Ron Goldman's relatives may have been denied justice in the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, and they may be denied their share of the $33.5 million awarded to them and the Browns in the civil trial, but they were not denied the inalienable right of all participants in the Simpson case—a book deal. The Goldmans signed one last March (for a reported $450,000) after initially resisting the idea, and their book may serve Ron's memory well. It is a moving and painfully intimate account of how they coped with the murder of their son and with being a subplot in the sordid O.J. spectacle.
Ron's fiery and emotional father, Fred, whose cracking voice at press conferences symbolized the family's anguish, is the central narrator, but cowriters Marilyn and William Hoffer (Midnight Express) weave in wrenching recollections from all of the close-knit Goldmans: Ron's younger sister Kim, Fred's third wife, Patti, and her children Brian, Michael and Lauren. (Ron's biological mother, Sharon Rufo, who hadn't seen her son in 15 years but who filed a wrongful-death civil suit citing loss of Ron's "companionship," is depicted as callously trying to capitalize on his death.) Taking us all the way through the verdict in the civil trial, the book bogs down when it covers legal issues that are by now numbingly familiar, but the passages that deal with the ordinary rituals of grief—a devastated Kim's eulogy of her brother; Fred's first tour of his dead son's apartment—will bring a lump to your throat.
When Fred recounts his fantasies of killing O.J. (he even received an offer from a stranger to supply him with a high-powered rifle), it is easy to understand his lingering rage. Determined to "haunt the halls of justice" through two long and gruesome trials, the Goldmans were seemingly a family stuck in an early stage of mourning, unable to accept what had happened as long as the man they call the killer skirted blame. Perhaps now that the civil trial is over and they have given voice to a victim known to most people only as "a sometime model" or "Nicole Brown's friend," the Goldmans can finally let go. (Morrow, $24.95)
by Julie Hecht
For the narrator of these nine comic stories, something is rotten with just about everything. She's 40ish (and fading), married (to a busy architect whom she rarely sees), lives in Manhattan (but flees every summer to Nantucket) and takes photographs (among her projects are portraits of a renowned reproductive surgeon who, alas, was unable to help her conceive).
In the title story, the unidentified narrator's terror of driving on an expressway leads her to take a bus, where she has to endure the smell of people eating peanuts—"contaminated by the carcinogenic mold aflatoxin" no less. In "Perfect Vision" she suspects her German optician of being a Nazi, his blue eyes made of a "frozen mineral substance through which every kind of cruelty could be transmitted." But Hecht's heroine isn't bitter or bonkers; she's a solitary soul too finely attuned to the world.
These are her private monologues—a mix of deadpan wit and despair and fleeting moments of joy. In "The Thrill Is Gone" she finds it a struggle just to get out of bed, but the story ends with a neighborhood boy pointing out a rainbow, which causes her heart to leap. Hecht delivers wry, brilliant ruminations on not merely the sorry state of things, but also on her search for an answer to "how to live in the world." (Random House, $21)
by John Grisham
In his eighth novel, Grisham not only tells a deliciously complicated tale of legal intrigue and life on the lam, he tells it with a twist: The novel begins with the capture of Biloxi, Miss., lawyer-turned-fugitive Patrick Lanigan. Four years earlier, Lanigan apparently faked his own death in a fiery car crash and fled the country—taking some $90 million dollars from his firm's offshore account. Now facing capital murder charges (there were human remains found in the fire), an FBI hunt for the still-missing money and a flurry of lawsuits filed by his former partners and insurance companies, Lanigan slowly deals out the details of his story.
