In the summer of 1953, two young women hitching a ride on the French Riviera were picked up by a British businessman, who soon pulled over to greet a handsome, auburn-haired American friend. One of the women was Gunilla von Post, the 21-year-old daughter of a distinguished Swedish family. And the American—who joined Gunilla for an elegant dinner and kissed her before the evening ended—was Sen. John F. Kennedy, at liberty just a week before his wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier.
Love, Jack is Gunilla von Post's account of the love affair that followed this meeting. For two years the future President pursued Gunilla with letters and phone calls until, in 1955, they spent an idyllic week together in Sweden, their joy marred, she writes, by Jack's bouts of crippling back pain and his marital worries. The lovers met only once more, for a few moments and by accident, in 1958 at a Manhattan banquet that Gunilla attended with Anders Ekman, the wealthy landowner she had married.
Love, Jack does little to quash the image of JFK as a slick womanizer. Still, this short, rather touching book is suffused with the sweet nostalgia of a woman recalling a long-ago romance that changed her life. (Crown, $20)
by Fredrica Wagman
This slender novel (117 pages) can easily be read in one sitting, during which the title character comes and goes like someone in a dream. The narrator, a poor Philadelphia girl named Marty Fish, begins her tale the day she is introduced to her fabulously wealthy future mother-in-law, Golda Hornstien, and ends it decades later when she herself has become the family matriarch. In between we are given a familiar tale of female bonding and rivalry as Marty comes to understand the sadness beneath the old woman's suffocating bluster and learns age-old lessons about loss and renewal. Mrs. Hornstien feels like a Danielle Steel miniseries crunched into an hour-long show—it hasn't any more insight, and it's a lot less fun. (Holt, $14.95)
by Arthur Hailey
Catholic priest turned Miami homicide detective Malcolm Ainslie is leaving on vacation when the phone rings. It is Elroy Doil, a brutal serial killer Ainslie helped convict, now hours away from the electric chair, and he wants to make a final confession. What he has to say will shake Ainslie's theories about the murders and put him on the trail of another killer, all too close to home.
The result is a provocative story about justice and character. Hailey's meticulous research imbues Detective with the same gritty realism that helped turn his previous efforts (including Airport, Hotel and The Evening News) into bestsellers. Here the pacing feels a little off, though. Hailey's lengthy explanations of police radio codes and salary debates prove he knows his stuff, but they also slow down the story, as do flashbacks to Ainslie's altar-boy childhood. Too bad, since Ainslie is such an intriguing hero. Noble yet flawed, he carries around his own guilt like a service revolver and quotes the Bible as easily as the penal code. With luck, Hailey will bring him back—next time in a smoother story. (Crown, $24)
by Marie Darrieussecq
A literary sensation when it was published in France last year, Pig Tales is that rare first novel that both tops the bestseller list and is regarded as intellectually serious. Twenty-eight-year-old Marie Darrieussecq's work already has been translated into dozens of languages and is being made into a film by the noted French director Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless).
Reading this disturbing allegorical story—in which a woman gradually turns into a pig—it is hard to understand all the fuss. Widely regarded to be a feminist fable, Pig Tales centers on a young and unnamed Parisian masseuse who seems average in every sense. When she inexplicably begins gaining weight, growing a thick, spotty hide and then a snout and tail, she goes from darling to device. The author uses her heroine's condition to explore a passel of social and psychological issues ranging from the hypocrisy of right-wing politicians to the underlying animal nature that humans try futilely to disguise.
Though Darrieussecq's tone is humorous and her touch light, her novel gets stuck in the mud. An entertaining read in parts, Pig Tales' comments on human nature are, in the end, disappointing in their lack of substance and surprise. (The New Press, $18)
by Ronald Kessler
If the American people found out what was going on there," says a source in Ronald Kessler's alarming study of Congress, "they would tear it down brick by brick." That's a troubling sentiment in this edgy time of antigovernment zealotry, but it is also understandable, given the amoral, often criminal behavior depicted in Kessler's exposé.
A former political reporter for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal who isn't shy about naming names, Kessler has cataloged decades' worth of corruption and scandal involving our nation's elected officials. Drawing mainly from the eyewitness accounts of Capitol police officers, doormen, clerks and pages, Kessler uncovers wanton sex (a nymphomaniacal former female aide with a penchant for senators), rampant lawlessness (police "unarresting" congressmen for drunk driving) and nauseating bureaucratic excesses (senators ordering $20,000 silk-covered chairs—which they get to buy for $100 at retirement). The rules of disorder have been followed by Republicans and Democrats alike. But not all the news is bad; we learn, for instance, that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is a really good tipper.
Collectively, Kessler's findings amount to a call for massive congressional reform—tempered with a warning that such a purge probably won't happen anytime soon. (Pocket, $23)
by Tess Gerritsen
Beach Book of the Week
WHEN AN ELDERLY MAN IS WHEELED into the emergency room naked and delusional, Dr. Toby Harper's preliminary diagnosis is Alzheimer's disease. But when the patient mysteriously disappears, she fears something more is going on. Is it ever. Harper's hunt for answers puts her on the trail of a macabre experiment to regenerate wealthy 70-year-olds with cloned fetal cells, a project some ruthless doctors will do anything to protect.
Gerritsen's richly drawn hospital scenes (the author is a former internist) can't quite disguise the book's paper-thin characters, particularly the villains. But the chilling science (footnoted to real journal articles) and breathless, ER-style pacing make it a quick, delightfully scary read. (Pocket, $23)
Edited by John McNally
With adultery now on the front page, this may be the right time to sample High Infidelity, an anthology in which 24 authors offer fictional stories of illicit romance—of the cheaters and the cheated-on, old and young, straight and gay, happy and tormented.
Sara Powers's "The Wild" portrays the shock of a wife who discovers her husband's affair when the adulterous couple are mauled by a grizzly bear. The hero of Ethan Canin's "The Year of Getting to Know Us" hides in the trunk of the family car and overhears his father's tryst with another woman. The book's tallest tale—"Ike and Nina," by T. Coraghessan Boyle—is told by a White House staffer who claims to have facilitated an affair between Dwight Eisenhower and Nina Khrushchev, wife of the Soviet leader. The stories are of varying quality and originality; taken together, they show that infidelity, high or low, can be considerably more various and complex than the headlines suggest. (Morrow, $22)
>A LITERARY APPETITE
MOST COOKBOOKS ARE BORING because they don't contain any good quotes," says food author Sharon Tyler Herbst of Greenbrae, Calif. But no longer. Herbst, who has written 12 books on food and wine, has filled that void with Never Eat More Than You Can Lift (Broadway, $20), a compendium of 1,500 observations—with a title borrowed from Miss Piggy—including these:
"I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond."—Mae West
"In general my children refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV"—Erma Bombeck
"There are three reasons for breast-feeding: The milk is always at the right temperature; it comes in attractive containers; and the cat can't get it."—Irena Chalmers
"If this is coffee, please bring me some tea. If this is tea, please bring me some coffee."—Abraham Lincoln
"Civilized adults do not take apple juice with dinner."—Fran Lebowitz
"Men and melons are hard to know."—Benjamin Franklin
"My idea of heaven is a great big baked potato and someone to share it with."—Oprah Winfrey
"I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead—not sick, not wounded—dead."—Woody Allen
"I never see any home cooking. All I get is fancy stuff."—Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
"Everything you see I owe to spaghetti."—Sophia Loren
- Contributors:
- Curtis Rist,
- Francine Prose,
- Paula Chin,
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Lan N. Nguyen,
- Alex Tresniowski.
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!
