Mary Fisher captured Americans' hearts, and broke many of them too, at the Republican National Convention in 1992, when the petite heiress announced: "I represent [the] AIDS community.... Though I am female, and contracted this disease in marriage, and enjoy the warm support of my family, I am one with the lonely gay man sheltering a flickering candle from the cold wind of his family's rejection." Cameras panned across faces awash in tears as Fisher concluded: "To all within the sound of my voice, I appeal: Learn with me the lessons of history and of grace, so my children will not be afraid to say the word AIDS when I am gone."
Fisher, 45, learned that she was HIV positive in 1991 but remains asymptomatic. She could have spent the rest of her life in luxurious anonymity, making use of the best medical care her family's real estate and oil fortune could buy, and caring for her young sons, Max, 6, and Zachary, 4. (Neither of the boys has been infected with the disease.) Instead, Fisher has taken her gospel on the road, speaking at conferences, churches, colleges and high schools across the nation, pleading for compassion for the afflicted and sounding the alarm to those still untouched.
This collection of excerpts from 24 of Fisher's speeches, written with corporate consultant A. James Heynen, is both poetic and poignant. The volume begins with a touching letter to Max and Zachary, which Fisher read at a New York City Mothers' Voices Luncheon in May 1992 and ends with an urgent call to arms at a Washington press conference following her tenure as a member of the National Commission on AIDS last June. (The previous week, her husband, Brian, from whom she was divorced, died of the disease.)
Illustrated with photographs of Fisher and her children, the book's proceeds will go to the Family AIDS Network, a nonprofit organization that supports AIDS-related community building and caregiving. Even without Fisher's elegiac delivery, her words have the power to galvanize. (Mover Bell, $22.50)
by Roseanne Arnold
Roseanne Arnold may indeed have 20 separate personalities, as she claims in this, her second autobiography (the first, Roseanne: My Life as a Woman, appeared in 1989). But only one of them—the vindictive Roseanne—showed up to write it. Packed with more pop psychology than Oprah during sweeps week, My Lives reads like the transcript of a hellish therapy session, excoriating everyone whom Arnold feels turned her into a diva of dysfunction.
A few are spared: Johnny Carson, who gave the comedian her big break, comes across as fatherly, while husband Tom Arnold's monstrous cocaine use is excused because as a child he was treated with Ritalin for attention-deficit syndrome. But others are vilified, including first husband Bill Pentland ("For our honeymoon, we went to his friend's house, and he got drunk while I sat on the bed and watched"), her sitcom co-creator Mall Williams and various network bosses with "veiny, reticulated faces."
The biggest bogeyman is her father, Jerry Barr, whose alleged molestation of young Roseanne is recounted as a recovered memory. Which would be fine if My Lives were nearly as funny and moving as Roseanne's highly rated TV show. It isn't, though it does zing along, driven by her defiant, blue-collar bluntness. To accept My Lives as a heartfelt rationalization of Arnold's bizarre antics, you have to agree with her credo: "The world makes you into a bitch, no matter how quietly you go, so you may as well go kicking and screaming." (Ballanline, $23)
by John Updike
Like Dorothy in Oz, Updike fans will likely discover, just a few chapters into the author's 16th novel, that they're certainly not in Connecticut anymore. Brazil reads more like a parable from Jorge {Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) Amado than anything by the esteemed chronicler of North American suburban life. Not only does much of it take place deep in the Brazilian jungle but the plot involves characters who switch races, thanks to the spell cast by a native shaman.
Tristão is a black teenager from the slums when he meets fair Isabel on a Rio beach. Soon after their initial coupling, Isabel's rich uncle separates them: in race-conscious Brazil, such mingling of blood and class is unacceptable. But even after Tristão and Isabel run off together to the jungle, where Isabel is captured by another man, they are forever bound to each other. Believing that her lover will fare better as a white man, she persuades a magician to make her black so that Tristão can have her whiteness.
That such hocus-pocus fails to save the lovers will come as no surprise to readers familiar with the legend of the doomed Tristan and Isolde, on which this novel is loosely based. But then, Brazil merely uses the story as a vehicle to explore some typical Updikian themes: the social politics of love, the connection between sex and violence, the inevitable failure of most social contracts. All of which exist, the author seems to be saying, both somewhere over the equator—and in our own backyards. (Knopf, $23)
by J.I. Merrill
On Oct. 7, 1944, the Liberty Belle, a B-24 bomber piloted by Lt. Jim Merritt, then 24, crashed in Yugoslavia after being hit by antiaircraft fire during a bombing run over Vienna. Merritt and his crew parachuted to safety and spent the next two months with partisan sympathizers trekking across Croatia and dodging enemy soldiers before reaching the Adriatic Sea and safe passage to Italy.
Goodbye, Liberty Belle is the dramatic re-creation of that walk to freedom, but with a twist. Written by Merritt's son, it is the story of one man trying to learn more about a father whose past had always seemed mysterious. The younger Merritt writes about his boyhood fascination with the khaki Air Corps uniform hanging in his parents' closet and the letters and faded newspaper clippings kept in the attic. As he solves the mystery, he not only crosses the country to interview members of the crew, but also travels with his father to Yugoslavia, where they raise glasses of plum brandy with the men who rescued the crew of the Liberty Belle.
