Selected Books: Nonfiction 
Selected Books: Fiction The Norton Book of American Autobiography
by Jay Parini (Introduction), Gore Vidal (Preface)
Rounding up all the usual suspects (Benjamin Franklin to Mary Karr) as well as some once-popular authors now criminally neglected (Ulysses S. Grant, Lucy Larcom), editor Jay Parini has assembled 62 entries that amply attest to both the diversity of American autobiography and its essential coherence. It's been a long two and a half centuries from the majestic, near-biblical cadences of Jonathan Edwards's chronicle of his striving towards God to the intimate (some might say whiny) tone in which Elizabeth Wurtzel examines her generation's reliance on friends to heal the wounds inflicted by family. But both of these writers and most of those in between delineate a very American process of self-discovery and enlightenment. Parini manages to represent most of the genre's important contributors: African Americans (including W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X); women (from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Terry Tempest Williams); nature writers (Thoreau, of course, and Annie Dillard); and today's nothing-is-off-limits confessors (Caroline Knapp on booze, Paul Monette on AIDS). Those readers who are familiar with the books from which most of these pieces are excerpted may find their brevity frustrating, but Parini has gone for breadth rather than depth. Consider this a collection of tasty hors d'oeuvres designed to whet individual readers' appetites for full-course offerings from the chefs they find most appealing. --Wendy SmithThe Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story
by Janet Gleeson
Since the middle ages, Western Europeans have practiced alchemy, a primitive form of chemistry, in the great hope of transforming base metal into gold. In the early 18th century, a second great secret puzzled Western Europe's early scientists: how to make porcelain. Recently arrived from the Orient, porcelain quickly became a symbol of power, prestige, and good taste. In The Arcanum, Janet Gleeson presents an entertaining and informative account of the invention of European porcelain and the founding of the Meissen Porcelain Manufacture outside Dresden, Germany
Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream
by Robert Dawson, Gray A. Brechin
"Troubling and illuminating. . . . makes a fresh and startling impact, thanks to the skillful and complementary blending of prose and pictures. . . . In photo after photo, Dawson's unflinching eye requires us to look again at the world we inhabit. . . . Gray Brechin's text is full of pictures, too. His writing is supple and admirably concise, combining factual knowledge with vivid imagery. . . . The book's final chapter is devoted to stories of inspirational resistance, paying tribute to groups and individuals who have worked to protect or restore various chunks of this state--from the Nature Conservancy and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission to the Urban Garden League and the Mothers of East L.A. . . . Their book is both an indictment and an eloquent plea, reminding us that this legendary region is not a cornucopia of limitless reserves but a bountifully endowed place with very specific limits that have to be acknowledged, honored and attended to." --This text refers to the paperback edition of this titleTis: A Memoir
by Frank McCourt
The sequel to Frank McCourt's memoir of his Irish Catholic boyhood, Angela's Ashes, picks up the story in October 1949, upon his arrival in America. Though he was born in New York, the family had returned to Ireland due to poor prospects in the United States. Now back on American soil, this awkward 19-year-old, with his "pimply face, sore eyes, and bad teeth," has little in common with the healthy, self-assured college students he sees on the subway and dreams of joining in the classroom. Initially, his American experience is as harrowing as his impoverished youth in Ireland, including two of the grimmest Christmases ever described in literature. McCourt views the U.S. through the same sharp eye and with the same dark humor that distinguished his first memoir: race prejudice, casual cruelty, and dead-end jobs weigh on his spirits as he searches for a way out. A glimpse of hope comes from the army, where he acquires some white-collar skills, and from New York University, which admits him without a high school diploma. But the journey toward his position teaching creative writing at Stuyvesant High School is neither quick nor easy. Fortunately, McCourt's openness to every variety of human emotion and longing remains exceptional; even the most damaged, difficult people he encounters are richly rendered individuals with whom the reader can't help but feel uncomfortable kinship. The magical prose, with its singing Irish cadences, brings grandeur and beauty to the most sorrowful events, including the final scene, set in a Limerick graveyard. --Wendy Smith
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report
by South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Truth and reco, Desmond Mpilo Tutu
The publisher, Lisa Nachtigall , August 27, 1999
From the LA Times Book Review!
