A political cartoonist who is not all that preoccupied with politics, Luckovich, 36, draws wide-ranging syndicated panels that rival such contemporary cartoonists as Oliphant, Conrad and MacNelly in wit and versatility. This little collection—the first from Luckovich, who is based at the Atlanta Constitution—includes 50 of his best cartoons, which are generally bipartisan but more inclined to caustic takes on Dole than on Clinton. (Comic writer Al Franken writes a brief, specious introduction devoted mostly to extraneous Newt-bashing.)
Luckovich veers away from politics to touch subjects like TV (A little boy tells his parents, "Yo! I ought to slap you silly for doin' the nasty with my wife's transvestite love slave!!" whereupon his dad asks, "Has he been watching daytime talk shows?"). The artist also takes on players in the Simpson trial, smoking, JFK assassination fanatics and handgun fanciers. It's good to be lucky, but it's even better to be Luckovich and good. (Pocket, $10)
by Tess Gerritsen
Calling Dr. Crichton, Dr. Michael Crichton.... This highly hyped and unduly praised medical thriller by first novelist and internist Gerritsen needs a second opinion. The plot creaks like an arthritic knee, and the characters are suffering from stereotype-itis.
Altruistic Dr. Abby DiMatteo surgical resident at Bayside Hospital, makes the first of many mistakes when she thoughtlessly decides that a plucky teenage boy should get first crack at a new heart that was supposed to go to a rich woman. This has Bayside's ruling suits and smocks fuming. There is, after all, a national list of transplant candidates waiting for "harvested" organs. With her career in jeopardy, Abby steps in it romantically when she decides to marry fellow surgeon Mark Hodell. He is involved with a shadowy cabal of transplant specialists who are, horrors, dealing in black-market organs.
Abby is shocked. Apparently she has never read newspapers, which regularly run exposés on various illegal organ markets. Despite frantic action and flashing scalpels, Harvest remains a terminally bad read. (Pocket, $22)
by Joan Didion
When the narrator of this bleak, elliptical novel introduces us to Elena McMahon, she is sitting alone in a hotel coffee shop some-where in Central America, eating a chocolate parfait and bacon. Something is clearly wrong with this picture—and with Didion's unmoored, middle-aged heroine. A former newspaper reporter turned Hollywood wife and mother, Elena has once again cut and run, this time from her job as a Washington Post correspondent covering the 1984 presidential campaign. Volunteering to help her dying father, who has spent a lifetime making shady deals, she runs one for him, an arms shipment for the Nicaraguan Contras. It's Didion redux here—the usual meditation on the how and why of a woman's derailment, the random collision with politics and history, and the author's singular style. Her tautness has its moments, but just as often her chanting refrains come off as a dull drone. (Knopf, $23)
by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Alan Steinberg
It would have been easy for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who retired from the champion L.A. Lakers in 1989, to bronze his jock and hire someone like HBO's fictional sports agent Arliss to market the big guy's legend. But a man who relaxed between NBA contests by devouring books on African-American history obviously has more on his mind than lingering over his press clippings.
Like rewriting 200 years of American history. "Although some 500,000 [black] Americans were an integral part of our fledgling nation, we know almost nothing about them," writes an outraged Abdul-Jabbar, 49. "Why were white historians so intent on denying black people credit for being at the forefront of historic events?"
Abdul-Jabbar sets the record straight with a major assist from cowriter Steinberg. He assembles an impressive cast of black patriots and heroes, organized in a straightforward chronology. We learn about Estevanico, a Moroccan slave turned explorer who, after being shipwrecked off the coast of Texas in the 1530s, so excited Spanish leaders in Mexico City with Indian stories about the seven golden cities in the Northwest that they sent an advance party, guided by Estevanico himself, to plunder the occupants and appropriate the precious nuggets for themselves. Along the way he discovered what is now New Mexico and Arizona.
Then there's Bass Reeves, the first black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi, who from 1885 to 1907 always got his man. The book, with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr., revitalizes such celebrated figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks with impassioned storytelling and prose as deft as one of Abdul-Jabbar's patented hooks from the paint. Swish. (Morrow, $22)
by Sherman Alexie
Seattle is bleeding. Amid the fashionable coffee bars and breathtaking vistas that serve as the backdrop for this powerful and profoundly unsettling new novel, someone is stalking white men, stabbing them, scalping them and leaving owl feathers by the corpses. As police hunt for the slayer—whom they dub the Indian killer because of the owl's association with death in tribal mythology—other hate-inspired crimes begin exploding throughout the city.