Culminating with a tour of the crash site almost 40 years later—and four years before the start of the current civil war—Goodbye, Liberty Belle draws moving portraits of young men on both sides of the battlefield caught up in the tragedy of World War II. At the same time, it admirably recounts the political and military divisions in Yugoslavia, divisions that still haunt us today. (Wright Stale University Press, $18.95)
by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase
Long before Madonna strapped on a bullet bra, there was Josephine Baker, all of 20 years old, scandalizing Paris in the 1920s wearing nothing but a belt ringed with bananas. Beautiful, impetuous, brazenly sexual and ambitious, Baker sang and danced her way through five decades of international stardom (you have a way to go, Madonna), and her death in 1975 at age 68 inspired several biographers to claw at the curtain of her legend in search of the genuine Josephine.
The latest truthseeker, Jean-Claude Baker, had the advantage of serving as his subject's close confidant and manager in the last seven years of her life. (The author even took her name, though they are not related.) Admittedly obsessed, he set out to humanize Baker by deflating some of the self-created mystique surrounding her remarkable life.
The result is a dense, choppy portrait of a difficult woman who, despite her success, remained sad and unreachable. Prodigiously researched, The Hungry Heart offers plenty of illuminating details, particularly about Baker's early struggles in race-torn St. Louis and her self-destructive 1951 run-in with columnist Walter Winchell. But the author's eagerness to set the whole record straight proves detrimental in this biography: Too many briefly sketched husbands, lovers, impresarios and rivals pop in and out to make a truly engaging narrative.
Maybe a memoir limited to his years with Baker—when she went broke, cared for 12 adopted children and continued to dazzle audiences in her 60s—would have been more satisfying. Still, Baker buffs will revel in this honest, emotional grab bag about one of the 20th century's most enigmatic female pop stars. (Random, $27.50)
by Ethan Canin
Moral failure is the central territory of Canin's rich new collection of novellas. These are stories of ordinary citizens who stumble into extraordinary circumstances and are unable to rise to the occasion. But Canin shows abundant compassion for his characters—a trait he has honed as a resident at San Francisco General Hospital and author of the highly acclaimed Emperor of the Air and Blue River.
Take Mr. Hundert, the narrator of the title novella, a history teacher at an exclusive boarding school. "A man's character is his character," he says when faced with a student cheater whose father happens to be a prominent U.S. senator. Hundert chooses not to expose the boy, but years later, when the boy runs a successful race for a Senate seat, Hundert must ponder why he did not tell the truth years earlier.
Such tests of moral courage may seem extreme, but Canin's characters display a stoutness of heart in the face of adversity. They stare their failures down. Like parachutists who jump out of planes using faulty chutes, they have ti me to contemplate the consequences of their actions. Readers of A Palace Thief will want to catch these falling characters before they hit the ground. (Random, $21)
by John Berendt
We're a little enclave on the coast—gloriously isolated," the elderly Miss Mary Harty tells John Berendt on his introductory tour of Savannah sometime in the early 1980s. For the next eight years, Berendt, a former editor of New York Magazine (1977-79) who now writes a column for Esquire, became a part-time resident of this gracious southern city and participant in its complicated and eccentric society. The characters Berendt meets in this nonfiction work are as colorful as any created in novels. The Lady Chablis, an outrageous black drag queen coerces him into chauffeuring "her" home from a black debutante ball. And then there's the sullen inventor with a vial of poison powerful enough to pollute the city's water supply, and a bespectacled voodoo priestess who communes with the dead for good and evil and scoops handfuls of dirt from their grave sites at midnight.
The heart of the book is the sensational trial involving Savannah's premier citizen, antiques dealer Jim Williams, who is charged with killing his companion/handyman, Danny Hansford, "a walking streak of sex."
An accomplished journalist, Berendt has a keen and sympathetic eye, and while Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil sometimes drags as the anecdotes pile up, his intimate portrait of Savannah is impossible to resist. (Random, $23)
by Roddy Doyle
This 100-yard dash of a novel, set in 1960s Dublin, is told entirely in the voice of a 10-year-old hellion. Paddy Clarke and his mates run wild through the working-class suburb of Barrytown, "messin' about" in construction sites and carrying on the snakes-and-snails-and-puppy-dogs'-tails traditions of boyhood.
Beyond tormenting teachers, their foolish pleasures include shoplifting, hunting for tar bubbles and solemnly sending a dead rat into the hereafter with a Viking funeral.
Readers of Doyle's best-selling "Barrytown Trilogy" (The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van) know that the author has a genius for quick-witted, detailed storytelling. But it's easy to miss the artistry' behind his reconstruction of childhood group-think found in lines like "We all heard something. Kevin did." And a boy's simple, furrow-browed activities: "I'd hold my arms straight out till they ached and I spinned."
Though largely impressionistic, Paddy Clarke, which won Britain's coveted Booker Prize last fall, is not without plot. Our hero may regard the real world as a boring place where mean-spirited Americans fight defenseless hair)' gorillas in a land called Vietnam, but it's apparent that a disturbing drama is unfolding at home. His parents are heading for a split, and a free-floating anxiety begins to nudge Paddy's carefree daily routine. Doyle also re-creates the creeping cruelties of adolescence, as silly gibes give way to nasty insults and boys begin to fight amongst themselves, jostling to dominate the sane.
Every so often the curtai slips open a bit and a spot of advanced vocabulary reveals the man hidden behind the boy. Despite the occasional misstep, this is a bittersweet, respectful and vivid chronicle of youth that deserves a wide audience. (Viking, $20.95)
- Contributors:
- Don Sider,
- Alex Tresniowski,
- Sara Nelson,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Dani Shapiro,
- Louisa Ermelino,
- David Ellis.
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!
