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NonfictionPop Culture

A hip and culinary trip to China

Review by Heather Seggel

It’s fitting that Eddie Huang’s follow-up to the bestselling Fresh Off the Boat—adapted into a TV series—opens as he phonetically transcribes a Charlie Parker sax riff. Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China is a foodie travelogue and comic tour de force, but it’s also something of a word-jazz concerto.

The setup is simple: Feeling pressured by his success, Huang ventures to Chengdu to cook with street vendors and dig further into the roots of the food he’s known for. He also plans to fly his girlfriend out and propose. 

Huang’s hip-hop patois infuses his writing, whether he’s describing a bout of chili-induced diarrhea (and there are several) or exploring the difficult family dynamics that shaped him as a young man. He captures the pressures of the kitchen, which are even greater while he’s in China, since as often as not he’s cooking in a converted closet, battling chili fumes along with carbon monoxide. 

Huang’s romance takes some unexpected twists (on his way to propose he is almost left behind at a rest stop where he’s once again paying for his gastronomic bravery), but Double Cup Love has more to offer than that. The rooftop parties and underground clubs, chewy intestines and all that swagger reveal a family story that’s tender at the core.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s fitting that Eddie Huang’s follow-up to the bestselling Fresh Off the Boat—adapted into a TV series—opens as he phonetically transcribes a Charlie Parker sax riff. Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China is a foodie travelogue and comic tour de force, but it’s also something of a word-jazz concerto.
NonfictionPop CultureArts & Culture

Hollywood’s lovers and fighters

Review by Pat H. Broeske

Forget Ben, Jennifer and the nanny. Don’t give a second thought to Gwen and Gavin. Contemporary Splitsville sagas are dullsville compared to the craziness of Golden Age Hollywood stars Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. Their four decades-plus romance, detailed in John Brady’s juicy and judiciously reported Frank & Ava: In Love and War, was the stuff of both dreams and nightmares and makes for a doozy of a read.

They met in the 1940s at the trendy Mocambo club on the Sunset Strip. Budding actress Gardner was with new husband and MGM star Mickey Rooney. (Yes, Mickey Rooney.) Frank Sinatra, a family man who was nonetheless on the prowl, ambled over and said to her, “Hey, why didn’t I meet you before Mickey?” 

Rooney and Gardner lasted less than a year. Ditto Gardner’s subsequent marriage to big band leader (and famed Lothario) Artie Shaw. Inevitably, Sinatra and Gardner married. He called her Angel, she called him Francis. He liked being in charge, she hated being told what to do. His career was at a crossroads. She had become a box office queen.

They both liked booze and drama. They’d fight, she’d threaten to leave, he’d threaten suicide. They once tore into the desert night—in a Caddy—with a bottle and a pair of Smith & Wesson .38s. They shot out shop windows in a small burg. The cops got involved. Sinatra made a phone call and no charges were filed. 

Best known previously for his tell-alls about writing (The Craft of Interviewing), former Writer’s Digest editor Brady once worked for Reprise Records, where he met Sinatra and many of his musical chums. The gig obviously resonated. In addition to original interviews, the book makes adroit use of the author’s knowledge of the music scene, Sinatra in particular, along with sourced materials in previous works. 

More than a story of a dizzying love affair, Frank & Ava depicts the profound aftershocks of a relationship. For instance, Gardner campaigned for Sinatra to get the role of doomed Angelo Maggio in the screen version of the era’s hot book, From Here to Eternity. He got the part, won an Oscar and saw his movie career skyrocket. Hers, alas, went the way of aging actresses. 

The marriage fizzled, too. Divorced, they went their colorful ways. But they kept reconnecting, even talking remarriage. The sequel never happened.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Forget Ben, Jennifer and the nanny. Don’t give a second thought to Gwen and Gavin. Contemporary Splitsville sagas are dullsville compared to the craziness of Golden Age Hollywood stars Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. Their four decades-plus romance, detailed in John Brady’s juicy and judiciously reported Frank & Ava: In Love and War, was the stuff of both dreams and nightmares and makes for a doozy of a read.
NonfictionPop CultureHistory

Behind America’s boardgame

Review by Keith Herrell

There it is, right at the beginning of the rules pamphlet included with our family’s well-worn Monopoly game. “In 1934, Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, presented a game called Monopoly to the executives of Parker Brothers.” Sounds simple enough. But as Mary Pilon shows in The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, the road to fame for Monopoly was circuitous.

For decades, the “inventor” of Monopoly was purported to be Darrow—a Depression-era unemployed salesman who drew up a board representing Atlantic City properties. “There was only one problem,” Pilon writes, with a journalist’s directness: “The story wasn’t exactly true.”