In this tense, racially charged climate, further heated by people like right-wing radio shock-jock Truck Shultz, almost everyone begins to seem guilty of something—particularly construction worker John Smith, an Indian adopted at birth by a wealthy white family. Smith's years of quiet paranoia appear to his family and coworkers to be erupting into something much more desperate.
The enigmatic Smith, literally without a tribe after records pertaining to his adoption were sealed, becomes the prime suspect in the murders—and the focus of an unblinking exploration of identity and race by Alexie, himself of Spokane-Coeur d'Alene descent.
Although fans may miss the earthy humor that leavened Alexie's previous work (poems, short stories and two novels), the author more than compensates with the masterful storytelling evident in this novel of terrible beauty. (Atlantic Monthly, $22)
by John R. Maxim
Page-Turner of the Week
MYSTERY WRITER MAXIM, AUTHOR OF the Bannerman series, pulls some smooth moves on the well-worn man-loses-everything-and-doesn't-know-why plot, and in the bargain gives readers a hard look at a little-known but lucrative area of international crime. Young investment banker Michael Fallon is beset by a series of deadly misfortunes. His Uncle Jake, a renowned New York City power broker, is brutally murdered with a baseball bat. Fallon's fiancée is gunned down in a robbery, and soon afterward two muggers almost take Fallon off the board. As he retreats to Martha's Vineyard to hide out and try to start a new life, Fallon slowly uncovers the perplexing reason for his fate: the huge traffic in counterfeit prescription drugs. In its tangled past, Fallon's family became involved with shady pharmaceutical distributors who sold millions of units of fake Prozac, Tagamet, digitalis and other commonly prescribed medicines to unwary hospitals, drugstores and physicians. Readers may need to take blood-pressure pills themselves as Fallon races to save himself and bring the drug peddlers to heel. (Avon, $23)
>Mike Luckovich
BUCKLING UP WITH BILL
Recently back from a one-day campaign swing from Washington to St. Louis with Bill Clinton aboard Air Force One, Mike Luckovich shared his impressions with PEOPLE.
What most impressed you on board Air Force One?
The seats are really big and comfortable, and you have your choice of about 100 movies from a menu. The food is really good. For breakfast I had French toast and ham. And they gave us nice cold hand towels labeled Air Force One.
Were you nervous about meeting the President?
A little bit when I showed him my book. I said, "Some of the cartoons are about you, so I hope you have a sense of humor." I was thinking, "Jeez, this could screw up the whole trip." He looked at it, and he started laughing so hard he turned red. So that was a big relief.
What happened next?
Clinton took a call from Helmut Kohl. So there I was sketching the President while he was on the phone with the German Chancellor. They got into a big argument over who was cooler: Hogan or Colonel Klink. No, that's not true. They were talking about Boris Yeltsin. It was just so much fun.
Could anything top this trip?
Well, I hear Bob Dole is a pretty fun guy, so I have a call in to his people.
>Jenny McCarthy
PLACE: South Bend, Ind. BOOK: MTV's Singled Out Guide to Dating AUTOGRAPHS SIGNED: 1,800
THE SCOTTSDALE MALL TURNED INTO
Hormone Central when 1,800 fans—about 95 percent of them male and under 20—lined up to meet gen-X dream girl Jenny McCarthy, 23, cohost of MTV's Singled Out. McCarthy flirted with speechless high schoolers and giddy college freshmen ("Hey, babe, thanks for coming down"), kidded with adoring adolescents ("You're a little doll, do you have a girlfriend?"), and cheerfully signed copies of her book (hip tips for the lovelorn), her new Surfin' Safari CD and even copies of Playboy (with guess who on the cover).
Many worshippers posed for pictures with their goofy goddess, while some lucky fans got a peck on the hand. "She looks gorgeous," sighed Aaron Nolan, 20, a premed student at nearby Notre Dame. "I skip classes to watch her show." His schoolmate Ryan McCallister, 18, went further. "I'll probably travel around the country, just following her." McCarthy, who lives in Los Angeles with her manager Ray Manzella, weathered the attention by recalling her days as a high school wallflower. "If they only knew," she said, "all the people said no to me when I asked them out."
At 6:15, with the last fan appeased, McCarthy rushed off to a Notre Dame pep rally. "I try my best," she explained, "to make fans feel like they got a lot in two seconds." Mission accomplished.
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- J.D. Reed,
- Paula Chin,
- Wayne Kalyn,
- Pam Lambert,
- Mary Green.
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!
