In this extraordinary memoir from 1932-1934, Kitty Crockett Robertson describes her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts during the Depression, a time when she, a Harvard graduate, became a hard-working apple farmer to save the family farm in Ipswich. Her physician father had died, and Kitty, wanting to keep the farm from being sold for development, which her Boston-based brothers favored, decided to give up her job working at the Harvard Library to try to make the orchard profitable enough to save the land. Working almost single-handedly, she spent the next two years doing all the dirty work, learning in the process that “The Depression was that time of leveling when she and her neighbors kept going on the strength they learned from each other.”
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First published in English in 1981, and republished in 2008, after the film “La Vie en Rose” created a whole new generation of passionate Piaf fans, Monique Lange’s biography of Piaf comes closer to capturing her personality and explaining her behavior than any other biography that I have read. An editor, writer, actress, and scriptwriter, Lange associated with some of the same Parisians who adored Piaf, especially Jean Cocteau, who persuaded Piaf to act in one of his plays. Though she does not indicate that she ever met Piaf, Lange seems to understand her and appreciate how she became who she was. Often sympathetic to Piaf’s problems, Lange never forgets that Piaf was just as often impossible to deal with–her own worst enemy. Writing in the conversational style of a feature article for a magazine or newspaper, Lange “gets inside” her characters, draws conclusions about Piaf’s life, and provides many pages of candid photographs.
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Though Jane Austen has always been much read, the current “Jane-mania” has now reached epic proportions. Claire Harman, author of JANE’S FAME, in this readable and scholarly analysis, goes back to Jane Austen’s own time to describe the events leading to her increasing popularity over the past two centuries, ultimately explaining “How Jane Austen Conquered the World.” Writing for the public was still a man’s activity, though occasionally books were published anonymously, “By A Lady,” and Jane Austen spent most of her life writing privately, for family and friends. For twenty years, she wrote and, more importantly, rewrote her six famous novels. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY was finally sold to a publisher in 1811, when Jane was thirty-five, and three other novels soon followed, all written “By A Lady”: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813), MANSFIELD PARK (1814) and EMMA (1815). Two more novels, NORTHANGER ABBEY and PERSUASION were published posthumously, in 1817. By now, all of her books have been produced as TV mini-series.
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The subtitle, “A Passionate Life,” epitomizes everything Edith Piaf believed in and stood for. Perhaps because of her impoverished childhood, in which even a small kindness meant everything, Piaf grew up craving attention and love. Abandoned by her mother, she grew up in Pigalle, doing whatever she could to stay alive and find happiness, however fleeting. If that meant doing a quick trick to get enough money to eat, she did that. If she could get enough money singing on a corner, she did that instead. Uneducated and unloved, she developed few, if any, inner resources, intellectually or emotionally, to deal with the fame that was to become her fate, and with her need for love, she was fair game for every manipulator, sleazy operator, and parasite who came her way. Marcel Cerdan, the love of Piaf’s life, as we see in the film, LA VIE EN ROSE, is just a small part of the story here. This book contains a full discography with detailed information about her song-writers.
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In the first biography of his new Great Stars series, which also includes Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, and Bette Davis, author David Thomson examines the career of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman (1915 – 1982), from her makeup-free screen test for David O. Selznick (1939) through Autumn Sonata (1978) made with Ingmar Bergman. Using the plots of her films as a framework for placing Bergman’s life and career into perspective, Thomson shows how each film drew on her life experience and increasing maturity to provide added depth to her characterizations. Thomson, a film critic, film historian, and author of Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films, is uniquely suited for this role, and as he presents each film and critiques Ingrid Bergman’s performances, the reader sees her growing on both the personal and professional levels. Remarkably, her reputation rests almost exclusively on the ten films she made between 1942 and 1949.
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