Just the thing for the book collector and trivia buff in the family.
A calendar and treasure trove for the bookish among us, marking events in literary history great and small, writers’ birthdays and death dates, and the like.
As compared to James Salter’s Life Is Meals: A Diner’s Book of Days (2006), eight-time Jeopardy! champion Nissley’s compendium is a little down-market; if Salter is all haute cuisine and brilliant wines, Nissley finds room for pop-cult writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Grace Metalious, among the less-ephemeral likes of Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot. That catholicity, however, as well as Nissley’s enthusiasm for books, readers and writers, lends his collection considerable charm. Although there’s plenty of, well, book learning here, there’s also plenty of the sheer fun of reading, as when Nissley commemorates the birth of Dr. Seuss on March 2, 1904—March 2 being, coincidentally, the day, an exact century later, that Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead for the latter’s having dared to give him a bad review. (Quoth Whitehead afterward, “This wasn’t the first time some old coot had drooled on me.”) Nissley casts a wide net to catch the likes of the Marquis de Sade (died Dec. 2, 1814) and Haruki Murakami (born Jan. 12, 1949) among the literati; he records the day in 1969 that Kingsley Amis had the bright idea to write a book (On Drink) about drinking so that he could write off his drinking against taxes, which, Amis rightly said, “would be a tremendous achievement.” Nissley also notes the runaway best-sellerdom of the Warren Commission Report of 1964, the birth of the Guinness Book of World Records and the creation of Amazon.com, among other momentous turns in the life of bookdom. The book itself is guaranteed to occupy plenty of pleasant hours, but Nissley’s recommended reading lists are a bibliophilic bonus.
Just the thing for the book collector and trivia buff in the family.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-23962-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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