Bookworm

Ten Things I Wish I'd Known before I Went Out into the Real World

2005-06-15T00:31:00.000-07:00

*Starting at the bottom--over and over again

*Dealing with--and learning from--the Boss from Hell

*Giving up the Wedding Delusion, not to mention that one-way ticket to Happily Ever After

*Being asked to bend your principles--by your superiors

*Wanting to be a high-powered success and super parent

*Knowing that children will both exhaust and sustain you

*Facing that terrifying question: "What have I been put on this earth to do?"

You could call them notes from life's trenches. Maria Shriver's Ten Things I Wish I'd Known: Before I Went Out into the Real World gives us her reflections, confessions, advice, memories, and, most of all, hard-earned lessons...all the things we wish we knew before we started out, and that few people ever honestly discuss.
Here is the truth about: the price we pay for giving in to our fears, as well as the relief we feel when we finally face them; the humiliation of swallowing our ego so that we can learn from an abusive experience; the rewards of taking risks and the pain of failure; the joy of finding someone we can love and the limitations of every relationship; how it's never too late to tap the wisdom of others, even (especially!) our own parents; and the importance of taking what we do seriously without taking ourselves seriously.

Expanded from Maria's acclaimed College of the Holy Cross commencement address and written in the voice of a trusted and trusting best friend, Ten Things I Wish I'd Known: Before I Went Out into the Real World is a pithy, poignant, down-to-earth, and at times laugh-out-loud book that will help people of all ages and on all roads in life.

It's within you to carve out your own future, create your own destiny.

I wrote this book so that you might be spared. Not from having to learn the lessons I had to learn. No one can spare you that, because learning is experiential, and you have to do it yourself. As a wise person once told me: If I could spare you the pain you're experiencing, I wouldn't--because I wouldn't want to deprive you of the strength and wisdom you'll gain from having gone through it and come out the other side.

Each and every one of you is a powerful, resilient human being capable of living the life you design for yourself. I wish all of you the faith and the courage to pinpoint your passion.

A Lotus Grows in the Mud

2005-06-15T00:14:00.000-07:00

Long in the works, Goldie Hawn's spiritual autobiography lives up to every expectation. A Lotus Grows in the Mud is not a mucky Hollywood "tell-all"; instead, it is a wonderfully candid, informal walk through the life of a woman whose spirited spontaneity won us over decades ago. With winning directness, the Academy Award–winning actress talks about her ugly-duckling childhood; her sudden, surrealistic rise to fame on TV's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In; and her still vibrant film career. She also writes about her family, which includes longtime partner Kurt Russell and her children, one of whom is the actress Kate Hudson. Perhaps most movingly, she confides about her spiritual journey from her Jewish roots to meditation and Buddhism.

Goldie Hawn's life is an ongoing tableau of stories, and she has a born knack for telling them. In this candid and insightful book, Goldie invites us to join her in a look back at the people, places, and events that have touched her. It is the spiritual journey of a heart in search of enlightenment.

With her trademark effervescent humor, Goldie tells us about the lessons she's learned and the wisdom she feels she's been given in the hope of giving something back. Not a Hollywood "tell-all," A Lotus Grows in the Mud is a very personal look at moments private and powerful: her delight in her father's spirited spontaneity; the confidence instilled in her by her mother; the unexpected gifts of comfort from strangers many miles from home; and the joy of being a daughter, a sister, a lover, and a parent. This memoir is Goldie's chance to talk about everything from anger and fear to love, compassion, integrity, and friendship, to the importance of family and the challenges of show business.

Goldie writes about her younger self -- the little girl who felt like an ugly duckling -- and growing up in suburbia dreaming of becoming a ballerina. She takes us on a tour of her go-go dancing years in New York in the sixties, her phenomenal success on TV's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and then on to the world of Hollywood stardom and such memorable films as the Oscar-winning Cactus Flower, Swing Shift, and Private Benjamin.

A Lotus Grows in the Mud speaks of her relationship with her family -- her partner, Kurt Russell; her children, Kate Hudson, Oliver Hudson, Wyatt Russell, and her stepson, Boston Russell -- her growing faith, her curiosity for that which she doesn't yet know, and her unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding. Most of all, it is a trip back through a life well lived by a woman well loved.

Sinatra: The Life

2005-06-15T00:11:00.000-07:00

Controversial biographer Anthony Summers turns the high beams on singer/actor/Rat Pack leader Frank Sinatra, with unsparing scrutiny of Sinatra's love life and alleged Mob ties.