"...this extraordinary and indispensabledocument....deserves the widest possible readership." Jon Blair, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 29.The publisher, Lisa Nachtigall, Grove's Dictionaries Inc., grove@grovereference.com , July 28, 1999
"A remarkable reference"
"This remarkable reference guide contains the first full report of the commission...The included CD-ROM provides relatively easy access to the commission's databases. Essential for major academic and public research libraries." Library Journal, starred review, June 15.The publisher, Lisa Nachtigall lnachtigall@grovereference.com , March 3, 1999
One of the most important historic documents of our time
South Africa's violent and complex history is chronicled in this 5-volume Report of the TRC of South Africa. With a foreword by Nobel peace prize winner Desmond Tutu, who was chairman of the commission, the report provides a chilling record of the hearings that exposed the atrocities of the apartheid era over a 34 year period. Dramatic full-page photographs and a CD-ROM enhance the value of this most important publication.Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills
by Winston Churchill, Mary Soames (Editor), Clementine Churchill
"I seize this fleeting hour of leisure to write and tell you how much I liked our long talk on Sunday," Winston Churchill wrote to Clementine Hozier in April 1908, shortly after their third meeting, "and what a comfort and pleasure it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality and such strong reserves of noble sentiment." They were married by September; he was 29, she 19. They would remain married--though, due to political circumstances, they were not always together--until his death in 1965. During that time, their daughter Mary Soames remarks, some 1,700 items of personal correspondence passed between the two. Winston and Clementine is far from a complete collection, but it does offer a comprehensive overview of their epistolary relationship and the deep love and mutual respect upon which their marriage was based. It may be somewhat disconcerting to see the man who stirred a nation to war with "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" and other memorable phrases sending "kisses to my sweet and beloved Clemmie cat," yet it also makes the imposing statesman seem more human.The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things
by Barry Glassner
Americans are afraid of many things that shouldn't frighten them, writes Barry Glassner in this book devoted to exploding conventional wisdom. Thanks to opportunistic politicians, single-minded advocacy groups, and unscrupulous TV "newsmagazines," people must unlearn their many misperceptions about the world around them. The youth homicide rate, for instance, has dropped by as much as 30 percent in recent years, says Glassner--and up to three times as many people are struck dead by lightening than die by violence in schools. "False and overdrawn fears only cause hardship," he writes. In fact, one study shows that daughters of women with breast cancer are actually less likely to conduct self-examinations--probably because the campaign to increase awareness of the ailment also inadvertently heightens fears.Although some sections are stronger than others, The Culture of Fear's examination of many nonproblems--such as "road rage," "Internet addiction," and airline safety--is very good. Glassner also has a sharp eye for what causes unnecessary goose bumps: "The use of poignant anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, the christening of isolated incidents as trends, depictions of entire categories of people as innately dangerous," and unknown scholars who masquerade as "experts." Although Glassner rejects the notion that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, he certainly shows we have much less to fear than we think. And isn't that sort of scary? --John J. Miller
Cousins' Wars
by Kevin P. Phillips
Political commentator Kevin Phillips (author of the 1991 bestseller The Politics of Rich and Poor) takes a break from analyzing the latest election returns with this sweeping history of Anglo-American exceptionalism. How did the political culture of Anglo-America rise "from a small Tudor kingdom to a global community and world hegemony"? asks Phillips. His answer comes in the course of studying three wars--the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Civil War. Phillips does not examine the military history of these conflicts, looking instead at the political, religious, economic, and sectional interests that shaped them. He makes several eye-opening observations, comparing, for instance, a "state-by-state portrait of which counties, towns, districts, or regions were loyal" during the American Revolution to "ethnoreligious maps of the modern-day Balkans." This is a hefty book (over 600 pages, not including appendices and footnotes), and while Phillips's preface is a bit self-absorbed, admirers of David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel will find much to like between its covers. --John J. Miller --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this titlePlaces Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation
by John Phillip Santos
Mexican American journalist John Phillip Santos's lyrical and loving memoir explores his family's history in magnificent prose touched with the singing cadences of his Spanish-language heritage yet vibrant with the energy of American English. It's a combination utterly suited to his native San Antonio, where las viejitas--the little old ladies of the Garcia and Santos families--ruled over their children and grandchildren with the toughness and grandeur of the Mexico they left during the revolution of 1914. "Poised between those ancient Indio origins from the south ... and our Mestizo future in the north," these new Texans made Mexico live for their descendants in the magical stories and folkloric practices of an older culture. Yet there was also a sense of secrets kept and cherished possessions left behind, of people who had traveled far and traveled light. The "wind of story" was also "a wind of forgetting," and as Santos probes his heritage, he comes to understand that "it is okay to move on and forget." Nonetheless, this is a book that restores to memory the drama not just of a single family but of an entire people whose past is more closely entwined with that of the United States than some Americans care to remember. Santos depicts them with care and dignity. --Wendy SmithThe Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane
by Paul L. Mariani
