Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady...

2008, first edition, from HarperCollins
Maureen McCormick
Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice
Original price $25.95, bought used for $20.76
Hardcover in good condition
B-

Although this book is partly about McCormick dealing with the mixed legacy of her role as Marcia, there's not terribly much about the show or her life during that time.  Mostly, it's about the years afterwards, as she struggled with drug addiction and other serious problems.  Her family seems to have been very dysfunctional, from the beginning to the end.  (The last few chapters discuss her brother's elder abuse of their father.)  

It's an interesting read but, like other books of its time, it could've used a better editor.  Not only does she make mistakes about The Brady Bunch, things any fan could've fact-checked for her, but she thinks her hair is "chestnut," which is not a synonym for blonde.  There are typos as well.  And it felt like she rushed through the last twenty years or so.

Although Susan Olsen (little sister Cindy) hasn't yet written an autobiography, she will have her say on the Brady legacy in the book she cowrote, Love to Love You Bradys: The Bizarre Story of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, coming up in '09....

I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This!

2006, "a leatherbound signed edition of this book has been published by the Easton Press," obviously this is not that edition, but it's probably '06, from Hyperion
Bob Newhart
I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This!, and Other Things That Strike Me as Funny
Original price unknown, purchase price $5.60
Hardcover in good condition
B-

I laughed out loud at this book, especially his recounting of his exchanges with the likes of Johnny Carson and Dean Martin, but I found the long excerpts from his "classic" routines fell flat, partly because the humor hasn't aged well and partly because we need to hear his inflection on the lines, much more in a monologue than a dialogue.  Also, some of the material here has been presented elsewhere, including on the audio commentaries for his '70s sitcom.  Yes, he does address his Danzaing, how everyone of his shows has at least part of his name.  (George of George & Leo comes from his real first name.)  

This isn't a strict biography, since it doesn't talk about all of his life.  (Ironically, while he discusses his Catholicism a bit, he tells the joke that the book's title is from differently than I've heard it, where it goes, "I'm Catholic.  I shouldn't even be doing this.")  It's more a collection of anecdotes.  Still, it's entertaining enough, and I especially recommend it to his fans, as long as they're not expecting anything as good as the best of his comedy.

Barbra: The Way She Is

2006, first edition, from HarperCollins
Christopher Andersen
Barbra: The Way She Is
Original price $25.95, purchase price $7.80
Hardcover in good condition
B-

Not since Schorer's Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), have I come across a biographer who seems to dislike his subject so much.  This book can be summed up as "Barbra Streisand is very talented and very bitchy."  Other than his attitude, and his frequent misuse of "proverbial" (hint, is the item actually in a proverb?), the book isn't bad.  Andersen traces Barbra's life through her unhappy childhood, her awkward adolescence, and on to more than four decades of (super)stardom.  Although I've followed her career off and on (seeing a movie or two every decade), I'm not a huge fan, and there was much here I didn't know.  However, Andersen does jump to conclusions, as when he strongly implies that Streisand had an affair with Bill Clinton.  (Not that that's implausible of course.)  And he seems to exaggerate her neglect of her sister.  

One thing that does come through the book, whether or not Barbra is a good person, she is very witty!  If she ever writes her autobiography, I'd love to read it, even if she doesn't quite tell all.  

Since Andersen discusses Streisand's creative endeavors, in between the gossip, I'm using all these "criticism" tags.  And, yes, I'm also using the "LGBT" tag, in honor of Barbra's son and many of her fans, and because of course the subject of homosexuality comes up repeatedly.

Margaret Pole: Countess of Salisbury, 1473-1541

2003, 2009 University of Wales Press edition
Hazel Pierce
Margaret Pole: Countess of Salisbury, 1473-1541
Bought newish for unkown
Slightly worn paperback
C+

This has some of the faults of other biographies of royal women, the main one being the complex one of never resolving the contradictions in personality and values of the subject, or really making her come alive to the modern reader.  It's a shame, because here's a woman who was not only the Countess of Salisbury in her own right, but niece to Edward IV and Richard III, godmother and governess to Mary I, and a very posthumously declared martyr of the Catholic Church.  Yet, Pierce crams the first three decades of Pole's life, up to her widowhood, into one chapter.  And she spends too much time on the lives of people who were only peripherally connected to Pole.  Still, there are enough nuggets worth digging out, such as Margaret's liking for black clothes and hiring of women estate officers, and her son Geoffrey's fondness of puns, that I can recommend this particularly to those with an interest in the sixteenth century.

