New Today: Inklings by Jeffrey Koterba

The debut work of writer, musician and political cartoonist Jeffrey Koterba is published today. Inklings (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) tells the author’s own story with the aid of strong graphic elements, without the maudlin self-pity often associated with works of that genesis.

In his bio, Koterba tells us that “during the summer of 1978 [I] was struck by lightning and lived to tell about it.” He makes it sound like an advantage -- a thing to have survived and gained strength from, rather than a horrid obstacle which had to be overcome.

That pretty much describes all of Inklings. Koterba’s inky stylings are luminous, yes. But so is the spirit that drives them. Inklings is an almost rabidly optimistic look at a difficult childhood and coming-of-age from the hands of a fiendishly talented artist.

If Inklings is just the beginning, I can hardly wait to see what is yet to come.

New in Paperback: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

It’s not that Warren Buffett gave Alice Schroeder permission to write his biography, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam). He hand-picked her, a move typical of the man many consider to be one of the most successful business people in the world. And typical of Buffett’s style, he chose right.

Former Morgan Stanley analyst Schroeder’s in-depth portrait of Buffett is better, even, than one might imagine. Buffett gave Schroeder full access: spending many hours with her and talking candidly about his personal life and his business. Nor is The Snowball simply sunshine. The Oracle of Obama comes across as extremely human: strong, assured, deeply intelligent, but flawed, of course, and sometimes even frail. More importantly, The Snowball delivers on the promise every biography makes but few can dish up: careful readers leave feeling as though a secret has been shared -- several, really -- and that the answer to an important question is within reach.

When the book was released early in 2008, The Los Angeles Times said, “The Snowball is likely to remain the most authoritative portrait of one of the most important American investors of our time.” We agree.

Biography: Stitches: A Memoir by David Small

David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir (McLelland & Stewart/W.W. Norton) is fantastic. As good or better than the most celebrated graphic novels that it will inevitably be compared to. Stitches is all the more compelling because it is not a novel at all. Rather, it is a graphic telling of author and illustrator David Small’s early life.

This is David through the Looking Glass as seen by David Lynch or perhaps Tim Burton, a dark and often disturbing graphic glimpse at a childhood that many of us might have thought was best left alone. Small takes us through the dark corridors of his childhood in Detroit in the 1950s, the son of a radiologist father whose constant x-raying ultimately gives the boy cancer. And things go downhill from there.

Stitches is a huge distance from the work Small is best known for. He has illustrated over 40 children’s books and won the most prestigious awards available to him in the process. It’s not hard to see why: Small is hugely talented and his understanding of visual storytelling is complete. Stitches is undoubtedly one of the best books of 2009.

New This Month: The Last Founding Father by Harlow Giles Unger

Harlow Giles Unger is one of those authors with the talent and skill -- not to mention passion -- to breathe life into history. You don’t have to read very far in his 16th book, The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness (Da Capo) to understand this:

The world was awash with war when James Monroe was born in the spring of 1758. A dozen nations were spilling the blood of millions across four continents, and the seas between them, in what was then called the “Great War for Empire.”

In The Last Founding Father, Unger builds a case for the importance of a vastly overlooked and underrated figure, America’s fifth President, James Monroe.

Monroe’s presidency made poor men rich, turned political allies into friends, and united a divided people as no president had done since Washington. The most beloved president after Washington, Monroe was the only president other than Washington to win reelection unopposed.

There’s more, of course. A lot more. Unger delivers his material on a wave of adventure and a compelling sense of importance. You won’t ever see the early history of America in quite the same way.

Biography: After the Falls by Catherine Gildiner

Ten years after the publication of Too Close to the Falls, the critically acclaimed biography of growing up Gildiner in Lewiston, New York, clinical psychologist -- and sometime writer -- Catherine Gildiner brings us another chunk of her life in After the Falls (Knopf Canada). This time out Gildiner explores her precocious coming-of-age in the 1960s.

Pretty much as After the Falls opens, Gildiner bridges her old life with the one that’s about to begin:

As the car chugged toward the top of the escarpment, I, like Lot’s wife, looked back at the town below me. I had no idea then that I was leaving behind the least-troubled years of my life. Strange, since I felt there was no way I could cause more trouble than I had in Lewiston.

On the surface of things, there’s not much here. Let’s face it: book one dealt with the childhood years of a non-celebrity. Someone who most of us probably would not be that interested in knowing more about. Book two deals with the same person’s teenage years. And a third book (one can only imagine the Falls allusions) is currently under Gildiner’s pen. But Gildiner’s successful telling of these tales is as much about her perspective as it is about her experience. That, of course, and charm. Is there sometimes too much charm? Maybe just a little. But she is an ordinary person doing -- mostly -- fairly ordinary things, but relating them in an extraordinarily skillful way. In the end, I think, she entertains us by reminding of us our own specialness. A fantastic gift.

Film rights have been optioned.

Biography: Imagine: A Vagabond Story by Grant Lingel

In 2005, not many credits shy of a college degree, Western New York student Grant Lingel knew he wanted something else.

“Nothing made me different than most people at twenty-two,” Lingel writes in Imagine: A Vagabond Story (Langdon Street Press). “I was broke, scared, clueless, and annoyed. College debt was up to my ears, and there was no clear direction down any particular path.” When a path didn’t present itself, he bought a one-way ticket to Mexico and, with $300 in his pocket, he left his life behind, trading in the safety of the life his middle class white American upbringing had assured him for a sea of question marks in parts unknown.

Lingel is no Kerouac and Imagine is certainly no On the Road but Lingel’s earnest ramblings have a certain youthful appeal. It’s good to know, too, that the more things change, the more they stay the same and even children of the high tech age (Lingel was born in 1983) can be called beyond the safety of their laptops, PDAs and entertainment consoles.

Excerpt: The Michael Jackson Tapes by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

In 2000–2001, Michael Jackson sat down with his close friend and spiritual guide, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, to record what turned out to be the most intimate and revealing conversations of his life. It was Michael’s wish to bare his soul and unburden himself to a public that he knew was deeply suspicious of him. The resulting thirty hours are the basis of The Michael Jackson Tapes, recently published by Vanguard Press. From the book:

“I am scared of my father to this day. My father walked in the room -- and God knows I am telling the truth -- I have fainted in his presence many times. I have fainted once to be honest. I have thrown up in his presence because when he comes in the room and this aura comes and my stomach starts hurting and I know I am in trouble. He is so different now. Time and age has changed him and he sees his grandchildren and he wants to be a better father. It is almost like the ship has sailed its course and it is so hard for me to accept this other guy that is not the guy I was raised with. I just wished he had learned that earlier.”

The full excerpt is here.

Snowbird Hits the Road

Iconic Canadian singer, Anne Murray, has announced a cross-country tour in support of her memoir, All of Me (Knopf Canada), which goes on sale near the end of October.

Knopf Canada says the book will offer details of the singer’s 40-year career, including her start in the coal-mining town of Springhill, Nova Scotia.

“Murray achieved her first gold record in 1970 with Snowbird,” says Knopf Canada, “and went on to rack up a string of top-selling hits including Talk It Over in the Morning, What About Me and You Needed Me.

Biography: Marcus Aurelius: A Life by Frank McLynn

Frank McLynn is a historian of some note. The author of biographies on as historically diverse a cast as Robert Louis Stevenson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Charles Stuart and Lord Stanley, McLynn was awarded the 1985 Cheltenham Prize for Literature (for The Jacobite Army in England) and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Literature at Strathclyde University. All of this is not shorthand for saying that McLynn brings substantial credits and busloads of credibility with him to the writing desk. Which is a good thing because, despite the sparkling nature of his topic here, Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Da Capo) is a bit of a slog.

Don’t get me wrong: one gets the feeling that everything one reads in the book is correct. Everything. But -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- McLynn writes like an academic. Marcus Aurelius: A Life is dense and distant and -- perhaps as a result -- seems very, very, very long. Actually, at nearly 700 pages, it is very, very, very long. Not that I mind long books but there’s very little here that is joyous.

There is a self-contradiction right at the heart of the Stoic’s version of goodness or virtue, which is compounded when we come to discuss their conception of evil. We are constantly told that the only good is moral good and that what defines moral good is that it should conform with the law of reason and be located within the domain of humanity…

And so on. Not necessarily what one signs up for when wanting to learn about one of the original philosopher kings.

That said, one never gets the feeling that Marcus Aurelius: A Life is not perfectly researched and accurately put down -- or, at least, as much as history will allow. That is to say that, if the ride is not joyous, it is at least correct. If you want to discover all that is known about Marcus Aurelius and you only want to look in one place, this, then, is certainly it.

Biography: Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life by Michael Greenberg

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life by Michael Greenberg. Says Leach:

By the time he wrote Hurry Down Sunshine, a memoir of his daughter’s descent into mental illness, Michael Greenberg had been plying his trade, with intermittent success, for over two decades. Sunshine changed all that, catapulting Greenberg to enormous fame. Literature, it seems, is no longer sufficient diversion: we have become a society in love in other people’s suffering. We want the real, the screams and rants, the pills and pains, the hospitalizations and ensuing insurance battles. And Greenberg, who has spent his adult writing life searching out such stories, suddenly had an awful tale crash into his family like a bomb. Voilá.

The full review is here.

Biography: The Supremes by Mark Ribowsky

As a culture, we just don’t seem to get sick of epic Motown girl group, The Supremes. We’ve had movies and television shows and, of course, books and books and books. None of this diminishes the pleasure of author Mark Ribowsky’s The Supremes (Da Capo). Nor, in some ways, does it diminish Ribowsky’s hubris: for himself and his chosen subjects. “[The Supremes] are the most important modern American music act after Elvis Presley, and this may well be the first real biography of them,” Ribowsky writes in his Introduction. Fair enough. Especially as he points out that this might have something to do with “the geology of female acts and gender-based assumptions of what is a ‘serious’ subject matter.”

