Books

If ever a singer were difficult to pin down, it was Billie Holiday (1915-59), whose harrowing life story was first told in an unreliable memoir published just three years before her death. With Lady Sings the Blues, the jazz legend known for her emotional honesty not only allowed herself to be misrepresented (after all, she wasn’t even a blues singer), but actively participated in fabricating the fake stories which proliferated through the book. Some of these — such as a misstatement of her place of birth — are still repeated to this day. Two decades after the publication of Lady Sings the Blues a steady stream of more accurate biographies began to appear.

If you’re one of the many people worried that US foreign policy is in the hands of a visibly declining eighty-one year-old president, Alexander Ward’s account of the Biden administration’s first two years in office may — or may not — make you feel better, for he leaves readers with little doubt as to who is actually the executive branch’s most influential decision-maker: forty-seven year-old national security advisor Jake Sullivan. Ward might deny any such authorial intent, but time and again he shows his hand, as when he invokes “Sullivan’s first two years at the helm alongside Biden.

One of the Ukraine war’s minor celebrities is Ramzan Kadyrov, a Russian politician and Islamic hardliner who rules his native province of Chechnya as a personal fiefdom. Kadyrov and his combative underlings have been active on social media from the beginning of the conflict, posing with guns and trophies and boasting about their martial prowess.  Before they became villains in the Western press, tarred by their association with Russian aggression and Islamic fundamentalism, the Chechnyan mountain clans’ struggle for independence was a Victorian cause celebre, akin to Western support for Ukraine today.

Many magicians have passed through Las Vegas since its inception somewhere around the early 1940s: David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, Criss Angel. But possibly its most renowned, yet least acclaimed, trickster was a woman named Gloria Dea.   Dea performed traditional magic — the sleight of hand stuff — but she had a specialty in billiard ball manipulation, tossing the balls so that they seem to multiply and then disappear. A prodigy, you could say — and one of the first magicians, let alone a female one, to set foot on the Strip. In 1941, Dea, who was born Gloria Metzner in Oakland, California, appeared at the Round-Up Room at the El Rancho Vegas. She was not yet twenty years old. Dea lasted a year before Hollywood recruited her into D-movies.

Green-eyed Gertrude Bell belongs in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, that slab of velvety antique that enthralled the English (they were not yet British) in the love-affair phase of their relationship with the Arabs. County Durham-born to a wealthy industrialist father, Bell (1868-1926) was a key player when the Powers tried ineptly to mould the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. She is well covered in the literature and appears in a large hat alongside Churchill in conference photographs. But as Pat Yale announces in this new book: “Her time in Turkey has been largely overlooked.” Bell traveled extensively in that country before the first world war (starting in 1899) and in its aftermath.

Manhattan-based literary magazine the New Criterion has published its first ever piece of fiction in its forty-two-year history. The author may raise an eyebrow: it’s legendary and controversial filmmaker Woody Allen. Allen has penned the short story “Breakfast Special” for the magazine's February 2024 edition. Appropriately enough, for both the magazine and the author, it takes place in Manhattan and stars Murray Tempkin, "a slim, bespectacled thirty-year-old writer, who on a good hair day resembles a scientist or an intellectual but should the weather turn humid looks more like some kind of meshuggener." The tale, which centers on a meetcute gone very, very wrong, bears all of Allen's hallmarks: neuroses, humor, romance, social awkwardness.

It was too dark to see, and the painting was upside down. In 1877 John Ruskin, the leading art critic of Victorian England, attended an exhibition that included paintings by the American-born artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He hated them — and said so. In print. “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued. The following year the argument came to court, on a dark day in a gloomy and gaslit courtroom. The canvases that Ruskin had so disliked were propped up against a wall and barely visible; one was the wrong way up, and another was dropped unceremoniously onto an elderly gentleman’s balding head.

Ah, welcome back. In our previous look at some of the major books of the year, I highlighted titles that went on to be acclaimed bestsellers and the most talked-about volumes of the past twelve months, as well — inevitably — as a few that failed to live up to the high expectations that we’d placed upon them. It is interesting that, just as Prince Harry’s Spare was indeed the most discussed book of last year, another hotly tipped memoir is undoubtedly the major release of 2024.

I visited Sicily in May 2005, when the airlines were still requiring all checked luggage to be left unlocked. After the flight from Paris touched down at Palermo, my wife and I went to collect our luggage at an apparently quiet and unrushed airport to discover my suitcase opened partway and an expensive dressing gown missing. Eighteen years ago, il Commissario Salvatore Montalbano was quite unknown to me. Otherwise, I should have immediately thought of the Sinagra family at the eastern end of the island, though the word “mafia” did come to mind as I rezipped the bag.