So what was true? Pilon gets to the bottom of the case with the quixotic tale of an economics professor who invented a game he called Anti-Monopoly and ended up battling Parker Brothers in court for 10 years. It’s a fascinating history, with featured roles for a group of Quakers and a turn-of-the-century feminist named Lizzie Magie, and side trips to a Delaware utopian community, Parker Brothers’ headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, and, of course, Atlantic City.

As for the “obsession, fury, and scandal” promised in the subtitle, it sounds like just another night of Monopoly in many households. But rest assured, there’s plenty of turmoil in this readable book. Read it, and the next time you’re circling the board with your Scottish terrier you’ll have a deeper understanding of Monopoly’s enduring popularity.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There it is, right at the beginning of the rules pamphlet included with our family’s well-worn Monopoly game. “In 1934, Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, presented a game called Monopoly to the executives of Parker Brothers.” Sounds simple enough. But as Mary Pilon shows in The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, the road to fame for Monopoly was circuitous.
NonfictionPop CultureBusiness & Finance

Spilling the beans

Review by Kelly Blewett

Remember the Beanie Babies? Peanut (a blue elephant), Lovie (a little lamb) and Cubbie (a Chicago bear) are just three of the beanbag animals highlighted in Zac Bissonnette’s strange, compelling book on the 1990s fad. Behind the Beanies was the meticulous, ambitious Ty Warner, a bizarre combination of wolf of Wall Street and master elf of Santa’s toy factory.

Warner comes vividly to life in The Great Beanie Baby Bubble through stories from his sister, two ex-girlfriends and dozens of former coworkers. Obsessed with the appearance of his plush cats, Warner plucked hairs around their eyes before trade shows so they could gaze at guests more persuasively. In fact, it was Warner’s obsession with detail that led to the strategy of “retiring” certain Beanies. As Warner tinkered with designs, changing a color from royal blue to light blue (as in Peanut’s case), Beanie collectors went into a frenzy to achieve a complete set. Readers will meet these collectors, from the first Chicago moms who made a killing, to the late arrivals, like a retired soap opera star who blew his children’s college fund on Beanie Babies.

When the market was rising, everyone—from Ty employees to shop owners to consumers—was exhilarated. The company had one of the first direct-to-consumer websites, which would announce upcoming retirees via a Beanie character who spoke in rhyme from the “Ty Nursery.” The secondary market went wild on a new website called eBay. But once the market bubble began to break, it broke hard. Bissonnette’s research into the history of speculative markets helpfully situates the Beanie phenomenon in a larger framework. The story is a Greek tragedy served with a brutal twist of American capitalism.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with author Zac Bissonnette.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Remember the Beanie Babies? Peanut (a blue elephant), Lovie (a little lamb) and Cubbie (a Chicago bear) are just three of the beanbag animals highlighted in Zac Bissonnette’s strange, compelling book on the 1990s fad. Behind the Beanies was the meticulous, ambitious Ty Warner, a bizarre combination of wolf of Wall Street and master elf of Santa’s toy factory.
NonfictionPop CultureHistory

America’s feminist superhero

Review by Alden Mudge

A harried reader could get the gist of The Secret History of Wonder Woman by opening it just past dead center and reading through the 16-page comic-book version of the story.

There you would learn, in brief, that William Moulton Marston, inventor of the lie detector test, came up with the idea for Wonder Woman in 1941. Also, that the Wonder Woman character drew on the feminism of Marston’s wife, Elizabeth Holloway, and of Olive Byrne, who joined the Marston household as a “housekeeper” and just happened to be the daughter of Ethel Byrne and niece of Margaret Sanger, two early, firebrand birth control activists. That under Marston, Wonder Woman enjoyed astonishing popular success, surpassed only by Superman and Batman. And that after his death, with the end of World War II and the dawn of the 1950s, Wonder Woman lost her superpowers and, like so many women who had worked in the war effort, was returned to domestic life.

But this barely scratches the surface of the personal and social history that Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and staff writer at the New Yorker, relates so well and so playfully. Her fascinating, often brilliant new book is profusely illustrated with photographs and cartoon panels. Marston turns out to be a brilliant, bombastic self-promoter, a terrible businessman but a wonderful father to the children he has with both Elizabeth and Olive (though their true parentage remains a secret to Olive’s children until later in their lives). Marston is a complicated personality whose marital relationships would seem to make him a very unlikely feminist. And yet he was—in ways that will lead readers to ponder political orthodoxies.

