In 1884 Ulysses S. Grant, the general who had won the Civil War and
former U.S. President, lost his life savings when an investment bank
in which we was a silent partner turned out to be a Ponzi scheme.
The bank's total loss of almost $17 million was called “the most
colossal swindle of the age.” In those days, there was no
post-presidential pension. Things looked dire for Grant. Enter
Samuel Clemens (whom Flood, in this otherwise fascinating and
entertaining book's one misstep, insists on referring to as “Mark
Twain”). Learning that Grant had started working on his memoirs in
order to earn some money, Clemens talked him into allowing his own
publishing house to release it. Soon the two most famous men in
America were fast friends and Clemens was an almost daily visitor at
“the General's” house. This book recounts Grant's efforts over the
next year to finish his memoirs before he died of throat and mouth
cancer. Grant's output was nothing short of herculean. Averaging
750—with occasional spikes as high as 10,000—words a day, Grant
eventually produced 291,000 words in that one year. What makes it
all the more remarkable is that he was in excruciating pain most of
the time. Nightly sprays of cocaine water to his throat alleviated
symptoms somewhat, but there were still times when drinking even a
glass of water was like swallowing “molten lead.” Grant thought
constantly of the future. Along with his desire to pass on his
unique story to posterity, he also wrote a letter of recommendation
for his black freeman valet, be used posthumously, and a letter to
the future president of the United States asking that his then-baby
grandson be appointed to West Point. (It would be acted upon 13
years later, and U.S. Grant III would eventually serve in both World
Wars.) Grant's project coincided with the 20th
anniversary of the South's surrender at Appomattox, and letters of
gratitude from soldiers and their children flooded in, including
some from former Confederates who remembered him as a “generous
victor” who “conceded liberal and magnanimous terms of surrender.”
Grant's Memoirs remain a classic to this day, and Flood's
view into the circumstances surrounding their creation makes a
perfect companion piece.
For people who grew up watching the “golden age” of MTV, its first
decade from 1981 to 1992, this 600-page oral history is biggest,
most satisfying nostalgia wallow of the year. Readers will dive in
and emerge days later with a huge grin and a list an arm long of
videos that they must rush to YouTube to watch again. Marks and
Tannenbaum interviewed 400 people, including business executives,
technical crews, and artists (Weird Al! MC Hammer! Martha Quinn!),
and the result is a detailed explosion of the world behind the
scenes. And not just the clever marketing; it's all here:
strippers, booze, cocaine, and midgets. Oh, so many midgets... Whole
chapters are devoted to exhaustively covering some of the
controversies. It is not true that MTV didn't play any black artists
prior to Michael Jackson, but it is true that the success of
Jackson's brand of R&B put an end to MTV's album-oriented-rock
format and opened the door for a multitude of new types of artists,
including the nascent world of rap. When the video format mostly
meant smoke machines and haircuts, Jackson showed “everyone what
you're supposed to do with it.” We follow MTV's evolution from a
tiny station that almost no cable company would carry to an
international cultural force. From record companies initially
refusing to give the station their videos, to them seeing that the
right video could propel an unknown band to double-platinum
superstardom. Eventually, the emphasis on the singles that backed
videos created a culture of one-hit wonders that destroyed
creativity and careers. Soon, as “the MTV attitude became pervasive,
videos began to feel commonplace.” And ultimately the conflicts
engendered in The Real World beat out even the plot of a
Beastie Boys video. Note: The index includes personal and band
names, but not the song/video titles. Gag me with a spoon!
Forward by Caroline Kennedy, Introduction and Annotations by Michael Beschloss
reviewed by Kevin Lauderdale
Just four months after the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy in 1964, his widow sat down with historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. for a series of recorded interviews. Jacqueline Lee
Bouvier Kennedy Onassis wrote no autobiography nor ever again spoke
publicly about her life with JFK, leaving these interviews as
posterity's sole record of her view of those remarkable times. The
conversations, sealed for 50 years, plunge readers into their world,
and, more importantly, give us an intimate view of JFK's mind and
personality. They are a treasure trove of insights, anecdotes, and
gossip.
