Eight-year-old Dana Owens of Newark took the Muslim name Latifah ("delicate, sensitive, kind") as her first act of self-definition. The rapper-actress, now 28, explains in her memoir: "Dana was daughter. Dana was sister. Dana was student, friend, girl in the hood. But Latifah...would belong only to me."
This uplifting if somewhat superficial book tells the tale of a strong, young African-American who grew up around poverty, drugs and prejudice and followed her head and heart to become a successful and humane woman. While still a teen, she championed rap lyrics that rejected misogyny in favor of female empowerment. Though she won a 1994 Grammy for the rap anthem "U.N.I.T.Y." and traveled the world, she remained close to her working-class family and childhood friends in Newark, N.J.
Ladies First offers many positive lessons for young readers. (Lose false friends, love your body, don't live for a man, quit smoking.) Those looking for deeper insight into Latifah's music or her psyche, however, will likely be disappointed by the book's light, self-help tone. (Morrow, $22)
Bottom Line: An admirable tale for teens
by Martin Gottfried
It took the actress best known as the endearingly dowdy detective Jessica Fletcher 41 years, 36 movies, 26 television plays and 3 Broadway shows to land a lead—the title role in the 1966 hit musical Mame. About time. For too long, Angela Lansbury, granddaughter of British Labour Party head George Lansbury, had been playing Medea-like movie mothers (in Blue Hawaii, All Fall Down and—most famously—The Manchurian Candidate) and never getting a chance to act her age.
There's a story to tell here about the engaging, now 73-year-old mother and grandmother, but Martin Gottfried, drama critic for The New York Law Journal, doesn't seem up to the job. He mistakes detail for telling detail: He can delineate the precise position of every cast member on a stage without conveying the excitement of a showstopping number. At one point he quotes Lansbury as saying, "So backstage romances are the most natural thing in the world. I don't really know anybody it didn't happen to." And no more about it. That's as juicy as it gets in this authorized biography. (Little, Brown, $25)
Bottom Line: Murder, she wrote; tediously, he writes
by Walter Mosley
Sci-fi battles of good vs. evil, light vs. dark or life vs. death are common enough. But how many of them are created by writers better known for their detective stories? Here, crime-fiction master Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress) vaults that genre barrier with an engaging tale that opens with a shower of intelligent light.
In 1965 strange streaks of brilliant blue cut across the California night. Those who see the lights—a motley bunch of humans and animals—become the Blues, godlike telepaths, evolved beyond human consciousness and social limitations.
But before they can put their new selves to humanity's benefit, the Blues must defeat an evil force that is Death itself. Told by a biracial, failed Ancient Studies scholar simply named Chance, Light turns a large cast, fantastic elements (singing red-wood trees, altered DNA), biblical allusions and talk of the Greek historian Thucydides into an abstract novel about community and identity based as much on myth as science.
An allegory about humanity's ideals and shortcomings, Light does not reveal a truly different world, just a darker, though perhaps more poetic version of the one we've got. (Little, Brown, $24)
Bottom Line: Literate tale fails to shine
by Patricia Cornwell
After all those years in the morgue with medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, you can't blame novelist Patricia Cornwell for wanting to lighten up a bit. But in Southern Cross, the second installment of her new police series, she puts laughs ahead of logic.
The novel brines back Judy Hammer (1997's Hornet's Nest), now heading the Richmond, Va., police force and trying to cope with inept colleagues, raccoon-hunting rednecks and a graffiti artist who turns a statue of Confederate hero Jefferson Davis into a black hoops star.
The comedic tone makes the arrival of the inevitable violence—this is Cornwell—seem out of place. And the multiple subplots add more muddle than texture. Cornwell has done better. (Putnam, $25.95)
Bottom Line: Cornwell cops out
by Jonathan Kellerman
Book of the week
Jonathan Kellerman (When the Bough Breaks, Survival of the Fittest) has justly earned his reputation as a master of the psychological thriller, one who takes us inside the minds of his characters, virtuous or wicked. Billy Straight, a homeless 12-year-old, witnesses a vicious murder in the book's opening pages. Petra Connor, a cop trying to put her life back together after a devastating divorce, has to save Billy while she solves the murder: Who killed the beautiful former wife of a talentless TV star who once played football? Was it—shades of the O.J. Simpson investigation—the ex-footballer himself?
Six corpses soon pile up as the author spins his tightly constructed plot. The bad guys, easy to dislike, include a former Soviet policeman, an obese biker who slugs his trailermate and threatens her child, and a criminal psychopath motivated by a well-hidden inferiority complex. Sooner or later each gets what's coming to him; for all the depravity on display, Billy Straight affirms a moral order in which decency prevails. The title character is a notable creation: a kind of urban Huckleberry Finn, a heroically resourceful boy whose life is in perpetual jeopardy in the streets and parks of Los Angeles. The writing is vivid, the suspense sustained, and Kellerman has arranged one final, exquisitely surprising plot twist to confound the complacent reader. (Random House, $25.95)
Bottom Line: Huck Finn meets Police Woman in a first-rate thriller
>BARBARA JORDAN Mary Beth Rogers From preacher's daughter to civil rights champion, this engaging bio charts the inspiring rise of the first black woman elected to Congress from the South. (Bantam, $27.50)
ROAD SWING Steve Rushin A SPORTS ILLUSTRATED writer takes a laugh-a-mile journey to the soul of American sports, including bowling night in St. Louis and smalltown Iowa baseball. (Doubleday, $22.95)
THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN Alice Munro In these eight jewellike stories, the grande dame of Canadian fiction explores love, passion and the surprising paths that emerge from both. (Knopf, $24)
- Contributors:
- Mark Bautz,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- V.R. Peterson,
- Cynthia Sanz,
- David Lehman.
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!