This book finishes off a shelf, although as always, that's subject to future shifting.

Backstage with the Original Hollywood Square

2002, possibly first edition, from Rutledge Hill Press
Peter Marshall with Adrienne Armstrong
Backstage with the Original Hollywood Square
Bought newish for $24.99
Hardcover in good condition, "includes CD of Zingers from The Hollywood Squares"
B-

Marshall looks back fondly on the popular game show he hosted for sixteen years.  For a long time, THS was assumed to be lost, but shortly before this book came out, many hours were rediscovered and ended up on the Game Show Network.  I have to admit, based on the 45-minute CD and what I've seen on Youtube, the program hasn't aged well, unlike the still funny and fun-to-play-along-with-at-home You Bet Your Life, Match Game, and Bert-Convy-hosted Password.  (Marshall by the way hates Convy, but doesn't explain why, unlike his dislike of Dan Rowan, which he goes into a bit.)  I probably got more laughs out of the print collection of Zingers from '78.  Yet, there are some behind-the-scenes anecdotes that are worth reading.  Marshall is still alive at 87 and last month was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, although this show is his main claim to fame.

(Includes film criticism in the sense that Marshall talks about his not very well known movies, and there's some biography, including that he's actress Joanne Dru's brother.)

"I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!"

2001, possibly first edition, from Prometheus
Bill Sloan
"I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!": A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact
Original price unknown, purchase price $12.50
Hardcover in good condition
B

Sometimes I ask myself, "Will I regret it more if I buy this or I don't buy it?"  (This applies to other things than purchases of course.)  In the case of this book, I was on the fence and didn't buy it when it was relatively new, and regretted it.  Luckily, I found it used years later.  It's a fun, although sometimes serious, read about "the tabs" by a journalist who got to know many of the key players in the golden years of the late '60s through late '80s.  Generoso Pope (real name) and the other publishers were almost as strange as the people and creatures who appeared in their magazines/newspapers.  My favorite chapter was about the likes of Weekly World News, where nearly everything was made up and bizarre.  I was never a big tabloid reader, except during my early teens, and even then it was mostly so my best friend and I could make fun of them.  

Sloan argues convincingly that everything changed in the 1990s, due to factors that included corporate consolidation, the Internet, the Lewinsky scandal (when daily newspapers could wallow more easily and more deeply than the tabs), and the aging of the prime audience, the housewife readers of the glory days.  Of course, the story begins back in the 1890s, with Hearst and Pulitzer, but Sloan moves quickly to the '50s when The Enquirer and its less successful competitors began with violence and sometimes smut, later cleaning up their acts as newspaper/magazine purchasing shifted from news-stands (think of the Bellini family in The Cricket in Times Square in 1960) to supermarkets.  I went to two different supermarkets this past weekend and noticed that one didn't seem to have any tabloids, while the other had a few at the less used checkstands.  I can still remember laughing at headlines while waiting in grocery lines in the '90s, but Sloan is right that the tabs were in a long, slow decline throughout that decade.  On the other hand, I just looked, and nationalenquirer.com has news of Peter O'Toole's death, so tabs are still out there in some form.

The book could be criticized as too short to cover all it sets out to cover, but I found it an enjoyable read for what it was.  And, yes, it's got one of the more eye-catching titles in my book collection.

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

2001, 2002 Norton edition
Mary S. Lovell
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family
Original and purchase price both unknown
Hardcover in good condition
B

I was wrong that Jessica's The American Way of Birth (1992) would be the end on my blog for this colorful family, because after that I got a used copy of this group-biography.  I thought Lovell did a fairly good job of balancing the different sides, although she's admittedly harder on Communist Jessica than Fascist Diana or Nazi Unity, perhaps because Diana and Debo were then still alive.  (Diana died in '03.)  She even pays some attention to Pam, who's sort of the Gummo Marx of the family.  Father David and in particular Mother Sydney come off as much nicer, if not as colorful, than in Jessica and Nancy's books.  Yes, there's some repetition from other books (including the Collier & Horowitz book on the Kennedys), but there was enough new material to be interesting, and sometimes amusing.