There are no blockbuster revelations. She does not speak of the
assassination. (She spoke with William Manchester about that in
interviews still sealed for another 50 years.) She makes no mention
of any of her husband's affairs, but does note how his energy and
charisma made him admired by women and men. She reveals that Ian
Fleming wasn't JFK's favorite author. The President read
voraciously, but it was almost excursively histories. Indeed, one of
the things that stands out so prominently in her reminiscences is
the amount of reading, and thinking about what they read, that
Kennedy and those around him did. For all the Camelot glamor,
his was an intellectual administration. Jackie viewed the
President's ability to be “conciliatory” and to forgive opponents in
order to move on towards a greater good as what made him so
successful. He was so conciliatory that he couldn't bear to get rid
of his own vice-president, Lyndon B. Johnson, despite the fact that
frequently said, “Can you ever imagine what would happen to the
country if Lyndon was president.”
Of former presidents, Kennedy most admired Jefferson. He considered
Theodore Roosevelt “fatuous,” and thought FDR was a “poseur” who had
made a lot of foreign policy mistakes. Eisenhower, whose golf cleats
left holes all over the White House floors, he accused of keeping
the U.S. “standing still.” Jackie viewed her role as trying to
create “a climate of affection” where the President could relax
after the day's work, and where he might have “diverting” company
for dinner. She shows her own class prejudices on numerous
occasions, and only a decade later gave up the idea, which she
expresses here, that women were “just not suited” to politics.
The book comes with the eight hours of conversations on CDs.
Listening to them is a rewarding and intimate experience. Recorded
at her home, you can occasionally hear the tinkling of ice cubes in
her glass or her children playing in the next room. But the book is
more than just a transcript. It's generously illustrated and
annotated. That last is especially helpful. The conversation is
filled with contemporary references that mean nothing to us today.
Why was “everyone … so mad at General de Gaulle last year”? What is
“that calendar” that JFK gave his friends as a souvenir of the Cuban
Missile Crisis? How did the ominous-sounding “Skybolt” almost end a
British administration? This book is required reading for students
of those times.
Roger Ebert's life has not been particularly glamorous; he makes his
living watching movies and then telling us what he thinks about
them. It just so happens that he does that exceedingly well. Thus,
this book, his autobiography, succeeds solely on the strength of his
excellent writing. The events are almost secondary to how well he
takes us into his mind and times. When he tells stories about John
Wayne, Martin Scorsese, or Woody Allen, it's them talking—sometimes
about a third person entirely. Any glamour present is rarely about
Ebert. He did spend a college year abroad in South Africa and have a
few adventures making Russ Meyer’s Beyond The Valley of the Dolls,
but this book also devotes entire chapters to the 1957 Studebaker
Golden Hawk and the Chicago burger joint Steak 'n Shake. He views
himself as “a newspaperman,” not a Hollywood insider. His heroes
were the columnist Mike Royko and legendary interviewer Studs Terkel.
He may have been to London and Venice for glamorous reasons—to
interview a star, to attend a film festival—but he experienced them
like nearly any tourist. The things he saw and did might be
experienced by almost anyone. (Writing of a real London character:
“He appears in a Dickens novel I haven't read yet.”) His
relationship with fellow film critic Gene Siskel was brotherly in
its competitions and disagreements. Ebert's youth was Rockwellesque,
and the early chapters of his book evoke an era of wonder. He is
especially sad that movies today are “more craven and cowardly, more
skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes, instead of
educating them.” The early days of his career, spent at the
Chicago Sun-Times were a world right out of the The Front
Page, complete with drinking, smoking, and guys who knew all the
nicknames of Chicago's mobsters. Ebert is straightforward but not
maudlin about his thyroid cancer and jaw tumor surgeries (which have
left him unable to eat, drink, or speak) and detached about his
alcoholism (which didn’t seem to affect him that badly). His last
chapter reflects on eternity and God. Considering that his current
television show is currently in abeyance, and not likely to return,
this may be the last significant work from Ebert. If so, it’s one
hell of a final act.