Cocky and calculating, Lanigan seems even more one-dimensional than Grisham's previous heroes. But if the characters are thinly drawn, perhaps it's because Grisham is so busy thickening his plot. As the story bounces from Biloxi to Brazil and back, the author weaves in bounty hunters, a sleazy defense contractor and an unfaithful would-be widow. Brisk and packed with surprises, The Partner won't silence Grisham's critics, but it's an irresistible read. (Doubleday, $26.95)
by Diane Ackerman
The night shift at a suicide-prevention hotline is never referred to as the graveyard shift, we are told in this astonishing account of a year the author spent answering phones in a clinic in Upstate New York. The nocturnal callers are dangerous and deeply depressed. The counselors find boredom a welcome respite from the adrenaline charge of talking to a stranger who has a gun or a bottle of sedatives at hand. In one of the many compelling stories she tells, Ackerman recounts how, over the course of an hour, she slowly eased one suicidal woman's desperation.
Ackerman, whose poetic sensibility shone so brightly in her Natural History of the Senses (1990), here brilliantly captures the intimacy and intensity of her work. In addition to the strangers in need, she examines the lives of the counselors and splices in marvelous insights from her own life—whether she is observing squirrels outside her window or cross-country skiing in the moonlight.
In A Slender Thread, Ackerman stands at the edge of a precipice with each troubled caller and comes away with a deeper understanding and appreciation for life. This sensitive, sharply observing book will convince readers that indeed there is, as she puts it, "hope at the heart of crisis." (Random House, $24)
by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
In this collection of thoughtful and moving profiles, Gates, a professor of humanities at Harvard, focuses on eight "extraordinary" African-American men as a way of answering—or at least asking—critical questions: What does it mean to a be a black man in America? Does each individual bear the burden of representing his race? How do African-American men define themselves in a society ready to define them as threatening and violent?
In some sense, all that Gates's subjects have in common is race. Harry Belafonte, whose activism has at times hampered his career as an entertainer, could hardly be more unlike the critic Anatole Broyard, who spent his life trying to conceal his racial origins. Louis Farrakhan's rantings are miles from the measured opinions of Gen. Colin Powell. The two writers included here, James Baldwin and Albert Murray, have immensely different sensibilities. And the dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones is a true original—certainly nothing like O.J. Simpson, whose criminal trial provides the occasion for an incisive essay about racial divisions and misunderstandings.
Indeed, what unifies these essays is not so much subject as tone: They feel less like formal interviews than ongoing conversations. What's striking is the patience and depth, the lack of prejudgment with which Gates approaches these men. He's honest about his own opinions yet refuses to let those opinions stop him from hearing what he's being told. Not only can Gates write beautifully, but he can truly listen and understand. (Random House, $22)
by Harold Robbins
To call Robbins's latest sex-and-greed potboiler a cartoon is to insult Homer Simpson and Dr. Katz. At least that pair of pen-and-ink characters resemble real humans—unlike Robbins's cast of stick figures. The 80 year-old author's 23rd novel follows the rise of Jack Lear, a California-born Jew who marries into WASPy Boston society after 1929's Great Depression. Ever the socially conscious tycoon on the make, Lear keeps his Jewishness secret as he builds a vast network of radio stations, helps General Eisenhower triumph over the Nazis and still finds time to bed a blur of blindly adoring and sexually innocent women—from his children's nanny to his colleagues' love-starved wives to a British countess.
One doesn't expect polished prose from Robbins, but a lively—or at least a coherent—story would be nice. Characters introduced in one chapter are forgotten thereafter. And promising plot threads are abandoned for others that are then also dropped. Worse, the novel's sex is frightfully unsexy. Whether depicting Lear's wife's adulterous foray into the Sade-like world of whips and handcuffs or his top radio correspondent's homosexual trysts, Robbins skimps on the passion. Sorry, but this Tycoon is bankrupt. (Simon & Schuster, $24)
by John J. Nance
In his last airborne thriller, Pandora's Clock, Nance put a doomsday virus on a commercial airliner. This time he's got a bomb on board. And not just any bomb. It's a 20-megaton nuke capable of instantly obliterating half the Atlantic seaboard and crippling the world economy by fossilizing every computer chip on the continent with the so-called Medusa effect, a devastating electromagnetic pulse.