Through assiduous research (the endnotes comprise almost a third of the book and are often very interesting reading), Lepore unravels a hidden history, and in so doing links her subjects’ lives to some of the most important social movements of the era. It’s a remarkable, thought-provoking achievement.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A harried reader could get the gist of The Secret History of Wonder Woman by opening it just past dead center and reading through the 16-page comic-book version of the story.
Pop Culture

Recipe for success

Review by Heather Seggel

The Food Network and the stars it spawned are such ubiquitous figures in our kitchens and living rooms, it's hard to recall that at its founding the network was a seat-of-the-pants experiment that virtually everyone expected to fail. In From Scratch: Inside the Food Network, Allen Salkin takes us through that history and, as you might expect, things get dishy.

Initially conceived as a low-budget channel well-stocked with reruns of old Julia Child shows and newsy live programming (one exec called it “CNN with stoves”), the network hit pay dirt when agents began promoting chefs as “rock stars.” Prior to that time, even Wolfgang Puck often found himself on a coach flight to an ill-stocked kitchen with no support staff to prepare a “gourmet” meal for bored heads of state. No more. The network moved away from wonky programming and straight into the flying cleaver of “chunk”—that's chef-hunk—Emeril Lagasse. Viewership and sales took off, not with a whimper but a “Bam!”

Salkin uncovers great stories here. Agent Shep Gordon chose his profession at the urging of Jimi Hendrix while poolside in L.A. On her first day in the studio, where the talent were not allowed to stop taping for any reason, Rachael Ray oiled an overly hot pan and unleashed a four-foot column of flame. Her eyebrows survived and she soldiered on. Emeril Lagasse failed to see the writing on the wall as his expensive show lost viewers, and was devastated when he was abruptly canceled.

And those are just the big names! The power struggles behind the scenes are another thing entirely. Shows filmed in an unventilated room with electric ranges and no ovens (hosts would pretend to slide the food under the sink and stomp the floor to mimic the sound of an oven door) would not seem to be worth fighting over, but every change in power brought new rules and restrictions. When the New York-based network was purchased by Scripps News Service, a minor civil war over standards and practices erupted for fear that Southerners wouldn't appreciate risque humor. Good thing they weren't watching when someone spliced a minute of hardcore pornography into an episode of “Too Hot Tamales.”

From Scratch is a saucy tell-all, by turns shocking, funny and informative. Fans of the network or those who just love seeing how the show-biz sausage is made, this one's for you.

The Food Network and the stars it spawned are such ubiquitous figures in our kitchens and living rooms, it's hard to recall that at its founding the network was a seat-of-the-pants experiment that virtually everyone expected to fail. In From Scratch: Inside the Food Network,…

Pop CultureMusicMemoir

A memoir with a heart of gold

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

My, my, hey, hey, Neil Young is here to stay in this rambunctious, affectionate, humorous and celebratory memoir of his wild ride through life from the windswept prairies of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in “Mortimer Hearseburg,” his 1948 Buick hearse, to the windblown walls of Topanga Canyon.

With characteristic grace, he invites us to sit in the passenger seat as he drives down the many roads he's veered onto during his remarkable career, stopping along the way to introduce us to his beloved family, the musicians and friends with whom he has created memorable songs for generations, as well as his cars, guitars and ingenious inventions. One is the PureTone player that allows listeners to hear music the way musicians hear it when they're recording; another is the Lincvolt, a repowered 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible that runs on alternative energy sources.

From his first band in Canada, The Squires, to his days with country-rock pioneers Buffalo Springfield, and his short-lived and sometimes contentious association with super group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, to his solo career and ongoing involvement with Crazy Horse, Young has blown through the musical landscape like a hurricane with the force of his creative genius and innovative spirit. Throughout his career, he has embraced various musical styles, tinkering with new sounds and creating enduring songs such as "Cinnamon Girl," "Down by the River," "Helpless," "Heart of Gold," "The Needle and the Damage Done," and "Harvest Moon," among many, many others. Reflecting on the death of his dear friend Ben Keith, the pedal steel guitar player who played with Young from his album Harvest (1972) to late 2009, Young offers his thoughts on the central role of music in his life: "When music is your life, there is a key that gets you to the core. . . . Crazy Horse is my way of getting there. That is the place where music lives in my soul."

Young's life has not always been easy. He recovered after painful treatments from a childhood bout with polio, weathered major epileptic seizures and learned to live with his condition, and raised two sons, Zeke and Ben, with severe physical impairments. Out of this experience with his sons, he and his wife Pegi built The Bridge School that assists children with severe physical conditions and complex communication needs. In the face of such challenges, Young shares his deep gratitude for life: "I accept the extreme nature of my blessings and burdens, my gifts and messages, my children with their uniqueness, my wife with her endless beauty and renewal."

