During the summer of 1985, a young blond man was wheeled into a hospital emergency room in Johnson City, Tenn., "puffing like an overheated steam engine...squeezing in 45 breaths a minute." My Own Country begins with the riveting account of how the staff at the Johnson City Medical Center mobilized to save the man's life—and how the rural Smoky Mountain community recoiled when it discovered that the patient had AIDS. "The hometown boy was now regarded as an alien, the father an object of pity," writes Verghese, a physician specializing in infectious diseases, who settled in Johnson City shortly after the young man died.
An outsider himself, Verghese soon became the town's primary caretaker of AIDS patients—nearly 100 over three years. They are the heroes of this story: gay men returning home and coming to terms with their sexuality, a heterosexual couple infected by a blood transfusion, a hemophiliac who yearns to improve his relationship with his father. In this account of a deadly disease insinuating itself into America's heartland, Verghese, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who has published fiction in The New Yorker and elsewhere, captures the conflicted emotions that rock the local citizenry. The result is a wrenching, gracefully written memoir. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
by Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher
It's easy to see why Calvin Klein reportedly tried to kill this book (it was abruptly dropped by its original publisher). Vividly told and packed with intimate revelations, Obsession dynamites the designer's refined image, exposing a life full of drugs and bisexual escapades.
The fashion giant and his closest friends refused to cooperate, but authors Gaines and Churcher did their best to let nothing come between them and their Calvin. Interviews with neighbors, classmates and business associates help flesh out their complex subject. Raised in a lower-middle-class family in The Bronx, Klein was an awkward teenager who preferred sketching ball gowns to batting baseballs. The authors follow him closely through his days as a dashing young designer who prowled gay nightclubs in New York City up to his comfortable second marriage in 1986 to his former assistant Kelly Rector, 14 years his junior. (His first marriage, which ended in divorce after 10 years, produced his only child, Marci, now 27.)
The book is particularly unflinching when it deal with Klein's personal life. The authors report that Klein had silicone injections to plump up pitted acne scars; that he was heartbroken when designer Perry Ellis, who died of AIDS in 1986, didn't return his affections; that he made a drug-crazed call to Palm Beach, Fla., neighbor Donald Trump claiming that people with submachine guns were surrounding the house he had rented there.
And yet for all its frankness in depicting Klein's bisexuality, vanity and ding use, Obsession is best when providing a behind-the-scenes look at the fashion world, where power plays, questionable deals and his own manic perfectionism helped Klein revolutionize the clothing industry.
Ultimately, Klein comes across as a singularly gifted man given to indulging his enormous appetite for more. Surely such a graphic biography will trouble the ever-image-conscious designer, now 51, but readers are likely to find that the authors have documented a uniquely American success story. (Birch Lane Press, $22.50)
by Robert B. Parker
One of the saddest recent experiences for mystery fans has been to watch the steady decline of Robert B. Parker, creator of the ultimate meat-neck detective Spenser. All the old quirks remain—the preoccupation with recalling meals item by item, the jokey brooding about machismo and feminism, the stunted sentences, the labored puns—but the poetry has gone out of the storytelling, and the kinetic thrill has gone out of the scenes of violence.
In Parker's 26th novel a stage director is being stalked, then an actor is murdered onstage during a performance. But Parker doesn't get nearly-enough mileage out of this setup. The plot, ultimately involving Chinese businessmen, immigration scams and several love triangles, feels convoluted and arbitrary. Committed fans of Spenser, his psychologist lady friend, Susan, and his black sidekick, Hawk, can probably fill in the blanks. For anyone happening on Parker for the first time, alas, there are blanks aplenty, as though the author feels he has exhausted the possibilities of these people but is stuck with them for reasons of reader expectation and money. Better to buy a paperback copy of Looking for Rachel Wallace or The Judas Goat and remember what Parker used to be. (Putnam, $19.95)
by Ingrid Seward
Seward, the editor of Majesty, a glossy monthly that breathlessly tracks the British royals, has mixed cute photographs with familiar anecdotes and superficial chitchat to create this collection of profiles of 28 Windsor tots. There is young "Lilibet," the future Queen Elizabeth, a good little girl who before she was 3 had learned "to control her bladder in return for the reward of a biscuit"; young Prince Charles, who was 4 before his father came to one of his birthday parties; and 4-year-old Princess Beatrice, who on a visit to Balmoral in 1992 cried out, "I want to stay here with Papa," after her mother was caught by the tabs cavorting without a top.
To pad her 266-page book, Seward relies on the kind of stats that appeal strictly to Windsor addicts (lists of birthplaces, birth dates, birth weights). There is one interesting nugget: Princess Diana, Seward notes, is a distant cousin of Dr. Benjamin Spook's. Now what would he have to say about the raising of Seward's royal subjects? (St. Martin's Press, $22)
by Rene Rosenzweig
Madonna's recent cuss fest opposite David Letterman came too late to be included in this amusing send-up, but it confirms the author's premise: The Material Girl is out of material. In this pastiche of previously published interviews, reviews and gossip items, Rosenzweig sets out to make the ultimate case for Madonna's "success of style over substance and marketing skill over talent."