Marie Antoinette: The Journey

2001, 2002 Anchor Books edition
Antonia Fraser
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
Original price $16.95, purchase price $5.95
Worn paperback
B

This is equally as good as Fraser's 1969 biography of Mary Queen of Scots (one of MA's* ancestresses).  As with that profile, Fraser humanises the queen, flaws and all, although it's mostly a positive portrayal.  Even the flaws are ones that Fraser sees as common to MA's times, places, and class.  She argues that the "let them eat cake" remark was not only attributed to many earlier French princesses, but it would've been out of character with the soft-hearted MA.  The book can be fairly criticized for not giving much if any sympathy to MA's many enemies, although I understand why Fraser chooses to instead focus on MA's perspective and experience.  

One aspect I found especially interesting, as a post-Hillary-as-First-Lady book, is that MA was the subject of nasty rumors and even pornography, presenting her an anything-that-moves bisexual bitch who controlled her weak husband.  Although Louis XVI was killed first, it was her beheading that was meant to be cathartic, and unifying, for the French.  In her show trial, she was accused of incest with her eight-year-old son.  (And, yes, some right-wing sickos have accused Obama with incest with his daughter, and his father.)  As Fraser notes, some modern lesbians have claimed MA as one of their own, but in her lifetime and for a long time afterward, her sexuality (real or imagined) was considered part of her evil.

Fraser argues that MA had little interest in sex, and her closest female friendships were sentimental, not "tribadic."  And yet Fraser herself, on little evidence, insists that MA had a several-years-long affair with Count Fersen.  Fraser claims he used condoms to prevent pregnancy, but I think it's more plausible, given all the risks, that MA made out (or maybe just kissed) with the Duchesse de Polignac, and saved sex for reproduction with her often uninterested husband.

Still, I enjoyed this book so much the first time that my boyfriend bought me a novel about MA's son, "Louis XVII."  It wasn't very good, so I reread this book again instead of finishing that.  This time is my third read in three years, so that's saying something.


*I'm going with this abbreviation, especially since the queen's birth name was Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

2001, "originally published in hardcover in slightly different form...in 2000," this edition from Vintage (Random House)
Dave Eggers
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Original price $14.00, purchase price $2.00
Worn paperback
C-

In "Mistakes We Were Making," the sort of afterword/update that you have to flip the book over to read, Eggers complains that many people assumed his book is ironic, when it's just funny.  The real irony is that the book isn't funny.  While his namesake David Sedaris can make me laugh out loud, even when I don't like the subjects (in both the "people" and "topics" senses), Eggers keeps undercutting himself.  If the whole book had been along the lines of the copyright page, then I might've liked it about equally to the 250-years-older Tristam Shandy, but unlike Sterne, Eggers doesn't sustain this.  Even as a memoir of what it was like to be orphaned at 22 and raise his 7/8/9-year-old brother (the chronology is really screwy), it doesn't work because Eggers, yes, sidetracks himself.

Another irony, considering Eggers's weird racial and gender issues, is that the book this most reminded me of was McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back, in that it's "autobiographical fiction"* but I couldn't tell how much of the unreliable and/or unpleasant narrator was unintentional.  Also, they both keep emphasizing their own coolness, and yes, they doth protest too much.  And thirdly, they both are set in very specific times and places-- '90s Northern California in both, as well as respectively Illinois and Jamaica-- that it's interesting to visit in book form, but the settings unfortunately take a backseat to the characters, themes, and so-called plots.  I moved to the Silicon Valley in '94, so I wanted to know more about Berkeley and San Francisco at that time, but this isn't the book to inform me.  And when I'd tell myself, "OK, forget about the single/young parent thing, because Eggers has, let's focus on his experience at Might magazine," Eggers would do what he could to make that sound unappealing.  (If you can't even get a good story out of faking Adam Rich's death, there's not much hope for you.)

As with Stella, I was in a way more annoyed with this book than with something that deserves a D+ or lower.  There are some not-bad passages, there is potential.  But Eggers seems determined to frustrate the reader on every front.  

