2 comments about My Own Cape Cod.

1. After reading this book, you feel as though you've just spent a summer on the Cape and can't wait to go back next year. It's like a vacation without leaving home. An excellent read!



2. This book is a wonderful escape for anyone who picks it up, but if you are familiar with Cape Cod or the coastline of New England you'll find it even more appealing. The people and places so accurately described in Taber's work will make you a convert and read all of her books. Her prose is so superb that you forget you're reading at all and feel that you're having a conversation with Gladys herself. Gone from this world for over two decades, Gladys is still alive with such a presence in these pages that I open her books when I need comfort and I feel as if I'm speaking to my grandmother. An accomplished professor of Writing, a Wellesley grad, a naturalist, and a New Englander, Gladys Taber will remind you that all is and can be right with the world.

1 comments about Unplanned Parenthood:: The Confessions of a Seventy-Something Surrogate Mother.

1. Just when you think Liz Carpenter's eventful life (as war-time journalist, Lady Bird Johnson's press secretary, best-selling author)must surely settle into some smooth sailing, she inherits her brother's three noisy, undisciplined teenagers. Unplanned parenthood, indeed!
   
   At 73, Liz is a mom again, opening her home and her heart, helping these kids chart the course to a new life--across a generation gap she says is "wider than the Grand Canyon." Facing drugs, sex, fast cars, punk rock, junk food, and the Bay of Pigs (her house), she manages to keep her cool, holding social discussions at the dinner table, confronting Puff the Magic Dragon (marijuana) head-on and no-holds barred, and managing to have a significant talk about the meaning of life with a 14-year-old on an exercise bike.
   
   The job this surrogate mom took on isn't for everybody. Only someone as stout-hearted, quick-witted, nimble-footed, and smart-talking as Liz Carpenter could have done it. Thank heavens she did--and lived to tell the tale. It's nothing short of inspiring.
   
   by Susan Wittig Albert
   for www.storycirclebookreviews.org
   reviewing books by, for, and about women

2 comments about Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters.

1. Leslie Mitchell has set himself a daunting task in his new biography of Edward Bulwer Lytton. First, as Mitchell points out early on in the text, while at one point in the Victorian era he vied with his fellow novelist Charles Dickens in popularity, since the end of the First World War he has been almost entirely forgotten - except to be ridiculed as the author of the worst sentence ever to open a novel: "It was a dark and stormy night" (which inspired the Bulwer Lytton Contest for bad writing, which Mitchell, tactfully, does not mention). Secondly, Lytton was, to put it mildly, a very off-putting fellow, who might have been the most personally obnoxious author who ever lived (and try mulling over the implications of *that* statement for a second!).
   
   It doesn't sound promising, does it? A forgotten author who was a real jerk -- who's interested in reading about him? But the fact is that Mitchell has done an admirable job of resurrecting this unsung writer and made him seem worth considering, even if you wouldn't want to sit next to him at a dinner party.
   
   Of course, it helps that Lytton had one of the most famously catastrophic marriages in all of literary history - one that makes the Tolstoys and Fitzgeralds seem like Ozzie and Harriet by comparison. The marriage of Edward Bulwer Lytton and his wife Rosina was a total nightmare. At one point he had her committed to an insane asylum, and she retaliated by writing a series of abusive fictitious accounts of their marriage and humiliating him publicly whenever she got the opportunity. It's pretty grim stuff but it makes for engrossing reading.
   
   The only flaw with this biography is that it is not a straightforward narrative, as most biographies are, but a little more impressionistic. Each chapter takes one aspect of Lytton's life and discusses it at length. And while I might have preferred a more conventional approach, the method utilized by Mitchell does prove effective. And putting all the information about Lytton's marriage, for example, in one chapter makes it even more harrowing (and entertaining - there's definitely a Merchant-Ivory film in that disastrous mesalliance).
   
   Mitchell makes a token effort at making a case for Lytton as a novelist who can be appreciated today, but the fact is that it's hopeless: Lytton's prose style was so pretentious and convoluted that I very much doubt that he'll ever reach any type of popularity again (unlike his contemporary Anthony Trollope, who has seen an extraordinary renaissance of interest in his work in the past few decades). So what you're left with is the very gaudy life of a man who destroyed nearly everything he touched, but whose very faults make him interesting. So I can recommend this book, and if you go on from this to sample some of Lytton's fictional wares, well, you're a lot more adventurous than me.



2. One wonders how the Victorians ever acquired a reputation for prudery or ideal family life with one affair after another and second families scattered around the globe and their children farmed out to relatives or paid nannies. Perhaps Victoria herself was the only "Victorian," yet who knows what really went on between her and "Mr. Brown"?

   Here are Bulwer Lytton and his wife who, after marriage and two children, discovered they heartily hated each other and spent the next forty years, still married, but living apart, violently attacking each other in the public press and neither one of them caring a whit for their two children.

