On My Radar

The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970's
by Peter Doggett
Harper Books
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

“Astonishing and absorbing…from glam rock, minimalism and punk, to radical left-wing politics, music video, and a mass of other subjects that helped shape the ideas behind Bowie’s songs.”
—Sunday Times (London)

The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Doggett—author of the critically acclaimed Beatles biography, You Never Give Me Your Money—is a song-by-song chronicle of the evolution of David Bowie. Focusing on the work and the life of one of the most groundbreaking figures in music and popular culture during the turbulent seventies, Bowie’s most productive and innovative period, The Man Who Sold the World is the book that serious rock music lovers have been waiting for. By exploring Bowie’s individual achievements and breakthroughs one-by-one, Doggett paints a fascinating portrait of the performer who paved the way for a host of fearless contemporary artists, from Radiohead to Lady Gaga.

Book Description 

The Man Who Sold the World is a critical study of David Bowie's most inventive and influential decade, from his first hit, "Space Oddity," in 1969, to the release of the LP Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980. Viewing the artist through the lens of his music and his many guises, the acclaimed journalist Peter Doggett offers a detailed analysis—musical, lyrical, conceptual, social—of every song Bowie wrote and recorded during that period, as well as a brilliant exploration of the development of a performer who profoundly affected popular music and the idea of stardom itself.

Dissecting close to 250 songs, Doggett traces the major themes that inspired and shaped Bowie's career, from his flirtations with fascist imagery and infatuation with the occult to his pioneering creation of his alter-ego self in the character of Ziggy Stardust. What emerges is an illuminating account of how Bowie escaped his working-class London background to become a global phenomenon. The Man Who Sold the World lays bare the evolution of Bowie's various personas and unrivaled career of innovation as a musician, singer, composer, lyricist, actor, and conceptual artist. It is a fan's ultimate resource—the most rigorous and insightful assessment to date of Bowie's artistic achievement during this crucial period.

The song from which the book is named:

In My TBR Stack

Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York
by Robin Shulman
Crown Publishing

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

New York is not a city for growing and manufacturing food. It’s a money and real estate city, with less naked earth and industry than high-rise glass and concrete.   Yet in this intimate, visceral, and beautifully written book, Robin Shulman introduces the people of New York City  - both past and present - who  do grow vegetables, butcher meat, fish local waters, cut and refine sugar, keep bees for honey, brew beer, and make wine. In the most heavily built urban environment in the country, she shows an organic city full of intrepid and eccentric people who want to make things grow.  What’s more, Shulman artfully places today’s urban food production in the context of hundreds of years of history, and traces how we got to where we are.

 In these pages meet Willie Morgan, a Harlem man who first grew his own vegetables in a vacant lot as a front for his gambling racket. And David Selig, a beekeeper in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn who found his bees making a mysteriously red honey. Get to know Yolene Joseph, who fishes crabs out of the waters off Coney Island to make curried stews for her family. Meet the creators of the sickly sweet Manischewitz wine, whose brand grew out of Prohibition; and Jacob Ruppert, who owned a beer empire on the Upper East Side, as well as the New York Yankees.

Eat the City is about how the ability of cities to feed people has changed over time. Yet it is also, in a sense, the story of the things we long for in cities today: closer human connections, a tangible link to more basic processes, a way to shape more rounded lives, a sense of something pure.

Of course, hundreds of years ago, most food and drink consumed by New Yorkers was grown and produced within what are now the five boroughs. Yet people rarely realize that long after New York became a dense urban agglomeration, innovators, traditionalists, migrants and immigrants continued to insist on producing their own food. This book shows the perils and benefits—and the ironies and humor—when city people involve themselves in making what they eat.

Food, of course, is about hunger. We eat what we miss and what we want to become, the foods of our childhoods and the symbols of the lives we hope to lead. With wit and insight, Eat the City shows how in places like New York, people have always found ways to use their collective hunger to build their own kind of city.

ROBIN SHULMAN is a writer and reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, the Guardian, and many other publications.  She lives in New York City.