As hinted at in these words, Ribowsky’s biography is no lightweight fan fluff. Rather, this is an intelligent biographic retrospective, worthy of any university press, but arguably more gripping. This is, after all, good stuff. From the girls’ 1960 audition for would-be starmaker Barry Gordy, to playing the Apollo and “living their dream” to the famous -- infamous -- riffs between the Supremes themselves that eventually led to their break-up.

As Ribowsky points out, “the Supremes’ saga has produced a good many fables, a convenient fallen dream girl in Diana Ross, and a heavy in Barry Gordy.” Good stuff, well handled. The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal is a terrific book.

Biography: Rich Brother, Rich Sister by Emi & Robert Kiyosaki

Money can’t buy happiness, that’s what everyone always says. And there are certainly things more important than gold and the path demanded to line your pockets with the stuff. Of course, the other part of the message is this: money can’t buy everything... but it really does not hurt.

All of this is severely underlined in Rich Brother, Rich Sister (Vanguard Press), a self-helpishly toned memoir from big bucks guru Robert Kiyosaki and his sister, Emi who, on her way to becoming the Venerable Tenzin Kacho, ordained by the Dalai Lama, clearly took a different path.

Kiyosaki is the author of 14 “Rich Dad” books, with titles like Rich Dad, Poor Dad; Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant; Rich Dad’s Prophecy and Rich Dad’s Escape From the the Rat Race. In all, nearly 26 million copies of Kiyosaki’s motivational books are in print.

Though the title is similar and the tone not overwhelmingly different form his previous books, the content of Rich Brother, Rich Sister is not the same in that it introduces a new co-author: Robert’s sister Emi, a Buddhist nun. At one point in Rich Brother, Rich Sister, Emi writes: “Robert and I share our adventure with you because it is not just a physical journey, but a spiritual one, too. Our lives have been ones of searching for an outward life that would reflect and mesh with our inner journeys, our quests of the heart.”

In some ways, that statement sums the book perfectly. A brace of siblings, two very different journeys and yet the smiles the peer out at us from the cover image are similar as, in the end, is the message that comes through. And what is that? Well, you knew all along, didn’t you? Wealth can be quantified in many ways. And what ways matter? Why, the ones that are important to you.

Biography: Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott by Zac Crain

Unsurprisingly, Black Tooth Grin (Da Capo) begins at the end. December 8, 2004, 24 years to the day that John Lennon died. “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott killed onstage, mid-song. The founder of the metal cover band Pantera, Abbott was not well known outside of his own metal community. However according to author Zac Crain, no one who knew the musician ever wondered why so many people called the act “the 9/11 of heavy metal.”

Of course, Black Tooth Grin doesn’t just tell the story of Abbott’s death. Much more time and detail is spent on the doomed musician’s life. Does D Magazine senior editor and music scribe heavyweight Crain sometimes move Black Tooth Grin towards the maudlin? Maybe only slightly. For the most part, though, Crain seems to hit all the right notes, skillfully blending fact with educated fancy, filling in the blanks and also imagining the what-might have beens and the nearly-weres.

Metal fans will, of course, find Black Tooth Grin to be a must-read but even those who had only barely heard of Abbott will find Crain’s book compelling. It’s a portrait of the music industry exactly as you always suspected it was… and yet entirely different. Fascinating.

Biography: So Long As Men Can Breathe by Clinton Heylin

A little over 400 years after the publication of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, biographer and Elizabethan and Jacobian scholar Clinton Heylin offers up the story of Shakespeare’s Sonnet’s unauthorized and unorthodox path to publication.

It is a testament to Heylin’s art and skill that not only do we sense the presence of the living, breathing Bard in So Long As Men Can Breathe (DaCapo), we also feel the connections between a beleaguered 17th century publishing industry and the one we’re saddled with today.

Heylin’s vision is both eye-opening and entertaining. You’ve never seen the publishing industry in this light. You’ve never seen Shakespeare in quite this light. But in the same book? This is one that can’t be missed.

New in Paperback: The Islamist by Ed Husain

More than two years after its initial publication, Ed Husain’s The Islamist comes to us in a sleek new paperback from Penguin.

The Islamist is riveting. This is partly due the extraordinary subject matter and partly to Husain’s calm and stately voice.

Though this is a topic that can invite strident voices to either side, Husain is all the more compelling for never really going there. Instead, he tells his tale simply: born in a Muslim but largely non-political London suburb, recruited to fundamentalism at 16 and swimming with extremists for five years. When he was in his early 20s, Husain rejected what was on offer, did his own research and found his way back to a more traditional form of the faith in which he had been raised. Much of The Islamist consists of this spiritual and physical journey and the view from inside is both frightening and enlightening, as is Husain’s personal journey back.

Since The Islamist was first published in 2007, it was nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the PEN/Ackerly Prize for Literary Autobiography as well as several other prizes.

If you’ve ever wondered about Islam and how it fits into the modern world, you’ll find The Islamist to be a worthwhile starting point as well as a deeply interesting read. Highly recommended.

Biography: Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown by Jennifer Scanlon

If Bad Girls Go Everywhere (Oxford University Press) is not quite the sexy tell-all of author and journalist Helen Gurley Brown’s life that the cover might hint at, in some ways, it is a great deal more. Right away, it should be understood that author Jennifer Scanlon is an academic. A Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, she’s an award-winning teacher and scholar as well as the author of books with titles like Significant Contemporary American Feminists and The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader.

In some ways this authorship -- as well as Scanlon’s academia informed approach to the former Cosmo editor’s life -- makes Bad Girls Go Everywhere the definitive work on Gurley Brown. One can not imagine anyone exceeding it. Thirty-four pages of footnotes and a very good index tell that story.

All of that said, even though the book lacks the puerile tone and surface facts of biographies written with a more popular readership in mind, Bad Girls Go Everywhere is a very interesting book. Even without the author’s obvious passion and knowledge of her subject, Gurley Brown’s life provides plenty of fuel for a well-stuffed biography. Most surprising of all -- at least, for this reader -- was the fact that, despite her reputation as a tough-as-nails professional women who never ate enough, Gurley Brown emerges Scanlon’s portraiture as a second wave feminist. Someone whose contributions to the women’s movement and to her gender’s real-world emancipation are perhaps too great to calculate.

Other books on 87-year-old Helen Gurley Brown’s life may well emerge over the years, but I imagine Bad Girls Go Everywhere will remain the definitive record of this remarkable journalist’s life.

Biography: We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals by Gillian Gill

When a biography is very good and is also big and muscular, it’s common to compare the book to a novel. And what makes such a comparison valid? Certainly not -- or hopefully not -- a strong element of fabrication. Rather, how the book impacts the reader draws compare. A very good biography -- well researched, written with passion and competence, on a subject worthy of close examination -- will sweep the reader away. Take him or her to the special place in the imagination that good books inhabit. The characters -- or in the case of biography, the subject -- seem emotionally to leap off the page. They become real.

If, in fact, this is what is necessary for a biography to be crooned over as novel-like, then We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals (Ballantine Books) will be. Author Gillian Gill is that rarest of combinations: an academic (she’s taught at Northeastern, Wellesley, Yale and Harvard) who knows just how to spin a tale. She demonstrated same with earlier biographies of Florence Nightingale, Agatha Christie and Mary Baker Eddy. In We Too she tells the complicated story of one history’s most important and complicated royal couples: Queen Victoria and her Prince Consort, Albert.

Gill reveals a relationship much more complex than has popularly been thought. A passionate marriage, but one fraught with power struggles as well as a family trying to find its way through the confounding corridors of a life lived on center stage.

“At a distance,” Gill writes, “Queen Victoria and Prince Albert can look like charming tapestry figures, unicorns among flowering meadows, irrelevant to our modern world. But if we listen to their voices up close, we find to our surprise a forerunner of today’s power couple -- a husband and wife, each with a different personal agenda, but lovers as well as partners in a great enterprise, both leading meticulously scheduled, constantly monitored, minutely recorded, and carefully screened lives.”

Gill brings us their voices. It’s impossible to imagine a better biography of this deeply interesting and historically important pair or a more vivid picture of the times in which they lived.

Biography: Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits by Barney Hoskyns

Appearances can be deceiving. For example, it is easy to look at Lowside of the Road (Broadway), veteran music writer Barney Hoskyns’ biography of music icon Tom Waits, and be impressed by the apparent breadth and depth of the work: it’s a big, fat book. However, once you delve in deeply, it becomes obvious that Hoskyns is stretching some very excellent material mighty thin. And that’s a shame because, while Hoskyns clearly has both the talent and the passion to write the definitive biography on this subject, Lowside of the Road isn’t it. And why? Because not only did Waits himself not cooperate, he instructed everyone he knew not to, as well.

Even so, Hoskyns does a credible job with what he does have: some really excellent interviews with both Waits and some of the people close to him, done, however, before work began on this biography. Hoskyns uses these along with some good old-fashioned footwork plus the view from his own not inconsiderable experience in the music industry to craft a very informative and informed view of the notoriously private Waits.

Does Lowside of the Road lack some of the depth a sanctioned biography would have had? I think so. But, in the end, this is currently as good as it gets. Want something closer to the artist himself? For that you’ll just have to wait.

Biography: Triangular Road: A Memoir by Paule Marshall

As literary tales go, Paule Marshall’s is a good one. It has elements of Cinderella, with the happy fact that no one was ever required to turn into a pumpkin.

Here is the how story goes. One day in 1965, Marshall -- just one magnificent novel and a single short story collection into her young career -- received a letter from the US Department of State. Before opening the envelope, she flopped the words around in her mind -- “State Department” -- and quite naturally thought the worst. “The letter just had to be bad news of some sort,” Marshall writes in Triangular Road (Basic Civitas). “Why else would the State Department be writing me?”

When she finally gathered her courage enough to open the letter, she found not a nightmare, but a young writer’s fantasy. The world-renowned author and poet Langston Hughes would soon be conducting a month-long cultural tour of Europe and had insisted that “two young writers, of his choosing, be included on the tour.” Did Marshall wish to be one of them?

