminal personality,” Koehler “is not confessing so much as taking credit for his crimes.” More than once Koehler speaks of his “desire to be understood not only as a murderer but also a sparer of life.” Koehler’s attorney, Murray Richman, a mob lawyer who revels in his lowlife connections, is a piece of work himself. Richman likes criminals for their “simplicity” and believes that “murderers are the straightest guys in the world.” In a way, he makes the reader think of John Mortimer’s British barrister, Horace Rumpole, who also has a fondness for his clients, except that Richman’s criminal contacts are considerably more dangerous and less charming than Rumpole’s “villains.” Koehler’s defense consisted primarily of a war of nerves between Richman and the prosecutors, who were worried about the problems an old case presented. Richman held out for the lowest sentence he could get. As for Koehler, in the letters he wrote while being held on Rikers Island he “seemed to believe the lashes of his own conscience were all the punishment he needed.” When Gourevitch went to California to see where Koehler had lived, he found that the murderer was remembered fondly by those who had known him. When he went to visit Rosenzweig, who had retired to run a bookstore in Rhode Island 12 days before Koehler’s sentencing, he found him working, unofficially, on another case.

The only thing wrong with this book is that it is over too quickly. We hunger to know even more about these intriguing characters.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

n the trail of A Cold Case As decent and democratic and objective as you think yourself to be and probably are, when you watched the movie A Few Good Men and heard Jack Nicholson as the tough Marine colonel shout, “You can’t handle the truth!” you may have felt a small, silent, shameful twinge […]
Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Batter up There are several schools of baseball. One follows numbers, the statistics that drive the game and rivet baseball fans. Another dwells on nostalgia, a sense that things were better, purer in the “old days.” Then there are those like Robert Benson, who take an almost spiritual approach, honoring the game as a precious legacy to be passed from one generation to the next.

In The Game: One Man, Nine Innings: A Love Affair With Baseball, Benson combines several perspectives: those of a writer, a father and, of course, a baseball fan. One can imagine accompanying the author to his game of choice, a rather ordinary minor league affair between the Iowa Cubs and the Nashville Sounds, as he sits back during the course of nine innings to ruminate on myriad topics. With writing that is both spare and reverential, Benson compares the plays of a game with the joys and sorrows of day-to-day living. He notes that “baseball is a game of routine things.” In the minor league game he chronicles, “Of the fifty-one outs, only three or four of them came on great plays, or even above average plays.” The Game will be categorized as a sports book, but like baseball itself, it’s a metaphor for life. Sometimes you hit a home run; sometimes you make an error. As the game winds down, the author hopes his children will one day recall the important life lessons it offers: “I wish for them that they will remember that there will be days when the best that can be done is to move the runner . . . that even the best of us . . . strike out a fair amount.”

Batter up There are several schools of baseball. One follows numbers, the statistics that drive the game and rivet baseball fans. Another dwells on nostalgia, a sense that things were better, purer in the “old days.” Then there are those like Robert Benson, who take an almost spiritual approach, honoring the game as a precious […]
NonfictionScienceMemoir

Wired for Love

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Interspersing memoir with science writing, Stephanie Cacioppo leads readers through the brain science of love and connection in Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection. At 37, Cacioppo was already a lauded neuroscientist. She’d chosen to study the neuroscience of love, even though her faculty adviser in Geneva had warned her against it, calling it career suicide. Still, she persevered, earning research spots at Dartmouth and the Swiss National Foundation. She and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to create a “map of love,” showing that the brain reacts to love in complex ways and that romantic feelings of love affect the brain differently than friendship or parental love.

Even so, Cacioppo had never fallen in love, or even had a serious boyfriend. Instead, she decided that her passion would be for work. Then, at a conference in Shanghai, she met John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago social neuroscientist who’d done groundbreaking work on loneliness, establishing it as a dangerous health condition that is as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. She felt an instant connection with him, despite the 20-year age difference. After a period of emailing, they began dating long-distance and meeting up at conferences.

They were married soon after. “Looking back, it’s unbelievable to me that neither of us were struck by the irony of our situation, that John and I, which is to say Dr. Love and Dr. Loneliness, were not practicing what we preached,” Cacioppo writes. “Our research, from opposite ends of the spectrum, emphasized the human need for social connection. And yet both of us had the hubris to think we could go it alone.” Once connected, each spouse’s work informed the other’s. They shared a desk at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where they both worked, and at home.

A few years into their marriage, John was diagnosed with a deadly form of cancer. Cacioppo details the closeness they felt during his treatment, as well as her complicated grief after his death and her slow return to life. She is an engaging guide through the scientific portions of the book, and her own experiences of connection and loss enrich the narrative. Together, these intertwined strands of science and personal narrative make for a sprightly, illuminating book.

Interspersing memoir with research, neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo offers a sprightly, illuminating look at the science of love and connection.
NonfictionFilmBiography

Truly, Madly

Review by Anne Bartlett

The 1939 movie Wuthering Heights epitomizes golden-age Hollywood romance. However, the process of making the film was another matter entirely. It was a miserable set, in large part because Laurence Olivier, the brilliant British actor playing Heathcliff, hated his co-star, Merle Oberon, and regularly undermined her. But he would have hated any co-star who wasn’t his girlfriend, Vivien Leigh, whom he had failed to get hired for the part and with whom he was wildly in love.

As any movie buff knows, Leigh was about to become a star in her own right in another 1939 film, Gone With the Wind (also a miserable set). Olivier and Leigh had left their respective spouses and children for each other and would marry in 1940. They were the supernova show-biz couple of their day, paving the way for Liz-and-Dick and Brangelina. With Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century, Stephen Galloway, former editor of the Hollywood Reporter, has written an astute biography of that marriage, with wonderfully dishy details of productions such as Rebecca and A Streetcar Named Desire.

The Oliviers’ fabled partnership reached its peak on stage in the 1940s and ’50s before ending in chaos in 1960. The biggest factor in the marriage’s collapse was Leigh’s bipolar disorder, which was little understood at the time and ineffectively treated. Medical understanding has evolved immeasurably since Leigh’s death in 1967, and Galloway reexamines her mood swings, public mania, infidelity and alcohol abuse in light of psychiatric advances.

In the early days of their relationship, Leigh was the more likable of the two. Olivier had enormous talent, but he was shallow and deceitful. However, he did “truly, madly” love Leigh, and he tried his best to help her before her unfathomable behavior finally confounded him. Leigh died at only 53 of tuberculosis. Olivier, afflicted by multiple painful illnesses, lived until 82, and Galloway’s account of his last years is moving.

Olivier dominated the English-language stage and reinvented Shakespearean cinema. Leigh’s film acting remains incandescent, although her indifference to Gone With the Wind’s racism receives due criticism in this book. Anyone who loves the dramatic arts will be engrossed by Galloway’s perceptive history of this iconic duo.

Anyone who loves the dramatic arts will be engrossed by Stephen Galloway’s perceptive account of supernova show-biz couple Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

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