PEOPLE Celebrates People: The Best of 20 Unforgettable Years (People Books, $24.95), edited by the magazine's founding editor, Richard B. Stolley; offers readers a year-by-year collection of 400 surprising and of ten poignant black-and-white photographs that capture the highest, lowest and sometimes silliest moments of the past two decades of pop culture. All of the photographs were originally published in PEOPLE.
Inside PEOPLE: The Stories Behind the Stories (Villard, $19.95), by Judy Kessler, a former PEOPLE assistant editor and TV producer whose other books include Inside Today: The Battle for the Morning, is a chatty and anecdotal behind-the-scenes account of how PEOPLE's reporters and photographers landed some of the magazine's most memorable stories, ranging from the life and death of Ryan White to the Julia Roberts-Lyle Lovett wedding.
by Bill Carter
Comedy may not be pretty, but the campaign waged by Jay Leno and David Letterman for Johnny Carson's Tonight Show throne should at least be good for a few yuks. After all, since the two first met in 1975 as unknown stand-ups, each had, by 1991, ascended into the seven-figure salary bracket on the strength of his wit.
Yet rather than explore how these professional pals dealt with their game of high-stakes musical chairs, Carter, a New York Times reporter, concentrates on executive-suite machinations. Once Leno wins the job—thanks largely to Helen Kushnick, his Machiavellian pit bull of a manager—CBS chief Howard Stringer begins wooing Letterman with gifts. (The most irritating: a video in which CBS newscaster Connie Chung coos, "Whenever Maury [Povich] and I make love, I promise to say, 'Dave! Oh, Dave!' ") NBC's brass, faced with losing their Late Night star, order up endless viewer surveys before making a weaselly last-ditch offer.
Though well reported, this is pretty soporific stuff, not helped by the author's tin ear for prose ("The Tonight Show became the one altar at which everyone in show business worshipped at"). Worse, Carter portrays Leno, 43, as an unrefleclive Rain Man of one-liners and Letterman, 46, as a churlish lone wolf in need of constant petting. Warts-and-all journalism has its place, but surely these guys can't be all warts. (Hyperion, $24.95)
by Louise Erdrich
Ever since she first started writing about life on the Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota, Louise Erdrich has created one of the most compelling accounts of people and place in American fiction today. The Bingo Palace, her fourth volume in a series that began with the award-winning Love Medicine in 1984, adds to this complex portrait.
The Bingo Palace opens with the return to the reservation of Lipsha Morrissey, incurable dreamer and roustabout. His uncle, the reservation's entrepreneur, Lyman Lamartine, gives Lipsha a job sweeping out the bingo hall, a routine brightened only by his luck with a bingo card and his quest for Shawnee Ray Toose, a dancer who steals his heart the moment he sees her. That Shawnee might be Lyman's love, and is in fact the mother of his child, is of no real concern to Lipsha. She is unmarried, and he is brimming with ardor.
While Erdrich focuses on Lipsha's effort to edge out Lyman and convince Shawnee of his honorable intentions, she also provides snapshots of life on the reservation. Her poetic style graces the darkest moment, bringing a strange beauty to the most passionate and decisive scenes. When Lipsha, in despair, hurls a Bible across a room, it hits the stereo receiver and turns the radio to Jimi Hendrix blasting out "All Along the Watchtower."
In Erdrich's bittersweet world, humor often undercuts the most serious moment, and by knowing when to laugh, her characters are able to survive. (HarperCollins, $23)
by Jonathan Kellerman
Like many mysteries, Bad Love begins with a scream—this one captured on tape and delivered in a plain brown wrapper. When a child's chant—"bad love, bad love"—follows, it's clear we are in the charter territory of Kellerman's psychologist turned sleuth, Alex Delaware.
The mystery, Delaware soon deduces, goes back to a 1979 symposium in Los Angeles that nobody wanted to attend—a tribute to the psychiatrist Andres de Bosch and the de Boschian theory of Good Love/Bad Love. But who is stalking the seminar's participants—and why? Because Delaware himself had a place on the dais, he has more than a minor stake in solving this case of the disappearing doctors.
Since his 1985 first novel, When the Bough Breaks, Kellerman has proved consistently adept at balancing violent scenes and thoughtful social overviews. This ninth attempt—quick paced, delicately plotted, with some vivid scenes—will not disappoint his readers. Still, the originality of his earlier work is fading, and recurring characters are beginning to seem shopworn. Maybe it's time for Delaware to have a change of life—or for Kellerman to create a new protagonist. (Bantam, $22.95)
- Contributors:
- Tony Chiu,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Susan Toepfer.
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!