The latest entry in Princeton University Press' “Writers on Writers”
series of brief books is from Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic
Dirda. Here he covers one of his favorite topics: the creator of
Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The book is, naturally, heavy on Holmes and what Dirda calls the
“compulsive readability” of his adventurers. But Dirda's energy
makes the case for readers to try Conan Doyle's other writings, from
historical fiction like his tale of knighthood The White Company,
to his ghost stories, to his autobiographical writings. Dirda has
made a study of other writers' Holmes pastiches. Anyone picking up
this volume has probably already read the collected “canon,” so this
provides a guide to the best of what to read next. Dirda also
devotes a good portion of the book to the work of the Holmes
enthusiast (to put it mildly) organization The Baker Street
Irregulars. Dirda's comments, including a lengthy except from a talk
he once presented about a minor character in one of the Holmes
stories, are an exercise in imagination and flexing the mind,
something of which Conan Doyle himself would have approved. On
Conan Doyle would make an excellent stocking-stuffer for both
avid Holmesians and those who are only just discovering the Master
through the Robert Downey, Jr. films. Through it we see that Conan
Doyle and his creations inhabited a much wider world than is usually
recognized, and that subsequent writers and readers have only
enlarged it further. The book ends with lists of essential books and
online resources, but, alas, neither footnotes nor an index—which is
a real loss, considering how many other books and authors are
referenced.
On the morning of the accident, Carly had forgotten to set the alarm
and overslept.
That simple, understated opening belies one of the most intense and
devastatingly effective thrillers of the year, as Peter James’s
Dead Man’s Grip twists our emotions into knots even as it builds
a bridge across the Atlantic to link the British James with his
increasingly ardent American fan base.
The aforementioned Carly Grace finds herself racked by guilt in the
wake of a car accident in which she was involved that killed an
American student attending an English university. As if that wasn’t
bad enough, she soon learns that the drivers of the other two
vehicles have been tortured and murdered. Enter our old friend,
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace to try to get the bottom of the
apparent plot aimed at securing vengeance at the same time he
unravels the complex web behind it.
Once again, James pens an intensely personal, harrowing thriller
that marks the finest British crime writing this side of the
wondrous Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series. Nobody
captures the dual, contrasting psyches of cat and mouse better than
he, and Dead Man’s Grip is a tour de force triumph.
In
2019 a cure for aging becomes widely available. Millions of people
take the cure and although they can still die by normal means, they
don’t get any older biologically. The Postmortal takes this
premise and imagines its impact on humanity. Population skyrockets.
Extremists rise up against those who have been cured. Governments
enact increasingly draconian laws and procedures to deal with the
situation.
John
Farrell is a lawyer who gets the cure early in 2019. The
Postmortal is presented as his blog entries for sixty years
following his cure, as he navigates the increasingly bleak
landscape. The blog-entry concept allows Magary to present Farrell’s
first person narration plus headlines, news stories, and other
commentaries that Farrell has reposted or linked to on his blog.
Magary does a good job of introducing the near-future of 2019, a
time not too different from our own, and then slowly developing an
overburdened world, where the gap between developing technologies
and disappearing resources places civilization on the edge. The
descent into apocalyptic anarchy follows a disturbingly believable
progression. The only shortcoming of the novel is that space travel
is never mentioned; in a world overpopulated with people who can
live for millennia surely someone would think about colonization,
even if only to dismiss it as beyond the budgets or resources of the
planet. A minor quibble in an otherwise engaging, if depressing,
book that exposes human foibles without being preachy, and which
manages to be entertaining even as the darkness falls.
