MEMOIR
CRITIC'S CHOICE
This is an addiction memoir like no other. Roberts, a world-class mountaineer, spent his youth slinging lines across Alaskan peaks like Spider-Man. Now in his 60s, he has pushed himself to the dizziest limits and lived to tell the tale. Others haven't been so lucky, and now all that carnage and grief has Roberts wondering if the thrills are worth the price. He saw two pals killed in his younger years: Gabe, tumbling off a Colorado mountainside; and Ed, pitching soundlessly into an Alaskan abyss. In On the Ridge Roberts recounts those climbs with a technical precision that only makes them more disturbing. He also ponders expeditions he wasn't part of, bringing to light the surprising number of top climbers who have been lost to avalanches, freezing and falls.
Roberts's victories on the slopes, vividly detailed here, have made him "throw my arms into the air and shout with joy." But visiting Gabe's sister—still heartsore nearly 40 years after her brother's horrible death—he comes to see the selfishness of his own obsession, of risking everything not for a cause but for a kick. Without climbing, would he have been a better husband, a better son? It takes another kind of courage just to ask the question.
By Marian Fontana
MEMOIR
Marian Fontana might appreciate the tragic irony that it was the death of her husband, a fire-fighter, that allowed her to show her strength as a storyteller. A comedienne and playwright, she brings a screenwriter's sensibility to her account of the year that follows Sept. 11, 2001—a day when she felt "the ventricles of [her] heart start to pulse, popping and ripping, exploding in [her] chest" as she watched the World Trade Center's South Tower collapse with her husband, Dave, inside. The author's passionate, irreverent persona comes through on every page: She recounts her work lobbying the city on behalf of firemen's families, but she also deflates hypocrites, calls the bluff of a teacher who ignores her grieving son, smokes too much and cracks jokes about a tacky memorial service. Her book has the addictive appeal of a smartly paced novel, and readers will close it wanting more.
By Barbara Ehrenreich
NONFICTION
To write Nickel and Dimed, her 2001 investigation of living on minimum wage, Barbara Ehrenreich worked as a waitress and a cleaning woman. When she began researching Bait and Switch, she was movin' on up (or so she thought): Her plan was to land a mid-level corporate job paying $50,000 a year plus benefits. Instead, she found herself joining the mob of hopefuls under the sway of the "transition industry." So she penned this zingy expose of shady employment coaches who wield meaningless personality tests; she also describes futile job fairs and networking events that sometimes turn out to be Christian fellowship meetings in disguise. Bait and Switch isn't as gripping as Nickel and Dimed—partly because the concept is no longer new—but it is sobering: In almost a year, Ehrenreich never received a credible job offer. Today corporations demand not just hard work, but qualities like passion, and as she notes, "Not even prostitutes are expected to perform 'passionately' time after time."
By Danny Leigh
NOVEL
Crime novelist Lizbeth Greene gets a premonition that her deliverance from a crippling bout of writer's block might lie in telling the life story of notorious New York City gang leader Wilson Velez. But with a hint of the Hannibal Lecter-Clarice Starling tension in The Silence of the Lambs, Velez turns the tables and forces his collaborator to acknowledge her own deceptions and shading of the truth. Even the so-so ending doesn't blunt the power of Leigh's raw, vivid writing and brisk storytelling.
By Rick Moody
NOVEL
Moody's wildly entertaining latest is about a treatment for a TV miniseries, also called The Diviners, that aims to depict virtually every ethnic group and time period in history. A crowd-pleaser for every crowd! The catch? The screenplay that the treatment synopsizes doesn't actually exist. But the development exec, the agent, the Manhattan PR girls and almost everyone else viciously vying for a piece of the project don't know it's a fake. Moody tells each of these characters' stories in appropriately episodic fashion, offering up their urges and desires in his distinctive exuberant prose. So, sure, many of the hilariously unrestrained tangents (including one involving an abundance of Krispy Kremes) feel a little extraneous. But ambitious readers won't hold that against this book. They'll find The Diviners a prescient thrill ride through the flawed-but-promising America of the year 2000.
Candace Bushnell: The Sex and the City author's new novel, Lipstick Jungle, is about successful women. "It's something people are afraid of," Bushnell says. "That's what makes it interesting." Other things that interest her lately:
BRANGELINA "Think of Angelina as Anna Karenina."
NEW FASHIONS "Leopard print Manolo Blahnik is a good bet."
OLD FASHION
"People say, 'Don't throw anything out, it's going to come back,' and you don't believe it—but look at leg warmers."
LEG WARMERS "I don't have pet peeves...but you shouldn't wear them unless you're a ballet dancer."
HER HUSBAND, BALLET DANCER CHARLES ASKEGARD "I go to his performances and sit in the first row, so I see EVERYTHING."
BEING A HOMEBODY "I cook a mean roast chicken with stuffing."
THE PAPARAZZI "They don't bother me—but I wish they would!"
Get up-to-the-minute celebrity news and photos on your cellphone, iPhone or Blackberry at www.people.com!
