Wallflower at the orgy - Nora Ephron

Wallflower at the orgy - Ephron, Nora

Summary: From her Academy Award—nominated screenplays to her bestselling fiction and essays, Nora Ephron is one of America’s most gifted, prolific, and versatile writers. In this classic collection of magazine articles, Ephron does what she does best: embrace American culture with love, cynicism, and unmatched wit. From tracking down the beginnings of the self-help movement to dressing down the fashion world’s most powerful publication to capturing a glimpse of a legendary movie in the making, these timeless pieces tap into our enduring obsessions with celebrity, food, romance, clothes, entertainment, and sex. Whether casting her ingenious eye on renowned director Mike Nichols, Cosmopolitan magazine founder Helen Gurley Brown—or herself, as she chronicles her own beauty makeover—Ephron deftly weaves her journalistic skill with the intimate style of an essayist and the incomparable talent of a great storyteller. - (Random House, Inc.)

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Historic conversations on life with John F. Kennedy - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Historic conversations on life with John F. Kennedy: interviews with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 1964 - Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

Summary: Presents the annotated transcription and original audio for the 1964 interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy on her experiences and impressions as the wife of John F. Kennedy, offering an intimate and detailed account of the man and his times. Shortly after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, with a nation deep in mourning and the world looking on in stunned disbelief, Jacqueline Kennedy found the strength to set aside her own personal grief for the sake of posterity and begin the task of documenting and preserving her husband's legacy. In January of 1964, she and Robert F. Kennedy approved a planned oral-history project that would capture their first-hand accounts of the late President as well as the recollections of those closest to him throughout his extraordinary political career. For the rest of her life, the famously private Jacqueline Kennedy steadfastly refused to discuss her memories of those years, but beginning that March, she fulfilled her obligation to future generations of Americans by sitting down with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and recording an astonishingly detailed and unvarnished account of her experiences and impressions as the wife and confidante of John F. Kennedy. The tapes of those sessions were then sealed and later deposited in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum upon its completion, in accordance with Mrs. Kennedy's wishes.

Kirkus Reviews
The late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis speaks candidly about life in Camelot. Just before publication of this collection of interviews with journalist/historian Arthur Schlesinger, conducted in 1964, a few leaked bits of conversation revealed that Jacqueline was content to leave the politics to her husband. This led to Kennedy's being lambasted as a lightweight at best, a betrayer of feminism at worst. The interviews, gathered in transcribed form with elegant introductions by first daughter Caroline Kennedy and historian Michael Beschloss, indicate that she was anything but a lightweight, even if, as Beschloss wryly notes, "well-bred young women of Jacqueline's generation were not encouraged to sound like intellectuals." Jackie preceded the generation of feminists that would soon arise (and then became a role model, speaking frankly in Ms. and other movement publications). But the real defense comes through her words here, gathered only a few months after JFK's assassination. They reveal a nimble if worried mind. Personally, JFK wasn't the easiest man to live with, due in part to the sour stomach born of nerves and "those awful years campaigning…living on a milkshake and a hot dog," as well as the terrible general health that he bore stoically in public but that caused him private agony. Jackie is shrewd in her assessments about people: Stewart Udall rose to head the Interior Department, she notes, because he delivered Arizona to JFK in the 1960 election--but then emerged as a real leader. She also provides on-the-spot commentary about unfolding world events, such as the ever-more-urgent specter of Vietnam and a divided Germany (the only ambassadors JFK "really disliked" were those from Germany and Pakistan). All politics is local--and personal. These interviews are invaluable in providing a fly-on-the-wall view of life in the Kennedy White House--and there has never been so intimate a view from a First Lady's perspective. Copyright Kirkus 2011 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.


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Everyone loves you when you're dead - Neil Strauss

Everyone loves you when you're dead: journeys into fame and madness - Strauss, Neil

Summary: The author collects the most revealing moments from his celebrity interviews, including Tom Cruise's thoughts on Scientology, Snoop Dogg on record companies and baby diapers, and Eric Clapton's thoughts on the death of Kurt Cobain.


Kirkus Reviews
Veteran pop-culture journalist Strauss (Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, 2009, etc.) offers an eclectic collection of interviews with the "artists, celebrities, and crazy people of the world."

By his own count, the author has conducted some 3,000 interviews with the famous, not-so-famous, used-to-be-famous and ought-to-be-famous denizens of popular culture. Here he brings together the best of these interviews in loosely and at times bizarrely connected chapters. All the well-knowns are here, including Madonna, Lady Gaga, David Bowie, The Who, Kenny G, Led Zeppelin, Puffy Combs and Bo Diddley. The author also includes many lesser-known artists, such as the master mandolin player Johnny Staats, who still drives a UPS truck, and the pioneering electronic-music artist Patrick Miller, who was taken early by drugs—as are too many of the subjects here. Known or unknown, they all have something to say. The subject is not always clear, as Strauss often introduces an interview, drops it and returns to it many pages later, but that is part of the fun of his anarchic presentation. Bruce Springsteen is typically modest, noting that one of the main motivations of his music is "to try to be useful." Chuck Berry is open, funny and scatological. Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn are achingly poignant as they speak of death and courage. Motley Crue gets arrested. And so it goes with hundreds of other interviews. In a concluding tribute to the late critic Paul Nelson, Strauss wonders if such obsession with pop culture is worth it. He concludes that it is, if only to allow us to reflect on our own faults and follies and on what we have and think we want.

Gonzo interviewing at its best.
Copyright Kirkus 2011 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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The corpse walker: real life stories, China from the bottom up - Yiwu Liao

The corpse walker: real life stories, China from the bottom up - Liao, Yiwu

Summary: "A compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the 'new' China--the China of economic growth and globalization--is no more beneficial than the old. Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others--people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity. Liao's interviews were given from 1990 to 2003."--From amazon.com.

Publishers Weekly Reviews
In this rich, often harrowing oral history, Chinese writer (and notorious target of censors) Liao travels to the margins of Chinese society, interviewing 27 outsiders from China's forgotten classes. The book contains an incredible cast of characters: a grave robber, a composer, a leper, a professional mourner paid to wail at funerals, a human trafficker and a delusional peasant who has anointed himself emperor. These conversations, largely recorded from memory, showcase Liao's empathy for his subjects and a particular talent for getting into tight situations; on one occasion, the author is forced to leap out of a three-story building when he fears the Communist government is targeting him for talking to a Falun Gong supporter. Liao's research took 11 years, and his final product is a stunning series of portraits of a generation and class of individuals ignored in history books and unacknowledged in the accounts of the "new" China. (Apr.)
[Page 147]. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

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Underground America : narratives of undocumented lives

Underground America : narratives of undocumented lives

Summary: Underground America tells the stories of men and women who have come to the United States seeking a better life for their families, only to be subjected to dehumanizing working conditions. Supporting myriad industries, these workers form an essential part of our economy — often by working the least desirable jobs without the most basic legal protections. Underground America allows this largely ignored part of our country to finally share its experiences.
- (Perseus Publishing)

Staff Review
Eye-opening and heart-breaking. These first person accounts share the lives and stories, hopes, dreams and crushing reality of 21 illegal immigrants.

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