From the best-selling author of Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, the first fully documented, comprehensively researched, birth-to-death biography--the definitive life--of Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra is the story of an American icon who held the imagination of millions for more than fifty years and whose influence in popular music was unsurpassed in the twentieth century. As a child, he said, he had heard "symphonies from the universe" in his head. No one could have imagined where those sounds would lead him. Tracing the arc of this incredible life, from the humble beginnings in Hoboken to the twilight years as a living legend in Malibu, Sinatra follows a career built on raw talent, sheer willpower--and criminal connections.

Drawing on a treasure trove of documents and interviews, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan reveal stunning new information about Sinatra’s links to such Mafia figures as Sam Giancana and Lucky Luciano. And we see for the first time where the Mafia connection began, how and why it lasted, and how it impinged on others, not least President John F. Kennedy.

Here, too, is the core of the private Sinatra--alternately caustic and sympathetic--that the singer so long concealed. The heartbreaking truth about his passion for Ava Gardner emerges from never-before-published conversations with Gardner herself. In exclusive, intimate interviews, the women who loved Sinatra--some of them unknown to the public until now--share memories of the joy and pain of their relationships with him. And we learn what it was like to be the friend of a man who was generous and loyal to a fault, yet--as some of his fellow Rat Packers discovered--who could turn abruptly into a vindictive brute.

Dramatic, eye-opening, and unfailingly fair-minded, Sinatra is masterful biography: the revelatory story of a brilliant artist and an infinitely complex man.

'1776': A year that changed the world

2005-06-14T00:16:00.000-07:00

1776 David McCullough Simon & Schuster

The book "1776" is published at a fortuitous time for the national morale. It speaks of a year in our history that at times looked terribly dark, but ended almost unbelievably bright. It is a tale of intrepid leaders and gallant followers, of noble goals and vast dreams.

In its pages no suspicion of general misconduct darkens the reputation of the colonial army. It may have been clumsy and certainly was untrained, but it never, in McCullough's smooth and reassuring narrative, was less than good in intention and honest in purpose.

ADVERTISEMENT Commanded by the incomparable George Washington, its principal officers were, except for the traitor-to-be Benedict Arnold, honorable men, and some of them, like Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox, worthy to be called true heroes of the emerging republic.
The familiar stirring words of Tom Paine ring through McCullough's pages: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

McCullough writes of the miserable conditions in which the soldiers lived. They were dirty and their camps stank of excrement. Many soldiers were faithless; when their enlistment terms expired, off they went. Yet others stayed on, even though Congress had not supplied Washington with the money to pay them their low wages.

It was all for what was then commonly called "the Glorious Cause." McCullough makes clear that the patriots really did believe the cause was just that.

By focusing on just one year (with a bit of stretching on both ends), McCullough jumps into the middle of things, then out. He assumes (perhaps recklessly) that the reader knows enough of the complex causes of the revolution and its complicated outcome so that the author can focus on the narrative in that easy style that launched him into the popular-history business with his well-crafted "The Great Bridge," about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and "The Path Between the Seas," on the planning and construction of the Panama Canal.

At the beginning of this book McCullough turns his eyes to London. His George III is a much milder and more likable fellow than appears in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and even the despised Lord North, George's prime minister, is treated gently.

But McCullough sees the revolution from the American point of view. The London government's British opponents come off particularly well. John Wilkes, lord mayor of London, declared that the war with "our brethren" in America was "unjust … fatal and ruinous to our country." Young British parliamentarian Charles James Fox called for a change of government, calling the conflict "silly," from which "we are likely to derive nothing but poverty, disgrace, defeat and ruin."
McCullough sees his chosen year through the actions of the armies. He handles the set pieces well: the retrieval of the big guns from Fort Ticonderoga in the dead of winter; their placement on Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston; the British evacuation of Boston; the movement of the armies to New York; Washington's withdrawal in the Battle of Brooklyn Heights; his retreat across New Jersey pursued by the British and their Hessian mercenaries; Washington pulling triumph from disaster by crossing the icy Delaware and walloping the British on Christmas night at Trenton and at Princeton just after the dawn of the next year.

Of the year 1776, McCullough writes: "Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning — how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities of strengths of individual character, had made the difference — the outcome seemed little short of a miracle."

But the leading thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment were set on banishing miracles from human affairs. It is enough to say that, in 1776, Americans, in a fortunate combination of luck, pluck and remarkable leadership, made the year most memorable for the new country and indeed all humankind.