Triangular Road is not Marshall’s story of that tour. Rather it is, in some rather important ways, her own story. From a historical standpoint, it is perhaps more important to note that the book also tells the story of her stories. Or rather, it shares the experiences that fueled the literary journeys this marvelously talented writer has shared with us.

It’s a slender book; an easy read. A love song to a life well-spent, published on the 50th anniversary of Brown Girl, Brownstones, the debut novel that paved the way for Marshall’s astonishing and deeply engaging career.

New in Paperback: Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford by Julia Fox

Whether you take history teacher-turned-author Julia Fox’s biography of Jane Boleyn as revisionist twaddle or long overdue understanding for “the infamous Lady Rochford,” Fox’s book is filled with drama, drama, drama. Not inappropriate for a figure history has loved -- and loved to hate -- for centuries.

Fox gives readers a glorious look inside Henry VIII’s court and at his sister-in-law, the other Boleyn girl, Jane.

Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (Ballantine) reads like fiction. Some critics have said that much of it is. Serious historians have largely given this one a miss. But readers who love their drama, their Boleyns and their Tudors will find a lot here to like.

New Today: A Day in the Life by Robert Greenfield

Through much of A Day in the Life (Da Capo) I kept getting the same uncomfortable feeling I got while watching Requiem for A Dream (2000), but not in a good way. There was a similar feeling of inevitable sinking and incoming tragedy. A similar feeling of wanting to shake someone and make them see.

Robert Greenfield (STP, Exile on Main Street) relates the tragic story of Tommy Weber and Susan “Puss” Coriat. Beautiful, aristocratic Londoners when they wed in the early 1960s, they are sucked into the vortex that the 60s became for many people and, by story’s end, both have been basically ruined by sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Puss dies by her own hand in 1971 and Tommy in 2006 after decades of self-abuse.

In between the golden beginning and the ignominious end, the couple have two children -- one of whom would grow to become the actor Jake Weber -- fall in with various nefarious rock n’ rollers and just rip their golden life to shreds.

A Day in the Life reads, at times, like a novel, but like one of those torrid little romances you’d rather no one see you with. And after you finish reading? Well, I just wanted to have a shower.

A Day in the Life is not a bad book, but it’s a sad book. I’m not sorry I read it, but I’d certainly never read it again. Fans of music history and 1960s culture will feel differently, I’m sure. This book is just stuffed full of the kind of juicy tidbits that lot likes best.

New This Week: Either You’re In or You’re In the Way by Logan and Noah Miller

Filmmaking twin brothers Logan and Noah Miller have a single car, mobile phone and computer between them. It’s not that they wouldn’t each like their own but, as they tell us in the opening paragraphs of Either You’re In or You’re In the Way (Collins) “right now money is tight. So, for now, we share. And are blessed to have someone to share it with.”

That’s pretty much the sentiment that floats us through the book. It’s a charming, witty and in some ways fascinating story that’s part memoir and partly the story of how -- against all odds -- the brothers wrote, produced, acted in and directed a feature film -- starring no less than Ed Harris -- in less than a year with little between them besides 17 credit cards.

That would be sufficient story for the book, but then the resulting film, Touching Home, was nominated for 26 Academy Awards and took home 11 of them.

Either You’re In or You’re In the Way is, in some ways, a Cinderella story in perfect Hollywood style with all the bittersweet details and plot twists such a story demand. And, all things considered, it’s no surprise that they can write, too. Those who love movies and/or a touching family story will enjoy this book. It’s a very worthwhile read on so many levels.

New this Month: Clara’s Story by Clara Kramer

You know this story. Even so, it does not get easier to hear. Sometimes you want to look away. But you can’t. You must not. It’s an important story to remember, beautifully preserved here, but still difficult to look at straight on.

In 1939, Clara Kramer was a teenager in Poland. When the Germans invaded her small town, she and her family were given shelter by the family of their former housekeeper. With two other families, they created an underground bunker of sorts, where 18 people settled in to try to simply live through the nightmare that had fallen over their world.

In many regards, Kramer’s story echoes that of the doomed Anne Frank but, of course, for the happier ending. That alone is a miracle: of the 5000 Jews in Zolkiew, Poland before the War, Kramer is one of only 50 to have survived. In reading her story, though, there’s more than survival here. There is perseverance, desperation and grace, in equal measure. That grace is present in every word. From the author’s note of Clara’s Story:

Writing this book was like walking out my kitchen door in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and straight into my home in Zolkiew. Although the events in this book happened sixty years ago, they have never left me. As with many survivors, I relive them in the present.

Now 81, Kramer was one of the founders of the Holocaust Resource Center at Kean University. It’s an organization she has been president of for the last 20 years.

New This Month: The Secret Lives of Litterbugs by M.A.C. Farrant

Fans of west coast Canadian writer M.A.C. Farrant can be forgiven if they feel there’s a shadow of the familiar in her latest book, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs (Key Porter). That’s because she partly mines territory already covered in 2004’s My Turquoise Years, a memoir that takes place in 1960, Farrant’s 14th summer. But don’t let possible redundancy scare you away: it doesn’t happen here.

The Secret Lives of Litterbugs is a collection of personal essays about Farrant’s own youth in the 1960s, as well as some that reflect her own experiences as a mother: the coin, then, is viewed from both sides.

Where My Turquoise Years is bathed in a certain nostalgic light -- 14 in 1960, somehow those numbers seem to just want to add up to nostalgia -- Litterbugs deals with a broader spectrum in terms of both timeline and emotion. It seems to me there’s a sharpness here that was lacking in the earlier book. But, whatever it is, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs is bright and fresh and real, a deeply enjoyable slice of family life, then and now.

New this Month: The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz

Considering how the last year or so has gone, Jacqueline Novogratz left her job in the financial sector just in the nick of time. That wasn’t what it was about. From the front flap of The Blue Sweater (Rodale): “Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it.”

The result was a journey that would have far-reaching results. For Novogratz herself, obviously, but also for the people whose lives she touched and who touched her and now, with The Blue Sweater, she touches ours, as well because, as empowered as she is and as powerful she has, in a way, become, Novogratz can also write. In The Blue Sweater she brings us along on her personal journey of transformation.

Part of the power in The Blue Sweater comes from Novogratz’s own urgency. “Today, I believe more strongly than I did as a young woman that we can end poverty,” she writes at one point. “Never before in history have we had the skills, resources, technologies, and imagination to solve poverty that we do now.”

Novogratz is the piper. The stories she tells here are her music. And it’s difficult to even want to do anything other than follow along.

Biography: Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd

To talk about Poe: A Life Cut Short (Doubleday/Nan. A. Talese) is to talk about Peter Ackroyd’s “Brief Lives” bite-sized biographies, because this latest entry falls into that series. But even that description -- “bite-sized” -- trivializes something that, though small, is actually quite grand.

Poe: A Life Cut Short is no Coles Notes biography: no abbreviation of a richer story. Rather it is an eloquently told biography in its own right, created by an author who knows his way around this world, having written internationally acclaimed biographies of William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens and others. To demonstrate, I offer up the beginning of Chapter Two, where Ackroyd’s subject is offered up in sketch form:

Edgar Allan Poe has become the image of the poète maudit, the blasted soul, the wanderer. His fate was heavy, his life all but unsupportable. A rain of blows descended on him from the time of his birth. He once said that to “revolutionise, at one effort, the universal world of human thought” it was necessary only “to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple -- a few plain words -- ‘My Heart Laid Bare.’ But -- this little book must be true to its title.” Poe never wrote such a book, but his life deserved one.

Obviously, I pull that quote now because Ackroyd here might be seen to be attempting to live Poe’s advice. Does Ackroyd add to the knowledge of this tragic, talented writer? I’m no Poe specialist, but I do not believe there is actual new material here. However, he slices Poe’s life with expert precision and the insight of one who is accustomed to looking at distant facts and having them line up in a sensical way.

Poe: A Life Cut Short is an enjoyable and surprisingly detailed biography. Published in the United Kingdom in 2008, the book saw light in North America in January of this year, just in time to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth.

New in Paperback: The Lincolns: Portrait of A Marriage by Daniel Mark Epstein

As The New York Times’ Janet Maslin pointed out when The Lincolns: Portrait of A Marriage (Ballantine) was new in hardcover, Abraham Lincoln as a topic for biography is territory that is so well worn, there is even a book about the top 100 Lincoln books. One would think that, after all, so much ink has been spilled, there wouldn’t be much new to say. However, if anyone is going to mine new material from the Lincoln mother lode, veteran biographer and poet Daniel Mark Epstein would be the one to do it. More: almost everyone -- including Maslin -- agrees that with The Lincolns, he has.

Epstein approaches his material with a poet’s eye and heart and the award-winning biographer’s soul. You don’t have to get far into The Lincolns to understand this; Epstein entrances us from the very first page: “Walking east on Jefferson Street with the setting sun behind him, Abraham Lincoln followed his shadow toward the house on Sixth Street where he had arranged to meet his love in secret.”

Though Epstein here chronicles the 22 year marriage of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln, this is territory not new to this author: he’s tackled aspects of Lincoln’s life before, including 2004’s Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington.

First published in mid-2008, The Lincolns is a fantastic book. Beautifully researched, wonderfully told. It would be a better book if it ended more happily -- there’s a lot of sturm und drang in the story of this couple: marital stress, the loss of a child, the pressures of a life lived in the spotlight and it’s probably not too much of a spoiler to tell you Mrs. Lincoln ends up alone. But, obviously, Epstein had no say in how it all turned out. What he brings us is the best imaginable window on a story as yet so fully untold. A happy ending for this particular tale is a little too much to ask.

Holiday Gift Guide: Last Canadian Beer by Harvey Sawler

Beer aficionados and those with a strong interest in Canadian business and marketing will most enjoy Last Canadian Beer: The Moosehead Story (Nimbus Publishing), an affectionate, insider-y account of the inception and growth of Maritime-based Moosehead Breweries.

