Thanks for the Memories - May 7, 2012
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Monday, May 7, 2012 New and notable biographies and memoirs. Published every other month. View more Thanks for the Memories: Blog View | Archived Newsletter View | Insider Questions? Email madtech @ scls.lib.wi.us |
 Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World Folklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music for the Library of Congress and by the late 1930s brought his discoveries to radio, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives. By the 1940s he was producing concerts that brought white and black performers together, and in the 1950s he set out to record the whole world. Lomax was also controversial. When he worked for the government he was tracked by the FBI, and when he worked in Britain, MI5 continued the surveillance. In his last years he turned to digital media and developed technologies that anticipated today's breakthroughs. Featuring a cast of characters from Eleanor Roosevelt to Leadbelly, Carl Sagan to Bob Dylan, Szwed's biography provides an account of an era seen through the life of one extraordinary man. |
 Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind the Legend Fletcher draws on a wealth of overlooked detail and the latest research to reveal Cleopatra as she truly was, from her first meeting with Julius Caesar to her legendary death by snakebite. Bringing the ancient world to life, Cleopatra the Great is full of tantalizing details about the Pharaoh's infamous banquets, her massive library, her goddess outfits, beauty regimes and hairstyles. |
 Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness In this sequel to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, the author returns to Africa and the story of her unforgettable family. In this book she braids a multilayered narrative around the perfectly lit, Happy Valley era Africa of her mother's childhood; the boiled cabbage grimness of her father's English childhood; and the darker, civil war torn Africa of her own childhood. At its heart, this is the story of Fuller's mother, Nicola. Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye and raised in Kenya, Nicola holds dear the kinds of values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land, and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals. The author interviewed her mother at length and has captured her inimitable voice with remarkable precision. |
 Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness Endgame is acclaimed biographer Frank Brady's decades-in-the-making tracing of the meteoric ascent-and confounding descent -of enigmatic genius Bobby Fischer. Only Brady, who met Fischer when the prodigy was only 10 and shared with him some of his most dramatic triumphs, could have written this book, which has much to say about the nature of American celebrity and the distorting effects of fame. Drawing from Fischer family archives, recently released FBI files, and Bobby's own emails, this account is unique in that it limns Fischer's entire life-an odyssey that took the Brooklyn-raised chess champion from an impoverished childhood to the covers of Time, Life and Newsweek to recognition as "the most famous man in the world" to notorious recluse. |
 Love at First Bark: How Saving a Dog Can Sometimes Help You Save Yourself The bestselling memoirist shows how saving a dog can sometimes help you save yourself. Julie Klam writes about dogs with a rollicking wit and a radiating warmth-as no other writer can. In her bestselling memoir You Had Me at Woof, she shared the secrets of happiness she learned as an occasionally frazzled but always devoted owner of Boston terriers. Now, with the same enchanting, pop culture-infused amalgam of humor and poignancy that reached the The New York Times and the Today show and won the hearts of readers across the country, she returns with more humorous insight into life with canine companions. Klam focuses here on dog rescue, and its healing power not only for the dogs who are cared for and able to find good homes, but also for the people who bond with these animals. |
 Love and Capital: Karl Marx and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution Brilliantly researched and wonderfully written, LOVE AND CAPITAL is a heartbreaking and dramatic saga of the family side of the man whose works would redefine the world after his death. Drawing upon years of research, acclaimed biographer Mary Gabriel brings to light the story of Karl and Jenny Marx's marriage. We follow them as they roam Europe, on the run from hostile governments amidst a secret network of would-be revolutionaries, and see Karl not only as an intellectual, but as a protective father and loving husband, a visionary, a jokester, a man of tremendous passions, both political and personal. In LOVE AND CAPITAL, Mary Gabriel has given us a vivid, resplendent, and truly human portrait of the Marxes-their desires, heartbreak and devotion to each other's ideals. |
 Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America Reynolds (English and American studies, City U. of New York Graduate Center) examines the elements that contributed to Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel an immediate bestseller and also follows its political, cultural, and social impact through to the present. While the book is credited with jump starting abolitionism in the North, it received a variety of responses from Southern readers: from admiration for its portrayal of Southerners to absolute condemnation. The author makes it very clear why Stowe's book has had such far-reaching and long-lasting impact on so many elements of society. |
 My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir From the author of the acclaimed novel A Pigeon and a Boy comes a charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev's birth. Here we meet Shalev's amazing Grandma Tonia, who arrived in Palestine by boat from Russia in 1923 and lived in a constant state of battle with what she viewed as the family's biggest enemy in their new land: dirt. Grandma Tonia was never seen without a cleaning rag over her shoulder. She received visitors outdoors. She allowed only the most privileged guests to enter her spotless house. Hilarious and touching, Grandma Tonia and her regulations come richly to life in a narrative that circles around the arrival into the family's dusty agricultural midst of the big, shiny American sweeper sent as a gift by Great-uncle Yeshayahu (he who had shockingly emigrated to the sinful capitalist heaven of Los Angeles!). |
 Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year The first biography of The New Yorker's influential, powerful, and controversial film critic. A decade after her death, Pauline Kael remains the most important figure in film criticism today, in part due to her own inimitable style and power within the film community and in part due to the enormous influence she has exerted over an entire subsequent generation of film critics. During her tenure at the New Yorker from 1967 to 1991 she was a tastemaker, a career maker, and a career breaker. Her brash, vernacular writing style often made for an odd fit at the stately New Yorker . Brian Kellow gives us a richly detailed look at one of the most astonishing bursts of creativity in film history and a rounded portrait of this remarkable (and often relentlessly driven) woman. |
 Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend He believed the dog was immortal. So begins Susan Orlean's sweeping, powerfully moving account of Rin Tin Tin's journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon. Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has been hailed as "a national treasure" by The Washington Post , spent nearly ten years researching and reporting her most captivating book to date: the story of a dog who was born in 1918 and never died. It begins on a battlefield in France during World War I, when a young American soldier, Lee Duncan, discovered a newborn German shepherd in the ruins of a bombed-out dog kennel. To Duncan, who came of age in an orphanage, the dog's survival was a miracle. He saw something in Rin Tin Tin that he felt compelled to share with the world. Duncan brought Rinty home to California, where the dog's athleticism and acting ability drew the attention of Warner Bros. Over the next ten years, Rinty starred in twenty-three blockbuster silent films that saved the studio from bankruptcy and made him the most famous dog in the world. |
 Spencer Tracy: A Biography Now James Curtis, acclaimed biographer of Preston Sturges ("Definitive" -- Variety ), James Whale, and W. C. Fields ("By far the fullest, fairest, and most touching account . . . we have yet had. Or are likely to have" --Richard Schickel, The New York Times Book Review, cover review), gives us the life of one of the most revered screen actors of his generation. Curtis writes of Tracy's distinguished career, his deep Catholicism, his devoted relationship to his wife, his drinking that got him into so much trouble, and his twenty-six-year-long bond with his partner on-screen and off, Katharine Hepburn. Drawing on Tracy's personal papers and writing with the full cooperation of Tracy's daughter, Curtis tells the rich story of the brilliant but haunted man at the heart of the legend. |
 [Sic] : A Memoir In this stream-of-consciousness memoir, Cody, a 30-something music teacher in New York City, takes readers on a maddening but ultimately satisfying ride through classical and popular music, art, and literature, as they somehow relate to (or don't necessarily relate to) his harrowing cancer treatment. Writing in a style similar to David Foster Wallace, he interrupts significant moments in the typical cancer story, such as hearing the news from his doctor that standard chemotherapy isn't working, for long digressions on architecture and history, which lead to personal anecdotes from his life and reflections on cultural ideas of sickness, beauty, sex, and death. Cody does not take his illness lying down; after a chemotherapy treatment, he goes barhopping, snorts cocaine, and beds the first of many lovers readers will meet, from a stripper-dominatrix to his hospital pain doctor. The book includes material transcribed from his diaries during the period, as well as his mother's diary entries during his hospitalization, and examples of his father's creative writing from earlier times |
