REVIEWED BY SUE CORBETT
NONFICTION
Anyone who has ever lost themselves in Monet's color-saturated gardens or swooned over Degas's dancers will enjoy this revealing group portrait of the artists who founded the Impressionist movement in mid-19th-century Paris. Roe takes readers into the studios where Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Cassatt and Morisot met, honed their craft and struggled to make ends meet. Responding to the societal upheaval that marked the reign of Napoleon III, these artists democratized the idea of what paintings could be about; ordinary life served as inspiration. Roe brings her own subjects to life with revealing details. Renoir began training as a teenager by painting Marie Antoinette's portrait onto porcelain teacups. Monet was once so depressed about his family and failing finances that he threw himself into the Seine but "was too good a swimmer to drown." Taking in the large cast and the wealth of information sometimes feels a bit like trying to see the entire Louvre in a single day, but for the armchair dilettante, as well as the art-history student, this is lively, required reading.
By Julia Hansen
REVIEWED BY JOSH EMMONS
MEMOIR
"I wanted to quit, but I didn't want to stop smoking," Hansen writes in her wry memoir about the demon weed. Nevertheless, she did, after desperate measures that included attaching herself by a 72-foot chain to a radiator for seven days in a bid to go cold turkey. A recovering alcoholic, Hansen takes an unsparing look at her life, work (including a stint as a Playgirl editor) and addictions, concluding that from her first cigarette at the age of 19, nicotine helped soften her belief that she was unlovable. She is gutsy, and readers on both sides of the no-smoking sign will applaud her.
By Gerard Donovan
REVIEWED BY ALLISON LYNN
CRITIC'S CHOICE
NOVEL
Donovan's quietly disturbing third novel is the story of a 51-year-old man who has lived in the same secluded cabin for 20 years. At first, Julius Winsome appears to be a kind soul who survives the lonely Maine winters with the help of his loyal dog. But after the animal is shot, something visceral and violent rises in him. Donovan covers less than a week of Winsome's life, but by laying out each day in painful, sometimes dreamy detail, he opens up the whole dark, serious and unpredictable nature of a wronged human heart.
William Styron
After Styron received the French Legion of Honor in '87, his pals on Martha's Vineyard threw their own ceremony. "We bestowed the award on him, but instead of swords we used breadsticks," says columnist Art Buchwald, a close friend. "Bill just loved it."
However he was honored, Styron, who died Nov. 1 at 81, was a giant of American literature. Best known for the Holocaust epic Sophie's Choice, he "had a personal sense of the gulfs and hazards that lie beneath the surface of social life," says friend Norman Mailer. Married for 43 years to poet Rose (they had four children), Styron "would want to be remembered for his [eight] books," says Buchwald, "and his books will live on forever."
THE MUST-READS:
• Lie Down in Darkness ('51): Debut novel that taps his southern roots.
• The Confessions of Nat Turner ('67): Story of a rebel slave.
• Sophie's Choice ('79): Meryl Streep won an Oscar for the title role.
• Darkness Visible ('90): An intimate memoir about depression.
A JUMBLE OF Polaroids, drawings, diary entries ("I striped my hair & it looks Horrible") and random jottings, Love's new book is full of telling detritus.
From her list Things That Interest Me: Nazis, Blues, Old Bottles, Old Blue Bottles & Tin Cans Poor Black/White People, Babylonia, Teapots, Strange Sexual Practices of the Famous, Bad Early 80's New Wave
In his controversial latest, Oxford prof and atheist Richard Dawkins dissects ideas passed down by generations of those he calls "faith-heads." Positing that readers raised on the Old Testament are "desensitized" to God's "bloodthirsty" nature, he argues below that the Bible may shock newbies.
Winston Churchill's son Randolph somehow contrived to remain ignorant of scripture until Evelyn Waugh ... in a vain attempt to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war, bet him he couldn't read the entire Bible in a fortnight: "Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped," reported Waugh. "He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud ... or merely slapping his side & chortling, 'God, isn't God a sh--!'"
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
