If you loved Peaky Blinders, give this new series a look. Also set in the U.K. just after World War I, it has Julianne Nicholson, an Emmy winner for Mare of Easttown, playing a widow in London who escapes desperate circumstances by opening a nightclub where one of her daughters becomes a featured dancer and illicit drinking and drug use thrives. Her principal foes are women too: a new cop working undercover and the matriarch of a ruthless Italian crime family. Monday, July 28, Hulu.

by Sophoe Elmhirst

Sophie Elmhirst’s fascinating first book is “so much more than a shipwreck tale,” said Laurie Hertzel in The Boston Globe. In 1973, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were sailing toward the Galápagos Islands when a sperm whale rammed their yacht and left them stranded at sea for the next 118 days on a tiny inflatable raft and 9-foot dinghy. Elmhirst has turned the British couple’s tale of survival into a portrait of a marriage. “What else is a marriage,” she writes, “if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?” In this case, Maralyn was strong-minded, Maurice ready to quit and die. In the end, though, their union, “for all its oddities,” emerges as a true partnership. 

“As harrowing and gripping as the Baileys’ story is, the real star of this book is its dazzling writer,” said Chris Hewitt in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Elmhirst, a journalist, “succeeds at everything she attempts,” whether waxing poetic about the open Pacific and its teeming life forms or psycho-analyzing her two lead characters. The “real meat of the book” is Elmhirst’s effort to understand how the Baileys’ relationship was strengthened rather than wrecked by their joint ordeal. Maurice was so misanthropic that he’d insisted on sailing the ocean without a radio, while Maralyn’s adventurousness was built on an optimism that never failed her. It was Maralyn who devised most of the couple’s lifesaving hacks, such as storing rainwater for drinking and catching and eating turtles. She also helped keep herself and her husband sane by fashioning a deck of playing cards from spare paper and reading aloud from a Shakespeare book they’d salvaged. “Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, except without all the yelling and drinking, A Marriage at Sea is a clear-eyed, insightful anatomy of a marriage.” 

“It’s billed as a love story; I don’t know if it is,” said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. “Whatever held the Baileys together was stranger and plainer than love, harder to come by, and even harder to explain.” Elmhirst tells us that they went back to sea for 14 months on a second yacht and notes how crazy that was, but I ached to know more about what their marriage was like in subsequent years and why, like so many couples, they felt bound to experience those years together. Still, A Marriage at Sea is “an enthralling account of how the commonest hazards of married life—claustrophobia, codependence, boundarylessness—become totalized amid disaster,” said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. The book “honors the courage and resourcefulness of the Baileys in visceral detail,” while showing deep compassion both for the story’s heroine and her difficult mate.

The D.C. operative who served four presidents

David Gergen was the consummate Beltway insider. Over decades in D.C., he served as an aide to four presidents: Republicans Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and Democrat Bill Clinton. Wearing hats including speechwriter, special counsel, and communications director, the centrist Gergen was known as a “spinmeister” who could craft a presidential message and work with reporters to get it out. Towering at 6 feet 5 inches, he was no arm-twister, but rather a genial schmoozer whose targeted leaks earned him the nickname “the Sieve.” He worked most closely with Reagan, writing one of the Great Communicator’s most effective lines. During a 1980 debate against Jimmy Carter, the Republican candidate asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The question resonated in an era of economic malaise, and it helped Reagan to a landslide win. “When you’re out there panhandling in the river,” said Gergen, “occasionally you get a gold nugget.” 

David Richmond Gergen was born in Durham, N.C., where his father taught math at Duke University, said The Washington Post. He attended Yale University and Harvard Law, then served as a Navy officer during the Vietnam War, stationed on a ship in Japan. With many career paths open to him, his “entry into politics was fortuitous.” On a friend’s tip, he applied for a job assisting Nixon’s speechwriter—even though, as he admitted during the interview, he’d voted for Democrat Hubert Humphrey. He “was brought aboard anyway” and soon rose to head speechwriter, helping craft Nixon’s resignation letter in 1974. 

In the Reagan White House, the pragmatic Gergen “was widely credited with softening the in-your-face conservative rhetoric” sought by far-right aides, said The New York Times. That centrism appealed to Clinton, who brought him on board in 1993. But between Clinton aides who mistrusted Gergen as an “interloper” and Republicans who “deemed him a turncoat,” he lasted barely a year in the Clinton White House. “Between stints in government,” said The Guardian, he had success in media and academia. Sometime editor of U.S. News & World Report and a frequent columnist and TV news commentator, he also taught government at both Duke and Harvard’s Kennedy School. Always, he preached the values of civility and compromise. “Centrism doesn’t mean splitting the difference,” he said in 2020. “It’s about seeking solutions, and you bring people along.”