Authors Books - Page 17

Fear and Loathing in America : The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist

Hunter S. Thompson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, Hunter S. Thompson is back with another astonishing volume of his private correspondence, the highly anticipated follow-up to The Proud Highway. When that first book of letters appeared in 1997, Time pronounced it "deliriously entertaining"; Rolling Stone called it "brilliant beyond description"; and The New York Times celebrated its "wicked humor and bracing political conviction."

Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. To read Thompson's dispatches from these years -- addressed to the author's friends, enemies, editors, and creditors, and such notables as Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut -- is to read a raw, revolutionary eyewitness account of one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in American history.

River-Horse: Across America By Boat

William Least Heat-Moon, William Least Heat-Moon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 95 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

"It's all about me" said Author. 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Heat-Moon undertook a fabulous adventure with the assistance of a seemingly very capable and helpful (and anonymous) crew; it's a shame one of them wasn't an author who was up to the task of capturing such a remarkable journey. He can't seem to keep the focus on the trip, but instead constantly writes about 'me, me, me, me, me' and how urbane and worldly he is. His expressed surprise and dissapointment at the lack of gourmet dining and Guinness in small river towns across the US is just one of the many examples that gave me the impression that he was a bit out of touch and unprepared for the realities of such a trip. Throughout the book, Heat-Moon never seems to decide if the trip is supposed to be a rugged, Lewis and Clark-type excursion to truly experiencing America by river and along the river, or an opportunity to tell the reader how superior he is by criticizing the rural communities he passes through and the agencies and people that helped make his trip possible.

He does bring up some very valid points regarding their first-hand observations of negative environmental impacts due to land-use policies, but these valuable points are lost in his smug presentation and finger-pointing. His cumbersome and pretentious writing detracts from the book's flow and kept me from feeling any real connection with the author and his story.

Editorial Review:

In his most ambitious journey ever, William Least Heat-Moon sets off aboard a small boat named Nikawa (river horse in Osage) from the Atlantic at New York Harbor in hopes of entering the Pacific near Astoria, Oregon. He and his companion, Pilotis, struggle to cover some 5,000 watery miles, often following in the wakes of our most famous explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark.

En route, the voyagers confront massive floods, dangerous weather, and their own doubts about whether they can complete the trip. But the hard days yield incomparable pleasures: generous strangers, landscapes untouched since Sacajawea saw them, riverscapes flowing with a lively past, and the growing belief that efforts to protect our lands and waters are beginning to pay off.

Teeming with humanity, humor, and high adventure, River-Horse is an unsentimental and original arteriogram of our nation at the millennium.

The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father

Jim Wight

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

No one is better poised to write the biography of James Herriot than the son who worked alongside him in the Yorkshire veterinary practice when Herriot became an internationally bestselling author. Now, in this warm and poignant memoir, Jim Wight talks about his father--the beloved veterinarian whom his family had to share with half the world.

Alf Wight (aka James Herriot) grew up in Glasgow, where he lived during a happy rough-and-tumble childhood and then through the challenging years of training at the Glasgow Veterinary College. The story of how the young vet later traveled to the small Yorkshire town of Thirsk, aka Darrowby, to take the job of assistant vet is one that is well known through James Herriot's internationally celebrated books and the popular All Creatures Great and Small television series.

But Jim Wight's biography ventures beyond the trials and tribulations of his father's life as a veterinarian to reveal the man behind the stories--the private individual who refused to allow fame and wealth to interfere with his practice or his family. With access to all of his father's papers, correspondence, manuscripts, and photographs--and intimate remembrances of all the farmers, locals, and friends who populate the James Herriot books--only Jim Wight could write this definitive biography of the man who was not only his father but his best friend.

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen

Jacques Pepin

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Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the moment of its publication, The Apprentice established itself as an "instant classic" (Anthony Bourdain). With sparkling wit and occasional pathos, the man whom Julia Child has called "the best chef in America" tells the captivating story of his rise from a terrified thirteen-year-old toiling in an Old World French kitchen to an American superstar who ad-libbed and demonstrated culinary wizardry as the cameras rolled — and changed American tastes.
The Apprentice is an engrossing tale of the modern cooking scene and how it came to be, told from an engaging personal perspective. The story begins in prewar France, with young Jacques cutting his teeth in his mother"s small restaurants. Moving to Paris, it offers tantalizing glimpses of Sartre and Genet. In his role as Charles de Gaulle"s personal chef, Jacques witnesses history being made from behind the swinging door of the kitchen.
In America, he rejects an offer to be chef in the Kennedy White House, choosing instead to work at Howard Johnson"s. He then proceeds to make some history of his own, creating a revolution with a band of fellow food lovers: Julia Child, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne. Culinary high jinks and revealing portraits ensue. The Apprentice also includes well-loved recipes, from Maman"s Cheese Soufflé to Chicken Salad à la Danny Kaye.

Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent

Anthony Rapp

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Review 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is amazing. It's a great read, easy to follow and really hits at your heart. I would reccommend it to everyone.