For fun, not history, of the Old West

2005-06-14T00:12:00.000-07:00

Appaloosa A Novel Robert B. Parker Putnam.

Robert B. Parker's "Appaloosa" doesn't tell us much about the real Old West, but it offers a dryly amusing take on the Hollywood version. Elmore Leonard wrote westerns before finding his groove with contemporary crime stories; and Parker, best known for the Spenser mystery series and for completing "Poodle Springs," begun by Raymond Chandler before his death, returns to the genre for the fun of it. Here he revels in "Yep. Nope." dialogue and spare descriptions of frontier towns and arid landscapes and the gunfighters, storekeepers, painted women, hostile Kiowas and People Without a Past who inhabit them.

"Appaloosa" is narrated by Everett Hitch, a former cavalryman who found soldiering "crampsome" before he signed on as permanent deputy to Marshal Virgil Cole and began a 15-year career pacifying one hellhole after another. The two come to the copper-mining town of Appaloosa at the request of the leading citizens, who complain that rancher Randall Bragg — who, lest we have any doubt he's the villain, wears a black hat — and his cowboys have been "living off us like coyotes live off a buffalo carcass." They have stolen goods, raped women and, most recently, murdered the previous marshal and a deputy.

ADVERTISEMENT It's the plot of "Seven Samurai" and "The Magnificent Seven" all over again, with the numbers whittled down and a few twists added. Cole pledges to enforce the law in Appaloosa — provided he makes the laws himself. The townspeople agree, with misgivings. They sense correctly that Cole, as a professional gunman, has more in common with Bragg than with them. He's a hero, all right, but he tends to beat people up when he gets irritated. And irritation aplenty soon arrives in the person of Allie French, who is pretty, neither a squaw nor a prostitute — therefore a kind of woman Cole has never experienced — and bent on lassoing herself the territory's alpha male.

At first this seems to be Cole, who is unflappable when hot lead is about to fly. He starts building her a house. But later it seems to be Ring Shelton, head of an outlaw family Bragg hires to spring him from custody after Cole has gone to all the trouble of arresting him and holding him for trial. Still later it seems to be Bragg, who comes mysteriously into a fortune, gets a presidential pardon, declares himself a changed man, mounts a charm offensive, buys most of the businesses in Appaloosa and prepares to have Cole and Hitch fired.

"Appaloosa" is difficult to locate in history. Indians and buffalo are still around, but gunfighter culture appears to have existed forever. The town is somewhere vaguely east of the Rockies and north of Texas. It's a stage set. Nobody who lives there has any connection with the outside world — except for Hitch, who does have a past, a certain amount of education and the smarts to see beyond his sidekick role.

Hitch realizes that Cole is a born killer who needs to justify himself by sticking to the letter of the law. This rigidity allows Bragg to outmaneuver him. Hitch likens Cole's relationship with Allie to that of a wild appaloosa stallion with his mares, compelled by instinct to fight off all challengers. Cole can't step out of character. To help him, the easygoing Hitch must do so himself — must confound our expectations and ride right off the set and into the sunset, in a conclusion that had to make Parker smile as much as his readers will.

Byron's heir

2005-06-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

By Peter Straub, Peter Straub is the author of many works of horror fiction, including, most recently, "In the Night Room."

In the 20-odd years since publication of the magisterial "Little, Big," John Crowley's fiction has been among the most ambitious, brilliant and nuanced — and sentence by sentence, most imaginative — ever published in this country. Let us get this unhappy matter out of the way right now: The main reason Crowley's body of work has not been widely ranked with that of, say, Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie has to do with an inaccurate perception of its relationship to genre. "Little, Big," a work that challenges its readers at every step, is a fantasy novel in the way "War and Peace" is a historical novel (although it is a fantasy novel, all right). The as-yet-unfinished four-novel sequence beginning with "Aegypt" and representing the heart of his achievement, resists classification altogether even as it expands on "Little, Big's" themes on its way toward an original, ultimately tragic vision.

A similar ambition and originality propel "Lord Byron's Novel." In the longest of the book's embedded layers, "The Evening Land," Crowley channels the lively, freewheeling style of Byron's journals and letters to give us — in a muscular early 19th century prose bristling with dashes, exclamation points and italics — the novel the busy lord never paused to write. Try this, from Chapter 1: "Thereupon the world and the night gave a sort of shudder, as a shudder may pass over a calm sea, or a horse's flank; and like a building fallen around him in an earthquake, the night fell away in pieces, his sleep shattered, and he awoke. He had slept, and dreamt! And yet — most strange — still he found himself on the track to the watchtower, which stood ahead…." In that Gothic tower, our former sleepwalker, a Scottish nobleman remarkably named Ali, finds, strung up by a rope, "a form like a man's — face black, eyes starting from their sockets as they stare upon him, black tongue thrust out as in mockery." He has come upon the corpse of his murdered father, a vicious rakehell bearing the ironic title of Lord Sane.

