Ethel Merman
by Brian Kellow (Viking, $26)
Ethel Merman lived a “mostly empty life” offstage, said Robert Gottlieb in The New York Observer. Raised in Queens, she burst into Broadway stardom in 1930 and thereafter strung together “triumph after triumph,” thanks to her big voice and innate stage smarts. Of two new better-than-decent Merman bios in stores now, Brian Kellow’s is the more fluent. The Opera News editor captures the rhythms and challenges of theater, the only setting in which Merman was truly worth watching.
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Young Stalin
by Sebastian Sebag Montefiore (Knopf, $30)
Josef Stalin has for too long been misconstrued as a party hack turned tyrant, said William Grimes in The New York Times. Sebastian Sebag Montefiore’s lively and authoritative new work should put an end to that. It vividly re-creates his hardscrabble boyhood, his artistic and intellectual precocity, and his “wild years” as a revolution-minded bank robber, arsonist, and extortionist.
Boone
by Robert Morgan (Algonquin, $30)
Daniel Boone was apparently as heroic as legend makes him out to be, said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. He didn’t kill many Indians. He was a serial failure in business. He didn’t even “discover” the Cumberland Gap. But Robert Morgan’s “comprehensive and deeply sympathetic” biography shows the peripatetic frontiersman to have been brave, tolerant, soulful, and charismatic. Though “a trifle long,” it’s otherwise perfect.
Alice
by Stacy A. Cordery (Viking, $33)
Alice Roosevelt Longworth was “America’s first megastar,” said Sandra McElwaine in The Washington Times. An insouciant 17-year-old when her father, Teddy, moved into the White House, she charmed and scandalized the press, then transformed herself into a salon hostess and stayed intimate with power for another half-century. Unfortunately, the book Stacy Cordery has written is “more dissertation than biography.” There are delicious nuggets of new information, but they’re buried in dull prose.
Nureyev
by Julie Kavanagh (Pantheon, $37.50)
This “superbly researched” biography delivers all the dirt anyone could want about the most dynamic male ballet dancer of the past half-century, said Toni Bentley in The New York Times. But Rudolf Nureyev’s artistic genius gets overpowered by the meticulous chronicling of his bad-boy antics and “very busy” sex life. In depicting his impoverished Soviet boyhood and his final battle with AIDS, Kavanagh makes Nureyev poignantly human. In between, he’s reduced to mere celebrity.
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Quiz of The Week: 9 – 15 AugustQuiz Have you been paying attention to The Week's news?
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Britain's giant rat problemRising infestation reports and increased sightings of oversized rats have caused concerns about waste management in some areas
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The Week Unwrapped: Has Donald Trump secured his Nobel Peace Prize?Podcast Plus, what does the use of North Korean and Indian labour tell us about the Russian war economy? And why have we all gone crazy for pickles?
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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.”