It's 1935, and Frank Nichols and his wife Eudora have just moved to
the tiny, rural community of Whitbrow, Georgia. Frank has inherited
a ramshackle old plantation, with instructions from his late aunt,
the previous owner, to sell it immediately: “there is bad blood
here, and it is against you for no fault of your own.” Almost
immediately the couple bump up against the hamlet's mysteries. Why
does this poor community turn loose pigs—pigs they can ill afford to
lose—into the woods across the river every month? Is it just because
“it's always been done,” or is there any truth to the legends that
it's to appease the Devil or some “devil dog”? When the town decides
to stop sacrificing the pigs, people start dying, and something
seems to be coming into Whitbrow in search of the pigs. Then, when
20 of Whitbrow's dead are dug up and their corpses propped up in the
school house with the message SEND THE PIGS scrawled on the
blackboard, the townsmen form a posse and finally go across the
river. The novel is spooky and atmospheric—all the more so because
the rest of it is so firmly grounded in reality. The Depression is
almost a character in itself here, Frank is a semi-shell-shocked WWI
vet, and the atrocities of his Civil War-era ancestor live on into
the 20th century. Buehlman has created a Southern Gothic
ghost story that's quite unputdownable.
Stephen Hunter didn’t invent the high-action thriller. But, as
Hunter once again demonstrates in Soft Target, he might as
well have. This lightning-paced tale that serves as a kind of
demarcation point for Hunter’s multi-generational thriller saga most
resembles his pre-Swagger tale THE DAY BEFORE MIDNIGHT in its
sparseness and simplicity.
Infamous Black Friday, with its trampling hordes of pre-dawn
shoppers now armed with pepper spray, is bad enough already without
adding terrorists to the mix. But that’s exactly what Hunter does,
offering up a hefty dose of them with their soft target of the title
nothing less than Minneapolis’ Mall of America, the largest such
structure in the country. Good thing for the victims that Marine
sniper Ray Cruz, son of the iconic Bob Lee Swagger, is among those
taken hostage. Bad thing for the dozen gunmen who had the
misfortune of catching Cruz in anything but the holiday spirit.
Having no gun is only one of the challenges Cruz must face to prove
himself the equal of his celebrated father and equally celebrated
grandfather, the great Earl Swagger.
Soft Target
is Die Hard with a brain and a plan, before Bruce Willis got
old and bald. While so many thriller authors have followed the
Clancy model by fashioning needlessly bloated books, Hunter instead
trims the fat and gives us a lean, action-packed tale that begs to
be read in a single sitting. Personally, I’d recommend savoring it
a bit since, just like Christmas, Hunter books only come around once
a year.
My Reading Log by Jeff Ayers, Associate Editor
It has been forever since I’ve done a
reading log. My reading has been primarily reviews for other venues
so my reading outside those places has been somewhat limited. This
month, I do have a few books to recommend:
Two
books on the craft of writing have emerged for the author on your
holiday list.
Now Write! Mysteries (Tarcher Penguin, $14.95)
gathers a phenomenal array of quality teachers and writers in the
genre. A collection of short essays covering everything from voice
to point of view, story structure, and revisions, the book will
appeal to both the pro and the beginner. The sections are short
enough to be read in less than five minutes, and there is an
exercise at the end for practice.
One
of the best writing teachers in the country is Christina Katz. An
expert in building an author’s platform, she has taken her
unparalleled advice and spread it out over a calendar year (if you
can pace yourself to read one a day) in
The Writer’s Workout: 366
Tips, Tasks, & Techniques From Your Writing Career Coach. (Writer’s
Digest, $19.99). She helps focus the author on the quality and
voice of their work. This is a mandatory addition to any writer’s
bookshelf.
The
Amazon.com company defied the odds and Jeff Bezos did everything his
way against the normal ways of doing business. In One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com (Portfolio/Penguin, $25.95),
Richard Brandt delivers a concise and compelling look at the
beginning of the company and how it became the dominant company
everyone knows.
The
latest collection of humorous Big Nate cartoons by Lincoln Peirce
looks vastly different due to the source material being almost
fourteen years old. (The previous collections have highlighted
recent cartoons). It is great to look back at such a fun comic
strip and character in Big Nate. Like fine wine, it ages well.
Big
Nate and Friends. (Andrews McMeel, $9.99).
I had the pleasure of selecting
for Library Journal the best thrillers of 2011.
Here is the link.
My Reading Log 