   Lytton, a man whose literary works are now virtually forgotten, was once as popular as his contemporary Dickens but didn't have Dickens's talent for self-promotion. Lytton was quick to take offense and lost friends easily. He had a dour personality and was never a happy man, always feeling slighted by friends and the public alike.

   Mitchell explores, in separate chapters, L's upbringing; his awful marriage; his children and their fates; his literary career; his political career, first as a radical, then as a conservative, and finally as Secretary of State for the Colonies (a post in which the author claims he did an excellent job); and finally his role as a prophet.

   In a book that seems otherwise well written, there were too many typos and grammatical errors.

No comments about A Sacred Trust: Nelson Poynter and the St. Petersburg Times.

No comments about American Journalists: Getting the Story (Oxford Profiles).

2 comments about Commie Girl in the O.C..

1. I bought this book because I liked the title and I wasn't disappointed! It's a diary of real life in the community of idle rich airheads and knee-jerk rightwingers made famous by the TV shows. Commie Girl just happened to end up in the thick of it and she's spitting mad! It's a brilliantly funny book, full of great stories and characters, and if you've got fed up with all the bragging and posturing amongst the presidentential hopefuls, this will put a smile back on your face for sure.



2. Nobody dishes like Commie Girl! She's the most, and that ain't the least! Roast Republickin, anyone?

5 comments about The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine (P.S.).

1. Isaiah Wilner has obviously done his homework. A graduate of Yale and a worker himself on the famed Yale Daily News that Hadden and Luce once worked for, Wilner adds credibility to a story that leaves no stone unturned in the amazing record of how Time really began.
   
   Vivid details and interesting quotes fill the pages that tell the complete, complex stories of both Britton Hadden and Henry Luce, from childhood to death. Within their accounts are riveting details about the entire creation of Time magazine, including early workers, tricks of the trade, and an excellent picture of society at the time.
   
   This book is excellent for journalists and entrepreneurs, but it is also a good depiction of how two men chose to spend their lives. Luce lost his passion for God in the midst of Time's reign in his life, and Hadden lost his life by choosing satisfaction in things that ultimately let him down. Personal applications can be drawn from this account as well as business and journalistic lessons.
   
   Well done, Isaiah Wilner. Your time was well-spent.



2. The Man Time Forgot is a true pleasure to read. It's hard to fathom that the history of such an important organization could be lost, but who knew that its rediscovery could be such fun? Wilner has crafted a truly fascinating tale, elucidating the enigmatic relationship between the modern mass media's arguably two most important figures. Well researched and even better written, the anecdotes almost turn the pages themselves and the argument resurrecting the legacy of Briton Hadden is even more compelling.



3. This book by a first-time author is sensational, I enjoyed every page of it. The story should be read by everyone working in the media today. Stylistically, it is a true innovation. He brings to life every major event in Hadden's life, and gives a fair assessment of Henry Luce's cover-up. I recommend this book to everyone. It was a quick, enjoyable weekend read. Very educational.



4. Isaiah Wilner's new biography, The Man TIME Forgot, does for Time Magazine what Time Magazine did for the news - it is less concerned with "how much it includes between its covers - but in how much it gets off the pages into the minds of its readers." Wilner indeed gets his remarkable story off the pages - and how! Though the conflict and tragedy at the core of the book help make it a page turner, what really marks this book as a must-read are Wilner's stylistic innovations. He fuses the pioneering sumptuousness of Indian author Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things and the irreverence of the 1920's "Timestyle" in a way that transforms what might otherwise be a dry corporate history into a poetic delight. He's bringing the beauty of the Roy style to non-fiction, paying as much attention to the art of writing as to the information he's relating. But the style never obscures the fascinating epic at the core of the book. Instead, the sparkling sentences illuminate how the titanic personal and professional battle between Time's two founders generated a creative tension that was a prerequisite for Time's transformation of American journalism and the 20th century mind.
   
   At the heart of Wilner's book is the story of the nearly-forgotten Britton Hadden, who along with the currently far more famous Henry Luce, founded Time in 1923. Despite Luce's later greater fame, it was Hadden who, as early as his grade school days, dreamt up the idea of a publication that would synthesize the infinite information available in the modern world into a series of pithy and irreverent stories full of personality and pictures. Hadden believed that such a presentation would break through the information overload afflicting Americans as early as the 1870's, and result in a more enlightened nation.
   
   Of course, transforming such an idea into reality wasn't simple, even for two well-born Yale graduates who were members of the Skull and Bones secret society. Launching a national magazine was an expensive venture. Wilner's writing gives Hadden and Luce's hunt for capital the thrill of a hunt for a ticking time bomb. Under the spell of Wilner's prose, I found myself hanging on every meeting with a financier or wealthy family friend - hoping they'd raise the money to keep the magazine going, even though I already knew that they'd succeed.
   