In My TBR Stack

Road to Valor: A True Story of World War II Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation
by Aili and Andres McConnon
Crown Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Road to Valor is the inspiring, against-the-odds story of Gino Bartali, the cyclist who made the greatest comeback in Tour de France history and secretly aided the Italian resistance during World War II. 

   Gino Bartali is best known as an Italian cycling legend: the man who not only won the Tour de France twice, but also holds the record for the longest time span between victories.  During the ten years that separated his hard-won triumphs, his actions, both on and off the racecourse, ensured him a permanent place in Italian hearts and minds.

   In Road to Valor, Aili and Andres McConnon chronicle Bartali’s journey, starting in impoverished rural Tuscany where a scrawny, mischievous boy painstakingly saves his money to buy a bicycle and before long, is racking up wins throughout the country.  At the age of 24, he stuns the world by winning the Tour de France and becomes an international sports icon.

   But Mussolini’s Fascists try to hijack his victory for propaganda purposes, derailing Bartali’s career, and as the Nazis occupy Italy, Bartali undertakes secret and dangerous activities to help those being targeted.  He shelters a family of Jews in an apartment he financed with his cycling winnings and is able to smuggle counterfeit identity documents hidden in his bicycle past Fascist and Nazi checkpoints because the soldiers recognize him as a national hero in training.

   After the grueling wartime years, Bartali fights to rebuild his career as Italy emerges from the rubble.  In 1948, the stakes are raised when midway through the Tour de France, an assassination attempt in Rome sparks nationwide political protests and riots.  Despite numerous setbacks and a legendary snowstorm in the Alps, the chain-smoking, Chianti-loving, 34-year-old underdog comes back and wins the most difficult endurance competition on earth.  Bartali’s inspiring performance helps unite his fractured homeland and restore pride and spirit to a country still reeling from war and despair.
   Set in Italy and France against the turbulent backdrop of an unforgiving sport and threatening politics, Road to Valor is the breathtaking account of one man’s unsung heroism and his resilience in the face of adversity.  Based on nearly ten years of research in Italy, France, and Israel, including interviews with Bartali’s family, former teammates, a Holocaust survivor Bartali saved, and many others, Road to Valor is the first book ever written about Bartali in English and the only book written in any language to fully explore the scope of Bartali’s wartime work.  An epic tale of courage, comeback, and redemption, it is the untold story of one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century.

In My TBR Stack:

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
by Kristen Iversen

Crown Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." It's the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets--both family and government. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats (cleaning supplies, her mother guessed)--best not to inquire too deeply into any of it.

But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions. She learned about the infamous 1969 Mother's Day fire, in which a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously ignited and--despite the desperate efforts of firefighters--came perilously close to a "criticality," the deadly blue flash that signals a nuclear chain reaction. Intense heat and radiation almost melted the roof, which nearly resulted in an explosion that would have had devastating consequences for the entire Denver metro area. Yet the only mention of the fire was on page 28 of the Rocky Mountain News, underneath a photo of the Pet of the Week. In her early thirties, Iversen even worked at Rocky Flats for a time, typing up memos in which accidents were always called "incidents."

And as this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism--a detailed and shocking account of the government's sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents' vain attempts to seek justice in court. Here, too, are vivid portraits of former Rocky Flats workers--from the healthy, who regard their work at the plant with pride and patriotism, to the ill or dying, who battle for compensation for cancers they got on the job.

Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book promises to have a very long half-life.

In My TBR Stack

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris
by David King
Broadway Books

Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Death in the City of Light is the gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld.  

The main suspect was Dr. Marcel Petiot, a handsome, charming physician with remarkable charisma.  He was the “People’s Doctor,” known for his many acts of kindness and generosity, not least in providing free medical care for the poor.  Petiot, however, would soon be charged with twenty-seven murders, though authorities suspected the total was considerably higher, perhaps even as many as 150.

Who was being slaughtered, and why?  Was Petiot a sexual sadist, as the press suggested, killing for thrills?  Was he allied with the Gestapo, or, on the contrary, the French Resistance?  Or did he work for no one other than himself?  Trying to solve the many mysteries of the case, Massu would unravel a plot of unspeakable deviousness. 
When Petiot was finally arrested, the French police hoped for answers.

