Long before Antonio Banderas donned The Mask of Zorro, the Latin Lover was a Hollywood staple: the ludicrously sensual seducer characterized by Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro and Cesar Romero. Fernando Lamas once voiced his frustration with being cast as a cliché. "They seem to think all Latins make love all day long," he said in 1961. "I assure you that isn't true. Once in a while I read a book!"
You wouldn't know it by reading this book. A swooning tribute to Hollywood's leading lotharios, its profiles are light on insight, serving merely as an excuse to print some appealing archival pictures. In modern times, Thomas laments, the Latin Lover has been slowly emasculated by the "gorgon-like gaze" of feminists, leaving just one amigo to fill his well-stitched boots: Banderas. "He is at once leather and lace," she writes, "merging uninhibited animal beauty with a teasing finesse." That's enough to make any guy want to hide behind a mask. (Angel City, $26)
Bottom Line: Just pretty faces
by Jeffery Deaver
Beach book of the week
Pirouetting out of harm's way with ease, the hit man known as the Coffin Dancer has dodged many a bullet. But he may finally have met his match in quadriplegic Lincoln Rhyme. A felon's nightmare even before the accident that ended his NYPD career, Rhyme, now a forensic consultant, is more relentless than ever. Especially when, as in his chilling new case, he has a personal score to settle.
Readers of Deaver's recent bestseller, The Bone Collector, know he is a master of ticking-bomb suspense. By upping the action here, he pushes the plot beyond plausibility. But with the heart-pounding pace, hairpin twists and a singular sleuth, you'll be too engrossed to care. (Simon & Schuster, $25)
Bottom Line: Breakneck thriller
by Sara Donati
When Elizabeth Middleton arrives in America in 1792 at the age of 29, she is happily resigned to being a spinster schoolteacher; then she meets Nathaniel Bonner, who, much like Natty Bumppo in The Last of the Mohicans, is a white man raised as an Indian. In addition to that rather baffling homage to James Fenimore Cooper, Donati borrows conceits and character names, such as Chingachgook, from the classic novel. At first, Donati's book appears to be derivative and ridden with clichés—what with the spunky heroine who can only be tamed by a virile frontiersman, as well as her noble, decidedly 20th-century mission of racially integrating her school-house. If you can hang on, though, the author builds a powerful adventure story, animating everyone—German villagers, slaves and Scottish trappers alike—in a gorgeous, vividly described American landscape. The erotic passages aren't bad either. (Bantam, $22.95)
Bottom Line: Slow-starter that picks up speed
by Harold Robbins
Within the first few pages of Harold Robbins's latest and final novel—completed shortly before his death last year—his hero, Jerry Cooper, has lost both parents in a car wreck and has had a steamy sexual encounter with a girl downstairs. The Predators keeps up this breathless pace, tracking Cooper from Manhattan, where he works for his uncle, a small-time crook, to Paris during World War II. There, Cooper gets involved with a Corsican gangster who traffics in smuggled cars. Robbins doesn't waste time on niceties of style or subtleties of characterization as he follows Cooper's rise to power and respectability. There's something quaintly old-fashioned about this no-frills potboiler and something distasteful in its tired, one-dimensional takes on homosexuals, African-Americans and endlessly compliant women. (Forge, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Robbins's last, a crude stew of sex and money
by Joanna Higgins
The place is Andersonville, the most infamous of the Civil War's Confederate prison camps. The time is 1864, a moment when politics has halted all prisoner exchanges. That leaves captured Union soldiers with little more than rumors and delusional hopes to ease the chronic misery and the prospect of death from disease, deprivation or dementia. This remarkable debut novel, laced with historical detail, delivers a riveting portrait of the mental and physical toll of that gruesome internment.
Higgins convincingly finds her way into the mind of the young soldier Ira Cahill Stevens. Propelled initially by hopes of exchange, Stevens stokes his will to survive on escape fantasies raw hatred and, finally, love. In this grim place, he grows to understand that human goodness wears no particular uniform. Though Higgins's taut prose is unsparing in its cruel detail, she ultimately delivers a message of hope. (Permanent, $24)
Bottom Line: Powerful tale of Civil War imprisonment
by Bruce McCall and Lee Eisenberg
Dropped on an unsuspecting public in April, Viagra, the little blue pill that can, has done wonders for (a) the love lives of elderly men, (b) Pfizer Corp. stock and (c) the bad-joke industry. Now, in the second wave of Viagra humor, comes a hilariously clever book that addresses issues we thought we'd never have to ponder, like what to do in the case of a Viagra overdose, the effects of Viagra on pets and how to fill your prescription without the whole town knowing.
Eisenberg, an editor for creative development at TIME, and McCall, whose humor has brightened the pages of The New Yorker, took only two months to crank out this amusing gem. Give it to a male friend who's having a significant birthday. (HarperPerennial, $10.95)
Bottom Line: Potent humor
>Diana Spencer
It's hard to believe there is anything left to say about the face that launched a thousand books. But these offerings on Princess Diana, published to coincide with the first anniversary of her death on Aug. 31, should feed the habit of the most ravenous royals junkie.
The Day Diana Died by Christopher Andersen (Morrow, $27): Not for the faint of heart. With quotes from nurses, the priest who administered the princess's last rites, even the funeral employees who did her hair and makeup, Andersen's account is riveting, though sometimes very graphic. It won't make you like the Queen any better. After she learned of Di's death, the author says, the Queen called the British embassy in Paris to insist that any royal jewels on the princess be returned at once.
Diana: Her Life in Fashion by Georgina Howell (Rizzoli, $40): Heavy on photos, Howell's contribution to the canon features dishy quotes from the princess's stable of designers. ("I wanted to tell Lady Diana to improve her posture," confides Britain's Roland Klein, "but I didn't have the guts.")
Diana: Portrait of a Princess by Jayne Fincher (Simon & Schuster, $35): Fincher spent 18 years as the only female photographer in the royal press pool, and her picture book is a cut above most. Crystal-clear shots, many never before published, are complemented by Fincher's memories of the princess who became a friend.
Dodi and Diana: A Love Story by René Delorm with Barry Fox and Nadine Taylor (Tallfellow Press, $19.95): A starry-eyed account of the doomed pair's romance by Dodi's butler. So protective is Delorm of his late boss that he never mentions model Kelly Fisher, whom he must have known Dodi was two-timing after Diana came along. But Delorm's devotion can be touching. "You left me," he wrote in the condolence book at Dodi's funeral, and then dissolved into tears.
>FLORENCE HARDING Carl Sferrazza Anthony Think Hillary Clinton has it tough? Then read this noted historian's colorful bio of Mrs. Warren G. Harding, super-savvy First Lady and stolid bystander to the most scandalous Presidency in American history. (Morrow, $30)
THE BUNNY YEARS Kathryn Leigh Scott A former Playboy bunny interviews more than 250 of her cotton-tailed ex-colleagues, including Lauren Hutton and Deborah Harry, in this revealing yet nostalgic memoir of a hare-raising bygone era. (Pomegranate, $25)
PRESIDENTIAL DEAL Les Standiford Jack Deal's back, in the fifth thriller in this popular series. This time the Miami contractor turned sleuth takes on a high-level conspiracy connected to the kidnapping of the Commander in Chief's wife. (HarperCollins, $24)
- Contributors:
- Anne-Marie O'Neill,
- Pam Lambert,
- Laura Jamison,
- Francine Prose,
- Jill Smolowe,
- Michael Neill,
- Kim Hubbard.
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!