Author Sawler’s book is an affectionate look at the family that built one of Canada’s largest and most enduring breweries. If there’s dirt to dish here, Sawler doesn’t go for it. He begins with the Oland family’s long history in Atlantic Canada. So long, in fact, the definitive beginnings of it are lost to history. Then in the 1860s, matriarch Susannah Oland started brewing beer in her backyard. In 1867, the family opened its first brewery. Six generations later, Moosehead remains Halifax-based and in Oland hands.

“This book,” writes Sawler, “admittedly shows the Olands and Moosehead in a positive light, because frankly, that is the way the world sees both the family and the company.” A successful business model enacted by nice people? That seems a thought for the season.

Holiday Gift Guide: Hitman by David Foster

Consider the music producer. Do you know what they do? In the simplest terms, a music producer directs the music, just as a director directs a film. That is, he (or she) brings all aspects of a song to life, from performance to orchestration to mix to final release. Some music producers are famous in their own right; perhaps the most famous is Quincy Jones, who has worked in many different kinds of music, from jazz to pop to film scores.

Interestingly, despite working for so long, Jones doesn’t seem to have a signature style. His work is shaped by the needs of the project. But that can’t be said of every producer. David Foster is one of those who does have an enduring style -- a distinctive voice. For forty-odd years, Foster has been making the music we know and love. He’s worked primarily in pop, though he’s also created memorable instrumental work and composed wonderful film scores. But somehow, even with the variety of genres and the much wider variety of artists he’s worked with, Foster’s music is cohesive. If you listen carefully, you’ll find his style is as distinctive as, say, that of Steven Spielberg.

Over the years, Foster has worked with, oh, let’s just say everybody -- certainly everybody whose name can be reduced to one word: Streisand, Dion, Houston, Groban, Buble, Bocelli, McCartney, Loggins. And then there’s Chicago. Earth, Wind and Fire. I could go on and on. I mean, he discovered Celine Dion, Josh Groban, and Michael Buble. More than perhaps any other producer of the last four decades, David Foster’s work has shaped the sound of our lives. And now he’s collected a lot of his most memorable moments in a new book, Hitman (Simon & Schuster).

This is one fast read. Foster’s life flies by and so does the book. Without dipping into overwhelming detail, he paints his life in choice, telling and fascinating details -- and seems not to hold anything back, even the occasional blemish. Foster is obsessed with work, and he shares his life story in terms of that work. His childhood in British Columbia, when he discovered he had perfect pitch. His first forays into music, playing and traveling with bands. His move to Los Angeles, which is when things really started to happen in a big way. There, he becomes the David Foster we know.

What I love most about his story are the real moments. His preference for milk and cookies at sessions, rather than the drugs of the day. His almost geeky reverence for the iconic performers whose paths he crossed and whose music he helped to create. His awe mirrors our own -- and it makes him comfortably, reassuringly human. In a tough business, that’s pretty meaningful, but his dedication to work and talent and his own values certainly paid off. He’s made music that’s great -- but more, he's made music that counts. And the sales speak for themselves. Fifteen Grammy Awards. Three Oscar nominations. Half a billion records sold.

Part of what’s great about Hitman are the stories about the music that you might know David Foster had a hand in. But even more thrilling was learning about music I love that I didn’t know he’d ever touched. For example, he co-wrote the Cheryl Lynn classic “Got to Be Real.” He produced the Broadway cast recording of Dreamgirls. He created some of Chicago’s career-defining songs, such as “Hard to Say I'm Sorry” and “Hard Habit to Break.” Earth Wind and Fire’s “After the Love is Gone”? His. Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” from The Bodyguard? His. Natalie Cole’s "Unforgettable" duet with her late father? Foster’s as well.

All this, plus his decades-long work raising money to help Canadian families whose children need organ transplants.

These are the gems that make up a life, but they’re also the gems that make a terrific book. But then, Hitman is more than a book: It’s also a DVD of a new concert, with an accompanying CD. The DVD includes performances by Bocelli, Buble, Dion, Groban, Boz Scaggs, Brian McKnight, and many others. They came out to honor their friend and producer -- and reading his book, learning about his dedication to music, it’s easy to see why. Hitman, indeed.

Holiday Gift Guide: Solitude by Robert Kull

“In many cultures, solitude is recognized as an opportunity to journey inward; in our culture, spending time alone is often considered to be unhealthy because we tend to believe that meaning in life is found only through relationship with other people … one of the challenges of solitude is that you have to face yourself.”

Robert Kull is an extraordinary man. In 2001, he put together sufficient supplies to last one year, then he traveled to a remote island in the Patagonian wilderness with the idea of exploring the effects that deep solitude might have on body and mind.

Years before, a motorcycle accident had left him with only one leg, so, right away, one knows that the physical challenge would be greater than might otherwise have been the case. But does that physical challenge even come close to the mental one?

In Solitude (New World Library) Kull’s prose is journal spare: a deep thinker’s notes to himself. “Rock-sitting in the evening rain,” he writes on December 4, 2001, “and then a shift. Light, that seems to come from beyond, floods my soul and brings love, peace, beauty and the gift of Life.”

And the answers he found?

“Some of those answers cannot be put into words,” writes Kull, “but I hope they have come drifting up between the lines of my journal.”

Some of them have.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Letters of Allen Ginsberg edited by Bill Morgan

“If you are in any ennui or doldrums, lift up your heart, there IS something new under the sun.” This line opened a letter Allen Ginsberg wrote to Jack Kerouac in July of 1950. The newness he was writing about was a relationship. “Ah, Jack,” he continues later in the missive, “I always said that I would be a great lover some day. I am, I am at last.”

Most everyone is familiar with the work of poet Allen Ginsberg, but few had reason to know that he was also a fabulous -- and prolific -- correspondent. Editor Bill Morgan -- Ginsberg’s archivist and biographer -- reports that he sifted through nearly 4000 Ginsberg letters to come up with the 165 reproduced in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (Da Capo). “Strictly speaking,” Morgan tells us, “a man of letters is not someone who has written a lot of letters but rather someone who is actively engaged in the literary and intellectual world. Allen Ginsberg was both.”

Morgan has -- once again -- done a terrific job with Ginsberg’s words. In many ways, what we have here is the very heart of the Beat Generation. A wonderful book.

Holiday Gift Guide: Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman

It’s like we turned a special corner, hit some magical turnpike or passed a mystical milestone no one can really see. But -- quite suddenly -- everything seems like Neil Gaiman, all the time.

One of the reasons for all the brouhaha, of course, is that November marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Gaiman’s seminal Sandman series. Vertigo Comics is marking the date with the publication of -- among other things -- The Absolute Sandman Vol. 4, which is the final of four slip-cased volumes collecting the final 19 issues of The Sandman series. Also, keep your eyes posted for other publications and events commemorating the date. For example, on November 9th, author and designer Chip Kidd will discuss Sandman with Gaiman at a special anniversary celebration at Kaufmann Concert Hall in NYC. More information on that event can be found here.

Another mark of the author’s achievement comes in the form of Prince of Stories: the Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (St. Martin’s Press) by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden and Stephen R. Bissette. If the authors seem to occasionally run to hyperbole, we must forgive them: at this moment, and just a few days shy of his 48th birthday, Neil Gaiman seems poised on the very lip of the type of literary achievement that nails names into history books forever. From the introduction to Prince of Stories:

Who is Neil Gaiman?

Forbes magazine labeled him “the most famous author you’ve never heard of.” His publisher, William Morrow, calls him a “pop culture phenomenon.” He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of “the top ten living post modern writers,” along with Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs.

Prince of Stories is the perfect biography of a powerful artist at mid-career. It collects some of the interviews he’s done throughout his career, never-before-published writing by Gaiman himself, rare artwork, comics and book covers; trivia on Gaiman, a Gaiman timeline; Gaiman trivia; a foreword by Terry Pratchett; information on the entire Gaiman oeuvre and more. So much more.

Prince of Stories is not the final word on Gaiman. Not by a longshot. With any luck at all, we won’t be seeing that book for many, many years. In the meantime, though, fans of the author and his work simply must have this book. It casts a light on this important author in a way we’ve never seen before.

New in Paperback: Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

I kept coming back to his face. Earnest. Hair swept back rakishly. Eyes straight ahead to a glorious future. This is the face of evil, wreathed still in youthful innocence. It’s difficult to imagine.

And I kept coming back to the question: nature or nurture? Who wouldn’t want to know that? The product of the original dysfunctional family -- a violently alcoholic father, a sexually ambitious mother -- a youthful Josef Stalin goes off to study for the priesthood, a turn of events perhaps not expected from the man who will grow to become one of history’s bloodiest dictators.

In Young Stalin (Vintage) Simon Sebag Montefiore takes us there elegantly. His research is exhaustive, yet seamless. That is, we’re so swept away by the story he tells, that we can’t see it or feel the work it took to get us there. That’s as it should be. Nor is there any doubt that the author knows his way around this material. And know it he does. In its publication year, Young Stalin won the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Literature, the Costa Biography Prize and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography.

And if you love this author and just can’t get enough, in November look for Sashenka: A Novel (Simon & Schuster). The byline is different but similar -- Simon Montefiore – as is the time we spend. Sashenka begins in Russia in 1916 in an odd calm before the storm.

Biography: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: A Memoir

For those not keeping score, Grandmaster Flash has been to urban music what Todd Rundgren has been to MOR pop. Clearly, both would exist without these important early purveyors, but -- and arguably -- the resulting genres would have been quite different.

In The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats (Broadway), Flash -- with the help of bestselling author David Ritz (Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, Rhythm and the Blues) riffs through his early life and career with the aplomb one would expect from the man many consider to be the father of contemporary hip hop.

There are times he tells his story calmly: one word neatly marching behind the other in accepted fashion. Other times he shares his remembrances in rhyme and still others when he tells his story in a sweet blend of both. Here, for example, he shares the disappointing result after an early performance:

Maybe my speakers weren’t loud enough. Maybe the people didn’t recognize the jams. Maybe they weren’t in the mood. Maybe they just didn’t understand.