But the trial soon became a circus.  Attempting to try all twenty-seven cases at once, the prosecution stumbled in its marathon cross-examinations, and Petiot, enjoying the spotlight, responded with astonishing ease.  His attorney, René Floriot, a rising star in the world of criminal defense, also effectively, if aggressively, countered the charges.  Soon, despite a team of prosecuting attorneys, dozens of witnesses, and over one ton of evidence, Petiot’s brilliance and wit threatened to win the day.

Drawing extensively on many new sources, including the massive, classified French police file on Dr. Petiot, Death in the City of Light is a brilliant evocation of Nazi-Occupied Paris and a harrowing exploration of murder, betrayal, and evil of staggering proportions.

On My Radar: 7/27/12

The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Reprint)

by Paul Theroux
Mariner Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

“A book to be plundered and raided.” — New York Times Book Review

“A portal into a world of timeless travel literature curated by one of the greatest travel writers of our day.” — USA Today

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe in this collection of the best writing from the books that have shaped him as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel contains excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:

Vladimir Nabokov         Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh          James Baldwin
Charles Dickens         Pico Iyer
Henry David Thoreau         Anton Chekhov
Mark Twain         John McPhee
Freya Stark         Ernest Hemingway
Graham Greene         and many others

“Dazzling . . . Like someone panning for gold, Theroux reread hundreds of travel classics and modern works, shaking out the nuggets.” — San Francisco Chronicle

On My Radar

A Freudian Slip is When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother: 879 Funny, Funky, Hip and Hilarious Puns
by Gary Blake
Skyhorse Publishing
Hardcover


From the publisher website:

Everyone delights in wordplay! When there’s a sale on tennis balls, it’s first come, first serve. Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion. Why does the Pope travel so much? Because he’s a roamin’ Catholic. What is purple and 5,000 miles long? The Grape Wall of China! 

O-pun the door to 1,001 goodies that will have you howling or groaning, but certainly—like the surgery patient—in stitches.

Hotels, Hospitals and Jails by Anthony Swofford

I am currently in the middle of Anthony Swofford's tale of an ex-warrior coming to grips with an emotionally elusive father.  Let me say, Mr. Swofford knows how to write.  I did not read his previous memoir, Jarhead, nor see the movie, but this book has made me rethink that decision.

As someone who has strugged with the father-son dynamic for most of my life (as a son), I find this book revealing yet guarded and the words hit home more often than I expected.  Ex marine Swofford is traversing a minefield of a different sort in this book; one where he tries to avoid the explosive dangers his father has planted as well as the ones he wasn't trained to avoid by what every boy needs -- an involved dad.

Some people have wonderful parents who do everything right -- they are the one percent.  The rest of us claw through the tangled underbrush of pain and confusion, anger and hurt, gifted to us by parents who don't necessarily mean to do so. 

Where Anthony Swofford succeeds is in writing a story that could have been overly vitriolic and full of spitfire, but instead he keeps a controlled voice yet clearly expresses his anger.  In what could have been a difficult read, he instead provides us with the opposite: an honest, well-written, account of a man trying to make his way despite all the obstacles in his path.

They say to really write well, one must bleed on the page.  Thank goodness Swofford takes this advice.  It could easily have turned into a bloodbath, but instead is a steady trickle.  A bloodletting, if you will.

Highly recommended.

On My Radar

The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia
by Sal Polisi and Steve Dougherty

Gallery Books / Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

The Mob was the biggest, richest business in America—too dangerous and too deadly to fail. Until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime Family values.

And by guys like Sal Polisi.

He was born in Brooklyn—the same place that spawned Murder, Inc., Al Capone, and John Gotti, the future Mob godfather who became his friend. Polisi was raised on a family legacy that led him into the life he loved as a member of the Colombos, one of the New York Mob’s feared Five Families, and came of age when the Mafia was at the height of its vast wealth and power.