"The Evening Land" whirls merrily on, to an account of Ali's Albanian childhood, his adoption by a "Pacha" and surrender to his real but mad father, false imprisonment, rescue by a "zombi," the slave trade, misadventures in London society, a mysterious doppelgänger and much else. Now and again, our hypothetical author wearies of his task and laments the difficulties his characters pose both themselves and him. Throughout, the novel-within-a-novel is pitch-perfect Byron and always engrossing, in the old what-happened-next manner.

However, it is the two other narrative layers, which interrupt, explain and reflect on Byron's hitherto lost whiz-bang, that give "Lord Byron's Novel" its powerful emotional resonance. Immediately after Ali is swept up by the Pacha — whereupon Byron grandly announces, "I shall here break my page, and rest my pen" — an unexpected, almost shockingly abrupt tonal update drops us into an exchange of e-mails between literary Alexandra Novak, newly arrived in London, and her lover, Thea Spann, a mathematician who is organizing a website honoring female scientists.

The long-estranged daughter of a brilliant and scandalous father, Alexandra is in London to ferret out information about Byron's abandoned daughter, Ada Lovelace, a scientist and mathematician close to Charles Babbage, the inventor of a giant calculator called the Difference Engine. (To assist Babbage in the creation of his next project, the Analytical Engine, Ada has worked up the first usable computer program.)

Through a series of comic encounters that are examined and puzzled over in the lovers' vibrant e-mails — Crowley gets the women's quirky, idiosyncratic voices down as ripely as he does Byron's — Alexandra succeeds in acquiring a trove of previously unknown Lovelace papers, among them (maddeningly) a lengthy run of pages covered with random numbers. It is a kind of manuscript, but one that rejects interpretation. Thanks to Thea's patient cryptographic efforts, the women discover that Ada, who when dying of cancer had been ordered to burn her father's novel, had instead translated it into a numeric code that she trusted a more evolved version of the Analytical Engine to one day decipher.

The dying Ada's voice, lambent with deep-running emotional currents, emerges from the annotations to her father's manuscript to form the novel's third and most crucial narrative layer. Beneath the wind-whipped Byronic sizzle of "The Evening Land" and the charming, headlong tension of Alexandra and Thea's investigations glows an increasingly moving awareness of the depth of the father-daughter relationship, however painful or imperfectly resolved it may be. With his characteristic insight, delicacy of touch and distilled purity of language, Crowley concludes Alexandra's "Introduction" (placed at the end of the book) with her conviction that "[Byron's] voice did reach into [Ada's] heart…. [H]is voice reached into her heart, as it would have done, I believe, whether or not she had ever found the novel that here follows."

Specimen Days

2005-06-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

Like his Pulitzer Prize winner, "The Hours," Michael Cunningham's new novel, "Specimen Days," is a trio of narratives juxtaposed in a way that makes 1+1+1 equal a whole lot more than three. In "The Hours," Cunningham cut up his stories (two set in the past, one in the present, each haunted in its own way by Virginia Woolf and "Mrs. Dalloway") and restitched them in a manner that evoked Woolf's kinetic writing. Here Cunningham hangs his panels side by side, three novellas of past, present and future unified by locale, character and, most grandly, moral vision. His setting is mostly New York City, particularly Lower Manhattan. Each section features the same trio of characters reincarnated at three points in time: the mid-19th century; today; and late in the 21st century, after a nuclear meltdown has left much of the middle part of the country uninhabitable.

There's Simon, an ironworks operator who becomes a futures trader and returns as a simulo, or artificial human; Catherine, a seamstress reimagined as Cat, a forensic psychologist, and then replaced by Catareen, an alien with skin as green and slick as a leaf; and finally Luke or Lucas, who transforms from a boy who hears ghosts to a child terrorist with a pipe bomb duct-taped to his chest to a born-again Christian who climbs aboard a spaceship to emigrate to a planet in another solar system. If this sounds extravagant, complicated and exciting, it is.

