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Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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NonfictionAudioMemoir

Manifesto

Review by Autumn Allen

British author Bernardine Evaristo narrates the audiobook of her inspirational memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (6 hours). She reads in a measured, clear voice and steady, unwavering tone that serve some parts of the book more than others. When she tells stories—episodes of her childhood in a biracial home, for example—or connects identity, politics and creativity with truths that resonate especially with creatives of color, the clarity of her narration enhances the listening experience. However, her slow pace and lack of variation in tone cause other sections to drag, especially when they’re not as relevant to the inspirational theme at the heart of the book. Some listeners may prefer to play this audiobook at an increased speed, perhaps while engaged in other activities, so as not to lose momentum.

For focused listeners seeking an audiobook for edification, not for leisure or relaxation, Manifesto is a smart choice.

Read our review of the print edition of ‘Manifesto.’

For focused listeners seeking an audiobook for edification, not for leisure or relaxation, Manifesto is a smart choice.
HistoryAmerican History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.

S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest, Vegas is also a magnet for the imagination. Inevitably the authors focus on the four-mile stretch of casinos called the Strip, but along the way they address many other aspects of the Industry as Las Vegas residents refer to gambling including entertainment, prostitution, organized crime, and law enforcement.

Let’s move from the narrowest focus to the broadest. Pete Earley, the investigative reporter who wrote The Hot House about Leavenworth, and also published exposes about the Aldrich Ames and John Walker spy cases, has a new book, Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas (Bantam, $26.95, 0553095021). He explores everything from legendary Las Vegas promoters such as Bugsy Siegel and Howard Hughes to the astonishing success of recent family-oriented entertainment facilities.

Several of Earley’s stories demonstrate the hypnotic pull the city exerts on residents who try to escape. One security guard tells the story of his experiences during the tragic fire that raged through the MGM Grand Hotel in 1980. Afterward, traumatized, he and his wife moved to Florida to flee the memories, but finally they returned because they missed the twenty-four-hour excitement. Andres Martinez covers some of the same territory from a completely different point of view in 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas (Villard, $25, 0375501819). Martinez gave himself a month to lose the $50,000 his publisher had given him to chronicle a gambling spree. Along the way he wrote a vivid, you-are-there account of his adventures, one day per chapter. Like Paul Theroux, Martinez seems part fascinated anthropologist and part happy-go-lucky adventurer. It’s an appealing combination, and makes for a personal take on an impersonal town. Unlike the other Vegas books described here, 24/7 is also extremely amusing.

Inevitably, the most varied of these volumes is an anthology, The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip (Oxford, $30, 0195130707), edited by journalism professor David Littlejohn. Fourteen vivid chapters by as many writers explore such topics as gambling, organized crime, the real estate boom, and locals who decry their home town’s reputation. For example, the chapter Law and Disorder details the countless scam artists who trail the nouveau riche foolish enough to flaunt their wealth. Skin City follows a limo driver who caters to whorehouse clients and acts as surrogate uncle to the prostitutes themselves; then it explores the strip joints of the city.

Broader still in scope is David Thomson’s new book, In Nevada, which bears the ambitious subtitle The Land, the People, God, and Chance. You’ll recognize Thomson’s name from his several previous books, including Rosebud, his biography of Orson Welles, and Beneath Mulholland, a lively tour of Hollywood history. From early nuclear testing to recent theological battles, he prowls his self-assigned turf with scrupulous attention. He refutes those who consider Vegas hell on Earth: Hell is rebuke, torture, and eternal punishment for those who have sinned. Las Vegas may be founded on a paradox, or a trick, but the idea that you will play and strive and then lose is not hellish. For many of us, it’s a profound and absorbing metaphor for life. Thomson mentions that, because he normally writes about film, people couldn’t understand why he was writing about Nevada. If I sometimes seem to concentrate on film, why, really, it’s just a way into life, and words, and wondering what you can believe. For Thomson, as for the authors of these four books, that is precisely what Las Vegas is a way into many other things that seem to converge in the near-mythical city that rises from the desert like a neon mirage.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.