Known by his Mob name, Sally Ubatz (“Crazy Sally”), he ran an illegal after-hours gambling den, The Sinatra Club, that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters like Gotti and the three wiseguys immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas—Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, and Tommy DeSimone. For Polisi, the nonstop thrills of glory days spent robbing banks, hijacking trucks, pulling daring heists—and getting away with it all, thanks to cops and public servants corrupted by Mob money—were fleeting. When he was busted for drug trafficking, and already sickened by the bloodbath that engulfed the Mob as it teetered toward extinction, he flipped and became one of a breed he had loathed all his life—a rat.

In this riveting, pulse-pounding, and, at times, darkly hilarious first-person chronicle of his brazen crimes, wild sexual escapades, and personal tragedies, Polisi tells his story of life inside the New York Mob in a voice straight from the streets. With shocking candor, he draws on a hard-won knowledge of Mob history to paint a neverbefore- seen picture of the inner workings of the Mob and the larger-than-life characters who populated a once extensive and secret underworld that, thanks to guys like him, no longer exists.

***

I was always a street guy. I was into robbing and stealing and gambling and loan sharking. I wasn’t involved in the bigmoney sit-downs, the labor racketeering and construction company shakedowns, the Garment District and garbage and cement company kickbacks. . . . For guys like me and Fox, my blood brother and crime partner, the thing we loved about being in that life was the action, the excitement. . . .We were in it for the money, sure. But it was the danger, the thrills that made the life of crime something special.

A guy like John Gotti was different. He was far more ambitious than me and Fox. He wasn’t just in it for the rush and the riches. He wanted the power and the glory.

John Gotti’s tragedy, if you can call it that, was that he was born too late for the old-school gangster crown that he craved. He began his rise as the Mob was beginning to crumble; by the time he got to the top, the bottom had dropped out.

From the beginning, John was charismatic and smart. He just wasn’t cut out to be godfather. Once he became boss, he drove the bus right off the bridge. Or maybe it was the bus that drove him. Either way, I watched him go.

Here’s how it all happened.

On My Radar

It Could Have Been Yours: The Enlightened Person's Guide to the Year's Most Desirable Things
by Jolyon Fenwick & Marcus Husselby

Profile Books
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Things you never knew you wanted - even if you could afford them

From Silvio Berlusconi's bed to Casanova's memoirs (the most expensive manuscript in history), via the Statue of Liberty's nose and an X-ray of Marilyn Monroe's chest, here is a remarkable record of some of the quirkiest, most unexpected and sometimes bizarre possessions that have changed hands in the last year - some costing millions, some only pennies (or even nothing at all). Ranging from rare historical artefacts (such as Marie-Antoinette's pearls) to the weirdly iconic (Elvis's medicine cabinet, anyone?), by turns ingenious, intriguing and witty, this is a brilliant and teasing insight into the culture of our time, packed with extraordinary things to amuse, inspire or amaze.

- - - - - - 

What is "On My Radar"?

I have worked in book retail for much of my adult life.  I am pretty well-versed in the way the business works, at least at the store level.

One of the things that has always bothered me is that there are many new books that come in and get shelved with no publicity whatsoever.  A lot of books, whether they are by a popular author, or have received some pre-release critical buzz, get prime placement in stores through “co-op” deals.  These are deals where book publishers pay retail outlets to place certain books in prime locations to guarantee they will be seen.

But many books don’t have this sort of push behind them.  This is where BookSpin comes in.
I do my best to find under the radar books and publicize them on my humble little blog.  Sometimes the books that catch my eye are also “popular” releases, but my focus is normally the ones that could easily be lost in the crowd.

Look at this way:  if a new book comes in and has no co-op support, it could easily be shelved in its section with only the spine showing.  What are the odds this book will be found?  BookSpin strives to be an outlet for getting the word to readers about these under the radar books, and therefore the ironic “On My Radar” was born.

On My Radar also serves as notice to publishers that these are the type of titles I am interested in and would love to review (hint, hint).

Also, a little bit more honesty here….I am disappointed how infrequently the publisher twitter accounts utilize the “@connect” button to search the mentions of their twitter names.  A “retweet” from a publisher can result in new followers for those of us out here doing our best to get the word out for them.