Editorial Review:

Anthony Rapp had a special feeling about Jonathan Larson's rock musical Rent as early as his first audition, which won him a starring role as the video artist Mark Cohen. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent opened to thunderous acclaim off-Broadway -- but even as friends and family were celebrating the show's first success, they were also mourning Jonathan Larson's sudden death from an aortic aneurysm. And when Anthony's mom began to lose her battle with cancer, Anthony found himself struggling to balance his life in the theater with his responsibility to his family.

In Without You, Anthony tells of his exhilarating journey with the cast and crew of Rent as well as the intimacies of his personal life behind the curtain. Marked by fledgling love and devastating loss, Without You is an exceptional memoir of the world of theater, the love of a son for his mother, and maturity won far too early.

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

Carlos Eire

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Total reviews: 71 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of "Waiting for Snow in Havana," a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing up in a privileged Havana household -- and of being exiled from his own childhood by the Cuban revolution. That childhood, until his world changes, is as joyous and troubled as any other -- but with exotic differences. Lizards roam the house and grounds. Fights aren't waged with snowballs but with breadfruit. The rich are outlandishly rich, like the eight-year-old son of a sugar baron who has a real miniature race car, or the neighbor with a private animal garden, complete with tiger. All this is bathed in sunlight and shades of turquoise and tangerine: the island of Cuba, says one of the stern monks at Carlos's school, might have been the original Paradise -- and it is tempting to believe. His father is a municipal judge and an obsessive collector of art and antiques, convinced that in a past life he was Louis XVI and that his wife was Marie Antoinette. His mother looks to the future; conceived on a transatlantic liner bound for Cuba from Spain, she wants her children to be modern, which means embracing all things American. His older brother electrocutes lizards. Surrounded by eccentrics, in a home crammed with portraits of Jesus that speak to him in dreams and nightmares, Carlos searches for secret proofs of the existence of God. Then, in January 1959, President Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Castro has taken his place, and Christmas is canceled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. At the Aquariumof the Revolution, sharks multiply in a swimming pool. And one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear -- spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, alone, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, "Waiting for Snow in Havana" is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died -- and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War

Robert Roper

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family brought to life, in Robert Roper’s brilliant evocation of the Family Whitman.

Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world.  Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother, George Washington Whitman, who led his men in twenty-one major battles—from Antietam to Fredericksburg, Vicksburg to the Wilderness—almost to die in a Confederate prison camp as the fighting ended.  Drawing on the searing letters that Walt, George, their mother Louisa, and their other brothers, wrote to each other during the conflict, and on new evidence and new readings of the great poet, Now the Drum of War chronicles the experience of an archetypal American family—from rural Long Island to working-class Brooklyn—enduring its own long crisis alongside the anguish of the nation.  Robert Roper has constructed a powerful narrative about America’s greatest crucible, and a compelling, braided story of our most original poet and one of our bravest soldiers.

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

Kathleen Norris

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

More spirituality than Dakotas 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I had been meaning to read this book for years. After finally doing so, and then skimming through the 40+ previous Amazon reviews, it is clear that the book will appeal most to those of a highly spiritual bent (but probably not devout followers of an organized religious denomination or practice). I am not highly spiritual, so the book does not speak as intensely to me as no doubt it does to many. Nonetheless, I admire the author's sincerity and her individuality.

As for the "Dakota" angle, that too is present, although not to the degree perhaps suggested by the title. Don't expect some sort of travelogue or overview of the Dakotas. In point of fact, much of the content is rather prosaic, which of course is not really a criticism of what is essentially an inward, spiritual book. Actually, the "geographical" locus of the book has more to do, I think, with the High Plains and with small towns than it does with the Dakotas.

The book consists of thirty or so short stand-alone chapters, interspersed with what the author terms "weather reports". Thus, it is somewhat of a hodgepodge; it certainly is not an example or product of linear thought (which also denotes it as spiritual in nature). I ended up marking a few sentences or paragraphs for future reference. In that sense, I found the book to be somewhat like a magpie's collection -- a few sparkling gem-like pieces of glass amidst a lot of string, weeds, and twigs.

Editorial Review:

"A book of stories, a book of prayer, a book to be read meditatively and well," DAKOTA offers a timeless tribute to a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth. From the award-winning author of AMAZING GRACE, DAKOTA is Kathleen Norris at her most thoughtful, her most discerning, her best. She gives us, once again, a rare "gift of hope and balance, a place to begin" (Chicago Tribune) and assurance that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.

The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Donald Hall's celebrated book of poems Without was written for his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. Hall returns to this powerful territory in The Best Day the Worst Day, a work of prose that is equally "a work of art, love, and generous genius" (Liz Rosenberg, Boston Globe).
Jane Kenyon was nineteen years younger than Donald Hall and a student poet at the University of Michigan when they met. Hall was her teacher. The Best Day the Worst Day is an intimate account of their twenty-three-year marriage, nearly all of it spent in New Hampshire at Eagle Pond Farm — of their shared rituals of writing, close attention to pets and gardening, and love in the afternoon. Hall joyfully records Jane's growing power as a poet and the couple's careful accommodations toward each other as writers. This portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, is laid against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months. Hall shares with readers — as if we were one of the grieving neighbors, friends, and relatives — the daily ordeal of Jane's dying, through heartbreaking and generous storytelling.
The Best Day the Worst Day stands alongside Elegy to Iris as a powerful testimony to both loss and love.