With the bulk of the action taking place in less than 12 hours, the novel snares the reader early and doesn't let go. As the time to detonation ticks down, Nance, a full-time pilot for Alaska Airlines and aviation consultant for ABC News, skillfully ratchets up the suspense. The spell is broken only by the all-too-predictable romantic subplot between the plane's pilot and a government scientist and the puzzling addition of a midair rescue on the wing of the bomb-carrying Boeing 727 (as if the threat of nuclear annihilation wasn't exciting enough?). Still, where the mythical Medusa turned to stone anyone who gazed at her, Nance keeps his Medusa so compelling it's tough to look away. (Doubleday, $23.95)
by Gregory McDonald
Page-Turner of the Week
IS SKYLAR WHITFIELD JUST AN IRRITATING doofus from rural Tennessee or a calculating—and criminal—manipulator hiding behind a hayseed image? Folks in the Connecticut country club set can't get a handle on the strapping 20-year-old when he crosses the Mason-Dixon line to visit his rich uncle Wayne Whitfield and the investment banker's snooty family. While the enigmatic Skylar doesn't have the flash of Fletch, author McDonald's most notable hero, he does raise eyebrows and blue-blooded questions: Why do his aunt's $5 million diamonds—Skylar calls 'em "gembobs"—disappear the evening he arrives? Why does his cousin Jon's girlfriend have pathological fantasies about bedding Skylar? And when there is a murder—of course there's a murder—what part did he play in it? Saturated with McDonald's fine sense of social pretensions and as darkly humorous as anything he has written, Yankeeland takes no prisoners. (Morrow, $23)
>NO FAUX PAWS
WHAT A CATASTROPHE! TO hear Bradford Telford and Michael Cader tell it, the typical domesticated tabby now has fur balls for brains when it comes to managing its owners. What's gone wrong? In The Rules for Cats (Dutton, $11.95), the authors offer guidelines that, if followed to the litter, will help a cat assert its rightful place as head of the household:
•Don't accept a Saturday-night left over after Wednesday. •Be frisky but mysterious. •Don't rush into laps. •Don't discuss any of your other eight lives with your owner. •Don't screech, don't hiss and certainly don't caterwaul. •For God's sake, don't come when they call you. •Break plants, break tchotchkes—but don't break The Rules.
>Rosemary Breslin
THE BEST MEDICINE
DIAGNOSED WITH AN INCURABLE BLOOD disorder when she was 32, Rosemary Breslin—the daughter of columnist Jimmy Breslin—made her friends promise to help her husband, Tony Dunne, find a new love if she dies. "In my heart," she says, with endearing illogic, "I just think it would kill me if he spent the rest of his life alone."
Breslin, 39, mixes heartbreak with humor in her new memoir, Not Exactly What I Had in Mind, an account of her ongoing, eight-year battle with a rare form of anemia, which her physicians have tried to treat with blood transfusions, chemotherapy and experimental medications, including, most recently, a serum derived from horses. "My sister calls me Mr. Ed," says Breslin, one of six children born to the journalist and his late wife, Rosemary. She worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, then quit in 1988 to try scriptwriting and eventually collaborated on several NYPD Blue episodes after she became ill in 1989.
Two years later, Breslin met Dunne, the nephew of writers Dominick and John Gregory Dunne. Realizing she had strong feelings for him, she fretted about telling the then-38-year-old set designer about her health. When she did (on their third date), Dunne accepted it matter-of-factly. "I figured, 'This is what's wrong with the guy,' " she recalls. "He's a moron."
Breslin, who requires blood transfusions every other week, remains in stable but uncertain health. Still, she frets most about Tony, who she imagines in her memoir as an old man out for a drive. "Someone has to be in the seat next to him," she writes. "I pray, dear God, how I pray. Please let it be me."
- Contributors:
- Alex Tresniowski,
- Paula Chin,
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Francine Prose,
- Mark Bautz,
- J.D. Reed,
- Lan N. Nguyen.
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!