In addition to several volumes of poetry, Paul Mariani has also written biographies of major 20th-century American poets: William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. In his fourth biography, he takes on the life of Hart Crane (1899-1932), a contemporary of Williams who held a similarly pivotal role in the development of American literature's avant-garde. "It would be difficult," Mariani suggests, "to find a serious poet or reader of poetry in this country today who has not been touched by something in Hart Crane's music." (However, at the time, many critics--with some of whom he had strained personal relationships--did not evaluate his work so highly, which contributed in part to Crane's dramatic suicidal leap off a ship at sea.) Crane loved New York, moving there from his hometown of Cleveland as soon as he could; even when financial straits forced him to return home to work for his father, the "white buildings" of Manhattan loomed in his imagination. The Broken Tower does a fine job of recreating the passionate energy and vitality of Crane's life. Mariani weaves lines from Crane's letters and poems into his narrative throughout, and while he does not skimp in his accounts of the poet's alcoholism and promiscuous sex life with other men, he treats these matters simply as components of the poet's complex personality.The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood
by Jesse Green
Journalist Jesse Green's delightful memoir makes it quite clear that the pleasures and perils of parenting are always the same--even for a gay 37-year-old man who stumbles into it by falling in love with a person who has an adopted son. As Green puts it in a typically well-turned phrase, "fatherhood trumps gayness," which is to say that heterosexual parents at the playground sometimes find it easier to relate to Green, his boyfriend, Andy, and son, Erez (soon joined by baby brother Lucas), than do the well-buffed, perennially youthful male guests at a Fire Island party--they flinch at the sight of diapers and baby bags. As the author searchingly and intelligently considers what it means to gay people to become parents, and the ways in which it does and does not pull them closer into the mainstream, his narrative is often extremely funny. (Joking about Erez's apparently heterosexual inclinations, Green deadpans, "We tried our best: We played him Judy Garland records and showed him tapes of West Side Story.") A very moving examination of identity and the making of a meaningful adult life that resonates profoundly for people of every sexual orientation. --Wendy Smith
The Holocaust in American Life
by Peter Novick
In the first decades following World War II, Americans rarely discussed the Holocaust. Now, remembering the Holocaust has become a fundamental part of Jewish identity; gentiles, too, view the Holocaust as a touchstone of moral solemnity. In The Holocaust and American Life, Peter Novick asks why, and his answers are both sensible and shocking. He explains the immediate postwar silence about the Holocaust by reviewing the basics of cold war politics: just after the liberation of the concentration camps, Americans were called upon to sympathize with "gallant Berliners" who resisted the Soviets and built a wall against Communism--an "enormous shift from one set of alignments to another," Novick notes. Novick then leads readers through the series of events that brought the Holocaust to the forefront of American consciousness--the trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Six-Day War, the Carter administration's Israel policy, and the construction of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.Among Novick's most controversial ideas is his assertion that American Jews spoke softly of the Holocaust at first because they didn't want to be seen as victims; later, Jews decided that victim status would work in their best political interest. Or, as Novick puts it, "Jews were intent on permanent possession of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics." The Holocaust in American Life is as carefully researched and argued as it is polemical and probing. Novick does not suffer Holocaust deniers lightly, and he is empathic toward victims and survivors, but he has no tolerance for false sentiment. One wishes that more people would ask, as Novick does, what kind of a country would spend millions of dollars on a museum honoring European Jewish Holocaust victims instead of a monument to its own shameful history of black slavery. --Michael Joseph Gross
Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin
by Alice Echols
To call Janis Joplin the Judy Garland of the Woodstock set is in some sense a fair characterization. The brassy, carnal, extravagant, and ultimately pitiable queen of psychedelic rock is indeed a cultural icon. And while Joplin reveled in her own ballsy, boozy legend, its needy, inebriated, real-life equivalent was a shadow that darkened her short life and, in the decades since her 1970 drug-induced death, has come to eclipse the party-girl persona.To her great credit, author Alice Echols reconciles the two faces of Joplin in this ambitious, thoroughly readable biography. She does so by tracing Joplin from her youth as a natural-born libertine in dreary Port Arthur, Texas, to her emergence as the sole female rock superstar of her era--a period when beneath-the-surface sexism hampered Joplin's progress even while women's liberation was being widely touted. The author does not shy away from sordid sex-and-drugs episodes, and there's plenty of raw material---the singer was promiscuous, bisexual, and, at various times, an alcoholic, a speed freak, and a junkie. Echols, however, elevates this biography above run-of-the-mill rock profiles by painting her subject against an elaborate and ever-changing cultural backdrop. Here is Joplin the aspiring folksinger, the white-picket-fence wannabe, the wayward daughter, the hit-and-miss recording artist, and, finally, the ill-starred spirit with nothing left to lose. --Steven Stolder
Runaway Slaves is yet another masterpiece from the esteemed African American historian John Hope Franklin, author of the influential From Slavery to Freedom. Along with history professor Loren Schweninger, Franklin examines the often unexplored phenomenon of slave resistance--specifically, that of runaway slaves. For too long, there has been a myth that slaves were happy with their condition. Armed with the data from numerous Wanted posters, letters, county-court petitions, and newspapers, Franklin and Schweninger prove that slaves were in a constant state of rebellion with their masters. The intense circle of violence between blacks and whites was marked by property sabotage, work stoppage, assault, murder, and escape into the North. "Perhaps the greatest impact runaways had on the peculiar institution," the authors suggest, "was in their defiance of the system. Masters and slaves knew that there were blacks who were willing to do almost anything to extricate themselves from bondage." Comprehensive in scholarship and compelling in prose, this book sheds light on an underappreciated aspect of the American quest for freedom. --Eugene Holley Jr.
Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds
by Bernd Heinrich
Beyond croaking, "Nevermore," what exactly do ravens do all day? Bernd Heinrich, biology professor at the University of Vermont and author of Ravens in Winter, has spent more than a decade learning the secrets of these giants of the crow family. He has observed startlingly complex activities among ravens, including strong pair-bonding, use of tools, elaborate vocal communication, and even play. Ravens are just plain smart, and we can see much of ourselves in their behavior. They seem to be affectionate, cranky, joyful, greedy, and competitive, just like us. And in Mind of the Raven, Heinrich makes no bones about attributing emotions and intellect to Corvus corax--just not the kind we humans can understand. He mostly catalogs their behaviors in the manner of a respectful anthropologist, although a few moments of proud papa show through when he describes the pet ravens he hand-raised to adulthood.Heinrich spends hundreds of loving hours feeding roadkill fragments to endlessly hungry raven chicks, and cold days in blinds watching wild ravens squabble and frolic. He is a passionate fan of his "wolf-birds," a name he gave them when he made the central discovery of the book: that ravens in Yellowstone National Park are dependent on wolves to kill for them. Mind of the Raven offers inspiring insight into both the lives of ravens and the mind of a truly gifted scientist. --Therese Littleton
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
by Dava Sobel
Everyone knows that Galileo Galilei dropped cannonballs off the leaning tower of Pisa, developed the first reliable telescope, and was convicted by the Inquisition for holding a heretical belief--that the earth revolved around the sun. But did you know he had a daughter? In Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel (author of the bestselling Longitude) tells the story of the famous scientist and his illegitimate daughter, Sister Maria Celeste. Sobel bases her book on 124 surviving letters to the scientist from the nun, whom Galileo described as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and tenderly attached to me." Their loving correspondence revealed much about their world: the agonies of the bubonic plague, the hardships of monastic life, even Galileo's occasional forgetfulness ("The little basket, which I sent you recently with several pastries, is not mine, and therefore I wish you to return it to me").The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena
by Jean-Paul Kauffmann, Patricia Clancy (Translator)
This is an unusually intelligent, elegiac book; not merely an account of Napoleon's last days in exile on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena but a meditation on the interrelations of past and present and the shadow a figure as gigantic as Napoleon casts onto futurity. On one level, the book is a travelogue, as Jean-Paul Kauffmann revisits modern St. Helena and describes what he finds; the small-scale lives of the islanders are related with tenderness as well as humor. But we also learn a great deal about Napoleon as Kauffmann passes through the places associated with him and attempts to get inside the head of the deposed emperor.There is a danger of pretentiousness, and there are moments when the Gallic gush is a little much; but overall the sheer force of Kauffmann's imagination fuses the whole into a powerful and affecting unity. In particular, his lyrical, poetic style has been well translated (by Patricia Clancy) and there are many striking moments. The beaches of St. Helena, for instance, are described as "black shingle, shiny as nuts of coal." Even the sunrise in this part of the world has a prison-like feel: "only one ray from the rising sun manages to pierce the clouds, falling on a corner of the coast as through a basement window." Thought-provoking and often exquisite, this is a unique sort of history. --Adam Roberts, Amazon.co.uk
Denmark Vesey
by David Robertson
In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a Caribbean-born free Negro from Charleston, South Carolina, led the largest attempted slave revolt in U.S. history with over 9,000 blacks. Although it failed--thanks to the confessions of a house slave to his master--and Vesey was executed, his heroic attempt continues to be a source of pride for African Americans. David Robertson's well-researched book chronicles Vesey's life as a slave in Haiti, his move to Charleston, his fluency in English, Creole, and French, and his skillful use of Christian teachings (and possibly Islamic ones, as well) to inspire the slaves to rebel. "He was a black man of great physical presence, strength, and intellect," Robertson writes, "linguistically fluent and politically facile enough to mold various African ethnic and religious groups into one unified force." Using court testimony from Vesey's trial and historical archives, Robertson unveils the stark and violent climate of antebellum life in 18th-century America, bringing to life a hero who fought for the same principles upon which the democratic nation in which he was made a slave was founded. --Eugene Holley Jr.
Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
by Peter Guralnick
Until Peter Guralnick came out with Last Train to Memphis in 1994, most biographies of Elvis Presley--especially those written by people with varying degrees of access to his "inner circle"--were filled with starstruck adulation, and those that weren't in awe of their subject invariably went out of their way to take potshots at the rock & roll pioneer (with Albert Goldman's 1981 Elvis reaching now-legendary levels of bile and condescension). Guralnick's exploration of Elvis's childhood and rise to fame was notable for its factual rigorousness and its intimate appreciation of Presley's musical agenda.Picking up where the first volume left off, Guralnick sees Elvis through his tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Germany, where he first met--and was captivated by--a 14-year-old girl named Priscilla Beaulieu. We may think we know the story from this point: the return to America, the near-decade of B-movies, eventual marriage to Priscilla, a brief flash of glory with the '68 comeback, and the surrealism of "fat Elvis" decked out in bejeweled white jumpsuits, culminating in a bathroom death scene. And while that summary isn't exactly false, Guralnick's account shows how little perspective we've had on Elvis's life until now, how a gross caricature of the final years has come to stand for the life itself. He treats every aspect of Presley's life--including forays into spiritual mysticism and the growing dependency on prescription drugs--with dignity and critical distance. More importantly, Careless Love continues to show that Guralnick "gets" what Presley was trying to do as an artist: "I see him in the same way that I think he saw himself from the start," the introduction states, "as someone whose ambition it was to encompass every strand of the American musical tradition." From rock to blues to country to gospel, Guralnick discusses how, at his finest moments, Elvis was able to fulfill that dream. --Ron Hogan
Kazan - The Master Director Discusses His Films: Interviews with Elia Kazan
by Jeff Young (Editor)
The presentation of a lifetime achievement award to Elia Kazan at the 1999 Oscar ceremony was one of the most controversial events in American movie history. Kazan's theatrical résumé includes the original productions of The Skin of Our Teeth, Death of a Salesman, and four of Tennessee Williams's best dramas. For the screen, he created Pinky, A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden, Baby Doll, A Face in the Crowd, On the Waterfront, Wild River, and America, America. But during the red scare, the master director named names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, ruining the careers of several of his contemporaries.Project Girl
by Janet McDonald
Ultimately, McDonald demonstrates yet again the strength of her perseverance and her spirit in her willingness to relive her traumas by writing about them.From Kirkus Reviews , November 1, 1998 Anger-filled memoirs, partly straight narrative and partly excerpts from a journal, of a professional black woman whose journey from a low-income housing project in Brooklyn to a law office in Paris is replete with violence, hostility, and alienation. McDonald, the middle of seven children, was singled out early as gifted. She recounts how a supportive program at Harlem Prep gained her admission to Vassar. Here, in a WASP world far from her family in the projects, her feelings of fear and isolation led her to heroin. Fortunately, Vassar provided counseling, sent her home on medical leave, and readmitted her the ...
God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church
by Caroline Fraser
In God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, Caroline Fraser delivers the most intelligent, humane, and even-handed history yet published of this important American religion. God's Perfect Child begins by telling the life story of Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science in 1879. Eddy built the church from a fringe sect into a mainstream religion whose wealth and power exceeded that of many Protestant denominations in the mid-20th century--and were considerably augmented by the church's once-popular newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor.Fraser, a literary critic and poet who was raised a Christian Scientist, has a relentless analytic bent and an acute eye for physical detail, both of which are in evidence on every page of this book. Her stories of parents whose attempts at faith-healing resulted in their children's deaths are especially poignant. These stories also illuminate and analyze the fears and pains that have plagued many Christian Scientists who subscribe to Eddy's belief that individuals can control their physical destiny by force of faith. Ultimately, Fraser has little sympathy for the obdurate self-reliance advocated by Christian Scientist doctrine, which she sees as a forerunner to the extremist paranoia of contemporary cults. "The suggestibility, infatuation, and enthusiasm that sparked Christian Science ... lies behind our current anxious fixations on imaginary perils and medical conspiracies," Fraser writes. "Florid though they may seem, such fears can have far from imaginary consequences."
