by Letitia Baldrige
By Letitia Baldrige
Mrs. Kennedy The Missing History of the Kennedy Years
By Barbara Learning
At least the Jacqueline Kennedy industry isn't in recession. These two new books focus solely on Jackie's years in the White House, a time when she launched her considerable charms onto the world stage. From the wings, Baldrige and Learning offer different views, the former looking at place settings, the latter at a place in history. Take Jackie's 1961 state visit to Paris. In Learning's book, the First Lady warms up relations between De Gaulle and President Kennedy by acting as their interpreter. Baldrige, whose six books on etiquette have made her the maharishi of manners, makes more of French coiffeur Alexandre's effort to confect Jackie's "brioche" do. Both books recount JFK's remark: "I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it." For the Jackie-phile, the words still stir a frisson.
Too bad the thrills are familiar. Baldrige has the home-court advantage in this derby. A friend of Jackie's from their days at the Connecticut private school Miss Porter's, Baldrige was the First Lady's social secretary, a position that included directing replies to fan mail. (One letter read, "How many rollers do you put in your hair at night, and does the President object?") But Baldrige is too polite to dish about her employer's grooming or most other personal matters. The rest of her book details her life working in embassies and later in PR—details for which the Jackie fan is not searching.
Leaming, who wrote the best-selling biography Katharine Hepburn, draws on declassified documents and Secret Service records to give a tick-tock of Jackie's travels. She argues that Jackie's role has gone missing because historians don't appreciate the importance she had in upgrading JFK's image when he was floundering. Readers, though, won't appreciate the paucity of quotes from Jackie. (Baldrige: Viking, $26.95; Leaming: Free Press, $25)
Bottom Line: Secondary works on a vital First Lady
By Laura Van Wormer
Things couldn't get much better for a single, ambitious young newswoman: Sally Harrington has a spiffy sublet in Manhattan, a loyal mutt and a brand-new job as an assistant producer at national broadcaster DBS News. But when she starts working on a special about a Mafia killing, it's hard to tell what might end her career first: bullets, bizarre office politics or the tantrums of a Mob princess turned movie star, who's even more spoiled than Meadow Soprano.
A sometime romance writer, Van Wormer serves up some funny, steamy scenes as Harrington attempts to sort out her love life (and let a lovestruck intern down gently). The warm descriptions of Sally—sometimes savvy, sometimes impetuous, always human—drive this thriller more than the tangled wise-guy hijinks do. One quibble: Trouble's cast includes so many characters from Van Wormer's previous novels (including past Harrington adventures Exposé and The Last Lover) that newcomers may feel like first-time viewers of a long-running soap opera. Still, it's easy to catch on, and even easier to sympathize with spunky Sally. (Mira, $22.95)
Bottom Line: Funny, sexy suspense
By Alice Munro
A cancer-stricken woman unexpectedly discovers the "unspeakable excitement" that comes "when a galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility." A young wife, reviewing her marriage, detects "a little hum of hate running along beside her love." You're in Munro country, where surprising emotion seethes quietly beneath the well-scrubbed surface of small-town Canada.
In an austerely plotted but moving collection of stories, Munro burdens her townsfolk with familiar worries—aging, family friction and sexual infidelity. Her insights, rendered in crisply restrained prose, lift masks without being judgmental. She makes her characters' struggles our own. (Knopf, $24)
Bottom Line: Ordinary people, extraordinary voice
By Bill O'Reilly
Perhaps if you put this slim book in the ground, watered it and exposed it to sunlight (it comes with its own fertilizer), it would grow into a real book someday. Perhaps not, but at least you'd be rid of it.
O'Reilly, who nightly badgers guests he correctly calls "opponents" on his FOX News Channel talk show The O'Reilly Factor, is one of the thousands of hardworking journalists who have never interviewed Hillary Rodham Clinton but the only one who brags about it. Sprinkling more than 20 Factor transcripts over 190 pages, O'Reilly revisits his one-sided feud with Mrs. Clinton and other grudges. In spite of the book's title, the author spins at will, comparing himself to Hemingway and claiming he wants to save Mexican lives—by placing the U.S. military on the Mexican border.
Archie Bunker in a chalkstripe suit? No, Archie was funny. O'Reilly is the Eeyore of politics, breathlessly elevating fringe groups like the North American Man-Boy Love Association into national calamities. It's a worldview that was silly on Sept. 10, and it's sillier now. His is a fretful, whiny conservatism, a far cry from the can-do Republican sunniness of Teddy Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. (Broadway, $24.95)
Bottom Line: He moans, we groan
By Morag Prunty
If only Prunty were a television exec. Then perhaps we'd see the Sex and the City ladies compete on Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? That's the kind of story line the author, an Irish magazine writer and editor, dreams up for her wickedly funny first novel, which chronicles the frenzy among Dublin's stiletto set when an American billionaire arrives in search of a bride. The colleens in Wild Cats promptly pounce. There's the dissolute PR princess with tax troubles, the journalist aiming to document her own turn as the new Darva Conger and a decidedly unsuper model who calls herself Flame.
Though the tidy endings are predictable—each woman gets what she deserves—Prunty's chatty prose glistens when sending up the shallow end of a society that includes an adult-diaper manufacturer named Paddy Wallop, somehow still a hotly pursued bachelor. (HarperCollins, $25)
Bottom Line: Sparkling visit to the Emerald Isle
- Contributors:
- David Cobb Craig,
- Samantha Miller,
- Ellen Shapiro,
- Kyle Smith,
- Julie K.L. Dam.
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!
