Books reviewed in The Atlantic in 2008
Fiction | Biography | Current Events | History | Society & Culture

Up for Renewal, by Cathy Alter (Atria)
("Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"Alter writes with an adroit combination of reverence and irreverence. Ultimately the book is revealing, not just about the author's behavior and the very private thoughts in an insecure woman's brain that usually go unheard (it feels like public therapy), but also about why women's magazines are such a monumental part of women's culture in 21st-century America."

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Home: A Memoir of my Early Years, by Julie Andrews (Hyperion)
("Cover to Cover," July/August 2008)

"Revisiting a childhood filled with pressures and trials of all sorts, with too much stage-door parenting and too little of the more supportive variety, the mature woman, liberated to tell her tale, reveals herself at last, like Chaucer's Criseyde, truly 'myne owene woman, wel at ese.'"

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Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Music Prodigy, by Kevin Bazzana (Carroll & Graf)
("Cover to Cover," March 2008)

"Bazzana tells a sad and often-icky story of sexual excess—a dedicated satyr, the pianist had 10 wives!—and of a decline that took Nyiregyházi from a command performance at Buckingham Palace when he was 8 to a series of seedy California hotels that he inhabited until his death at 84. But the amazing thing about this story is the inextinguishable nature of this man's genius, which kept flickering to life in recordings and off performances, even incognito on occasion, long after the mainstream musical world had written him off."

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Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, & Rodin, by Ruth Butler (Yale)
("Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"This judicious, exhaustively researched, and gracefully written study examines the three women who played essential, although hitherto overlooked, roles in the evolution of three great artists. Grounding her subjects' stories in their cultural and sociological climate, Butler nicely demonstrates how feminist historiography can illuminate the life and work of male figures as well."

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The Unbearable Saki, by Sandie Byrne (Oxford)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("Where the Wild Things are," June 2008)

"The spellbinding quality of the stories is almost too easy to analyze and looks mawkish when set down in plain words, because Saki's great gift was being able to write about children and animals. But consider: How many authors have ever been able to pull off these most difficult of tricks?"

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Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: The Public Years, by Charles Capper (Oxford)
("Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"With the completion of Capper's award-winning biography (the first volume appeared in 1992), our understanding of one of the most original and consequential 'men of letters' in 19th-century America—this country's first modern feminist—is as complete as the art of biography allows."

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The Wagner Clan, by Jonathan Carr (Grove/Atlantic)
("Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"Carr illuminates both the artistic and ideological aspects of some singular and often forbidding folk. The book takes us into Hitler's Reich and even into the odd world of today's Bayreuth, where the Wagner family still holds sway."

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Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography, by Charlotte Chandler (Simon & Schuster)
Reviewed by Thomas Mallon ("I Am Joan Crawford," April 2008)

"Quotations are flung upon the page with no hint of a source or date, and long, inane plot summaries of Crawford's films pad the text more outrageously than Adrian ever filled out the star's shoulders. Almost everything else is underdeveloped, devoid of context, and badly located, as if the biographer were some incompetent prop mistress, misplacing all the glamorous clutter from the life of her subject, who, it's fair to say, would have hated this book for its sloppiness."

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Enemies of Promise, by Cyril Connolly (Chicago)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("Arrested Development," May 2008)

"If this were merely a cri de coeur of self-pity, emitted by a child of privilege who confuses his own spoiled embarrassment of choices with the shades of Wordsworth's prison-house closing about the growing boy, we could safely ridicule and despise it. But one of Connolly's great gifts was self-deprecation, and one of his easier styles was that of the tongue in the cheek.” He puts in mind two of the great contemporaries about whom he wrote—George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh."

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Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef, by Ruth Cowen (Trafalgar Square)
("Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"His personal story is a roller coaster of fortunes made and lost, his ending ignominious. Relish tells it all with verve and conviction, although anyone who has actually tried Lamb Cutlets Reform will realize how tastes have evolved in the time since Soyer ruled."

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The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los Angeles, by Margaret Leslie Davis (California)
("Cover to Cover," July/August 2008)

"Those who knew and worked with Murphy, and often shared the 'midwestern' values he extolled, would likely have desired a less eulogistic account of his life than this one by Davis. Here, Murphy's warts are too often airbrushed away or viewed as beauty marks."

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Charles Eliot Norton, by Linda Dowling (New Hampshire)
("Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"Drawing on unpublished portions of his journals, Dowling shows a man bereft of religious faith struggling to develop a principled ethic of civic liberalism in contrast to the predominant values of the Gilded Age."

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Sigmund Romberg, by William A. Everett (Yale)
("Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"Everett, a musicologist and music historian, is an authoritative guide to this pivotal figure in American musical theater."

