By Michael Gross
Ralph Lauren was going to give the author full access for this biography. But when Gross, who wrote 1995's Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, insisted on mentioning the designer's extramarital affair with model Kim Nye in the early '90s, Lauren backed out. Big mistake. The former Ralphie Lifshitz still comes off as a philanderer as well as an insecure wannabe and petty narcissist. He's a guy who posed for a portrait on a horse but couldn't ride one, "went ballistic because Vogue called his hair frizzy" and nearly backed out of the cochairmanship of a White House charity event for fear First Lady Hillary Clinton would "hog all the credit." Gross's research is impressive—he traces the designer's roots to such ancestors as Karl Marx—but skewed toward adversaries. And the book is so slowly paced that you'll likely find your dry cleaner's history as thrilling a ride. (HarperCollins, $25.95)
BOTTOM LINE: Cheaply woven
By Aminatta Forna
Late one night when Forna was 10, her father—a Sierra Leone doctor and popular former cabinet minister—was taken from their home and executed in a government attempt to quash democracy. But this isn't a political book. In the first part of this moving memoir, Forna brings her family to life, in both their idyllic ups (family gatherings in Freetown) and incongruous downs (living in a camper in her mother's native Scotland).
In the second, shorter section, an adult Forna, now a British journalist, returns to her father's homeland looking for the truth behind his death. Instead, she discovers the story of an entire nation's demise. "How fragile life is in a country like this," she writes. And how lucky the reader who sees it through her eyes. (Atlantic Monthly, $25)
BOTTOM LINE: Poignant and passionate
By Mil Millington
Pel, who works in a library at a shady British university, is raising two kids with his chilly German girlfriend Ursula. When they disagree, he says, "any slight irritation I might occasionally have is soon soothed by simply sitting alone in a car for a few hours and screaming."
Pel tangles with Ursula and gets promoted past his skills at work. His remarks are like stand-up routines, but they're as fine-tuned as Ray Romano's. Defrosting the fridge, he notes, "I am a wise enough man to realize that hardly anything is worth the misery and frustration of doing it." And what's the deal with shopping carts? "How did students get home from the pub before shopping carts? What did people throw into bodies of water back then?" (Villard, $12.95)
BOTTOM LINE: Winning argument
The Dante Club
By Matthew Pearl
A judge eaten alive by maggots. A minister buried upside down, his feet set aflame. Blame not Hannibal Lecter but the imagination of 14th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose Inferno rests at the center of Pearl's debut novel. In 1865 Massachusetts, the famed Fireside Poets—Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—gather to translate the Inferno into English when a series of murders inspired by the epic turns them from dilettantes to detectives.
The idea of grizzled poets playing action heroes does stretch the imagination. But the 27-year-old Pearl, a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School and a Dante scholar, ably meshes the (at times didactic) literary analysis with a suspenseful plot and in the process humanizes the historical figures. "Writing is not survival of the fittest but survival of the survivors," says Pearl's jovial but insecure Holmes. "[Critics] do their best to cheapen me, to make me of no account—and if I cannot endure it, I deserve it all." Pearl, for one, needn't worry about that. (Random House, $24.95)
BOTTOM LINE: A divine mystery
By Giles Milton
The life of William Adams, an Englishman who arrived in Japan in 1600, was fictionalized in James Clavell's Shogun, but Adams's true story turns out to be equally thrilling. A poor London boy, Adams pilots an expedition to Japan, facing starvation on the way, only to be nearly crucified upon landing. But the shogun takes a shine to him and Adams eventually becomes an honorary samurai. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Milton widens his scope to describe other raffish explorers and characters, like the elderly buffalo-hunting queen of Pattani. Their adventures are often surprisingly ribald. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24)
BOTTOM LINE: Memorable voyage
By Po Bronson
One telling vignette in this series of interviews with folks in search of their true calling describes an engineer in San Francisco who quits his job and moves his reluctant family to Portland, Ore., where homes cost half as much. He plans to use the extra cash to start a business building electric cars. Instead, remodeling projects in the new house eventually eat up all the seed money.
Bronson (The Nudist on the Late Shift) chats with everyone from a catfish farmer to "Phi Beta slackers"—lifetime students who drift among graduate schools and research grants without a purpose. He discovers that all of their searches are messy and difficult. By sharing his own checkered history, he brings intensity and compassion to a subject that has become a cliché, the midlife crisis. (Villard, $24.95)
BOTTOM LINE: Good job
By Louise Erdrich
Intimate and epic, tender and violent, Erdrich's new novel sweeps us back to the small town of Argus, N.Dak., in the aftermath of the First World War. After Fidelis Waldvogel, a butcher with a passion for singing, immigrates to Argus from Germany with his bride, Eva, his fate gradually becomes entangled with that of Eva's friend Delphine Watzka. The latter is an intelligent and passionate young woman whose love affair with a carnival performer, Cyprian Lazarre, conceals a disturbing truth. But that secret is not nearly so dark as the one hidden beneath the floorboards of her alcoholic father's house.
As always, Erdrich (Love Medicine) manages to reveal the hopes and fears, the history and gossip, the public and private myths of an entire community. She writes with immense sympathy, without a trace of moralism, and with a grace that makes the most extreme, even gothic, events plausible and convincing. (HarperCollins, $25.95)
BOTTOM LINE: Lyrical novel of small-town secrets
- Contributors:
- Jennifer Wulff,
- Allison Lynn,
- Kyle Smith,
- Julie K.L. Dam,
- Edward Karam,
- Lee Aitken,
- Francine Prose.
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!