Whatever it was, you could have heard a pin drop in that park, and my stomach was starting to twist. I looked over and saw Miss Rose, Penny, Lilly, and Mom. They could tell I was crushed. I could see them hurting for me, but there was nothing they could do.

Career-wise, of course, things got better from there. Flash’s tale does not end with his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, but it’s close. And though the book concludes on a hopeful note, one gets the feeling a lot has been left unsaid. In some ways, though, that’s OK. On the journey he gives us a taste: the misunderstood talent, the larger-than-life success, the almost inevitable addiction followed by recovery followed by the reevaluation of a life that needs to be richly lived. If the latter years of The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash seem sketchy -- and they do -- it may just be that the book itself is a bit premature. This is a story still in progress with many chapters still to write.

New This Month: Tycoon’s War by Stephen Dando-Collins

I wanted to love historian Stephen Dando-Collins’ account of conflict and economic turmoil in the middle part of the 19th century, I really did. Even the subtitle sounded killer exciting: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded A Country to Overthrow America’s Most Famous Military Adventurer. Seriously: that’s dead exciting stuff!

While I came away from Tycoon’s War (DaCapo) feeling as though I had a much better understanding of both Vanderbilt and the times in which he lived, somehow Dando-Collins never manages to lift the story off the page. At least not for me. At it’s very best, I found Tycoon’s War to be a bit of a slog. That seemed a shame. As I said, this is plenty exciting stuff.

The book points out that, despite the fact that when he died, Vanderbilt had more money than the U.S. Treasury, the would-be mogul nearly lost it all when genuis fellow-tycoon William Walker tried to conquer Central America, even though that attempt severely compromised Vanderbilt’s most lucrative business. And the war of the tycoons mentioned in the title is underway.

It’s an interesting story, well told and extensively researched. If the prose never sings perhaps Dando-Collins can be forgiven since he has here delivered a story that’s never before been told.

Review: Books by Larry McMurtry

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Stephen Miller reviews Books by Larry McMurtry. Says Miller:

Larry McMurtry’s literary street cred needs no boost from anyone. The author of, most famously, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment has been pounding the keys of his typewriter for well over 40 years. Along the way, he’s stumbled into Hollywood, winning an Academy Award for his screenplay of E. Annie Proulx’s short story, “Brokeback Mountain”. What is perhaps less well-known is that during all of this time, McMurtry has also been a book scout, rare and antiquarian book dealer, and proprietor of Booked Up, a sprawling complex of used bookstores managed in a highly personalized and somewhat defiant style (meaning no sales via the Internet and only two catalogs in 35 years). Transplanted from the tony environs of Washington D.C.’s Georgetown to McMurtry’s long-time residence of Archer City, Texas, it’s the American version of the Welsh book destination Hay-on-Wye, quite an achievement for a boy who grew up in a town with no books. In Books, McMurtry offers the third mini-memoir following Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and Roads.

The full review is here.

Biography: Shopping for Porcupine by Seth Kantner

Darkness -- huge and boundless, with only my one scoop of light, which thins across snow to gray, grayer, blackness. No assurance out there of another human, not on this planet anyway. I shovel my cave by headlight. Pitch in twin sleeping bags, a caribou hide, food. It’s small inside; big out here, and silent, a few flakes coming down, and a few stars blurry up there and not sharing their hard-traveling light. The air is not cold, only sixteen below, but a north breeze sears my cheeks.

There are times in Seth Kantner’s memoir of growing up Arctic that we encounter this sort of cold, Northern poetry. A kind of love song to the harsh land that fed -- perhaps nurtured -- the talent in his young soul.

Through Kantner’s sharp eye we see not only his own coming-of-age, but the transformation of the land he so obviously loves. Not all of the transformations are good.

This carefully wrought memoir is his first book-length work of non-fiction. Kantner’s fiction debut, Ordinary Wolves, brought the author wide acclaim in 2004. Shopping for Porcupine (Milkweed Editions) will bring him still more.

New This Week: Serve the People by Jen Lin-Liu

“In cooking class, I learned a startling array of things. Eating fish head will repair your brain cells. Spicy food is good for your complexion. Monosodium glutamate is best thrown in a dish just before it comes off the wok. Americans are fat because they eat bread, while Chinese are slim because they eat rice. If you work as a cook in America for three years, you can come back to China and buy a house.”

Jen Lin-Liu was a Fullbright scholar and is a food critic and the co-author of Frommer’s Beijing. And though Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China (Harcourt) would be engaging at any time, with the Olympics just moments away, it moves from interesting foody travel book to one of the must-reads of the season.

Even if you plan to get no closer to Beijing than your television, Serve the People will fill in some of the blanks with a great deal of style. Not only does Lin-Liu know this material, she can cook and she can write.

Serve the People is terrific. It might change your view of China, in a good way. And just in the nick of time.

Review: The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso. Says Leach:

Sarah Manguso is a poet, and if the beautiful, terse sentences in The Two Kinds of Decay are any indication, she is a fine one. In this short, sharp memoir, Manguso describes the head cold she caught in February 1995. She was 21 years old, in college, second soprano in a choir scheduled to perform Gregorio Allegri’s “Miserere” on March 5, 1995. She managed to keep her cold in check until after the concert, where the choirmaster praised her work. She went home for spring break and began a nightmare of illness that would last for next nine years.

Sarah Manguso has chronic idiopathic demyelinating poliradiculoneuropathy. In layman’s terms, this means her immune system secretes antibodies, which travel to the peripheral neurons, eat away the protective sheath covering the nerve cells -- myelin -- then eat the cells, which sometimes recover, sometimes not. Symptoms include numbness and tingling in the extremities, paralysis, and the inability to breathe.

The full review is here.

Non-Fiction: House Calls by Dogsled by Keith Billington

At first blush, it is the very opposite of a summer read, which quite often seem to be books whose covers feature iced drinks or miles of sand or seashells stretched on the seashore. House Calls by Dogsled: Six Years in an Arctic Medical Outpost (Lost Moose/Harbour Publishing) clearly does not meet that criteria for summer read. Yet it was the cover that finally forced the book into my hand on a hot day. And I’m glad.

So that cover. The arctic outpost of the subtitle. A line of dogs pulling a sled through the snow. And not recreationally, oh no: it’s clear that these dogs are doing serious snow business, keeping travelers alive by moving them through their arctic world. I felt 10 degrees cooler just touching the book.

Author Keith Billington’s story is warming, however. In 1963 and while still in their 20s, Billington, a nurse, and his wife Muriel, a midwife, arrived in Fort McPherson, 1700 miles north of Edmonton to work with the Gwich’in people. In the time the Billingtons spent in the Arctic, the Gwich’in taught them as much about life and the way the world works as the couple would help them. House Calls by Dogsled is that story.

Billington is no lyricist, nor does he even make an attempt. The material here is so rich, however, that it stands on its own: a fascinating glimpse into a culture foreign to many of us, with the narrating Billington most often the proverbial fish out of water. It’s a memorable book. And just the thing to lower the temperature on a hot day.

Review: Comfort: A Journey Through Grief by Ann Hood

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Comfort: A Journey Through Grief by Ann Hood. Says Leach:

In a world overrun with memoirs, parsing the good from the overwrought, the treacly, or even the completely faked can be nearly impossible. One need only look at the Frey hoopla (surely I wasn’t the only person, way back when, who questioned his claims of Novocain-free dental work?) to know that a genre capable of giving readers so much has taken some dents lately. The garbage, replete with talk show spots and new age affirmations, rises right to the top, while the finer works -- raw, honest, refusing ersatz comforts -- fall from sight, read by only a sleuthing few. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking transcended all that, but then again, she’s Didion.

Enough soapbox. Ann Hood’s Comfort is about the death of her five-year-old daughter, Grace, who contracted a full-body strep infection that killed her in three days. Comfort was excerpted in a book I reviewed a few months ago, Nell Casey’s An Uncertain Inheritance. At the time I wrote:

You have Ann Hood writing about the Strep infection that carried off her daughter Grace in three days. Grace was five. I have no idea where Hood found the strength to write this essay. Be sure you’re at home when you read this one. And make that drink a double.

Indeed, do read this at home -- at 188 pages, it is an evening or two’s reading -- have that drink nearby (Hood drank single malt whiskey, a fine choice), and keep the tissues handy.

The full review is here.

New Today: Life With My Sister Madonna by Christopher Ciccone

You might love her or hate her or be completely indifferent, but you know her face, her voice and some of her woes. You know who she is. Which is why, though you might not run out and buy the whinefest penned by her brother, Christopher Ciccone, you will probably be at least a little interested in knowing what’s inside.

Life With My Sister Madonna (Simon Spotlight Entertainment) is an absolutely unexceptional sibling memoir. In certain ways, we learn more about sibling jealousy and the nature of that green-eyed beast than we ever do about the author’s famous sister.

There is a breathlessness to Ciccone’s voice here -- as helped along by celebrity biographer Wendy Leigh (True Grace, One Lifetime is Not Enough) -- and even the most mundane bits of fact-sharing can sound like shocking revelations. Here, for example, Ciccone spills the beans on Madonna’s trouble sleeping:

Madonna’s insomnia only became apparent to me when we were living together in downtown Manhattan at the start of her career. Whenever I woke up during the night, she would be in the living room, perched on white futon, which -- no matter how many times we washed the floor -- was always dirty. She was usually dressed in a white oversize men’s T-shirt, baggy, white cowboy-print sweats, sucking Hot Tamales, her favorite cinnamon-flavored candies, and reading poetry -- often Anne Sexton whose lines sometimes inspired her lyrics. Or the diaries of Anais Nin, who along with Joan of Arc, is one of her heroines.

In Life With My Sister Madonna we’re told a great deal -- the book is 352 pages long, after all -- but we don’t really learn very much, which shouldn’t really be a surprise: Ciccone admits he and his sister have not been close since her (currently headline grabbing) marriage to Guy Ritchie in 2000. And, honestly, discovering at this late date that Madonna lost her virginity to some guy named Russell is not a revelation. We did know she’d lost her virginity as some point, did we not? Giving him a name adds nothing to the tale.