And then I looked up Eggers, thinking this was probably a one-hit wonder (best-seller, Pulitzer nominee).  No, actually he's still (at 43) considered one of the best writers of his (and, ugh, my) generation.  But I did feel vindicated because he cowrote the abysmal screenplay to Where the Wild Things Are (2009), which has some of the same flaws as this book, including a lack of resolution.  


*So why does this get the "biography" tag and that didn't?  I guess because the main "characters'" names are unchanged here.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

2000, 2001 Back Bay edition
David Sedaris
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Original price $14.95, purchase price unknown
Worn paperback
B-

Although I laughed out loud a few times, I didn't necessarily like this book.  The stuff about Sedaris's childhood and his time in France was best, the young-adulthood less so.  Although I'm using the "biography" tag, these are essays (many if not most published previously in magazines) about his life, so you have to piece together how old he is, and roughly how many and what order his siblings are.  It's interesting that his sexual orientation is sort of background rather than foreground.  When he has to take speech therapy to deal with his lisp, it's implied this was done to all the obviously gay little boys in his school, but then later we find out that his younger and straight brother has an equally girly voice (I'm not sure about the lisp).  Similarly, there's no coming out process, or reaction to him and his boyfriend Hugh as a couple.  Maybe that was dealt with in his earlier books, none of which I've read.

When he writes about his life as a pretentious drug-abusing young artist, or tells of his sister uglifying herself partially to annoy their pimp-like (but innocent) father, it's disturbing even when it's funny.  That sister, Amy, has written her own twisted books, and I think I skimmed the one where she was sort of Martha Stewart on crack.  I could see spending more time with the Sedaris family, but on the other hand, I'm not eager to, and I suspect I've read this book only once or twice before.

Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis

2000, 2002 Da Capo Press edition
Eric Myers
Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis
Original price $16.95, purchase price unknown
Slightly worn paperback
B

I found this biography to be about equal to Dennis's fiction, not so much because of Myer's writing style, since that's a little flat and overly redundant (he tells us several times that one of Dennis's nieces became a nun), but because Dennis was even more of a colorful personality than any of his characters.  Whether he was a 10-year-old dressing up as Margaret Dumont, or a fiftysomething working incognito as Ray Kroc's butler, he was the life of the party.  Even his letters to friends, family, and his editor are priceless.

Myers never quite finds the right tone to address the darker side of Dennis's real life as Edward "Pat" Tanner, the depression, suicide attempts, and struggle to deal with his sexuality.  Tanner was campy before camp was recognized (including as a Boy Scout), and yet he was never involved with men until he was in his 40s, leading to a very long separation, but never divorce, from his wife.  (They reunited not long before his death, still in love.)  I consider him to be bisexual, but of course for most of his life-- he died in 1976-- that wasn't an accepted orientation.

As in Dennis's best fiction, there's a vibrant cast to back up the "lead," and Myers does a good job of digging below the stereotypes, so that Louise Tanner isn't just the long-suffering wife, or Corry Salley the Hattie-McDanielesque maid.  And we learn more about the folks behind Little Me, which sounds like it was even more fun to make than to read.

Note, I'm using the "film criticism" tag as well as the "literary criticism," because Myers does talk about the movie versions of Auntie Mame.  Dennis thought Rosalind Russell was great but found Lucille Ball "a little too c-mm-n for the role."

Growing up Brady: Special Collectors Edition

1999, third edition from later that year, from Good Guy Entertainment [I do not make this stuff up]
Barry Williams with Chris Kreski
Growing up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg: Special Collectors Edition
Original price unknown, bought used for $4.50
Worn paperback
B- for new material

I ended up just skimming this edition because much of it was unchanged.  And I didn't find the new material as interesting as the original, although it was fairly interesting.  Here's a breakdown on what I spotted of the changes:

