by Leah Feldon
Anyone who has asked the question that forms this book's title probably knows that if an outfit has horizontal stripes, could double as a pup tent or shows how much your midsection resembles Santa's, the answer is yes. But this chatty, entertaining illustrated volume by fashion guru Feldon, author of three previous how-to-dress books, offers up some useful skinny on looking svelte—and shunning spandex is just the beginning. Do you like bright colors? Sorry: Dark neutrals, preferably a single shade worn head to toe, are the most slimming. Favor short sleeves? Get over it: Only a "total twig" can carry them off.
Feldon counters the bad news with some useful tips on achieving "camouflage chic." If you're long-waisted, for instance, wearing belts the same color as the lower half of your outfit will help you look lean and leggy. Short-waisted types of all heights will get a better (read slimmer-looking) fit in the petites department. Not riveting reading, perhaps—Fat is a book to be, er, skimmed. But consider this: "Smiling crotches," Feldon writes (referring to "those dreaded horizontal lines that you get across the front" of too-tight pants), "are not happy crotches." Words to live by. (Villard, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Solid advice on looking anything but
by Joe Eszterhas
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal seems tailor-made for Eszterhas, whose screenplays range from the glossy prurience of Basic Instinct to the seedy prurience of Showgirls. Like the Starr Report, this mostly nonfiction look at the sordid saga is at once fascinating, shocking, repellent and pointlessly repetitive. (Unlike the Report, sources go largely un-cited, leaving a reader to wonder where details of the President's early affairs come from: Arkansas troopers? The women themselves? The author's fevered imagination?) Eszterhas's entertaining narrative lurches from the White House to Hollywood, giving the screenwriter a cheap excuse to dish dirt on Glenn Close, Ryan O'Neal, Gina Gershon, ad nauseam. Of Sharon Stone he brags, "We wound up on the rug, crawling around..." Ah, what a gentleman. (The actress has declined comment.) The last voice we hear is that of "Willard," the Presidential Private Part, noting, "Billy's worked me hard my whole life." Talk about Rhapsody in blue. (Knopf, $25.95)
Bottom Line: The Starr Report, on acid
by Anne Rivers Siddons
Perennial bestselling author Siddons (The House Next Door, Up Island) borrows a few notions from Harper Lee's classic tale about race in a small town, To Kill a Mockingbird, for this coming-of-age tale set in the segregated South of the early 1960s. A sensitive tomboy, 12-year-old Peyton McKenzie (think Scout Finch), lives with her courageous father, Frazier (a lawyer and widower, just like Atticus Finch, the character played by Gregory Peck in the film version of Mockingbird), and their knowing housekeeper Clothilde. Growing up in quaint Lytton, Ga., Peyton spends much of her free time with the "Losers Club," which comprises ornery Ernie Longworth, a 34-year-old church sexton and cemetery caretaker, and 8-year-old Boot, Clothilde's clubfooted grandson. Yet with adolescence looming, Peyton, whose mother died in childbirth, feels increasingly self-conscious and in need of some womanly guidance. When 29-year-old hellcat cousin Nora arrives from Key West to fulfill this role—in a pink Thunderbird coupe, no less—Siddons's story takes wing. Under Nora's unconventional tutelage, Peyton participates in a lunch-counter sit-in, learns to apply lipstick and begins to come to grips with her burgeoning maturity.
Siddons, a Georgia native, has touched on racial themes before; 1976's Heartbreak Hotel—also about a young woman's growing self-awareness—revisits the summer of '56 in Alabama, when Elvis Presley's hit record was on everyone's lips. And Nora, Nora, like Heartbreak, paints a too-simple picture of the social reality of the civil rights revolution. Siddons shies away from conclusions about racism here, except to say that it's bad, instead focusing on the more palatable tale of a girl's journey to womanhood. Though Harper Lee devotees may be dismayed, Siddons's fans are likely to be satisfied that she has again delivered a cozy read. (HarperCollins, $25)
Bottom Line: Mockingbird lite
by Thomas H. Cook
Beach book of the week
Is golden-haired, green-eyed Dora March just dangerously attractive—or, literally, a femme fatale? That's the question assistant district attorney Cal Chase must confront in Depression-era Port Alma, Maine, after the fragile beauty flees the fog-shrouded coastal town. She departed as mysteriously as she arrived, leaving a brutally murdered man—Chase's brother Billy—in her wake.
Have no fear that we've spilled the baked beans here. This time out, veteran suspense craftsman Cook (author of 1997's Edgar Award-winning The Chatham School Affair) concocts twists that would be the main event in lesser mysteries. But he uses them as mere springboards for even more daring plot flips. With well-practiced ease, he glides between crimes, the past and the present, while also managing to work in a wealth of evocative detail. Yet this crackling tale is never in danger of turning into a 1930s period piece.
With its passionate characters, compelling family-driven narrative and surprising conclusion, Places presents irrefutable evidence that it sometimes pays not to be afraid of the dark. (Bantam, $23.95)
Bottom Line: Mystery woman sparks vintage suspense
>RIPTIDE Catherine Coulter
The title refers to a comfy manor house on the New England coast. But the heroine of this thriller—on the lam from both the law and a stalker—eventually finds it to be a nest of treachery. (Putnam, $23.95)
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST, AS AN OLD MAN Joseph Heller The final novel by the late Catch-22 author, who died last year, is, as it happens, about an eminent writer writing his last novel. Great humor abounds. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
DRIVING OVER LEMONS Chris Stewart In this zesty book, subtitled An Optimist in Andalucia, the British author describes making a life and a home for his family in sunny southern Spain. (Pantheon, $22)
- Contributors:
- Kim Hubbard,
- Dan Jewel,
- Erica Sanders,
- Pam Lambert.
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!
