Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrongby Terry Teachout
A biography that argues Armstrong was a misunderstood musical genius.
If only LiveJournal had existed back then: Louis Armstrong got a new toy in 1947—a tape recorder. At first, Armstrong just used it to record his shows so he could tweak them afterward. But soon he began documenting his entire life, recording dinner parties, conversations, and coaxing his wife into bed. The jazz legend left behind about 650 tapes, which were first made available in 2002. And Terry Teachout has made good use of them, the San Francisco Chronicle writes. “Unlike previous biographers, Teachout treats Armstrong as the true artist he was...Teachout’s book is the most balanced book ever written on Armstrong. In addition to making the oft-told tales of Armstrong’s upbringing in New Orleans and his landmark 1920s recordings sound fresh, Teachout devotes a full third of Pops to Armstrong’s final 25 years. This is positively revolutionary since the standard line of thinking for decades has been that the young, trailblazing genius of the 1920s threw his art away to become a smiling, commercial, clowning Uncle Tom for the rest of his career, a theory Teachout rightly dismisses without apology.”
Too Much Moneyby Dominick Dunne
From the master scribe of high society, one last, incisive novel of foibles and wit.
With the publication of Too Much Money, Dominick Dunne will settle a few last scores from the grave. The society crime writer died in August, but the manuscript for his last thinly fictionalized novel was complete, allowing him to leave fans with one last gleeful skewering of the Manhattan elite. The plot revolves around a possibly murderous heiress and her attempts to keep Gus Bailey, the author’s autobiographical character, from publishing a novel about her, but “[t]he plot of Too Much Money... is almost an incidental feature,” New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin writes. The point is to skewer all that Dunne finds loathsome, while still allowing for a little voyeurism. “It is this book’s style to obfuscate ever so slightly... while still allowing—no, insisting—that readers’ noses stay pressed to the glass of New York’s whirl of bold-face names. If you can’t figure out or don’t care that the talk-show host called Harry Sovereign may be Larry King, this is not a book for you.” But, Maslin writes, “[O]ne of the book’s sly virtues is using ‘cheap’ as a compliment where sex is concerned and as a horror everywhere else.”
Churchillby Paul Johnson
The stocking-stuffer version of Churchill’s life—all that one really needs to know.
Volumes and volumes have been written about Winston Churchill, perhaps the most famous and exalted statesman in recent history, but none have managed to capture his outsize significance and anecdote-rich life in as few pages as Paul Johnson does in this book. Ostensibly addressed to a younger audience, this biography, though perhaps not skeptical enough, will serve as an excellent introduction to Churchill for all ages. By quoting liberally from his subject, Johnson showcases the great man’s wit and style. He told The Wall Street Journal that he’s convinced that “Churchill was more than half American... all of his real qualities generally come from his mother’s side.” And Churchill’s lack of education helped him govern, says Johnson: “He never learned any of the bad intellectual habits you can pick up at university, and it explains the extraordinary freshness with which he came to all sorts of things, especially English literature.”
Hollywood Moonby Joseph Wambaugh
The latest hyper-realistic cop-thriller from a former reporter.
Joseph Wambaugh was a cop for 14 years before he quit to write full-time. His first book, The New Centurions, portrayed cops as they’d never been seen before—not as uncomplicated heroes, but as “hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, foul-mouthed, cynical policemen,” Patrick Anderson writes in The Washington Post. Since then, Wambaugh’s work has been hugely influential on the hyper-realistic cop novels that followed. He went on to write the acclaimed true-crime story The Onion Field, and then wrote for movies and television. Returning to the old-fashioned crime procedural, Wambaugh penned Hollywood Station (“ a triumph in the old style of heightened realism") in 2006. This year’s Hollywood Moon is the third novel he’s set in that city, and it features his signature dark humor and improbable situations.
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Babyby Tom Wolfe
The ur-text of New Journalism still bears rereading now.
With newspapers and magazines struggling for survival, it’s a good time to revisit one of the classic works of New Journalism that made the press seem so damned glamorous. The carpal-tunnel syndrome-cursed scribe hunched over a laptop asking why, God, why he chose this impossible field need only pick up a newly reissued copy of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby to remember why journalism once seemed like a plausible—nay, attractive—career path. When Wolfe’s essays, mostly published in Esquire and The New York Herald Tribune, first appeared, traditional journalists didn’t quite know what to make of them. Time wrote in 1965, “On the dust jacket the publishers tout Wolfe as quite a conversation piece.... Well, people have been talking unhappily about him, too, lampooning his literary mannerisms and planning branches of the Let’s Punch Tom Wolfe in His Southern Snoot Club. But even readers who dislike Wolfe’s flamboyant, exaggerated style and who feel that he has less than a firm regard for facts agree that there are few other writers today who have so mordant a sense of the ridiculous or such deadly sharpshooting aim.” Newsweek, too, pulled no punches harrumphing that “Wolfe’s prose is as outrageous as his clothes. For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie.’” Where is the new New Journalism?
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