Books Reviews - Page 28

My Life In The Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale
By James Atlas
Harper Collins

It’s during so-called "middle age" that adults most often come to grips with life’s realities. Writer James Atlas lays it all out—the physical limitations, bygone dreams, job layoffs, financial anxieties, aging parents and empty nests that await us all as we age. Not to mention the Grim Reaper. Drawing on his own experience and that of his friends, Atlas delves into the challenges of today’s mid-lifers and offers insights for young adults as to what lies ahead. My Life In the Middle Ages is a "reality reader" both honest and humorous as Atlas describes firsthand accounts of hitting some of those middle-age potholes. At 50, he’s shocked when he’s fired from his job. In pondering his own mortality, he dryly notes "getting into a cemetery will be as competitive as getting into a private school." The common thread throughout is that Atlas deals with mid-life, survives and embraces what’s around the corner. He then takes the extra step of sharing the process with readers.

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I Feel Good:A Memoir Of A Life Of Soul
James Brown
New American Library

Strap yourself in! R&B legend James Brown tells his rollercoaster life in his own words—from hardscrabble childhood and social indifferences to his anointment as the Godfather of Soul; from singing at The Apollo to endless run-ins with the law.

As you read you can almost imagine Brown speaking from a stage, wiping sweat with his trademark towel as he recounts bizarre incidents, including his stint at the Georgia State Penitentiary, his rocky relationships and his rise, fall and rise on the music scene. Brown is an important part of American music culture, and these pages are laced with great stories and insight. Elvis, he says "took a lot of my style and my teachings and put them into his own music, something I didn’t mind at all." He describes how his relationship was initially strained with Ray Charles. "Then we became such good friends," he writes. He even defines the difference between soul and funk. Hollywood made a great movie out of the life of Ray Charles; Brown’s bio would also be hot stuff on the big screen.

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The Breakdown Lane
Jacquelyn Mitchard
HarperCollins

Early in Jacquelyn Mitchard’s involving family novel, Julieanne Gillis—wife, mother and advice columnist for her Sheboygan, Wis., newspaper—communicates a secret she doesn’t even know she has: she’s suffering from multiple sclerosis. And that’s the least of her troubles.

Her lawyer husband is deep in mid-life crisis and feels the need for a "hiatus," the effects of which will permanently rip apart not only Julieanne’s world, but that of her two teens, particularly the mildly learning-disabled Gabe.

Julieanne, who easily solves other’s problems, doesn’t see it coming, and finally realizes she’s "the poster princess for willful self-delusion." The narrative turns on two stories—Julieanne’s wrestling with more than her share of bitter pills, and Gabe’s premature coming of age. Mitchard’s tale is overlong and meandering, but humor, hardship, and heart turn this soap opera into an indulgent bubble bath of a read.

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Sunday Money
Jeff MacGregor
HarperCollins

Stock car racing has traveled from the South’s moonshine backroads and the back of newspaper sports pages to Wall Street, multi-million dollar sponsorships and national television deals.

In Sunday Money, author Jeff MacGregor and his photographer wife, Olya Evanitsky, follow the NASCAR circuit for one season to bring you the glitz, glamour and grease pits of this high-speed phenomenon. MacGregor brings you close-ups of today’s cover boy race drivers like Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. But he’s equally adept at setting up the present by taking you back to the early years of dirt tracks, Bill France’s Daytona Beach, Fla., racing dream and yesteryear’s tire-tool heroes. The book serves as a good orientation handbook for the new fan as well as an enjoyable read for the stock car fanatic.

MacGregor describes the 1950s, which were the flourishing years for stock car racing with the opening of asphalt ovals in Daytona and Darlington, S.C. He also pays homage to names like Richard Petty, Buddy Baker and Fireball Roberts. But the real nuggets are found in detailed chapters with insight into the more than 70 million fans who follow the NASCAR circuit on the colorful and lively weekend pilgrimages. Sunday Money is like a season pass on the circuit. Set yourself on cruise control and enjoy.

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If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name
By Heather Lende
Algonquin Books

Author Lende, a National Public Radio Morning Edition commentator, lives in Haines, Alaska (pop. 1,811), where she writes the local paper’s society and obituary columns. "Writing about the dead helps me celebrate the living," she says in this beautifully crafted look at the townspeople and their most challenging lives. While much of Lende’s profiling carries a quiet humor—the high school principal is a Roy Orbison impersonator—her most resonant work details the wrenching hardships of an area remote and fraught with peril. She writes poignantly of a daughter who lovingly builds a coffin for her mother and of her own harrowing eight-hour drive through blinding snow for her son’s emergency appendectomy. It’s easy to see why two national magazines named Haines one of the 10 best "undiscovered" American towns—a place where no one loses sight of the magnificence and frailty of life itself.