Life With My Sister Madonna is already selling well and fans will not want to miss it and likely won’t be disappointed. Clearly, Ciccone can provide childhood details that few could duplicate. Others won’t need to stand in line, though: there’s little here beyond the expected.

Lost: A Memoir by Cathy Ostlere

I had a bad feeling most of the time I spent reading Cathy Ostlere’s skillfully wrought memoir of a family’s grief, Lost (Key Porter). The award-winning writer has a wonderful way with language and, despite the personal nature of the material she covers here, she approaches it with a journalist’s eye and heart. Even so, almost from the very first moment, you get the feeling that this is a story that can’t have a happy ending. From the beginning, there’s something in Ostlere’s tone; something in the slow, stately march of the words she chooses to relate this deeply personal tale. Lost breaks the heart, again and again. Sometimes, it breaks the heart too much.

I am holding my brother’s life in the soft flesh of my throat. I dare not tell for fear I’ll drop the ball of thread and lose us. If I speak, will the sky fall in? I am sister, daughter, wife, and mother – there is no myth to guide me with this question.

And that’s just from page 11.

In the mid-1990s, Ostlere’s word traveling, adventure loving brother disappeared while sailing his 28-foot sailboat from Ireland to Madeira, alone but for his girlfriend, Sarah. On his birthday, months after he set off, his family realizes he’s missing. Then they try to find him.

And sometimes it breaks the heart. Too much.

New this Week: Petite Anglaise by Catherine Sanderson

When agents and editors search the blogosphere looking for projects that will surprise and delight -- the overlooked gems that will wow the world -- Petite Anglaise is what they’re looking for. I’m sure of it. Not just a blog that is smart and jaded -- you can find those anywhere. Just throw a mouse in any direction and see where it lands. To make the successful transition from blog to book, though, it stands to reason that the blogger should not only have something to say, she should have the ability to say it well and in a way that will touch the heart.

Catherine Sanderson’s Petite Anglaise -- new in print in North America this week (it was published in the UK back in March) is just everything you’d want it to be. Perhaps more. There is a sweetness in Sanderson’s prose, but it doesn’t hurt the teeth. Sanderson manages smart and sharp and vulnerable all in quite manageable gulps. More: several Princess Diaries-for-grown-up-girls threads runs through Sanderson’s fledgling effort. This is an effect that is not lessened by the fact that it’s all true (or, at least, true-ish).

The set-up, then: as Sanderson’s story begins, she is living the dream. The young Brit is living in Paris, has a French lover (Mr. Frog), a charming tiny daughter (Tadpole) and everything should be perfect, but it is not. She starts her blog -- the place where Petite Anglaise is born -- as a place to muse over her life. “Petite Anglaise wasn’t really about me,” Sanderson writes early in the book, “at least not at first. For a month or two I filled the blog with what I hoped were witty arch observations about life in Paris,” but after a while -- and perhaps inevitably -- the blog became a sort of living diary, one that could, through comments from readers, talk back. Ultimately, the blog changed Sanderson’s life.

As compelling as all of that sounds, the blog is not the story here. Rather, it is the human tale wound up in fairy tale trappings and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- told with a true storyteller’s eye for the details that count.

Lord Black and Nixonland

There are a couple of reasons I found Conrad Black’s review of Nixonland for The New York Sun is both deliciously appropriate and kind of funny (though the giggle inducing was, no doubt, not intended).

In the first place, Black is the author of Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs), a huge, toe-breaker of a book The New Yorker called an “exculpatory gloss for seemingly every grimy facet of Nixon’s career.”

In the second place, Black -- who is also Lord Black of Crossharbour -- is currently in jail for obstruction of justice and fraud. It’s not much of a surprise that Black doesn’t love the more recent book on Nixon:

There has been a good deal of comment on “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein, a pastiche of journalistic highlights of the tumultuous years between Lyndon Johnson's immense landslide over Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Richard Nixon's comparable burial of George McGovern in 1972. The country effectively rejected the right for the center-left, and then the left for the center-right, similar responses, bracketing the heavy Vietnam involvement.

The book is unrigorously and almost unrelievedly opinionated. Its theses are that the United States is almost unprecedentedly divided; that its political discourse has been almost unprecedentedly coarsened; and that Richard Nixon is responsible for both. All of these propositions are demonstrably false. This is the last, and far from the most persuasive, stand of the Nixon demonstrators.

The book in question, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein was published by Scribner in mid-May and has been well-reviewed in other places. Black’s New York Sun review is here.

Tip of the hat to Quill & Quire.

New in Paperback: Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott

When it was released in hardcover last July, The New York Times called Karen Abbott’s biography of what was arguably America’s most notorious brothel “a lush love letter to the underworld.” What they didn’t say is that there are times in Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul (Random House) that you just want to shake your head and rub your eyes before continuing. It can be almost frightening when the reality sinks in: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Everleigh Club in Chicago was run by the sisters Everleigh, Minna and Ada at 2131-2133 South Dearborn Street at the early part of the 20th century. We get to know them quite well in Abbott’s book. “Their entrée in the madam business was a fortuitous accident,” she writes of the Everleigh sisters, “two proper Victorian ladies who decided that creating a fantasy for others was better than pretending to live in one.”

The Battle for Wine and Love by Alice Feiring

While the book is ostensibly about how wine writer Alice Feiring has been fighting back against the Robert Parker’s of the wine world (“How I saved the world from Parkerization,”) there’s more to The Battle For Wine and Love (Harcourt) than meets the eye. Most important of these is the fact that this is the memoir of a fabulously talented writer.

“When my world was still innocent,” Feiring tells us at the very beginning of chapter one, “I was drinking Manischewitz mixed with seltzer, but by the time my father ran off after a neighbor’s wife, I was drinking the partially fizzy Mateus.”

Earlier still, in the introduction, she lets us know about her mission. “When it comes to wine and love, I get attached. So when I realized that certain wines I had relied on and lusted after were disappearing from the universe, I lost sleep. In ingested. I sulked …. I could always find a different shade of lipstick, but there is no substitute for real wine or profound love.”

If, like Feiring , you view the world through taste-studded lenses, you’ll like The Battle For Wine and Love. It’s a beautiful journey with strong motivations and some great sub-plots.

Review: Around the World in 80 Dinners by Cheryl and Bill Jamison

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, Diane Leach reviews Around the World in 80 Dinners by Cheryl and Bill Jamison. Says Leach:

Cheryl and Bill Jamison are best known for their numerous cookbooks, many focused on grilling and outdoor cookery. As an urban dweller lacking a barbeque, I’d never read much of their work, and looked forward to their travelogue, a jaunt from Bali to Brazil celebrating their 20th anniversary.

I was sorely disappointed. What could be an informative, amusing journey though oft-neglected spots -- been to New Caledonia lately? -- is instead a slog through miserably bad writing interspersed with flat attempts at humor and a more than few trumpetings of the Jamison horn.

The full review is here.

New Last Week: A Freewheelin’ Time by Suze Rotolo

She captures it all beautifully, carefully, elegantly. With skill and verve, she recreates a time that has been attributed with almost mythical properties. And, in the telling, she places herself at the feet of one of the gods of the time, handmaiden to his growing godhead, the man who, as she herself describes it, finally becomes the elephant in the room of her life.

Suze Rotolo was 17 when she met Bob Dylan, himself then a raw 20-year-old. “Bob was my first significant relationship,” Rotolo tells us in A Freewheelin’ Time (Broadway Books). “During our time together things became very complicated because so much happened to him so fast. We had a good time, but also a hard time, as a young couple in love.”

Rotolo is artful in A Freewheelin’ Time. Her tone and the anecdotes she chooses to share evoke a significant moment in American history. And, yes: her relationship with Bob Dylan plays a part here. And, yes: that is Rotolo walking arm-in-arm with Dylan on the cover of Dylan’s album The Freewheelin’, the same image that covers this book and, not coincidentally, the title that lends itself here, again.

Though -- clearly -- Dylan’s presence is felt throughout, there is more to A Freewheelin’ Time as well. Much more. In a way, what we feel here is young American womanhood in the early 1960s, on the brink of something beyond imagining.

“Common sense is a wicked, hideous, backbiting enemy in cahoots with instinct to beat the daylights out of white-hot sentiment. No contest. Everything is obliterated.”

Rotolo’s A Freewheelin’ Time is a wonderful journey. I’d take it again.

Review: Out of the Frying Pan by Gillian Clark

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, Diane Leach reviews Out of the Frying Pan by Gillian Clark. Says Leach:

Clark, chef/owner of Washington D.C.’s Colorado Kitchen, had an immensely interesting book in her. Unfortunately for us, she didn’t write it, opting instead for a candy-floss memoir comparing the challenges of single parenthood to the brutalities of professional cooking.

Don’t get me wrong. Clark is a highly intelligent, educated woman who left a career in marketing to pursue her love of cooking, putting herself through culinary school in her early 30s. Anybody with the guts to do that deserves kudos. When that somebody has two small daughters and a hard-drinking husband soon off the scene, more power to her. But instead of digging deeply into the experience of being a female chef -- challenge enough in the masculine world of professional cooking -- she focuses on what readers of cookery memoirs will recognize as the usual suspects: shady investors, drug-addled cooks, sous chefs who honed their knife skills in prison.

The full review is here.

New this Month: Looking for Anne by Irene Gammel

If it seems like you’re suddenly hearing more about Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne Shirley, it’s because the first book in which Anne appeared, Anne of Green Gables, was published around this time one hundred years ago.

Earlier this year, we saw the publication of a brand new Anne book by Budge Wilson, Before Green Gables (Penguin Canada). Now noted biographer Irene Gammel brings us Looking for Anne (Key Porter Books) a brilliantly researched, in-depth and charming biography on both Lucy Maud Montgomery and her Titian-haired creation and brings us more than a few surprises. For example, we discover that Anne Shirley was as much a product of the zeitgeist as she was of innocent inspiration.