An editor at the Jewish newspaper Forward who calls herself a former fan, Rosenzweig contends that Madonna is really just "a housefly" and that "this book is a swat that aims to put her ceaseless buzz to rest."
The author's extermination efforts start with a list of colleagues whom Madonna has used and discarded (gal pal Sandra Bernhard and producer Jelly Bean Benitez, among others). Then there's a chapter documenting Madonna's wildest stunts, going back to the days when she knew how to pull them off to her advantage—like stripping down to her underwear in 1991, en route to a Truth or Dare screening at the Cannes Film Festival.
A chapter called "The Immaculate Rejection" catalogs Madonna's worst reviews and illustrates how even 10 years of critical slams have not slowed the indomitable marketeer, who shrewdly promotes her music projects with controversial videos and commercial tie-ins.
This is not a kind or evenhanded book, and yet the singer-actress shouldn't be too upset. It does, after all, deal with Madonna's favorite subject. (St. Martin's Press, $12.95)
by Lawrence Block
While this novel is far from Block's best, it has stirring moments of lock-picking skill and edgy searching. The breaking-and-entry maven of the title is Bernie Rhodenbarr, who in his spare time runs a bookstore. He has a spicy sex life, a sharp sense of humor and a hip lesbian sidekick who condones his midnight crawling through other people's drawers.
Oddly this mostly modern amorality tale involves a classic locked-room murder à la John Dickson Carr and ends with a hokey gathering of suspects straight out of Rex Stout, if not Agatha Christie.
Alas, those classic forms seem to demand a more pompous, earnest prose than Block's breezy banter. The enigmatic title refers to baseball cards, which figure prominently in a series of intersecting scams. But Block, skeptical rather than zealous, merely seems to have done homework about these high-price collectibles. He doesn't make a little-boy obsession among grown men interesting to readers who don't already share it.
Last month, Block won a special Edgar Award as a lifetime grand master from the Mystery Writers of America. They probably had in mind not this cute series but such bloody gems as A Walk Among the Tombstones, A Ticket to the Boneyard and Eight Million Ways to Die. (Dutton, $19.95)
by Brooke Kroeger
While hardly as well known as Amelia Earhart or Susan B. Anthony, Nellie Bly, born in Pennsylvania in 1864, was an important feminist figure of the early 20th century. One of the first female journalist! to venture beyond women's features at such papers as The New York World and The New York Evening Journal, Bly was a crusader who exposed social ills (by admitting herself to an insane asylum and reporting the horrible conditions there), who championed the downtrodden (by befriending orphans, and eventually adopting one) and who fought for women's rights (although, ironically, she was opposed to the idea of working mothers).
Yet, the Bly that emerges in Kroeger's long (552 pages), cluttered biography is more whining than winning. According to Kroeger—herself an established journalist, who has worked for UPI and The New York Times—Bly could be calculating.
In 1895 she married elderly Robert Seaman, a rich industrialist whom she had known for less than two weeks; the marriage, which made Bly a wealthy woman, lasted nine years until his death. Her lifelong battles with her siblings over small amounts of money also suggest that Bly, a crusader in print, was far pettier in person.
The biggest problem with Nellie Bly may be Kroeger's own fascination with her subject, which leads to in overdose of Bly minutiae. The reporter's financial situation, for example, is dissected as if by an IRS agent, and her newspaper articles are often quoted at length when one or two carefully chosen paragraphs would be more illustrative.
Perhaps Kroeger expects us to be as besotted with her subject as she is; if so, overloading us with unimportant facts only hurts her cause. (Times Books, $27.50)
>Abraham Verghese
WRITING TO EASE THE PAIN
"WHEN I WENT INTO INFECTIOUS diseases after becoming an internist, it was because it offered the promise of a cure," says Abraham Verghese, 38. "In the early '80s, infectious disease was the one discipline where a cure was common. Today I am a doctor who is unable to cure."
Born in Ethiopia, where his expatriate Indian parents had come to teach, Verghese studied medicine in Madras, India, before moving to the United States in 1980. He then spent three years completing his residency at Johnson City's East Tennessee State University. After additional training at Boston City Hospital, Verghese returned to the tranquil Appalachian town in 1985, never expecting to be confronted with an epidemic. "You're suddenly dealing with people your own age whose plight makes you reflect on your ideas about sex, about social issues and, of course, about your own mortality," he says. "Almost every emotion is magnified and brought into sharp relief with AIDS."
Since 1991, Verghese has lived with his wife, Rajani, and two sons, Steven, 8, and Jacob, 6, in El Paso, where he is chief of infectious diseases at Texas Tech University. In writing, he says he discovered, "a key to some of my frustrations at work. I can't reverse death, I can't get into a patient's mind and think his thoughts," says Verghese. "With writing, the boundaries are virtually limitless."
- Contributors:
- Joseph Olshan,
- Alex Tresniowski,
- William A. Henry III,
- Ben Harte,
- John Hassan,
- Sara Nelson.
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!
