A welcome update of classic works on California’s arid backcountry by Mary Austin, Marc Reisner, and Reyner Banham.
A sensitive, thoughtful portrait of a part of California that few people see—or want to.
The area around Bishop, California, was robbed of its water decades ago to fuel the growth of greater Los Angeles. That is the central fact of Atleework’s celebration of a place swept by vast dust storms and economic dislocation, its neighboring mountains prone to burst into flames at a moment’s notice. Another central fact is a family that is indisputably eccentric but perfectly suited to the place. “Every family cultivates a culture and lives by its own strangeness until the strangeness turns normal and the rest of the world looks a little off,” she writes, and the aperçu is exactly right. Her mother labored for years under the death sentence of a little-understood cancer while her father sold maps he made and explored the surrounding country with the inquisitive intensity of a 19th-century surveyor. All deserts are places of absence, but the desert of the Eastern Sierra is more lacking than most. As Atleework writes, “In my first five years of life, less than twelve inches of precipitation fell.” And yet, as one environmentalist remarks, the fact that LA takes away such little water as the place can deliver means that growth is something for other places to experience. The locals like it that way just fine, by Atleework’s sometimes repetitive account. One who traveled to LA for medical treatment returned appalled by the smog and traffic, even more so by plans to desalinate ocean water to sustain still more growth. “Imagine this state with unlimited water,” he told the author. “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” It makes a fine motto for a region that Atleework clearly loves.
A welcome update of classic works on California’s arid backcountry by Mary Austin, Marc Reisner, and Reyner Banham.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-998-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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