Along this journey, Young offers insights about former band mates, like David Crosby, Graham Nash, Richie Furay and close friend Stephen Stills. "Stephen and I have this great honesty about our relationship and get joy from telling each other observations from our past," he writes.

Young feels like he's massaging his soul when he makes music, and he makes some of his finest music in this lyrical memoir, massaging our souls by hitting just the right chords with his words.

My, my, hey, hey, Neil Young is here to stay in this rambunctious, affectionate, humorous and celebratory memoir of his wild ride through life from the windswept prairies of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in “Mortimer Hearseburg,” his 1948 Buick hearse, to the windblown walls of Topanga Canyon.

With…

Pop CultureArts & Culture

Songs in our hearts

Review by bookpagedev

Another new book reminds us that Broadway and Hollywood have been carrying on an affair, set to music, since the 1920s. A Fine Romance: Hollywood/ Broadway is a lovingly produced celebration of the relationship that became a marriage. Darcie Denkert makes her case by devoting chapters to productions such as West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Cabaret and Chicago, tracing the various transformations from stage to screen. Case in point: Chicago, based on the sensational Jazz Murders of 1924, was first a 1926 play and then a silent film, and was remade in 1942. Jump to the ’60s, and Bob Fosse’s search for a production to feature Gwen Verdon. Thus, the Broadway musical. And finally, the Oscar-winning film of 2002.

Another new book reminds us that Broadway and Hollywood have been carrying on an affair, set to music, since the 1920s. A Fine Romance: Hollywood/ Broadway is a lovingly produced celebration of the relationship that became a marriage. Darcie Denkert makes her case by…
Pop CultureArts & Culture

Songs in our hearts

Review by bookpagedev

Ken Bloom’s new volume The American Songbook: The Singers, The Songwriters &andamp; The Songs provides thoughtful analysis and vital perspective on the sounds and compositions from the era before Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis. Bloom, who is a respected authority on the pre-rock period, carefully distinguishes between the many idioms that emerged, from the marches and minstrel tunes of the late 1800s to the ragtime, boogie-woogie, barrelhouse piano, Broadway musicals and big bands of the ’20s, ’30s and early ’40s.

While profiling key creative figures (George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer) and vocalists (Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett), Bloom also shows how elements of blues and jazz influenced songwriters and performers not always identified with these styles, including Irving Berlin and Dinah Shore. He weaves in valuable side essays on related topics, such as war songs and holiday tunes, and spotlights the development of the music publishing industry and the role of song pluggers. The 600 photographs in the book add a stunning visual complement to the text. The American Songbook qualifies as the finest book currently available on the great standards and show tunes.

Ken Bloom's new volume The American Songbook: The Singers, The Songwriters &andamp; The Songs provides thoughtful analysis and vital perspective on the sounds and compositions from the era before Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis. Bloom, who is a respected authority on the pre-rock…
Pop CultureArts & Culture

Glamorous Garbo

Review by bookpagedev

One hundred years after her birth, iconic Greta Garbo is the subject of two extravagant volumes. Garbo: Portraits from Her Private Collection, literally illustrates Garbo’s mastery of image, and boasts rare family photos. Written by Scott Reisfield (a Garbo grand- nephew) and Hollywood glamour photography expert Robert Dance, the volume includes insightful essays. But the highlights are the tritone reproductions, which are made to look as though mounted on the page ˆ la a personal photo album.

When not writing about movies, Los Angeles-based journalist Pat H. Broeske likes to watch them.

One hundred years after her birth, iconic Greta Garbo is the subject of two extravagant volumes. Garbo: Portraits from Her Private Collection, literally illustrates Garbo's mastery of image, and boasts rare family photos. Written by Scott Reisfield (a Garbo grand- nephew) and Hollywood glamour photography…
Pop CultureArts & Culture

The man behind the music

Review by bookpagedev

The intimidating Frank Sinatra has been the subject of several biographies, most famously Kitty Kelley’s 1986 hatchet job. But to really understand Ol’ Blue Eyes is to follow his musical journey. The Sinatra Treasures is the perfect guide. The book’s (all lowercase) subtitle reads: intimate photos, mementos, and music from the sinatra family collection. Special “pocket” pages contain the mementos, including a newsletter from an early fan club (the Sighing Society of Sinatra Swooners); a mini-poster for Oceans 11 (the original film, not the throwaway remake); and reproductions of tickets to concerts in Rio and Japan. Neat, but the real highlights are the recollections and observations of friends, family and musical associates, interwoven with Sinatra’s own words, about his work on radio, in the recording studio, nightclubs and more. Terrific photographs, especially those with enduring pals (Sammy, Dino, Quincy Jones and others) further flesh out the subject as does a 12-track CD, which gives us Sinatra in song, interview and monologue. All that’s missing is the martini.

Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of Howard Hughes: The Untold Story, which would also make a terrific holiday gift.

The intimidating Frank Sinatra has been the subject of several biographies, most famously Kitty Kelley's 1986 hatchet job. But to really understand Ol' Blue Eyes is to follow his musical journey. The Sinatra Treasures is the perfect guide. The book's (all lowercase) subtitle reads: intimate…
NonfictionPop Culture

Object lessons

Review by bookpagedev

“A world drowning in objects,” the title of the introduction to Deyan Sudjic’s The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, is an apt description of the things-filled lives so many of us lead. It’s timely, too: rather than reveling in our objects, he explains, we’re feeling overwhelmed by them. How did it get this way? What makes one object more desirable than another? Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, intelligently and thoroughly explores the emotional and thought processes behind our appreciation of and craving for beautifully designed objects. In doing so, he provides a history of the people and innovations that have been instrumental in shaping our tastes and environment.

He turns his curator’s eye on everything from cars to computers to banknotes, and offers analyses of the evolution of objects’ roles as status indicators. For example, thanks to the advent of high-end computers, iPhones, BlackBerries and the like, the fountain pen is not as attractive a status object as it once was—but the watch is. Why? Because it’s jewelry, which has a “long history of addressing the emotional and tactile interaction between people and things.” Sudjic also examines how designer archetypes (the chair, lamp, certain types of architecture, etc.) frequently are re-imagined and addresses the role of fashion in design and vice versa.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is his explication of design vs. art, where he writes of the “taint of utility.” Or: art is art because it is useless, whereas design solves a problem and/or performs a function . . . but price “can have the effect of making a useful object useless” because something might be too pricey to use in everyday life. The Language of Things is filled with such moments of clarity, including Sudjic’s warning that, although design offers us a way of understanding the world, “We find ourselves seduced into constantly searching for the fleeting high of a new possession, a new purchase, and a fascination with the new.” An excellent point—and one of many in this insightful book, which is, of course, nicely designed.

Linda M. Castellitto is surrounded by designers in North Carolina.

 

“A world drowning in objects,” the title of the introduction to Deyan Sudjic’s The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, is an apt description of the things-filled lives so many of us lead. It’s timely, too: rather than reveling in our objects,…

NonfictionPop Culture

How they got to ‘Sesame Street’

Review by bookpagedev

To mark the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking, beloved children’s television show, "Sesame Street," Michael Davis has crafted a richly detailed history that includes behind-the-scenes looks at the program’s genesis, the creation of its quirky characters and the life stories of the founders of the first TV show that aimed to entertain and educate the preschool set.

Davis, a former preschool teacher and longtime journalist (including a nine-year stint as an editor and family television columnist for TV Guide), conducted five years of interviews and research, and his efforts show: Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is at once a fascinating, often funny story about a bunch of talented friends and colleagues who dared to try something new, and a point-by-point recounting of conversations, on-set hilarity and frustration, and the back-stories of the diverse group of people who became famous as characters and puppeteers on "Sesame Street."

The book begins on a sad note: Davis describes show co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney’s grief-stricken walk to the 1990 funeral of creative partner and world-famous Muppeteer Jim Henson. "The sidewalks were overrun by pedestrians . . . all moving toward the cathedral steps," Davis writes. Around 5,000 people attended the public memorial that day, from "Saturday Night Live" mastermind Lorne Michaels to actress Darryl Hannah, plus plenty of non-famous folks of all ages. Millions more have tuned in to the show—children, babysitters, parents, teachers, grandparents—since its debut on November 10, 1969.

Fun tidbits abound in Davis’ narrative, from the inspiration for Oscar the Grouch’s voice (a real-life cranky cabbie) to a hilarious description of a Cookie Monster game-show skit in which the big blue guy picks a "COOKIE!" over $25,000 in cash. Davis examines the social context of the show—the objections and challenges it has faced and the impact it’s had on education and parenting. Photo inserts offer a visual history, and statistics provide a sense of the show’s wide-reaching influence: 40 years later, "Sesame Street" reaches 8 million preschoolers via 350 PBS stations in the U.S. and it airs in 120 countries worldwide.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking, beloved children's television show, "Sesame Street," Michael Davis has crafted a richly detailed history that includes behind-the-scenes looks at the program's genesis, the creation of its quirky characters and the life stories of the founders of the…

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