Cunningham connects his characters and their moments in time via the hovering spirit of Walt Whitman and "Leaves of Grass." Once you recognize the source, lines from the great American epic appear everywhere — sort of like how, once you start looking for it, the spray-paint signature of a graffiti artist suddenly pops up all over town. A boy quotes Whitman rather than speaking for himself on the big subjects of love and death and the cosmos. A terroristic godmother has wallpapered every surface of her Rivington Street apartment with pages of the poem. An android has been programmed with it in order to introduce moral reasoning into his code. If in "The Hours" Cunningham borrowed Woolf's style and sensibility to create a sui generis work of art, here he's weaving with Whitman's actual words and, more subtly, his soul.

Part One, called "In the Machine," is a 19th century ghost story that at first will remind you of Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" but actually owes as much to his equally unsettling, anti-capitalistic "In the Cage." It's about a boy whose brother has been killed in an industrial accident, eaten by the iron teeth of a machine he operates. Lucas takes over his brother's job in the ironworks and soon starts hearing Simon, as the section's title suggests, in the machine.

Cunningham's point, or one of his points, is that the world shifted for the worse with industrialization. The machine has consumed us and this was the beginning of the end. That's a valid but pessimistic point of view, and it doesn't fit perfectly with Whitman's sophisticated optimism and his belief in the future. In the same way, when Lucas quotes "Leaves of Grass," it sometimes feels forced and unnatural, even within the open boundaries of a supernatural story. The intellectualizing is too apparent; the novelist's prints smudge the scene. Yet these weak points hardly tarnish an otherwise powerful and complex dramatization of New York at the dawn of a great and terrible age. This section ends with a spectacular fire at a shirtwaist factory in the Village, where garment workers must choose between incineration or leaping to their deaths while the city watches from the sidewalk below. If that brings to mind the twin horrors of the Triangle garment factory blaze and 9/11, then you're ready to turn the page.

The novel's middle section, "The Children's Crusade," is Cunningham's most commanding performance and one of the best police thrillers I've ever read. It's about a forensic psychologist chasing a group of child suicide terrorists who are randomly hugging people on the streets and then blowing themselves up. The terrorists quote Whitman and work for someone named Walt. Cat can stop the terror and save one of these children only by making sense of "Leaves of Grass." Here Cunningham's use of Whitman's poetry feels more organic to the story and less like a literary device. It serves as a source of natural clues, as well as emotional insight, in a mystery so engrossing and poignant that you'll wish that Cat was a recurring character in a series you could buy the new installment of each summer.

The novel's final part, "Like Beauty," spins ahead to the end of this century, when the now familiar characters escape New York for Denver. The trio drives across the desolate, toxic Midwest in a Winnebago outfitted with tank treads, off to see a mysterious scientific wizard who is planning a space journey in a three-legged flying saucer. Yet for all the enthralling sci-fi suspense in the novel's last 100 pages, Cunningham shows, through a deeply moving ending I won't reveal, that he is most interested in how we love and care for one another. The literary references in this section are especially plentiful (and fun to spot), starting of course with Whitman at his most cosmic, and including, to name a few, "The Wizard of Oz," Jules Verne and "Escape to Witch Mountain." That's not to say that "Specimen Days" is derivative of any of these. In fact, it's the literary cousin to two recent novels that convincingly span the past, present and future with profound moral seriousness: Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin" and David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas." (Full disclosure: I'm Mitchell's American editor.)

And that's what it all leads to: A moral outlook that sees the patterns in the chaos, the connections among the disconnected. A novel's disparate parts have to add up in a way that is both surprising and inevitable. What determines the success of this is, I believe, the author's moral vision. Cunningham cares most passionately (and most knowingly) about the largest and most hopeful human experiences: compassion, community, art, connection — the infinite manifestations of love. It is his unique moral vision that successfully hinges three distinct narrative panels into a triptych of unified beauty. It's what raises his individual stories out of their genres into the glorious realm of art.

"Specimen Days" does not gleam with the same precision and polish as does "The Hours," but to assume it would do so would be unfair. Cunningham's themes and ambitions are too exhilarating for neat containment. He's worried about the future of man in the universe — an understandably messy concern that can lead to an occasional narrative stumble. Too often he relies on Whitman to underscore his ideas when in fact his complex, affecting characters — whether human, ghost, alien or machine — do the job with full conviction. The first section is too long and the last not long enough. The science part of his science fiction — the lizardy aliens, the hoverpods, the surveillance drones that buzz around like pool balls with wings — is mostly familiar stuff. But when you close the book you won't be thinking about these minor flaws. Instead you'll be pondering Cunningham's big, haunting, beautiful vision of who we were, are and one day might be.