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Book stars: Brilliant gift choices for the intellectually inclined
REVIEWS BY JULIE HALE A smart new group of books sure to please the discerning reader on your gift list has arrived in time for the holidays. Exceptional additions to any library, the volumes featured here are just right for the writer or literature-lover in your life. Keep these selections in mind, and you'll get high marks this holiday season. Eminent domains
Acclaimed architectural writer Hugh Howard provided the volume's delightful text, while Roger Straus III—son of the publishing giant who co-founded Farrar, Straus and Giroux—contributed elegant, evocative photos. With 21 stops on their itinerary, including the estates of late authors like Kate Chopin and Flannery O'Connor, the pair traveled more than 10,000 miles to complete the book. The result: a magnificent showcase of the places Southern writers call home and a loving act of literary preservation.
By Hugh Howard Rizzoli, $35 286 pages ISBN 0847827674 The healing power of poetry
Keillor himself picked the 185 pieces collected in the book, and his choices vary in period and category, displaying a wonderful range of voices and forms. Old favorites like Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost and William Shakespeare stand alongside newer writers, including Barbara Hamby and R.S. Gwynn. There are poems on family and work, aging and love and simple day-to-day survival, poems to provide joy, inspiration and optimism, to combat sorrow, loneliness and loss. "Poets can make a feast out of trouble, /Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair," R. J. Ellmann writes in "To A Frustrated Poet," and Keillor's collection supports his statement. Whatever your situation or particular set of cares, Good Poems for Hard Times contains the perfect cure.
By Garrison Keillor Viking, $25.95 352 pages ISBN 0670034363 Cover artist
Kidd has provided the finishing touches for all kinds of volumes, and many of his jacket images—the pristine white boxer shorts on the front of David Sedaris' Naked, for instance, or the silvery mane that makes the cover of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses so memorable—will be familiar to book buyers. Suggestive and impressionistic, each jacket conjures up immediate associations for the reader, symbolizing and summarizing the book, complementing its contents. How does Kidd do it? In Book One, he reveals all, discussing his work habits, influences and inspirations. A host of notable contributors—Elmore Leonard, Haruki Murakami and David Sedaris, to name a few—share their thoughts on Kidd and his significance in the publishing world. The volume also spotlights Kidd's work in the field of graphic novels, focusing on his projects for DC Comics, including Batman Collected and Batman Animated. With an introduction by John Updike and photographs by Geoff Spear, Book One is a treasure—from cover to cover—for art lovers and bibliophiles alike.
By Chip Kidd Universe, $65 400 pages ISBN 0847827488 4,109 issues and counting
By New Yorker Magazine Random House, $100 ISBN 1400064740 Julie Hale keeps her old copies of The New Yorker in Austin, Texas.
Literary lives: new biographies Also available this fall for lovers of literature is a sizable set of new biographies that explore the sometimes inspired, sometimes tortured, lives of prominent literary figures. Any of these volumes would make good gift choices for admirers of the writers in question: • Mark Twain: A Life is Ron Powers' exhaustive portrait of Samuel Langhorne Clemens' rise from Missouri miscreant to American icon. Powers, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Flags of My Fathers and has studied Twain for more than 20 years, uses the resources of the Twain Project and his own storytelling gift to bring this complex and uniquely American writer to vivid life.
By Ron Powers Free Press, $35 736 pages ISBN 0743248996 • Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist, 1914-1949 is a response by O'Brian's own stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy, to an earlier biography by Dean King which depicted the master of seafaring fiction as a contemptible person and a cruel parent who had abandoned his first family and invented a new persona. Not surprisingly, Tolstoy takes a different view, using O'Brian's personal papers to bolster his arguments.
By Nikolai Tolstoy Norton, $29.95 512 pages ISBN 0393061302 • D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider by Lawrence scholar John Worthen reveals the author of Lady Chatterly's Lover to be a man estranged from almost everyone around him, including his own family. Nevertheless, this conflicted and difficult man left an important literary legacy still celebrated almost a century later.
By John Worthen Counterpoint, $29.95 528 pages ISBN 1582433410 • Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, by Julia Briggs, focuses on the intellectual struggles and triumphs of a literary genius. Illustrated with original dust jackets, pages from Woolf's manuscripts and a copy of the suicide note she wrote to her husband Leonard in 1941: "I feel certain that I am going mad again."
By Julia Briggs Harcourt, $30 544 pages ISBN 0151011435
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There's no denying that Southern authors are uniquely bound to their home turf—just think about the kind of writer William Faulkner might have become if he'd been born someplace besides Mississippi. In Writers of the American South: Their Literary Landscapes, the remarkable relationship between Southern authors and their native soil comes alive as 12 popular novelists take readers on a tour of their home regions, revealing what they love best about the towns where they live and providing fascinating insights into their domestic routines and work habits. Pat Conroy, Barry Hannah, Josephine Humphreys and Ann Patchett, among other authors, demonstrate some good old-fashioned hospitality and offer fans a peek inside their private residences. From the majestic, museum-like manor with gothic accents maintained by Allan Gurganus in Falls, North Carolina, to the two-story hurricane-proof "bunker"—bright, airy and built on stilts—overlooking Florida Bay, where Carl Hiaasen does his work, each place is unforgettable in its own way.
Often considered the most impracticable of art forms, poetry has been infused with a new purpose thanks to popular author and radio personality Garrison Keillor. He has long championed the genre on his NPR show "The Writer's Almanac," and Keillor now offers a new book, Good Poems for Hard Times, the follow-up to his 2002 anthology Good Poems—in support of his belief that poetry is the ideal antidote for the everyday pressures and concerns that plague us all. "The meaning of poetry is to give courage," he writes in the volume's introduction. "The intensity of poetry, its imaginative fervor, its cadences, is not meant for the triumphant executive, but for people in a jam—you and me."
Chip Kidd occupies a unique niche in the literary world. For the past two decades he has produced book jackets at Alfred A. Knopf, winning wide acclaim for his eye-catching artwork and ingenious designs. His uncanny ability to capture the essence of a book in a single image is showcased in Chip Kidd—Book One—Work: 1986-2006, a glossy new volume that offers a wonderful overview of his career.
What will the folks at The New Yorker think of next? Following the success of last year's Complete Cartoons, their newest coup, The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine, is an eight-DVD set that contains each issue of the weekly in its entirety, from February 21, 1925, to February 21, 2005. That's eight decades' worth of groundbreaking reportage, classic fiction and poetry, authoritative criticism and, of course, cartoons, all on DVD. Each disc has a search engine that allows you to locate favorite authors, artists and articles, and the set is attractively packaged with a companion book. The DVDs are only compatible with computers (system requirements: Windows 2000; Windows XP; Mac OS X 10.3 and higher). Updates to the collection will be made annually by the magazine. Imagine it: your own personal New Yorker archives, stored conveniently on disc, to peruse when you choose. At last, you can get rid of those old issues you've been saving!