What I'm Reading Now

Klonopin Lunch: A Memoir
by Jessica Dorfman Jones
Crown Publishing

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Gritty. Dirty. Hard-core. Transformative. Funny.  This is the real Sex and the City.

By her late twenties, Jessica Dorfman Jones had dutifully achieved everything she thought she was supposed to: marriage, law degree, high-paying job, nice apartment in Greenwich Village. But she was miserable and felt like she was living a life that wasn't hers. Desperate to change her status quo and figure out who she really was, Jessica went about the business of making a change by demolishing the life she knew. She threw her good-girl image aside and set out to unleash the very bad girl she had never before tried to be.

Embracing the deliciously debauched world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Jessica leaves behind her sweet and well-behaved husband for the ultimate bad-boy guitar player, starts her own band, and parties harder than she had ever thought possible. She starts a band, puts her job in jeopardy, and causes her friends and family no end of worry with her illicit behavior. And then, in the midst of her self-created chaos, the wildest thing of all happens. She figures out who she is, who she most definitely is not, and what might, if she's lucky, come next.

Klonopin Lunch is Jessica’s wickedly funny and uncensored journey down the rabbit hole and back out again, into a life that, at last, makes her truly happy.

Out This Week: American Gypsy

American Gypsy: A Memoir
by Oksana Marafioti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

A vivid and funny memoir about growing up Gypsy and becoming American
Fifteen-year-old Oksana Marafioti is a Gypsy. This means touring with the family band from the Mongolian deserts to the Siberian tundra. It means getting your hair cut in “the Lioness.” It also means enduring sneering racism from every segment of Soviet society. Her father is determined that his girls lead a better, freer life. In America! Also, he wants to play guitar with B. B. King. And cure cancer with his personal magnetism. All of this he confides to the woman at the American embassy, who inexplicably allows the family entry. Soon they are living on the sketchier side of Hollywood.

What little Oksana and her sister, Roxy, know of the United States they’ve learned from MTV, subcategory George Michael. It doesn’t quite prepare them for the challenges of immigration. Why are the glamorous Kraft Singles individually wrapped? Are the little soaps in the motels really free? How do you protect your nice new boyfriend from your opinionated father, who wants you to marry decently, within the clan?

In this affecting, hilarious memoir, Marafioti cracks open the secretive world of the Roma and brings the absurdities, miscommunications, and unpredictable victories of the immigrant experience to life. With unsentimentally perfect pitch, American Gypsy reveals how Marafioti adjusted to her new life in America, one slice of processed cheese at a time.

What I'm Reading Now 6/27/12

The Letter: My Journey Through Love, Loss & Life
by Marie Tillman
Grand Central Publishing

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

In 2003, Pat Tillman, serving in the US Army, hastily wrote a "just in case" letter to his wife, Marie. When he returned on leave before his departure to Afghanistan, he placed the letter on top of their bedroom dresser. For months it sat there, sealed and ever-present, like a black hole through which Marie knew her stable life would be pulled if she ever had reason to open it. Then, in April 2004, Marie's worst nightmare came true. In the days following his death, it was Pat's letter that kept her going and, more than that, it was his words that would help her learn to navigate a world she could no longer share with her husband.

In THE LETTER, Marie's talks for the first time about her journey to remake her life after Pat's death. In it, she recalls meeting and falling in love with Pat when they were kids, his harrowing decision to join the army after 9/11, and the devastating day when she learned he'd been killed. She describes how she withdrew from the public spotlight to grieve, learning along the way the value of solitude, self-awareness and integrity in the healing process. And, finally, Marie recounts her work to rebuild her life, including founding The Pat Tillman Foundation, an organization established to carry forth Pat's legacy of leadership, and her decision to step back into the public eye in order to inspire people to live with meaning and purpose.

Filled with the lessons Marie learned and the wisdom she gained since Pat's death, THE LETTER is both a heartrending love story and an inspiring tale for anyone, young or old, whose life has taken an unexpected hard turn -- and who struggles to get back on the right path.