Valuable insights into the work of a biographer and the lives of her subjects.
A book offers a diverse collection of memories and advice about a career as a biographer.
Bober (Papa Is a Poet, 2013, etc.) began writing while bedridden with illness. She’d studied poetry in college and decided to attempt a biography of William Wordsworth. This endeavor launched a successful career as a researcher, historian, and biographer. In her memoir, Bober reflects on her craft and the ways her own life was shaped by it: “I often find myself describing…my life according to which biography I was writing at the time.” For her book on Wordsworth, she first read what was already published. When she’d recovered, she traveled to England and Wales. She saw Wordsworth’s school and home, his desk and original manuscripts, and walked along the Wye River where he’d composed. This pattern—Bober’s insistence on experiencing places and objects relevant to her subjects—would repeat through her eight biographies. In this sense, her memoir serves as guidebook for writers. She shows what it takes to be “a storyteller whose facts are true.” When researching Thomas Jefferson, she made arrangements to see the desk on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence; a photograph would not do. Bober also discusses the challenge of portraying a complex personality. Her chapter on artist Louise Nevelson is intriguing. The author loved Nevelson’s work but, as a devoted mother and grandmother, she could not fully comprehend the sculptor’s choice of art over family. Further, Nevelson was living when Bober was writing her biography but was not particularly forthcoming with details of her life. The author’s account of working through these challenges provides sage advice for any researcher or writer. Bober asserts that her various subjects chose her and that she aims to tell her own “adventure.” This comes through: readers see Bober evolve as a biographer—and then into a Jefferson scholar—and her love of research and writing is palpable. On the whole, however, the book remains more about her subjects, particularly in the later chapters on American history. Perhaps this is inevitable for an inveterate biographer.
Valuable insights into the work of a biographer and the lives of her subjects.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6188-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Part tabloid-style tearjerker, part sophisticated corporate exposÇ, by a former People magazine crime writer and bestselling author (The Strawberry Statement, 1969). On May 14, 1988, just outside Carrollton, Ky., a drunk-driving ne'er-do-well named Larry Mahoney slammed his Toyota pickup into a schoolbus carrying 63 children. The impact set the bus's fuel tank on fire. Twenty-seven died and 16 were hospitalized with burns. Only two families opted not to settle with Mahoney's insurers and the bus manufacturers. The Fairs, parents of Shannon, 14 when she died, and the Nunnallees, parents of Patty, who was 10, hired John P. Coale, Esq., the self-styled ``master of disaster'' who had represented the city of Bhopal in the Union Carbide gas leak. Coale charged the Ford Motor Company (and Sheller-Globe, which assembled the schoolbus for Ford) with ``consciously disregarding'' the danger they were creating by placing an unshielded fuel tank next to the front door of a bus that had ``flammable seats, inadequate emergency exits and a too-narrow aisle.'' Kunen's lingering account of the crash and its aftermath makes for excruciating reading, especially when he abandons taste for cheap effect. For example, describing a videotape of Shannon and her friends forming a cheerleader's pyramid, he writes: ``Was that pyramid, in that room, in that house, in that moment, on a sort of raft, borne on a river of time toward a bus crash waiting downstream?'' Kunen is on firmer ground when he describes, in meticulous detail, Ford's long history of subverting national safety standards in the name of cost- effectiveness. The book's strongest section focuses on Ford's tawdry behavior during the trial (arguing, among other things, that a schoolbus is a ``truck,'' not a ``bus,'' and therefore not subject to the safety standards of passenger vehicles). You'll want to avert your eyes as Kunen recreates the accident in all its blood and tears, but hang on for some impressive corporate muckraking. (8 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-70533-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
An entertaining autopsy of a failed NBC TV drama/comedy. Don't worry if you never saw or even heard of a show called ``Smoldering Lust''—or ``A Black Tie Affair,'' as it was retitled. The program lasted only a few episodes. Though it had potential, with $9 million spent on production, the talent of award-winning writer/creator Jay Tarses (``The Carol Burnett Show,'' ``The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd'') and actress Kate Capshaw (also Mrs. Steven Spielberg), and themes like adultery and murder, the project quickly faced trouble. Shaky network support, quirky writing, and a confusing title soon gave way to larger problems: a seven-month delay before airing, bad test results from a sample audience, disputes with the network's top brass, a debut in a bad time slot on Saturday night at 10 p.m. over Memorial Day weekend, and many negative reviews. While he delivers a lot of bad news, former Life writer Muse makes it interesting, providing colorful chapters on everything from shopping for the characters' upscale wardrobes, building and decorating the sets, and scoring the show to basics like scripting, casting, and shooting. He populates the scene behind the scenes with comic episodes and likable, three- dimensional characters who really seem to love what they do, and he avoids easy stereotypes. For instance, Tarses is a seasoned and philosophical TV veteran with high standards and a desire to nurture young talent; Capshaw is an artist, not a pampered star; and the censor at Standards and Practices is laid back and accommodating. Muse remains fairly sympathetic to the doomed show until the book's final pages, when, with hindsight, the author becomes the expert. ``Might the series have succeeded if all thirteen episodes had aired, in a hot spot on a good night, and under the original title? No way...someone probably should have prevented this expensive disaster from happening.'' Overall, a small tale well told.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-62223-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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