From PEOPLE Magazine
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There's a lot wrong with this strange and powerful and crushing book: The drawings are rough, the structure is twisted, the story is unbearably sad. But there is more—far more—that is right. And what is right is so superior, so unerringly true that the issue of technique seems irrelevant.
Once again, Spiegelman uses his stark drawings and cartoon characters to tell what he calls his "autobiographical/biographical" tale. In 1986's Maus (recently reissued as Maus: My Father Bleeds History), Artie relentlessly questions his father, Vladek, a survivor of Auschwilz-Birkenau and Dachau, about his wartime travails. Spiegelman's oblique yet gripping narrative covered Vladek's life in Poland up until he and his wife, Anja, were shipped to a concentration camp. In the sequel, Artie, obsessed with the Holocaust, keeps after his ailing father with a tape recorder. As Vladek speaks, Spiegelman re-creates his ordeals in the death camps and in the heart-wrenching postliberation chaos, panel by agonizing panel. As before, the Jews are mice and the Germans are cats. Even in that choice, there is a world of meaning. Like cats playing with mice, the relationship is doomed.
Nevertheless, it is not only survivors and their haunting baggage that Spiegelman depicts. He tells us about all the woe and misunderstanding between generations. In this story, Artie is enraged and perpetually annoyed by all the demands laid on him by his nagging, skinflint father, a man who holds on to tea bags and saves wooden matches and counts pennies as if they were drops of blood. He finds it difficult to reconcile the fact that this clinging pest is the same man who, as a young, resourceful inmate of Auschwitz, mastered tinsmithing and shoemaking to avoid the ovens and provide food for himself and Anja (who survived, only to commit suicide in 1968) and maintained his sanity and stamina in the last outpost of hell.
As the reader of Maus II discovers, Spiegelman could not totally make peace with his difficult father before the latter died in 1982. But that is precisely what the son achieves on every page of this stunning tribute. (Pantheon, $18)
by Danielle Steel
Here is the basic Steel formula: Wealthy and/or beautiful heroine triumphs over adversity only to be tested by more adversity, then is rewarded by new love, maybe a new fortune. So it goes in No Greater Love. Tall, slim Edwina Winfield is sailing back home to the U.S. from England with her indulgent parents, her five younger brothers and sisters and her bright, handsome, kind fiancé. Too bad the ship is the Titanic. Edwina's parents and fiancé perish, and the bereft 20-year-old decides that she will hold her siblings together, forsaking all others, forsaking any chance for happiness.
Steel's rendering of the sea disaster is not without its touching moments, but she is utterly incapable of leaving well enough alone. Of course, there is more adversity in store for Edwina: One brother goes to war, the family newspaper must be sold, one sister goes to Hollywood and almost to ruin. Those who doubt whether Edwina will triumph and find happiness once again, or at the very least contentment, have simply not been paying attention. (Delacorte, $28)
by Shirley Abbott
Abbott, the profound and passionate author of Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South, turns this time to men—or rather, to one particular man, her "gentleman bandit" father, Alfred Bemont ("Hat") Abbott.
Whether or not Hat was extraordinary, he was certainly different—and as romantic as they come. A bookie by trade, Hat was also, Abbott emphasizes, a bookmaker of another sort: He loved to tell stories. And, as she writes in a conclusion that might as easily serve as introduction, "In the tales that constituted his legacy to me, my father's favorite character was himself."
Proud and dapper, with a pint of whiskey in his pocket, Hat set off each day in Hot Springs, Ark., for the Ohio Club and the Southern Club to take the bets, to make the payoffs. "An honest day's work," he actually called it—and indeed, in the resort town's shady economy, built on hot baths, wagers and political payoffs, it was honest enough. At night, Hat would return to rail against his wife ("You call this a meal?"), resent his parents (in the pinch of the Depression, mean Bemont and hypochondriacal Carrie shared their tight quarters) and reach out to his only child through stories of the past and an unwavering faith in her future ("I never wanted a boy, I wanted you").
Though his two bookmaking lives—gambler and storyteller—rarely collided, when they did, it was with unforgettable drama. Abbott recalls Hat coming home one lucky day and brandishing his winnings: " 'This is a C-note,' he said, his eyes alight.... 'It comes from Latin. C is the Roman numeral for one hundred. You don't know about the Romans, but I'll teach you' "
He taught her about the Greeks, as well, and what the word primeval means and about the sins of his own lather. What Hat did, in short, was instill a love of literature and life that, ultimately, enabled Abbott to recall him so vividly and eloquently. (Ticknor & Fields, $19.95)
by James B. Stewart
They were stupendously successful financiers in a decade lush with funds. Smart, handsome Martin Siegel of Kidder, Peabody & Co., a man haunted by his father's failure in business, could never have enough money. "Self-promoting, ineffectual" Dennis Levine of Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., shrouding himself in Swiss bank accounts and secret codes, was pulling down millions in illegal profits. Master arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, surrounded by bodyguards and wealth, had hopes of becoming "a latter-day Rothschild." Michael Milken, the financial wizard who turned junk bonds into an all-powerful weapon for corporate takeovers, earned $550 million in 1986 alone.
Their reign eventually crumbled, shaken in part by the stock market crash of 1987, the junk-bond collapse of 1989, the S&L crisis and the recession. Furthermore, justice came calling in the guise of men such as Gary Lynch, the determined chief of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the relentless federal attorneys Rudolph Giuliani and Charles Carberry.
Den of Thieves is a fascinating examination of what the author credibly calls "the greatest criminal conspiracy in financial history" and a hammering indictment of the profit-at-any-cost mentality that ruled Wall Street in the Reagan years. Stewart (The Partners), a Pulitzer-prizewinning reporter and currently page-one editor of The Wall Street Journal, expertly glues together all the pieces, turning a confusing financial puzzle into a coherent and compelling narrative.
Stewart animates not only the lavish parties, the money drops at public phone booths, the trading on inside information and the other stunning excesses and extremes but also the abstract ziggurats of leverage and junk on which fortunes were built. He brings to life as well the implacable lawmen poring over documents, pressuring the compromised, using big fish to catch bigger fish until, inevitably, the greed barons turn on one another.
The punishments doled out to the culprits may leave the reader exasperated, especially given the lens of thousands of people who lost their jobs in corporate takeovers. Milken, for example, will walk away from prison, perhaps as early as 1993, with a net worth of about $2 billion. (Simon & Schuster, $25)
AFTER THEY FINISHED WRITING
An Altogether New Book of Top Ten Lists (Pocket, paper, $10), David Letterman and his writers were still feeling frisky. So they penned the following list just for PEOPLE readers.
TOP 10 LEAST-POPULAR HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS FOR 1991:
10. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Reform School
9. When Your Inner Child Gets Carsick and Throws Up All Over Your Inner Car
8. Rabbit Returns as a Zombie
7. The Jimmy Swaggart Pop-up Book
6. You May Already Be a Winner: The Correspondence of Ed McMahon
5. Stephen King's first children's book, The Little Pony that Drank Blood and Killed Kids
4. The Big Book of Incredibly Obscene Square Dance Calls
3. Arthur Miller's updated classic Death of an Amway Salesman
2. Ethics, Schmethics! by John Sununu
1. The Crusades: An Eyewitness Account by Shirley MacLaine
- Contributors:
- Ken Gross,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Susan Toepfer,
- Lorenzo Carcaterra.
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!