Afi : American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States : Feature Films 1941-1950 Indexes (Afi Catalog Series, F4)
by Patricia King Hanson (Editor), Amy Dunkleberger (Editor), Bill Ivey
The American Film Institute Catalog has won great praise for its comprehensiveness, reliability, and utility. These volumes are an essential purchase for every library, and individual researchers will also find them indispensable. This newest AFI volume contains over 4,300 entries for feature-length films produced in the United States in the 1940s. The decade was an important and transitional one for filmmakers. Societal changes from the war years were reflected in films, and in the late 1940s the rise of television, the Hollywood blacklist, and the breakup of studio-owned theater chains greatly affected the number and types of films produced. Among films newly viewed for the book are such well-known classics as Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Casablanca, along with less heralded films such as Fighting Men of the Plains and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler. Entries include complete cast and crew credits, extensive plot summaries, and notes and sources for further study. A large accompanying volume provides access to the films through nine separate indexes, including personal and corporate names, subjects, and genres.The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private
by Susan Bordo
Shock waves riveted the Mattel, Inc., boardroom in 1961 when female executives suggested that Barbie's boy-toy, Ken--in keeping with Barbie's own physiognomy--ought to be a little more anatomically correct. No one was suggesting 1.25-inch-to-1-inch-scale plastic genitalia, mind you, just a modest groin bulge. But male execs at the toy company were scandalized; the suggested modifications did not make Ken more "authentic" in their eyes--they made him pornographic.My, how things have changed. In The Male Body, Susan Bordo (who snagged a Pulitzer nomination for 1993's Unbearable Weight) offers a frank, sprightly, and, yes, educational look at the male nude as an index to attitudes about sexuality in the broth of media and pop culture in which, like it or not, we all stew. While the Greeks were unafraid to celebrate masculine beauty, men have been strangely sexless throughout most of Western history--until Hollywood rediscovered the male body when Marlon Brando first shed his T-shirt in A Streetcar Named Desire. It's only been in the '90s, however, that the male image has gone so far as to reclaim its penis. From de facto censorship to near idolatry, has ever an organ made such a journey in one brief decade? But it's not the penis alone that makes a man a man; perhaps, Bordo concludes, it's time for us to rethink our metaphors of manhood. --Patrizia DiLucchio
Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story
by Don Normark
In 1949, photographer Don Normark walked up into the hills of Los Angeles, looking for a good view. Instead, he found Chvez Ravine, a ramshackle Mexican-American neighborhood tucked away in Elysian Park like a "poor man's Shangri-la." Enchanted, he stayed for a year in this uniquely intact rural community on the city's outskirts. There, Normark photographed a life that, though bowed down by poverty, was lived fully, openly, and joyfully. That ended in 1950, when the residents of Chvez Ravine were forced to abandon their homes to make way for Dodger Stadium. The past 50 years have not erased the memories of the uprooted descendants of Chvez Ravine. This haunting book captures their images, their stories, and their bittersweet memories, reclaiming and celebrating this lost village from a simpler time.About the Author Don Normark has had more than ten thousand photographs published in Sunset and other magazines. His award-winning work has been shown at galleries and museums around the US and is found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, MIT, and the Smithsonian.
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
by Christopher M. Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin
In early 1992, a Russian man walked into the British embassy in a newly independent Baltic republic and asked to "speak to someone in authority." As he sipped his first cup of proper English tea, he handed over a small file of notes. Eight months later, the man, his family, and his enormous archive had been safely exfiltrated to Britain. When news that a KGB officer had defected with the names of hundreds of undercover agents leaked out in 1996, a spokesperson for the SVR (Russia's foreign intelligence service, heir of the KGB) said, "Hundreds of people! That just doesn't happen! Any defector could get the name of one, two, perhaps three agents--but not hundreds!"Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin worked as chief archivist for the FCD, the foreign-intelligence arm of the KGB. Mitrokhin was responsible for checking and sealing approximately 300,000 files, allowing him unrestricted access to one of the world's most closely guarded archives. He had lost faith in the Soviet system over the years, and was especially disturbed by the KGB's systematic silencing of dissidents at home and abroad. Faced with tough choices--stay silent, resign, or undermine the system from within--Mitrokhin decided to compile a record of the foreign operations of the KGB. Every day for 12 years, he smuggled notes out of the archive. He started by hiding scraps of paper covered with miniscule handwriting in his shoes, but later wrote notes on ordinary office paper, which he took home in his pockets. He hid the notes under his mattress, and on weekends took them to his dacha, where he typed them and hid them in containers buried under the floor. When he escaped to Britain, his archive contained tens of thousands of pages of notes.
