Marlene
by Charlotte Chandler
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“Reading a biography by Charlotte Chandler is like going to a séance,” said Joseph McBride in the San Francisco Chronicle. As she’s done previously with Groucho Marx and Joan Crawford, Chandler here summons the spirit of Marlene Dietrich, as well as the ghosts of people who knew and loved her. “Pages upon pages” of ostensible interview transcripts can make it seem as if the late star is still with us. As at a séance, though, sometimes the revelations seem “too good to be true.”
No Regrets
by Carolyn Burke
(Knopf, $28)
“The life and loves of the great French chanteuse Édith Piaf are a biographer’s dream,” said Susan Miron in The Miami Herald. Though she’s the 29th author to take the lure, Carolyn Burke succeeds in creating a “vivid portrait.” Piaf’s life has “engendered many legends and half-truths,” and Burke is especially good at sorting out the truth. The singer’s claim that her mother gave birth to her on the street, for instance, is put to rest with the discovery of a hospital birth certificate.
Heat Wave
by Donald Bogle
(Harper, $27)
From the 1920s into the ’40s, Ethel Waters was “the most famous black woman in America,” said Wendy Smith in the Los Angeles Times. This new biography reveals Waters as a polymath who “belied stereotypes,” found fame recording songs like “Stormy Weather,” and later achieved acclaim as an actress. Though little known today, Waters blazed a new path into the mainstream—“as a sexy, self-confident diva who explored the full range of African-American experience without apology.”
Sempre Susan
by Sigrid Nunez
(Atlas & Co., $20)
Disclosing “the private lives of public intellectuals” can be a seedy business, said Alice Gregory in The Boston Globe. But Sigrid Nunez, who was the girlfriend of Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, performs the task “elegantly” in this new memoir. Sontag comes off as “great, but flawed,” possessed of bottomless curiosity and intellect but mercurial in her affections. In the end, Nunez’s affectionate, evenhanded appraisal “humanizes one of the most intimidating figures” of late-20th-century culture.
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”