Jay R. Tunney, a son of the famous prizefighter Gene Tunney (and also vice-president of the International Shaw Society), recreates the story of the twenty-year friendship between his father and George Bernard Shaw with such love, admiration, and sensitivity to the intensely personal relationship between these two men that the reader cannot help but be swept up by this story of two men who, ignoring a forty-year age difference, found enduring satisfaction in each other’s company: John James (Gene) Tunney was thirty-two; Shaw was seventy-three when they met in 1929 when Tunney was on his honeymoon with his bride, Polly Lauder, heiress to the Carnegie fortune. Both men had already achieved the peaks of their professions by that time, and they now had the leisure to explore new realms. Tunney had retired as heavyweight champion of the world in 1928, and Shaw had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Shaw has said that Tunney helped him “to plant my feet on solid ground.” And Tunney has said, “I think of Shaw as the most considerate person I have ever known.” (My Favorite non-fiction for 2010)
Read Full Post »
In the midst of the Blitz in London in 1943, an event took place in Bethnal Green that was so extraordinary it is not understood completely even to this day. On March 3, 1943, when the air raid warning sirens went off, thousands of people headed, as usual, toward the nearest bomb shelter, the local Tube station, a one-entrance location which could accommodate up to ten thousand people within a few minutes of their arrival. Some had come here many times and knew that they could reserve cots and places to sleep for the night. Others just took their chances, hoping that the emergency would not last long and that they would be able to return to their homes soon afterward. On this night, something unique happened. One hundred seventy-three people died of asphyxia within a minute of their arrival at the station, all suffocated in the crush on the first twenty stairs of the entrance. Author Jessica Francis Kane, who found and studied the original government inquiry into the reasons for this catastrophe, draws on the facts of the real Bethnal Green case to create a fictionalized version of what went wrong.
Read Full Post »
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.
Read Full Post »
Naturalist/writer Gerald Durrell, with a writer’s eye for the odd detail, a great sense of humor and absurdity, and an unquenchable enthusiasm for finding unusual animals and telling stories about them, recounts his third animal-collecting trip to the Cameroons in this 1960 memoir. Recently reprinted by Penguin Books, the book is a classic of nature-writing, filled with amusing anecdotes about the animals, the discoveries made about them, and, especially, about the people whose interactions with them often led to hilarious escapades. Durrell is a lively writer with a commitment to conservation and a tremendous sense of fun. Giving the flavor of the whole trip, not just the academic details, he provides a sense of realism at the same time that he displays his own irrepressible humor, much of it directed at himself. Durrell’s zoo on Jersey has now celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Read Full Post »
Instinctive and natural as an actress, and impulsive and romantic as a person, Bergman conveyed sensuality at the same time that she conveyed innocence, and the public loved her. They saw her as Sister Mary Benedict in Bells of St. Mary’s and as Joan of Arc, never knowing much about her private life, and ignoring the fact that she left her young child and husband, Petter Lindstrom, at home in Sweden to come to the US to make movies. Her affairs with Gary Cooper and Victor Fleming were never reported. Alfred Hitchcock was unabashedly in love with her and was devastated, as was her public, when she became involved with Roberto Rossellini in 1950, while working on the film of Stromboli. Her flagrant affair, her pregnancy, and her out-of-wedlock child in 1950 became the subject of a speech on in the US Congress and were regarded as a complete betrayal of the public trust which had believed her image. “As it was, Ingrid Bergman was only really “Ingrid” from Casablanca [1942] to Under Capricorn [1949]—seven years,” in which she made ten hit films.
Read Full Post »