• New cover that looks more low-budget (due to the change in publisher?)
• New chapter "The Bradys and Y2K...A New Beginning?", which briefly explains why Williams thought a new edition was justified
• More on Susan Olsen's decision not to participate in A Very Brady Christmas, including her joking, "Of course I had no way of knowing that the two-hour TV movie would last longer than my entire first marriage!"
• The new chapter "Remembering Robert Reed," which is what it says, although Williams also has harsh words for the media exploitation of Reed's death
• The new chapter "Beyond Re-runs, Reunions and Revisitations," where Williams understandably has high praise for the Day By Day  parody and faint praise for the Brady big-screen movies.  (I laughed hard at all three at the time, but the sitcom has unquestionably aged much much better, and not just because you get to see Christopher Daniel Barnes playing "Chuck Brady" before he was big-screen Greg, not to mention Julia Louis-Dreyfuss post-SNL and pre-Seinfeld.)
• The chapter "Where Are They Now?" is what is says as well.  Needless to say, Williams was still protecting Maureen McCormick and pretending that none of the Brady kids went bad.  (Unlike for instance, Danny Bonaduce.)
• The Appendices, like Barry's Filmography and Stage Credits, seem to be new.

The year after this edition, the TV-movie Growing Up Brady came out.  I watched it on Youtube a few weeks ago.  The casting was off, but it was interesting, especially considering Williams himself not only appears in it but got Sherwood Schwartz to do a cameo.  A lot was changed from the book, ironically to make it more of a dramedy. 

This finishes off the 1990s, just beating out the 1980s for the decade with the most entries, by about half a dozen, demanding what you count.  And it's only nine years till we get McCormick's Here's the Story....

Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings

1999, first edition, from Cleis
Gore Vidal
Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings
Probably bought new for $14.95
Slightly worn paperback
B

This overlaps 1968's Sex, Death, and Money, and not just topically.  The first three essays here are mid-'60s ones that appeared in SDaM, and although it's been a long while since I read that collection, I decided to skip those three works.  (Near as I could tell, Vidal hadn't made any changes or comments on them.)  I jumped ahead to a snarky and insightful look at David Reuben's Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, which even at age 14 I found dubious.  The book overall is smart and funny.  Even when I don't agree with Vidal, he's entertaining.  It was nice to get his take on Eleanor Roosevelt compared to B. W. Cook's.  (In 1971 he offers his memories of her, and then in 1999 he briefly talks about reading her correspondence with Lorena Hickok.)  There are also some interviews of Vidal by gay journalists, in 1974 and again in 1992.

One thing that Vidal said repeatedly that no one (of any orientation) seemed to get was that "homosexual" is an adjective, not a noun, and it applies to acts rather than people.  He was (I'm guessing) a Kinsey 4 or 5, defining himself as bisexual when pressed for a label, but seeing nearly everyone as potentially bi.  He does discuss homophobia, and the impact of AIDS, but I found his opinions changed little over time, except to become both more cynical and more hopeful.  In his lifetime, he saw gradually more acceptance of homosexuality, but he was always aware of the prejudices of society, particularly the Religious Right.

I doubt that I'll get his novel The Golden Age (2000) in time for this project, but this is not a bad place to end with him.  As you probably know, he passed away after I started blogging about him, but even at the time I saw him in Celluloid Closet (1995), he was an iconoclastic icon.  He may not be remembered fondly overall, but he will be remembered.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2: 1933-1938

1999, Viking (Penguin) edition probably from later that year
Blanch Wiesen Cook
Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2: 1933-1938
Original price $34.95, bought used for $8.40
Hardcover in good condition
B-

I didn't find this as good as the first volume, with my mind wandering more, especially with the long, drawn-out unhappy relationship with "Hick" getting so much attention.  I was more interested in the issue of prejudice and how ER and others (including Hick) dealt with it.  Cook points out that one reason for the U.S.'s silence for so long about the Nazi abuse of the Jews was not only American anti-Semitism, but the shameful racism of much of the U.S. (although most obviously in the South) towards Negroes (the then politest term).  Lynchings were common early during FDR's administration, although all sorts of anti-black discrimination (much of it similar to what Hitler urged towards Jews) were everyday. 

ER had her own blind spots, but she made great advances personally and politically in the half-decade Cook examines here.  She was controversial, and yet more admired than any woman of her time, or than her popular husband.  Cook gets a bit worshipful at times, although it's understandable.  According to Wikipedia, Cook is currently working on Volume 3.  I doubt it'll be out in time for this project, but I probably will get it if and when it's published.  It'll likely focus on the World War II era, and I'd like to know more about what ER did and said in that period.  (And a Volume 4 with the UN would be great of course, but that's probably a long way off, to say nothing of Volume 5 with her reluctant involvement with the Kennedy campaign.)