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This companion volume to a DVD/CD fascinates, even if it doesn’t always live up to expectations. Most of the private family photos have been published before, and pictures of the Presley estate’s memorabilia sometimes seem like Saturday Night Live sketches (Elvis’ comb takes up one whole page, as does the remote control from his television). The family interviews, presented as oral history, include memories from Priscilla’s mother, stepfather, and sister, as well as Elvis’ cousin. While these are unrevealing on the whole, Priscilla occasionally comes through with a chilling recollection, such as her eerie recounting of discovering the wardrobe of her late mother-in-law, Gladys Presley, in the attic. The most entertaining material comes from Lisa Marie, who charmingly and irreverently recalls life with her father. "This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me," Elvis said of Priscilla’s pregnancy in 1967. Chances are, he’d be proud of this book, too.

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Porter Shreve
Drives Like a Dream
Houghton Mifflin

In his follow-up to his debut novel, Obituary Writer, Porter Shreve focuses his attention on Lydia Modine, a 61-year-old Michigan car historian whose life falls apart when her ex-husband remarries and her three grown children remain scattered across the country.

Modine is a serious gatherer of facts—she’s writing a book about her father’s mysterious career with auto visionary Preston Tucker—but she suddenly switches to fictional storytelling in her personal life, concocting a ludicrous scheme to bring her family home.

Shreve masterfully interlocks stories, and he excels at conjuring eccentric characters with witty banter. Part woman’s story (empty nest blues, mother-daughter struggles) and part conspiracy theory about the golden age of the automobile, Drives Like a Dream proves a fine vehicle for fun.

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This is not a new Stephen King novel, but a non-fiction work that chronicles the unwavering baseball passion of noted authors King and Stewart O’Nan.

Early last year, the two men decided to document the upcoming Boston Red Sox season by sitting next to each other at Fenway Park, e-mailing each other their post-game analyses and writing about the games. They never could have predicted, or perhaps even dared dream, that they would write about the team during the first season in 86 years that the Red Sox would win the World Series.

They colorfully describe their rollercoaster ride from spring training to the final out of the Red Sox’s World Series championship game against the St. Louis Cardinals. The real centerpiece of the book is the heated rivalry between the Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Like all Red Sox fans, the authors had suffered through countless near misses and lingering heartbreaks since the "Curse of the Bambino," when Boston sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. Curse or not, this is a wonderful way to relive the season many are still talking about.

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Threads
Joseph Abboud (with Ellen Stern)
HarperCollins Publishers

Clothing designer Joseph Abboud’s autobiography is a fun, breezy read about the inner-workings of the fashion industry and his rise from Boston, where he fell in love with style at age 5, to the showrooms and catwalks of New York City, where he emerged as an award-winning designer who dresses celebrities such as Tom Brokaw, Bob Costas and Bryant Gumbel.

With the same skills he uses in creating an impressive outfit, Abboud uses the perfect blend of literary fabrics to make Threads an entertaining journey. There’s a little bit of behind-the-scenes gossip about other designers, but not enough to be negative or catty. Although Abboud details his successes, he humbly devotes an equal amount of attention to his mistakes, which reveal some of the book’s most rewarding insights.

He also offers invaluable fashion tips for men and dissects the marketing strategies behind a department store’s layout. You’ll never look at clothes shopping the same way again.

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The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America’s Greatest Band on Stage and in the Studio
By Keith Badman
Backbeat Books

They started out as the Pendletones, naming themselves after the plaid wool shirts popular with the surfing crowd in their native California. But by 1966, they would become America’s preeminent pop band as the Beach Boys, challenging and outlasting the Beatles.

Badman, whose previous works include three books on the British moptops, had the help of the Beach Boys in assembling this detail-laden, day-by-day chronicle of their lives and careers from 1961 to 1976 and beyond (including Brian Wilson’s current Smile tour). He documents their entire concert, recording and television history, as well as their squabbles, health problems and controversial associates (from Charles Manson to Dr. Eugene Landy).

If Badman gives too little detail on critical events such as the deaths of Dennis and Carl Wilson, he does a fine job of explaining why the good vibrations lasted so long.

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