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Lucian Freud, by William Feaver (Rizzoli)
("Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Feaver's usually intelligent but occasionally gaseous book examines the artist's oeuvre, which spans 70 years. Much of it is in private collections, so this volume, which displays more than 400 works (many reproduced for the first time), is by far the most important study of Freud to date."

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Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman, by Caryl Flinn (California)
("Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"Flinn's background in women's and media studies informs her lengthy and astute discussion of Merman's iconic status in lesbian and gay circles, along with her well-deserved place in the canon of American musical theater."

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The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, by Patrick French (Knopf)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("Cruel and Unusual," April 2008)

"To read French is to uncover a sordid rural slum that is essentially an emotional master-slave concentration camp built for two. There will always be those—I am one of them—who are determined not to have authors and writers judged by their private or personal shortcomings. But there is a limit, and this is a biography as well as a critical study."

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Being Prez: The Life and Music of Lester Young, by Dave Gelly (Oxford)
("Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"Tracing an odd life and elusive legacy with exactitude, the British critic (and saxophonist) writes with a rare reserve—a concision and perception, really—that his subject would have appreciated. In so doing, Gelly shows his own modernist stripes: playing only the right notes, embracing contextual space, emphasizing the song above all else."

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Balenciaga Paris, by Pamela Golbin and Fabien Baron (Thames & Hudson)
Reviewed by Benjamiz Schwarz ("Courture Clash," January/February 2008)

"Balenciaga Paris affords the most rigorous, richly detailed examination of the evolution of the couturier's lines."

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Frank Lloyd Wright in New York, by Jane King Hession and Debra Pickrel (Gibbs Smith)
("Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"The authors cast the Guggenheim as Wright's foil: the museum-as-ramp that became both the aesthetic driving force of his life and a symbol of his relationship with the city, something welcoming and discomfiting all at once."

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American Son: My Story, by Oscar De La Hoya (Harper)
("Cover to Cover," November 2008)

"Although De La Hoya is honest about his lapses in judgment along the way, his story is mostly about the judicious choices he has made at every stage of his life, shaping his phenomenal trajectory."

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Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh (Pantheon)
("Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"Never prurient, Kavanagh has her biographical priorities straight, and so, in a way, she tells us, did Nureyev. Brilliantly analytical but consistently stylish and knowing, this is among the most satisfying biographies of the year."

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Ethel Merman, by Brian Kellow (Viking)
("Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"Kellow's portrait is detailed and perceptive."

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Katie: The Real Story, by Edward Klein (Crown)
Reviewed by Caitlan Flanigan("A Woman's Place," January/February 2008)

"Klein's Katie: The Real Story proceeds from the notion that of all the forces responsible for his subject's protean success, the least significant is actual talent. Klein's book on Couric is not terrible nor even entirely mean-spirited, but its garbage heap of rumors—borne to us by unnamed sources who claim firsthand knowledge of everything from her sexual inclinations to her behavior while her husband was dying—lend the enterprise a stink. But then I was pulled up short by the final section, in which Klein delivers an accurate and devastating assessment of Katie's trials in the anchor's chair at CBS."

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Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art, by Simon Louvish (St. Martin's)
("Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"A half century after his death, DeMille is ready for another close-up, and this is as good a one as we're likely to get for some time."

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Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Paul Mariani (Viking)
("Cover to Cover," November 2008)

"The author's profoundly empathetic understanding of his subject's life and work—and of the milieus, secular and cloistered, in which he struggled to flourish—is apparent on every page of this exemplary work."

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Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, by Peter Moskos (Princeton)
("Cover to Cover," November 2008)

"Moskos, now an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, deftly intermingles cops-and-robbers verisimilitude and progressive social science, yet keeps his reportage clear-eyed, his conclusions pathos-free. What results is a thoughtful, measured critique—of the failed drug war, its discontents, and the self-defeating criminal justice system looming just beyond."

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Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter, by Susan Nagel (Bloomsbury)
("Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"Contrary to received wisdom, the woman in these pages emerges, after much evidence cited, as a veritable prototype of saintly Catholic forgiveness."

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Biography and Memoir: Acedia & Me, by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead)
("Cover to Cover," November 2008)

"Norris, a religiously inclined poet and essayist, compounds her interests here, offering a moving memoir and an etymological explication of acedia, a state of spiritual torpor and argues, sometimes persuasively, that a rarely diagnosed, centuries-old condition plagues us still."