Moab Is My Washpot

1997, 2004 Arrow Books edition
Stephen Fry
Moab Is My Washpot
Original price £8.99, priced at "3 for £18" but I can't remember if I bought any other books then
Worn paperback
B

Stephen Fry fan that I was and am, and having run out of books on a trip to Scotland (I had underestimated the amount of time I'd spend in transit), I picked this up at Heathrow to read on the flight back.  I enjoyed it, then and now.  Fry tells the story of his years at public school (in the British sense), with many flashbacks and forwards.  While he of course discusses the teachers and lessons, the book is also about how he became a thief and an out-to-himself homosexual.  The title, Wikipedia explains, comes from psalms in which the nation of Moab became like a basin, and Fry sees this book as "scrubbing at the grime of years."  Wikipedia also gives a somewhat happy ending to the story of Fry's love for a boy he calls here "Osborne," as they met again as adults, and both Mr. and Mrs. "Osborne" have been very nice to him in the years since.

Gay teenaged love and sex are rare to read of in autobiographies, but Fry shares much that's personal here, from his "deflowering" by a prefect to his inability to sing or play sports.  He also gives his opinions on various matters, and even if you don't agree with him (like whether corporal punishment has lasting psychological harm), he's always interesting.

And, yes, I'll be honest, with the first Harry Potter book approaching later in '97, it was helpful to get a nonmagical description of things like "houses," and trains that take the students to school.  Fry would go on to record the Potter audiobooks, and befriend Daniel Radcliffe, so this isn't entirely off topic of course.  

Since this book covers only Stephen's first 20 years, it's good to know that The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography came out in 2010.  I doubt I'll get it in time for this project, but we'll see.

A Desperate Passion: An Autobiography

1997, possibly first paperback edition, from Norton
Dr. Helen Caldicott
A Desperate Passion: An Autobiography
Possibly bought newish for $13.95
Worn paperback
B-

At the age of almost 60, Caldicott looks back at her life to that point.  (She's still alive at 75.)  She's honest about her mistakes, including a difficulty in seeing others' points of view.  She and her husband divorced after 26 years, so that affects how she describes their marriage, as her difficulties with her children affect how she sees her failures and successes as a mother.  The book is mostly, of course, about her political activism, especially in the 1980s.  (She expands on the story of her meeting with Reagan, his longest meeting with anyone during his presidency.)  After rereading the book, I felt like she can be admired more easily than she can be liked.  And I was most interested in the descriptions of Australia's political and literal landscapes.

This completes another shelf, although, as always, I may redistribute the books later.

Enter Whining

1996, 1997 Harper edition
Fran Drescher
Enter Whining
Original price $6.99, purchase price $3.50
Very worn paperback
B-

Drescher writes like she talks, no, not nasally, but she'll write, for instance, "I'm tellin' ya."  The book isn't whiny in the sense that she's complaining.  She's actually very upbeat, although she'll admit when she faces failure, as she did often (she was cast in Ishtar and then dropped), before clicking with The Nanny, which premiered in '93 and continued on till '99.  I watched it sporadically, and I wouldn't say I'm a huge fan, but I like her.  This book focuses mostly on her career, and isn't good about listing years, but it seemed like there wasn't much on her life before she met high-school sweetheart husband Peter Marc Jacobson, who went on to produce her hit series.

They divorced in '99, and then he came out to her as gay, leading eventually to another series that he produced and she starred in, Happily Divorced.  It ran from 2011 to '13, but I've never seen it.

The Golden Age Is In Us: Journeys & Encounters, 1987-1994

1995, possibly first edition, from Verso
Alexander Cockburn
The Golden Age Is In Us: Journeys & Encounters, 1987-1994
Probably bought new for unknown
Worn paperback
C+

Unlike 1988's Corruptions of Empire, which I could happily quote for an hour, I found this mix of journaling and journalism sometimes a bit boring or annoying.  Despite the Gulf War, there's surprisingly little on Bush's presidency (Quayle is mentioned once!), although Cockburn does work up animosity towards Bush's successor, "President McMuffin."  (However, the parallels between Clintonism and lesbian chic are something to ponder.)  And while the autobiographical parts are sometimes interesting, from his mother's death and various earthquakes, to less traumatic events (including his own occasional cross-dressing), I didn't feel I knew or liked him much better than I did before.