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
by Susan Faludi
Susan Faludi, author of the feminist bestseller Backlash, has done it again with an exhaustive report on the betrayals felt by working men throughout the United States. American men are angry and discontented, she argues in Stiffed, because their sense of what it is to be a man has been destroyed by everything from corporate downsizing and the shrinking military of the post cold war era to the increase in local sports teams leaving town. Whether she's interviewing the teenage male members of Southern California's infamous Spur Posse (who collected "points" for every female they had sex with), Cleveland football fans shaken by the departure of the Browns football team, militia movement activists, or Sylvester Stallone, Faludi seems stuck on the idea that American men today are man-boys, unable to completely grow up because they never received the nurturing they needed, and now constantly disappointed by life. Yet while many of the men Faludi interviews have real problems--bad luck and sad, troubled lives--somehow Stiffed still seems a bit whiny. Faludi's "travels through a postwar male realm" are a fascinating slice of male American life "under siege" at the end of the 20th century, even if she does finally leave us like the men she talked to--still wondering just what went wrong. --Linda KillianFriends Talking in the Night: Sixty Years of Writing for the New Yorker
by Philip Hamburger
...Hamburger's collection exemplifies the astute eye, the gracious humor and the unflagging curiosity of a master essayist.From Kirkus Reviews , December 15, 1998 A mainstay of the New Yorker staff since 1939, Hamburger has written everything from Talk of the Town entries to casuals and profiles; he even served as music critic and movie reviewer. Dozens of pieces are collected here, arranged chronologically within each category. The few comments provided by Hamburger are helpful: A ``Stanley'' essay was written, for example, to explore ``small, little-known islands in the East River and New York Harbor,'' and was authored by none other than the self-styled Our Man Stanley. Much of the material is dated; some of Hamburgers observations appear comically off the mark. For instance, ... read more
Mediterranean
by Mimmo Jodice, Predrag Matvejevic, George Hersey (Contributor)
Italian photographer Jodice captures the sculpture and ruins of classical antiquity in a stirring new way; they seem to shimmer before our eyes, bringing alive the magic of their origins. Creating his toned black-and-white images, Jodice uses a technique--a change of focus during exposure--that suggests motion, and it is this technique that gives distinction to the photographs, making them seem more than records. Most seem either to have a radiating, vibrating center that pulls the viewer into the space or to be strangely pulsing from within. Ringing the Mediterranean with his camera, Jodice traveled to Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey to its north, Tunisia to the south, and Syria and Jordan in the east. A few seascapes amidst the depictions of ruins remind us of what lay at the center of ancient Greece and Rome--their watery crossroads, so to speak. Lovers of classical art, travel, and photography alike will be intrigued with this book. Gretchen Garner
Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World
by Akbar S. Ahmed
Islam, argues Akbar S. Ahmed, does not mean the subordination of women, contempt for other religions, opposition to the modern world or 'barbaric' punishments for petty crime. Yet outsiders can learn to appreciate the beauty, depth and variety of Islamic tradition only by returning to its sources. Islam Today starts with the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an's 'five pillars', which govern the beliefs and behaviour of Muslims everywhere. It goes on to show how the great Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires have deeply marked the successor states in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and India, and explores how the Muslim minorities in the West struggle to maintain their identities and ideals in uncomprehending or hostile environments. Ahmed explores these issues with insight and sympathy, penetrating beyond the stereotypes to the realities of Islamic life.Blessed by Thunder: Memoir of a Cuban Girlhood
by Flor Fernandez Barrios
On the surface, this beautifully written memoir is riveting simply because it revolves around a young girl growing up in Cuba during the Communist revolution. When Flor Fernandez Barrios's parents consider fleeing Castro's regime, they are labeled gusanos, or traitors. Neighbors shame and taunt them. At the age of 10, Barrios is sent away along with thousands of other children to a work camp, where she is forced into hard labor, picking tobacco and sugar cane to offset the U.S. embargo.Barrios could have relied upon the dramatic details of her life in Cuba to make this memoir fascinating. But instead she dared to mine the depths of the cultural and spiritual story beneath the surface. Like Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, this is a tale of magic, spirits, and family devotion. Throughout her childhood, Barrios's mystical grandmothers, as well as her Afro-Cuban nanny, teach her the names and stories of their indigenous spirits, and their secret spells of healing. It is these Cuban spirits who thunder and comfort Barrios during her shameful punishments at work camp. Years later, the memories of her Cuban mentors and healing spirits help the exiled Barrios find her place in a new country. This is a highly recommended story of Cuban life, spiritual heritage, and human fortitude. --Gail Hudson
The David Story: A Translation With Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel
by Robert Alter (Editor)
There are countless good reasons to read The David Story, Robert Alter's new translation of the story of King David (beginning in I Samuel and ending in I Kings 2). In the book's introduction, Alter contends that the story of David is "probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh. It also provides the most unflinching insight into the cruel processes of history and into human behavior warped by the pursuit of power." Alter's translation is more literal than the King James version, which makes his rendering of Scripture newly immediate and jarring. (When Samuel anoints David in I Samuel 16, for instance, "the spirit of the LORD gripped David from that day onward.") This David Story is worth reading for the footnotes alone, which describe in vivid detail the mechanics of sheep-shearing festivals, sacrificial feasts, and other cultural phenomena that add depth and life to this familiar story. --Michael Joseph GrossThe Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