Author Gammel, who holds the research chair in modern literature and culture at Ryerson, tells us she was intrigued by the mystery that had surrounded Montgomery’s most famous literary creation. The book, Gammel writes, “was sparked by a paradox and a mystery.”

With over fifty million copies of the novel sold, a multi-million-dollar tourist industry, and countless adaptations of the novel and its sequels in musicals, movies, cartoons, dolls, and figurines, millions of fans know Anne Shirley intimately, but they know surprisingly little about how she came about. How can a work be so famous and yet its history so little known? We know more about other literary texts whose creation is shrouded in mystery, such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Erye, than we know about Anne of Green Gables.

Gammel never manages to lift all the secrets, but she makes some pretty strong inroads. Fans and scholars of this enduring book will leave it knowing -- or suspecting -- much that had been in the dark before.

Author Snapshot: Kevin Bazzana

Music historian and biographer Kevin Bazzana holds a Ph.D. in music history from UC Berkeley, a degree he puts to careful use in creating beautiful and lucid biographies of musical characters you just don’t think about every day. Not for this author either Madonna or Chopin: the objects of his interest tend to the more esoteric, the less known.

Bazzana’s first two books focused on various aspects of the life and work of Glenn Gould. Glen Gould: The Performer in the Work (Oxford University Press) was published in 1998 to international acclaim. As Library Journal pointed out, the book was much more than a biography, “this is instead a detailed critical study of Gould the musical interpreter, complete with a CD of pertinent recordings.”

Bazzana followed that up with Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (McLelland & Stewart) in 2003, arguably creating the author as the world’s leading expert on the brilliant and eccentric Canadian pianist.

Last year the publication of the biography of another eccentric and brilliant pianist brought Bazzana further acclaim. Lost Genius tells the story of the Hungarian-born Ervin Nyiregyházi, who spent his life struggling with his talent. New this month in paperback, Lost Genius is nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

While it’s difficult not to be curious about what will come next for this writer, we must resist the urge. As will be seen, it’s not his favorite question.



A Snapshot of Kevin Bazzana...

Born: Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
Resides: Near Victoria, Britsh Columbia (Brentwood Bay, actually.)
Birthday: July 27, 1963
Web site: I lack sufficient computer skills and self-esteem to create a personal Web site, and alas have no thoughts profound enough to justify one.

January Magazine: Please tell us about your most recent book.

Kevin Bazzana: Lost Genius is a biography of the Hungarian-American pianist and composer Ervin Nyiregyházi (1903-1987). He was a brilliant, highly original musician and eccentric character who led a bizarre life, though his story is almost unknown today. He was one of those gifted artists who was cursed psychologically in ways that sabotaged his career; his story is a tragedy about a great talent that cannot find its place in the world, and he left to posterity only tantalizing glimpses of his art in its prime.

He was one of the most remarkable prodigies in music history -- a psychologist wrote a book about his gifts when he was 13 -- and he had a sensational career in his childhood and youth. But in his early 20, though recognized as one of the greatest pianists of his day, he lost the momentum of his career, for complicated professional, artistic and personal reasons.

For the next half-century, he lived a restless and dissolute life, mostly anonymously in seedy neighborhoods of Los Angeles -- he lived in poverty, drank heavily, was sexually voracious (he married 10 times!). He occasionally performed in private or public, and even long after he was supposedly washed up he could amaze knowledgeable listeners with his playing, though efforts to revive his career always failed. (He spent most of his time composing -- more than 1000 works in a strange, old-fashioned, very personal style.) In the 1970s, he was rediscovered in old age, and enjoyed a brief, noisy, controversial renaissance -- he gave some concerts, made some recordings -- before slipping back into obscurity again.

In my opinion, Nyiregyházi’s is one of the most fascinating stories in music history, made all the more significant and interesting -- and ultimately tragic -- by his unquestionably great gifts.

What’s on your nightstand?

A few years ago, I realized that I was remarkably ignorant of all manner of literature, and since then have set about, more or less systematically, to remedy that defect -- reading Moby-Dick and Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and Ulysses and all the other books I should have read in college but didn’t.

Recently, I’ve been having a bit of a Philip Roth fit. I just finished American Pastoral and am now cracking open I Married a Communist. But I should add that I divide my free time almost equally between books and movies -- I am a passionate film buff -- and so my nightstand is often piled with DVDs rather than books. My most recent weekful of rented DVDs ranged from Ichikawa, Bergman and Godard, to Laurel and Hardy and The Pajama Game.

What inspires you?

I usually feel presumptuous using the word “inspiration” about my work, since writing non-fiction consists so much of the prosaic donkey work of research. In my experience, writing non-fiction resembles Edison’s famous definition of genius: “one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.” (This is why I sometimes think that the phrase “literary non-fiction” is an oxymoron -- so much of the process involves routine detective work that hardly counts as literary.) But I suppose something like inspiration does give me the motivation to do the labor required to write a biography. In the case of Lost Genius, I can definitely say that I was inspired by genuine interest in and devotion to the subject, and by a desire to share his story and make a case for his significance with the public. I felt particularly passionate about the subject because he was so obviously brilliant and original and yet almost completely unknown; a kind of missionary zeal propelled me in this case.

My previous biography was about Glenn Gould, and though I was genuinely passionate about him, too, he was already famous enough when I came along that he didn’t really need my championship. But Nyiregyházi, it seemed, was going to remain a “lost genius” unless I roused myself and did something about it. That, I suppose, could be called inspiration.

What are you working on now?

For whatever reasons -- weariness? indecision? dread? -- my brain has been in stand-by mode in the year since Lost Genius was first published. I have kept up with the various freelance writing, editing and lecturing jobs that feed and clothe me, but I am not yet at work on a new book. I have been poking my nose into various subjects that interest me, and have been seriously considering moving away from my chosen field (classical music), but have not yet found a new topic. I suspect I may have to wait until a new topic finds me. Part of the problem may be that I am uncertain whether I want (or have the stamina) to write another biography. Writing a biography is a huge, engrossing, exhausting task, and at the end of the day it’s difficult to feel truly confident that you have successfully captured something as elusive as a human life and personality. Anyway, at the moment, when it comes to my “next book,” I can only say, “Stay tuned.”

Tell us about your process.

With a biography, I begin rather amorphously, simply musing about the subject, reading about his life, going through his work and so on, without (at first) any firm goal in mind. Once I have committed to undertaking a full biography, I begin to accumulate data and materials more systematically. Actual writing comes fairly late in the process. (My ten years of work on Lost Genius included less than two of actual writing and editing; the rest was sleuthing.)

When it finally becomes clear that I have enough material for a book, I start with a pen and a piece of paper. I first lay out the overall structure of the book, initially on just one or two pieces of paper, so I can see the whole book at a glance. I then expand on this skeleton, creating ever more detailed outlines, until I feel confident that I know the main divisions of the book -- how the story will unfold, how I will balance chronological narrative with essay-like passages, and so on. (I let the subject dictate the form: every life story suggests its own structure, balance of factors, style and tone.)

Detailed outline at hand, I go systematically through my groaning files and put each bit of information into its appropriate slot. Eventually, I come up with a somewhat orderly pile of information that I can begin sculpting into something that looks like prose. Of course, there are always surprises along the way -- last-minute discoveries and ideas that need to be incorporated, sometimes even major structural changes late in the day. But I find that if I begin with a detailed outline I can avoid getting lost in the mountains of data, and can handle whatever is thrown at me at the last minute.

Finally, when every word and comma is self-evidently perfect, I send the text to my editor, who points out all the self-evident imperfections -- and then a whole new round of fun begins...

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?

A small bedroom converted into an office. My computer sits on a desk that looks out over a half-acre of lawns, trees and gardens -- a view sometimes inspiring, sometimes distracting. Our cat, Sophie, occasionally perches on the desk to look out the window or sun herself while I work. Around me are filing cabinets, bookshelves, and CD cabinets -- all of them reaching satiation -- as well as stereo equipment, photos, diplomas, prizes and tchotchkes. On one of the few bits wall space, a poster of Samuel Beckett (one of my heroes) bearing a quotation that is, if not exactly inspirational, at least ... reassuring: “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I read voraciously as a kid and always had a lot of books around me. Early on, I dreamed that one day I might do the unimaginable and actually create one of these magic “book” things myself. But as an adult there was never an “Aha!” moment when I decided to be a writer. I studied first theatre and then music in university, and eventually got a Ph.D. in music, assuming that I would pursue an academic career. But my academic career effectively ended with my doctorate, as I realized that I preferred writing and lecturing about music to non-professional audiences, which I have done in a variety of forums.

The opportunity to write a trade biography of Glenn Gould came about, in 2000, in a rather roundabout way (old-boy network, friend-of-a-friend -- that sort of thing), and at that point it suddenly appeared that I was a real writer. Actually, I published my first article when I was 16, and have been writing for publication and profit off and on ever since; in fact, I can’t really do anything else. But for whatever reasons, I never thought of myself as a professional writer until quite recently. So I never decided to become a writer so much as realized, late in the day, that that is what I actually was.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?

I sometimes fantasize about pursuing one of my non-literary artistic interests -- music, theatre, film -- in a professional way. If a genie gave me one wish for a career and the chops to pull it off, I might choose film director, though the thought of being a pianist or conductor would also be tempting. (In real life, I can barely play a C-major scale on the piano without falling off the bench.) As it stands, I don’t have any apparent marketable skills besides writing, so I can’t imagine what I would be doing if I couldn’t write. Probably living, like one of Beckett’s characters, on “small charitable sums.”

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?

Certain specimens of recognition I have received have been particularly meaningful. High-profile reviews and prizes and such. Perhaps this is not surprising, given how long and difficult and lonely the process of writing a book can be, it’s nice to see signs that your work was not entirely in vain. I’m a long-standing New Yorker fan, and I experienced particularly rewarding feelings of having “arrived” when my books were reviewed (well, technically “Briefly Noted”) in The New Yorker. All of my reviews get filed, but those in The New Yorker are the only ones that I actually laminate.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?

