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HAPPY DAYS

Name: HAPPY DAYS
Author: Shana Alexander
ISBN: 0-385-41815-9

MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, MY SISTER AND ME

by Shana Alexander ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1995

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Alexander, who has anatomized the lives of Patty Hearst, Jean Harris, and others (Anyone's Daughter, 1979, etc.) now wields her scalpel gently but with precision as she dissects her own family history; what is laid bare is tantalizingly mysterious, profoundly sad, and always riveting. Her childhood should have been charmed: Her father, Milton Ager, was a composer of hit tunes, including ``Happy Days Are Here Again''; her mother, Cecelia Ager, was a notedly astute and acerbic film critic. Famous folks waltzed in and out of their lives: George Gershwin, Oscar Levant, ``Dottie'' Parker. But chubby little Shana and her sister, Laurel, were not happy girls. They were suddenly uprooted from their one-of-a-kind apartment (painted for them by stage designer James Reynolds) and moved into a residential hotel with separate bedrooms for each parent (the senior Agers' living pattern for the rest of their very separate lives). Worse yet was the coldness of Cecelia and the harsh regime she imposed on her children. Why did they move? Why, despite their apparent mismatch, did the Agers never divorce? Was George Gershwin ever Cecelia's lover? As the grown-up Shana tries to reconstruct events and resolve these puzzles, a deliciously variegated narrative emerges: a history of Tin Pan Alley; a Jewish immigrant story; tales of tragic love and the complex bonds that tie mothers and daughters. Thanks to Alexander's humanity and insight, these elements all transcend the clichÇs that describe them. And she has a roster of wonderful characters, from her wild, fiery great-aunt, writer Anzia Yezierska, to her second husband, a ne'er-do-well whose reach was pathetically beyond his grasp. The author herself, as she matures, grows obsessed with her wish to be the ideal mother, even as her career burgeons and she fails to conceive a baby. Alexander says she wanted to write Patty Hearst's story because she found it quintessentially American. So is her own story, and she tells it here with great style.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-385-41815-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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UNDER MY SKIN

VOL. I OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TO 1949

by Doris Lessing ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 1994

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As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÃ‰, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994

ISBN: 0-06-017150-2

Page Count: 416

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
ALFRED AND EMILY
by Doris Lessing

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CLEFT
by Doris Lessing

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORY OF GENERAL DANN AND MARA’S DAUGHTER, GRIOT AND THE SNOW DOG
by Doris Lessing

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AS SEEN ON TV

THE VISUAL CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE 1950S

by Karal Ann Marling ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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An absorbing study of the role of style and design in early postwar American culture. Marling (Art History and American Studies/ Univ. of Minnesota; coauthor of Iwo Jima: Monuments and the American Hero, 1991) examines the period when TV first leveled its electronic gaze at American life and a dynamic new set of visual and cultural values were born. She describes leisure pursuits like amateur painting— and its ghastly derivative, the paint-by-numbers set—that rose with the country's self-conscious new prosperity; the growth of automobile fetishism; kitchen gadgets and their meaning for ever- busier women; Elvis's nouveau-riche stylistic pretensions; and national unease over the comparative worth of less frivolous Soviet accomplishments. The book begins slowly, detailing the national obsession with Mamie Eisenhower's hair and clothing, but gathers momentum in describing Disneyland's antecedents, the psychosexual lure of chrome-laden cars, and the growing hegemony of design over function in the development of American products. Marling writes with flair, and her text engages the reader even when profound insight is lacking. Readers may disagree with her on occasion (that ``the French [fashion] salon is a woman's place, ultimately governed by her preferences and skills'' seems debatable). And sometimes the breezy tone is less appropriate—memoranda showing how Betty Crocker psychologists exploited women's fears of failure in the kitchen arouse no comment from the author. Assertions that designers provided buyers a sensation of mobility and choice, and that these aren't bad aims, on the other hand, make sense. And Marling's right in noting that critics often missed what was pleasurable—and anti-elitist—about ``populuxe'' fashions of the '50s. Though Marling chooses to remain more chronicler than critic, this archaeology of our recent visual past is as important as any recent political history of the period, and far fresher in approach. (Illustrations, not seen)