by Daniel Mendelsohn
When Daniel Mendelsohn was growing up, he "secretly imagined a place where all the people were other boys, and where all the stores and books and songs and movies and restaurants were by boys, about other boys. It would be a place where somehow the outside reality of the world that met your eyes and ears could finally be made to match the inner, hidden reality of what you knew yourself to be." And while he's found that place in Manhattan's Chelsea district, Mendelsohn has only one foot there--his other foot is in suburban New Jersey, where he acts as a masculine role model ("not exactly a father but a man who would be present") to the young son of a close friend. The Elusive Embrace is an elegantly written memoir that shifts effortlessly between these locales, and between the events in Mendelsohn's life and the Greek and Roman classics that are his academic specialty. Whether he's elaborating upon his earliest explorations of his sexuality or teasing out the secrets that redefine his family history, he writes with admirable grace and delicacy. --Ron HoganSecrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
by Judith Thurman
The same keen yet affectionate gaze Judith Thurman trained on Isak Dinesen in her 1983 National Book Award winner, The Life of a Storyteller, distinguishes her robust portrait of the great French writer Colette. In Secrets of the Flesh, Thurman shrewdly disentangles fact from legend during the course of the writer's long and turbulent life (1873-1954), yet she doesn't question Colette's right to mythologize herself. The fictions Colette created about herself were part of a lifelong attempt to make sense, not just of her own experience, but of the "secrets of the flesh" (André Gide's phrase in an admiring letter), the bonds that link women to men, parents to children, in an eternal search for love that is also a struggle for dominance. Chronicling Colette's scandalous life--male and female lovers, a stint in vaudeville, an affair with her stepson, a final happy marriage to a younger man--Thurman makes it clear that the writer's adored yet dominating mother and exploitative first husband made it difficult for her to conceive of amorous equality. Yet she nonetheless created a satisfying, creative existence, firmly rooted in the senses and filled with artistic achievement, from the bestselling Claudine novels to the mature insights of The Vagabond and Chéri. Thurman assesses with equal acuity the bleakness of Colette's world-view and a zest for life that it never seemed to dampen. --Wendy SmithJames Joyce
by Edna O'Brien
It is swift, moving and brimming with the author's enthusiasms and her well-earned affection for a difficult colleague.From Booklist , October 1, 1999 Viking/Lipper's Penguin Lives series continues to make creative matches, here offering Ireland's best current novelist an opportunity to rediscover the greatest (and most notorious) Irish novelist of the century. O'Brien relished the assignment, discovering that Joyce, whom she "excessive[ly] love[d]" in youth, was as fascinating, troubling, and involving as ever. Like the other Penguin Lives, O'Brien's biography is Joyce without footnotes and other academic impedimenta: she tells the story of the aspiring young writer and his downwardly mobile family, his escape to Europe, the constant struggle to scrape together enough money to live on, and finally his relative comfort, thanks ...
Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford
by Scott Eyman
Borrowing his title from dialogue in John Ford's classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ("When the legend becomes fact, print the legend"), Scott Eyman heeds this advice in his splendid study of Ford, finding a convincing balance between the gruff image Ford cultivated and the sensitive artist that Ford truly was. The result is a to-date definitive biography, occasionally prone to indelicate critical assessment while benefiting greatly from Eyman's full access to the Ford family archives. Arguably the greatest American filmmaker of the 20th century, Ford protected himself with a façade of belligerence yet engendered more loyalty among his crew and stock players (notably John Wayne and Ward Bond) than any other director. Eyman illuminates the Ford legend while focusing on fact--on a complex genius who would berate even the most vulnerable actor and then "apologize without apologizing," a binge drinker who never let alcohol interfere with his closely-guarded artistry, and a stalwart Navy captain whose service in World War II became his primary source of pride.Print the Legend essentially confirms Ford's brief affair with Katharine Hepburn, but Eyman emphasizes Ford's deep, abiding affection for his wife, Mary, who valiantly tolerated his absolute devotion to filmmaking. While hundreds of interviews yield a comprehensive account of Ford's working methods (which the director was loathe to discuss), Eyman expertly navigates around Ford's own penchant for autobiographical embellishment. What emerges is likely to remain the most thorough portrait of a cinematic master who recognized his own greatness without parading it, and whose human flaws were ultimately forgivable by those--and they were many--who loved him. Readers should look elsewhere for more astute studies of Ford's films, but Eyman has captured Ford the man with lasting authority. -- Jeff Shannon
Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts
by Roger Shattuck
In Candor and Perversion Roger Shattuck carries on two conversations. The more strident of the two, deceptively titled "Intellectual Craftsmanship," takes up the first section of this collection of essays and reviews. Here Shattuck engages in verbal fisticuffs with those who would mire the study of literature in the byzantine politics of identity and the arcane language of theory. Insisting that he's not a conservative, he instead gives himself the coy title of "conservationist." "Some of us," he writes, "have come to believe that it is possible, even necessary, to be liberal in political matters and conservationist in cultural matters." Shattuck lays bare the perceived dangers besetting the traditional literary scholar, and insists on the primacy of canonical texts in our universities: "In order to have a common frame of reference within which to reason together, I would argue that there are books everyone should read." Lest anyone think him extreme, he follows up quickly: "And we should never stop discussing which ones those are."
Selected Books: Fiction
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