The hours, the working conditions and the wardrobe requirements. Admittedly, my wife has a good, secure government job and is very supportive of my work, so I’m quite aware that the circumstances in which I work are pleasant entirely because of her. If I lived alone, I would be working in much drearier conditions -- if at all.

What’s the most difficult?

Knowing that it is impossible to make a decent living writing books in Canada -- at least, books on the kinds of subjects that interest me. When I weigh the amount of work involved in writing a comprehensive biography against the likely audience for a serious book about a classical musician, I know that I will be working for something far south of minimum wage. That realization can make getting up in the morning to start writing a little difficult.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often? What’s the question you’d like to be asked? What question would like never to be asked again?

These questions are difficult to answer, since I have had relatively little public experience as a writer -- relatively few readings and interviews and such -- so I can’t claim a wearisome overexposure to questions. I have never had to deal with, say, the particular woes of a high-profile author on his tenth book tour, and so have never felt the urge to run amok after hearing Question X for the umpteenth time. Still, I sometimes feel that any question about one of my books is one too many. This may seem a little odd, but think about it: publication represents the beginning of the public’s interest in the book, but often the end of the writer’s. Even when you’re genuinely devoted to a subject, it can be a race to the finish-line to see whether you will complete the book before growing sick of it! I think that’s inevitable with a biography, when you spend so much time cooped up at close quarters with the same person. Once the book’s done, you think you want nothing more than to ignore the subject for a decade or so. But it’s precisely then that people start reading the book and wanting to talk to you about it. Of course, given that I’m currently uncertain about what project to take up next, I guess I could say that there is one question I would like never to be asked again: “So, what’s next for Kevin Bazzana?”

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.

I memorized the Greek alphabet in Grade 7, to impress a girl who had one of those endless, unpronounceable Greek surnames -- 13 letters long, beginning with a silent “M.” Ever since then, whenever I want to write secret notes to myself I write them phonetically using Greek letters; this way, I can, for instance, write down things my wife wants for Christmas and keep the lists out in plain sight. (Thus, “Van Morrison’s new CD” becomes “ΥανΜωρρισονςνευΚΔ.”) I once read that Bertrand Russell hit upon this same encryption system as a teenager -- a case of great nerds thinking alike.

Speaking of Cuba…

Talking about Havana puts us in mind of a book that really takes a special moment to warrant its discussion. After all, it’s not everyone who’s going to care about Fidel Castro Reader (Ocean Press, edited by David Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal), but if you’re one of those, you’ll care very much. It truly is an essential resource for those who like to fancy they know a lot about Cuba’s charismatic dictator and the world he created, or would like to.

On the very first page of Fidel Castro Reader, a Che Guevara quote from 1965 sums up the place in history where this book fits:

Fidel has his own special way of fusing himself with the people, [which] can be appreciated only by seeing him in action.

Action in this context includes over five decades of Castro’s speeches, beginning with “History Will Absolve Me” given in Santiago de Cuba in 1953 and concluding with “In Answer to the Empire: Letters to President George W. Bush” from 2004.

A photographic section adds texture and some context but, make no mistake: Fidel Castro’s own words take center stage here.

Review: Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff and Final Exam by Pauline Chen

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff and Final Exam by Pauline Chen. Says Leach:

Reading two memoirs about death within two days, whilst bedridden from chronic illness arguably isn’t an effective method for rapid recuperation. The reader may instead extrapolate her readings to her own (momentarily) failing body, or find so much pain, both within and without, unbearable. But Rieff and Chen’s books are such fine contributions, so beautifully, movingly written, that they did what great books do best: they made me forget myself.

Rieff is Susan Sontag’s son. His memoir of her final battle with the cancer is eloquent, elegant and pained. Three years after the death of one of our great intellectuals, her son remains in a state of deep, guilty grief. His is not a year of magical thinking; it is a lifetime ration, and we can only hope writing this book gave him some solace.

While Pauline Chen’s Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality…

… shifts the perspective from family member to doctor. Like Rieff, Chen faces death uneasily, casting about for the right words, the right gestures, the right decisions. But where Rieff is unable to draw meaningful conclusions, Pauline Chen is more fortunate. A surgeon specializing in oncology and liver transplants, her memoir examines the ways the medical profession and its practitioners are taught to manage -- or not -- the lives and deaths of their patients.

The full reviews are here.

Review: Slash by Slash with Anthony Bozza

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Slash by Slash with Anthony Bozza. Says Leach:

Initially I was dubious. Many rock biographies (Danny Sugarman’s Wonderland Avenue and Jimmy McDonough’s abysmally written Shakey: the Biography of Neil Young come to mind) suffer from awful writing by those “close” to the band. But co-author Anthony Bozza takes an admirable step back, allowing Slash’s voice, intimate, direct, highly colloquial, to roll right in your ear. What comes through is a largely easygoing, earthy guy. Slash ain’t Hegel, but to borrow a quote from Paul Simon, he can read the writing on the wall.

The full review is here.

Review: A Memoir of Friendship edited by Blanche and Allison Howard

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Cherie Thiessen reviews A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard. Says Thiessen:

The two women met at a university women’s club meeting hosted by Shields when both were beginning their writing. Shields was 35 and Blanche, 47.

It was to the older woman that Shields would turn when she needed advice on childrearing, wanted an expert eye to critique her writing, or someone with whom to share books, reflections, experiences and memories. They had much in common: enquiring and critical minds, children, long and successful marriages, a love of travel and a foothold in the Canadian literary scene. They knew many of the same people, had the same literary affiliations, had published books and devoured literature.

The evolution of the correspondence the Howards share with us is an interesting one. It takes us from rambling letters and occasional phone calls in the days when long distance calls were a rare luxury, to the formality of word processing, still sent by snail mail, but slightly differing in tone from the handwritten missive, and eventually to e-mail, with its more casual, emotive intimacy, and to regular phone calls as the rates became cheaper and the friends became wealthier.

The full review is here.

Review: ... and His Lovely Wife by Connie Schultz

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Mary Ward Menke reviews ... and His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man. by Pulitzer Prize winner Connie Schultz. Says Ward Menke:

Connie Schultz and Sherrod Brown, middle-aged and divorced with two children each, married in 2004. A year later, the Democratic Congressman from Ohio decided to give up his Congressional seat to run against Mike DeWine, a two-term Republican Senator, in a state where no Democrat had won office for 12 years. In ... and his Lovely Wife, Schultz writes candidly about the challenges facing her as an outspoken journalist, feminist and the wife of a political candidate: her newspaper’s decision not to endorse Brown; friendly co-workers who suddenly became adversaries and the growing consensus that a leave-of-absence from her job was in order; politicians’ wives who “saw themselves ... through the lens of their husbands’ lives” instead of as the talented individuals she knew them to be (“Honey, my husband is my career,” a senator’s wife told her); and the unexpected death of her adored father who had become an important part of the campaign. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

The full review is here.

Review: The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, January contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones. Says Leach:

Judith Jones hails from another era, one where garlic-fearing bluebloods hired cooks who served fish on Fridays and no upright person consumed French food, a cuisine that, with all those sauces, surely had something to hide. Daughters, after educations at Spence and Barnard, were expected to make good marriages and carry on the family lineage. Jones managed to escape this almost-forgotten mold, moving to Paris after college, where she hung out with an artistic crowd who loved foods that gave her mother fits: oysters (which, young Jones assures writes her parents, “had no ill effects”), entrecote, chicken liver pate, and the unpasteurized cheeses still widely feared on North American shores.

The full review is here.

Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, Diane Leach reviews Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. Says Leach:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle chronicles the Kingsolver-Hopp family's resolution to step off the petroleum grid for one year, eating only local, sustainably produced meats, fruits, and vegetables either from or near their Kentucky farm.

The journey begins literally, with the family -- biologist Steven L. Hopp, Barbara, 19-year-old Camille, and nine-year old Lily -- packing up their Tucson home and reverse migrating to Hopp's land. There the family cultivates vegetables and fruits, culls morels from a back field, and tends the asparagus patch. Lily raises chickens, displaying astonishing business acumen and a sure hand at her egg-selling enterprise. Bread and cheese making follow; amazingly, Kingsolver manages to breed turkeys.

The full review is here.

Review: Poster Child by Emily Rapp

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Andi Shechter looks at Poster Child by Emily Rapp. Says Shechter:

It is difficult to develop empathy or sympathy for Rapp, even when she tells you that she was often the only female at the prosthetics office, talking only with far older men, often war veterans. No one there was her peer, no one had an understanding of her situation. She doesn't seem to want any sympathy though. Maybe she wants to tell her story at the same time she wants distance from it, but that left me unable to understand her. She prefers stoicism to warmth, observation to understanding.

The full review is here.

Review: Julia Child by Laura Shapiro

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, Diane Leach reviews Penguin Lives: Julia Child by Laura Shapiro. Says Leach:

Almost all foodies know some of the story ... Child’s love affair with French food, and by extension, French life. Her training at Cordon Bleu, her pivotal friendships with Louise Bertholle and Simone Beck (Simca), relationships culminating in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volumes that rescued American foodways from a wasteland of frozen stringbean casseroles.

The full review is here.

Review: Too Soon to Say Goodbye by Art Buchwald

Today in January’s biography section, Mary Ward Menke considers Too Soon to Say Goodbye by Art Buchwald, published not long before the Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist passed away early this year.

Buchwald was well aware of the challenge of writing a book about dying: death may be inevitable, but nobody wants to talk about it. He starts by explaining that the purpose of hospice is to make death easier for the dying person and their family and allow the individual to die with dignity. And then his sardonic self takes over: “The average stay (at the Washington hospice) before you go to heaven is a few days to two weeks. If you are going downhill, Medicare pays for it. If your condition stays the same as when you arrived, Medicare will not pick up the tab,” Buchwald said, summing up the situation thusly: “Dying isn’t hard. Getting paid by Medicare is.”

You can read the review here.