Summer Reading

Now that my software seems to be working, I find I am blind as a bat. Forgive the typos. They float all through the review of Kurzman's book.

In the last few months, there have been several books which I enjoyed. Here are some of them.

If Keith Richards is still alive, I always feel I should be. In paperback, Keith Richards' Life is a great read. I particularly enjoyed it when he would go off at great length to explain the musical techniques behind his guitar playing and his theory on rock lyrics. And, of course, there are naughty bits galore throughout. Oh and he never got those annual blood transfusions.

Manning Marable's A Life Of Reinvention: Malcolm X.(Viking) . Black historian Manning Marable died before this biography of Malcolm was published. If you are used to writings about the civil rights struggle emphasizing Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bayard Rustin, then this book complements them as it traces the development of the Black Muslim movement, its strains of separatism and its conflicts with the mainstream civil rights movement. Malcolm X transforms himself throughout the period and ends up being more Muslim and more integrationist than his previous religion. Marable contributes his theory as to who and why Malcolm was assassinated in Harlem.

Patricia Albers, "Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter--A Life (Knopf). This is a real keeper. In my opinion, Joan Mitchell is one of the most significant painters of the last century. This biography is absolutely the best treatment of Mitchell I have read. From the days at Smith to the Village with the New York School of Painters over to Paris where she painted her masterpieces for decades. One of the founding women of Abstract Expressionism--which she would deny and denounce--she was so far ahead of her time she rejected being shown in latter life with other women artists. She hated being a "Lady Painter", she was a painter--period. Albers does a marvelous job in capturing Mitchell throughout her love affairs, her physical ailments, her alcoholism and her psychiatric sessions. She had an eidetic memory, which bothered her in her youth but became her strength as a painter. And you actually get to read about all her paintings. One of my great memories is walking by a museum on the West Side of New York and there sitting all along the curb were Mitchells after Mitchells waiting to be delivered for a retrospective.

Gail Levin "Lee Krasner: A Biography"(William Morrow). If artists are making a living today, you can thank Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock's widow who single-handedly created the modern art market. Feminists have tried for years to restore Lee Krasner's reputation as an artist in her own right. There is a case but I have never responded to her paintings like I do to Mitchell or Frankenthauler or Grace Hartigan. Perhaps I am too attached to Pollock's special genius not to see her. She was reviled after Pollock's death and was seen as too manipulative of his estate. But history has shown her judgments to be correct. For a walk through that time of the New York School, this is a superb introduction. Maybe Gail Levin can convince you on Krasner's merits as an artist. Obviously Hans Hoffman thought highly of her talent.

Sylvia Winter Pollock "American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock and Family". (Polity) Interesting artifact about Jackson Pollock but much more interesting as the letters of a family struggling through the Depression. While Jackson is the hook, it is his eldest brother Charles who comes across as the more interesting character. A radical, labor union organizer,a participant in the WPA, he knows Pete Seeger and other radicals of the time. Through his letters, we learn how FDR tried to purge the WPA of Communists and radicals and how the Pollock brothers tried to avoid all this by subterfuge. Jackson has severe problems with alcoholism from an early age and has to be committed to an asylum for a while. What comes across is a closely knit family, who communicated constantly with one another as family members travelled around the country looking for work. LeRoy and Stella Pollock, while living a working class existence, were enormously supportive of their sons' ambitions to become artists. The book provides the background for understanding Jackson's well-known closeness to his mother, who previously had been painted as somewhat overbearing. In fact, it was time Jackson assumed his role in supporting his mother who had become a widow. A wonderful vignette of hard times.

E.L. Doctorow "All the Time in the World" (Random House). What do you do with favorite writers? Should you reread Billy Bathgate,Loon Lake, and the Waterworks? I think Ragtime was ruined by the movie. One approach is to savor the best lines of a good author. This book contains six new stories from an American master--some are excellent; others not so much.

Do you remember Progressive Republicans? They are becoming a very distant memory. But Edmund Morris finishes his work on Theodore Roosevelt with "Colonel Roosevelt" (Random House), the saga of TR's last years and the death of his son Quentin in WWI. Running throughout the story is the mystery whether TR would run for President again as his friends and many of the progressives wanted. Behind the scenes, TR is working to undermine Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. Like the war horse he was, he thought he could do a better job of fighting the Germans. And on the Republican front, he was outraged by William Taft selling the Republicans to the corporate moguls. A fascinating portrait and one of Morris' finer volumes on Roosevelt.