S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As…

NonfictionMemoirEuropean History

The Nazis Knew My Name

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Magda Hellinger was a 25-year-old Jewish kindergarten teacher when she was deported to Auschwitz from Slovakia in March of 1942. She was one of the few who survived more than three years in a concentration camp, eventually relocating to Australia, where she lived to be almost 90. During her lifetime, Hellinger shared her experiences in interviews with organizations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, all while secretly writing a memoir of her experiences at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Nazis Knew My Name is grounded in that memoir, self-published in 2003, but enhanced by Hellinger’s daughter, Maya Lee, who has added further research and details from her mother’s oral testimonies. The result is a compelling and seamless portrait of a young woman who managed to survive and save others through cunning bravery and compassionate leadership.

At the core of Hellinger’s approach was this: “I constantly encouraged women to work together—a very simple form of resistance. A lonely, isolated woman was always more vulnerable than one who had others looking out for her.” Her determination and use of resistance tactics emerge time and again in this chronological account of her imprisonment, which lasted until the end of World War II.

When Hellinger was given the role of block leader at Auschwitz, she realized it was crucial that the prisoners under her charge avoid any behavior that would attract attention from Nazi officials. She therefore focused on trying to keep the women under her care as healthy as possible, making sure newcomers understood the rules of the camp and warning them of the most volatile guards. And while it was dangerous to challenge SS officers directly, at key moments Hellinger did exactly that, often risking her own life to win some small concession, such as replacing worn clothing for the prisoners.

The strain of Hellinger’s various roles must have taken an enormous psychological toll. At one point, she had 30,000 women under her care, yet she didn’t falter and always returned to the touchstone of cooperation. She mobilized others to improve sanitary conditions, ensure that food was distributed fairly and hide the most vulnerable prisoners to prevent them from being selected for the gas chamber. “If we could do these things, we might save a few lives, or make life a little more bearable,” Hellinger writes. “But we had to work together.”

The Nazis Knew My Name offers dreadful insights into the workings of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but at its heart, it remains an extraordinary portrait of one young woman who fought for others in the midst of unimaginable horror.

Holocaust survivor Magda Hellinger offers a compelling memoir of fighting for others in the midst of unimaginable horror.
Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come…
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

Review by Roger Bishop

The so-called lost generation of American writers and other expatriates began to return home in the late 1920s. By contrast, foreign correspondents became more concerned with international politics and began to venture abroad more often. As a result, what Americans understood about world events in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s came largely from these U.S. newspaper correspondents. In her luminous, extensively researched and beautifully written Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War, historian Deborah Cohen brilliantly captures the complicated personal and professional lives of that period’s four most influential journalists, all close friends, who witnessed the rise of fascism and communism, the powder keg of the Middle East after the Balfour Declaration and much more.

Dorothy Thompson saw journalism as her era’s “most representative form of letters,” as the theater or the novel had been for other periods. John Gunther described their profession by saying, “We were scavengers, buzzards, out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped.” These two journalists, plus Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean and H.R. Knickerbocker, felt the need to go beyond objective reporting and convey what they thought and felt about the rise of dictators and the strong chance of war, which set their reporting apart. Drawing from abundant primary sources, Cohen brings these four reporters, as well as Gunther’s wife, Frances, vividly to life in Last Call at the Hotel Imperial. Their disagreements, approaches to getting stories, excessive drinking, infidelities, ambitions, achievements and disappointments are covered in detail—as well as their interactions with figures such as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mahatma Gandhi, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud, Jawaharlal Nehru and Josef Stalin’s mother.

Sheean’s memoir of his experiences in China and Soviet Russia was a bestseller during his lifetime, as was his biography of Thompson’s marriage to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. Thompson became a prominent commentator and activist, and at one point she and Eleanor Roosevelt were called the most influential women in the country. Between the 1930s and ’50s, Gunther had more American bestsellers, both fiction and nonfiction, than all but one other author. Knickerbocker was an outstanding reporter but also an alcoholic, and Cohen explores the professional consequences of his condition with sensitivity. He eventually recovered and returned to work, only to be killed in a plane crash in India when he was only 51 years old.

Cohen’s book is a remarkable and exceptionally reader-friendly account of the lives of an extraordinary group of writers and people.

In Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, historian Deborah Cohen brilliantly captures the complicated lives of some of America’s most influential journalists.
Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come…

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