Between Corruptions and this book, I got married and divorced, and got a subscription to The Nation, which lapsed around the time this was published.  I mention this because I think this book might've belonged to my ex-husband.  There are many typos and I think it's my ex's handwriting that put "defiance?" where Cockburn says, "..the killing of peasants and social workers, all in defense of US and international laws."

At best, this is the bronze age of Cockburn's work.  While I enjoyed reading him in The Nation (more than Hitchens, less than Pollitt), I can see why I didn't get his later books.  Still, I was sorry to hear when he died July of last year (ironically a few days before his contemporary and former compatriot, Maeve Binchy).

A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes: My Story

1994, first edition, from Hyperion
Annette Funicello with Patricia Rowanowski
A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes: My Story
Original price $22.95, purchase price $2.80
Hardcover in good condition
B-

Funicello looks back with fondness on her career as Mousketeer and Beach Party star, although she emphasizes that being a mom was what was most important in her life.  At the time this book came out, Funicello herself had "come out," as a survivor of multiple sclerosis.  She lived almost another twenty years, having passed away this past April, at age 70.  

The book understandably has no "dirt," Funicello's life having been as wholesome and upbeat as her screen persona.  I do wish though that she had been able to step back a bit, not just smooth over the wrinkles and complications.  For instance, she was very introverted and this interfered with her life, affecting her career and socializing.  She was scared that Elvis would notice her hands were cold from nervousness, so she missed a chance to meet him.  (I doubt Elvis would've cared about her hands, or he might've put her at ease.)  When she considered getting therapy, Walt Disney-- whose advice she always took, because he was her "second father"-- discouraged her, arguing that her shyness was part of her appeal.  Now, I'm the last person to urge introverts to become outgoing (unless that's what they really want), but it would've been good if she had learned how to be more comfortable in her own skin.

Similarly, she is very glad to be part of a close-knit, protective Italian family, but she admits that being sheltered made it hard for her to adjust to marriage at 21.  (I don't mean sexually, but in terms of living with someone outside the family, and taking on responsibility.)

Funicello doesn't say much about frequent costar Tommy Kirk, and I wonder if this is partly because he was gay and a drug-user.  (Uncle Walt didn't approve.)  She does, however, have many kind words for Frankie Avalon, whom she dated briefly (before their movies, and before she got relatively serious with Paul Anka).  They became close friends, and he was very loyal to and supportive of her when her second husband confided her secret of MS.  Oh yeah, Annette actually got divorced!  But as she learned in the song she belted out at four, "You've Got to Accentuate the Positive."

So I'll say that this book is for the most part enjoyable, especially when Annette looks back at herself in her teens.  "'It's all right for a boy and girl to "make out" within the bounds of good taste.'  I wonder what I meant by that."

Great Catherine: The Life of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia

1994, first edition, from Crown
Carolyn Erickson
Great Catherine: The Life of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia
Original price unknown, purchase price $6.40
Hardcover in good condition with worn dustjacket
B-

The best aspect of this book is the description of eighteenth-century Russia, before and during Catherine's reign.  (The empress grew up as a minor German princess named Sophia, but spent the next fifty years or so in Russia.)  In some ways, it helped me better understand the world of Tolstoy, particularly War and Peace, in the same way that understanding the Georgian period in England throws light on Victorian fiction.  For instance, wife-beating was as normalized as it was in the Middle Ages, and yet there was an acceptance of female rulers, so that Catherine could rise to the throne with no claim of blood.  (She wasn't even the mother of the emperor's son, since she and her husband Peter never had sex, and she had to take a lover in order to have a child.)

I thought Erickson did all right exploring Catherine's character, but she didn't resolve the inconsistencies, like Catherine's "tender heart" with her often ruthless politics, from approving Peter's murder, to not insisting on freeing the serfs, to invading Poland.  She does address the empress's promiscuous reputation (including the "horse" story), making it clear that while Catherine was far from Queen Victoria (or Elizabeth I), she probably had fewer partners than, for instance, Henry VIII. And she shows how hard-working and self-educated Catherine was, as well as surprisingly down to earth.  (She liked to make animal noises to amuse the court!)