   But as Wilner details in this extraordinarily well-researched volume, Time had to overcome more than the skepticism of aging plutocrats to keep the magazine afloat. The thirty years prior to the founding of Time had seen an explosion of newspapers and magazines, and new media like movies and radio were beginning to compete for the populace's attention. Though nothing quite like Time existed, Hadden and Luce had to convince people who had never heard of their magazine that their product was different and better. They barnstormed the country, giving local chambers of commerce and university students a current events quiz, showing the local bigwigs, in front of their friends and colleagues, how uninformed about the world they were. In doing so, they almost embarrassed their audience into subscribing to Time. Hadden and Luce (and especially the more daring Hadden) also started publishing articles that attacked small and mid-size communities around the country, sometimes for racism, sometimes for corruption, and sometimes for sheer orneriness. When the local papers picked up Time's attacks, Time could count on an explosion of subscriptions, if not affection, in that city.
   
   But the marketing strategy that resonates most is their concerted effort to make sure their readers were intimately engaged in the magazine; seventy years before the blog, Hadden recognized that winning a readership's loyalty would require readers to feel like they could have input into the magazine. Wilner relates how Hadden invented the modern letters-to-the-editor section and how he relished in particular letters attacking Time, figuring they would produce controversy and interest like his attacks on small-minded cities. Hadden even went so far as to invent letter writers when the real correspondents weren't provocative enough. He'd then publish mutual attacks of real and imagined letter-writers for weeks, creating an ongoing controversy within the paper.
   
   Threaded throughout the extraordinary historical analysis of Time and its success is the gripping tale of the Hadden-Luce rivalry. From the moment they first met at the prestigious New England prep school Hotchkiss, Luce was always the leader of the two, and recognized as such. He had charm, wit, and a daring luminosity that drew peers, professors, and hordes of women to him. At Hotchkiss, he served as editor in chief of the school paper, while Luce worked under him. At Yale, he likewise bested the more reserved and conservative Luce in the contest for chairmanship of the Yale Daily News. And after graduation, it was he who invited Luce to join him in creating Time, and who came up with nearly all of the ideas that launched Time, and its sister magazines Life, Sports Illustrated, and many others to awesome success. But when Hadden died at the age of 31 as a result of a bacterial infection likely made worse by years of chain-smoking, heavy drinking, little food and little sleep, Luce betrayed him - largely writing him out of the history of Time magazine, and maneuvering to gain control of his Time stock against the wishes he expressed before his death. For the first time, Wilner exposes the betrayal and the complex emotions that underpinned it - delivering a story that redeems Hadden from his undeserved obscurity, and a style that should inspire readers and writers alike.



5. I found The Man Time Forgot on a friend's recommendation, picked it up and could not put it down. Read it in less than a day. I think it's going to be a huge success. It's a suspenseful narrative that grabs you from the start--a deathbed scene--and never lets you go right up til the end, a party that has to rival Truman Capote's "black and white party" as the best of the century.
   
   The book revolves around the friendship and rivalry of Briton Hadden and his classmate and business partner, Henry Luce. It turns out that Luce, the most famous publisher of the 20th century and the man who ran Time Inc all those years, actually did not shape the magazine or the company in its founding days. Luce stole the credit from Time's true innovator and genius, Briton Hadden, after his tragic and mysterious death at the age of 31--a stunning decline, death and betrayal that is expounded upon in heartbreaking detail.
   
   The writer apparently got access to a Time Inc. archive and found a private cache of letters and documents that had been concealed for half a century. It has been a long time since I've read a book that has carried me away to a different time and place.
   
   Reading this book, I felt like I could actually see what was going on. The characters came to life on the page and I felt like I was transported back to the Roaring Twenties.

2 comments about I'm Wild Again.

1. This book has some good tips on getting along in the work place.

   For me it was worth reading simply for the advice Helen Brown gives on how to get nails to grow. ie. 5,000 mcg of biotin each day and crisco. The biotin and crisco work; I now have nails after years of trying and failing to grow any.

   I would sum up HGB's philosphy in a nutshell:

   Get a man to marry you who will support you sexually and financially.

   Don't have any children; it might interfere with the good life.

   Get a good skin doctor and plastic surgeon in order to keep yourself buff.

   Embrace the go-go NYC lifestyle.

   Don't ever quit work. (Miss Brown is 78 and still shows up each day with her paper bag lunch)

   Helen has some good tips about exercise and vitamins.




2. Helen Gurley Brown basically has written the same book at least four times and only she could manage to make each new version totally captivating. This latest rewrite of "Sex and the Single Girl" covers a lot of the same ground as the original but 40 years later. It's still amazingly fresh, witty, original and brave. AND USEFUL. I'm a male mouseburger and Helen has provided many guideposts to life for me (we also turned out to have the same work habits, likes and dislikes, untiring ambition and enthusiasm for our work, love for good health). She's been there, done that, learned from it and she has always been totally generous with her wisdom. This book is a quick read, never a dull moment and mucho thought-provoking. You'll come back to it again and again. Bravo to HGB!

No comments about REBECCA WEST: A Life.

No comments about The Infernal Grove (Chronicles of Wasted Time).