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Vladimir Nabokov

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Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Display Case of Butterflies 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

I read "Speak Memory" over a series of sun-shiny days, sitting in my back yard garden with twenty-six species of flowers blooming around me, in a neighborhood of Victorian houses with 100-year old back yard gardens. My flowers include mallows, zinnias, beebalm, cosmos, snapdragons, and other nectar producers. Over the whole week, I saw just one butterfly, a simple Cabbage White.

I don't think Vladimir Nabokov would write so approvingly of America today as he did of America in the 40s and 50s. I think he'd be disappointed. He'd find it barren and ugly, a casualty of the artless modernism he raged against all his life. Nabokov was a fervid conservative in most things, a man committed to his own memories of a more gracious past, his own childhood in pre-Bolshevik Russia. But don't get the idea that Nabokov was the ultra-capitalist curmudgeonly ranting style of conservative that one hears all too often today; here's what he wrote about that sort of conservative, who "rallied close to my side but did so from such crude reactionary motivation that I was only embarrassed by their despicable support. Indeed, I pride myself with having discerned even then the symptoms of waht is so clear today, when a kind of family circle has gradually formed, linking representatives of all nations, jolly empire builders in the jungle clearings, french policemen, the unmentionable German product, the good old churchgoinf Russian or Polish Pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher, the man with bad teeth who squirts antiminority stories in the bar or the lavatory..."

Like almost everything Nabokov wrote, these memoirs pivot around the Bolshekiv Revolution. Talking about the spiral as a clearer signifier than the circle, he explicitly describes his own life as consisting of a first curl of the spiral, his childhood, ending with his family's flight from the Revolution; a second curl, his twenty years as an emigre in Europe, a grim and self-enclosed time; and his later life in America, a relaxed time of blooming friendships.

More than half the book recaptures the fluttering beauties of his highly privileged and cultured childhood. These chapters are essentially just like the childhood chapters of any memoirist who had a happy youth; they depict his growing self-discovery, his awareness of life in its larval and pupal stages, his acquisition of a sense of having a life cycle to fulfill. "All of this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time," he meditates, and in another passage, speaking of coincidences and chance encounters, he declares; "The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography." But what distinguishes Nabokov's clearly nostalgic memoirs from those of other writers is the splendor of his language. The moths and butterflies in his display cases are so beautiful and rare that the reader scarcely dares breathe on them. One can read Nabokov's tales of his Tsarist playland for simple verbal pleasure, without much bothering over their significance or reality.

Alas, I find the reality dubious. Tsarist Russia was not that cultured, that gradually progressive, that tolerant and susceptible to self-regeneration. Vlady is mythologizing, friends, painting his lost childhood idyll with acrylics in primary colors! There WERE serfs. There were pogroms, racial barriers and supressions of customs, grinding poverty, and rural neglect tempered only with exploitation. The Bolsheviks were thugs, yes indeed, but they couldn't have triumphed without the mastication of the masses by the upper classes.

The shorter and less lovely chapters of Speak Memory that retell Nabokov's years as an emigre also reveal a kind of display case glass between the author and reality: "As I look back at those years of exile, I see myself, and thousands of other Russians, leading an odd but by no means unpleasant existence, in material indigence and intellectual luxury, among perfectly unimportant strangers, spectral Germans and Frenchmen in whose more or less illusory cities we, emigres, happened to dwell. ...no real communication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own midst, existed between us and them." Well, well! Having been an emigre myself, on both sides of the Atlantic, I can certainly recognize this state of things. Old Vlad is certainly being honest and implicitly self-derogatory. Once again, however, he mythologizes: following the Bolshevik calamity, he says "With very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces -- poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on -- had left Lenin's and Satlin's Russia. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state." Thereafter he continues through a full chapter discussing the works of his fellow emigres, all but his own justly forgotten or repudiated by now, while however tenuously and in whatever peril, the writers and composers who stood their ground under Lenin, Stalin, and their troll-hearted successors -- Shostakovich, Prokofieff, Schnittke, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Vosnezhensky, Ahkmatova, Solzhentitsyn, and others -- have bequeathed post-communist Russia a heritage of masterpieces.

What saved Nabokov, I think, was his passage from the pupa stage of an emigre to the winged maturity of being an immigrant. That metamorphosis is not recounted in Speak Memory, which ends cleanly in 1939 with the Nabokov family's departure for America.

Such beautiful language! Such wit! Nabokov is a show-off, no doubt, an exotic hand-sized tropical moth of a writer, the only author whose books ever send me to a dictionary. Hey, that's what I enjoy about him.

Editorial Review:

A rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including LOLITA, PNIN, DESPAIR, THE GIFT and others.