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Daphne, by Justine Picardie (Bloomsbury)

The Daphne du Maurier Companioned., by Helen Taylor (Virago/Trafalgar Square)

Don't Look Now: Stories, by Daphne du Maurier (New York Review Books)
("Cover to Cover," November 2008)

"There can be little question now that du Maurier was an innovative and strikingly original literary artist. Her distinctive character comes to life in Picardie's fictional portrait. Virago's Companion contains essays (two of them by Picardie) on her work, as well as biographical material, and is a searching examination of her life and art. Don't Look Now is a stunning collection of du Maurier's particular brand of intricately plotted story."

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Christian Dior, by Marie-France Pochna (Arcade Publishing)
Reviewed by Benjamiz Schwarz ("Couture Clash," January/February 2008)

"The new edition of Marie-France Pochna's intelligently illustrated, thorough 1993 biography, Christian Dior draws heavily on the designer's own memoirs to elucidate two contradictory facets of his short career."

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods, by Annie J. Randall (Oxford)
( to Cover," December 2008)

"Much has been written about [Dusty] Springfield's life, but too little about her artistry and panache. Randall begins to remedy that with her stylish, deeply researched analysis of an epochal look and an era-defining sound."

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Dawn, Dusk, or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy, by Yasmina Reza (Knopf)
Reviewed by Cristina Nehring("Un Homme in Full," June 2008)

"In many ways, her narrative reads like a long-running tale of foreplay. Reza is pulsingly alive to Sarkozy's moods, his foibles, his ambiguities. It makes for a memoir that is unfair. For Reza ends up slightly bitter about her resistant subject."

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Rudyard Kipling: The Books I Leave Behind, by David Alan Richards (Yale)
("Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"Although the book is a companion to the recent Kipling exhibition at Yale, its discriminating choice of reproductions and intelligent, stylish commentary make it a fine reader's guide to a writer who—after a mid-century eclipse when the academy foolishly ignored him as a middlebrow reactionary—is now much in favor with critics, if not as popular with readers, as he was a hundred years ago."

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Swimming in a Sea of Death, by David Rieff (Simon & Schuster)
("Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"A devoted son writes a wrenching account of his mother's determined but ultimately unsuccessful struggle against a hideous form of cancer. A recipe to move an audience, you'd think, but there's an overarching sense of arrogance on the part of both writer and subject."

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Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, by Charles Spencer (Trafalgar Square)
("Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"Spencer is adept at evoking the brutal realities of 17th-century warfare but is also skilled at portraiture, not only of Rupert but also of the host of other characters, major and minor, swirling through his maelstrom of a life."

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Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography, by Richard Stirling (St. Martin's)
("Cover to Cover," July/August 2008)

"Several adjectives aptly describe Stirling's biography—tactful, judicious, informative—but intimate is decidedly not one of them. The book's value lies in its full account of its subject's work on stage and screen, rather than in its report of her personal life."

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Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin)
("Cover to Cover," July/August 2008)

"Whether talking with Orhan Pamuk in Turkey or passing through Birobidjan, Stalin's failed experiment in Zionism, Soviet style, Theroux is a master at spotlighting the central and the arcane. Constantly reflecting and refracting his surroundings, Theroux is the ultimate globetrotter, finding something of value wherever he roams."

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Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante, by Lily Tuck (HarperCollins)
("Cover to Cover," July/August 2008)

"Informed by her own early experiences in Italy's capital, the author traces an unconventional life and a volatile spirit, from Morante's modest beginnings to her self-willed work to her flight from Fascists to her tempestuous marriage."

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Mandela: Struggle and Triumph, by David Turnley (Abrams)
("Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"The subtitle is indeed accurate, for this book essentially concludes with Mandela's election as South Africa's president, in 1994, neglecting what he did—and did not—achieve in office. Dogged and admirable as Mandela's fight for justice was, his legacy is inseparable from how he united, governed, and led his country, so this portrait seems both out of date and partial, despite its evocative photographs and trenchant (though sparse) commentary."

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The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by John King (Princeton)
("Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"This passionately argued book makes clear that the Peruvian writer is a utopian at heart. He extols Les Misérables as 'one of the works that has been most influential in making so many men and women of all languages and cultures desire a more just, rational, and beautiful world than the one they live in.'"

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Audition: A Memoir, by Barbara Walters (Knopf)
Reviewed by Caitlan Flanigan ("The Uses of Enchantment," June 2008)

"We might dismiss Walters here as the world's greatest booker but most intellectually incurious interviewer. And yet, reading her book, I was impressed by how much her interests and reportorial inclinations have stood the test of time…In the end, she rightly recognized that we are most fascinated by the everyday details, the emotions and habits through which we can relate the extraordinary life or circumstance to our own."

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Oakland, Jack London, and Me, by Eric Miles Williamson (Texas Review)
("Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"London managed to be both a socialist and a fascist, both a fervent champion of the oppressed and a militant racist, and Williamson revels in his hero's contradictions."

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