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RSSFeeling rushed, helpless, out of sorts and just plain anxious?
Then you need to leaf through the pages of Rachael Hale’s The French Cat, a lovely coffee-table book from Stewart, Tabori & Chang.
Feeling rushed, helpless, out of sorts and just plain anxious?
Then you need to leaf through the pages of Rachael Hale’s The French Cat, a lovely coffee-table book from Stewart, Tabori & Chang.
You can look at "Outside/In" as an extended point/counterpoint – work from the Norton museum’s core photographic collection juxtaposed with the work of six contemporary Florida photographers and artists.
Or you can look at it as an opportunity to experience a lot of neat pictures.
The first time Greta Garbo came to dinner at Ellen Graham’s house was in the mid-1970s. Garbo’s friend Gaylord Hauser warned Graham that, whatever else she did, she shouldn’t ask Garbo about the movies. Oh, and one other thing: Whatever you do, don’t tell her you’re a photographer.
Yogi Berra, the longtime catcher and coach of the Yankees, and Ron Guidry, the team's pitching coach after an outstanding Yankees career, have been longtime friends. (AP)
DRIVING MR. YOGI, by Harvey Araton. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 256 pages; $26.
Driving Mr. Yogi began as a 1,500-word story in the New York Times last spring. Sportswriter Harvey Araton has greatly expanded the story for this book, and he hasn’t done himself any favors.
In sum, it’s about the friendship between Yogi Berra, the aging but game old Yankees catcher and mascot, and Ron Guidry, the Louisiana left-hander who was a pitching mainstay of the club in the ’70s and ’80s, and who serves as Berra’s valet and driver during spring training in Tampa.
It’s also about Berra’s renewed relationship with the team he boycotted after George Steinbrenner indulged in one of his characteristic displays of ugliness and unceremoniously fired Berra in 1985.
Berra and Guidry first became friendly in the mid-’70s, when Guidry joined the varsity and promptly reminded Berra of Lefty Gomez.
"Don’t think too much," he told Guidry, the same thing he told several hundred other pitchers. "Figure out a batter’s weakness and throw him that pitch over and over. And if he learns to hit that pitch, then throw him some other pitch that gives him trouble."
Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates (Yale) is a tidy paperback that not only fascinates but informs.
Martin Hopkinson’s book tells us that bookplates first came about in the 15th century, just in time for Albrecht Durer to design a particularly beautiful bookplate for one Willibald Pirckheimer, a friend of the artist, who did a portrait of Pirckheimer for his bookplate.
Author Pat Conroy will be at the Love of Literacy Lunch at the Kravis Center on Friday. (Photo provided)
Pat Conroy’s nine novels have earned him millions of devoted readers. He arouses a passionate devotion because of his combination of lyricism and emotional honesty.
The son of a military man, Conroy was expected to follow suit. He became a writer instead and has explored themes of dysfunctional families and Southern life in bestselling books such as The Great Santini, The Water is Wide, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music.
He will be speaking at the Love of Literacy Lunch at the Kravis Center on Friday, kicking off this year’s Read Together Palm Beach County event. The lunch is sold out, but Conroy spoke to The Palm Beach Post from his home in Beaufort, S.C.
A sense of place is paramount in your work, yet you had a peripatetic childhood where you were never in one place for very long. When did you first feel at home in a place?
I can answer that right now. Beaufort, S.C., where I am now sitting. When my father was dying, he pulled out a book and said, "Do you want to see all the places you lived?" When I was 15, we drove across the bridge and came to Beaufort and that was my 23rd move since I was born.
Beaufort was my third straight high school. I complained to my mother that I didn’t get to go to the house of a single boy. I’d never danced with a girl, never held a girl’s hand. I went to an all-boy’s school.
And she said, "Make Beaufort your home. America needs a fighter pilot in Beaufort."
So I just honed in on this little town. They didn’t ask for me, they got me. And I’ve attached myself to this town in my work.
The towns, once common currency as synonyms for brutality and death on an industrial scale, are now just words on a map:
Verdun. Chateau Thierry.
But nearly a hundred years ago, as The Great War ground to a halt, the air around those villages was filled with the smell of gunpowder and the mud was fertilized with thousands of unburied bodies.
Anne Morgan, the daughter of the financier J.P. Morgan, looked into the abyss and decided to jump. Morgan was a sophisticated New Yorker with taste – she founded the Colony Club and helped finance one of Cole Porter’s first Broadway shows.
Morgan had been a Francophile before World War I, but when she saw the devastation left behind, she was determined to do something about it and rebuild the lives of French refugees.
The photography exhibit, Anne Morgan’s War: Rebuilding Devastated France 1917-1924, was, appropriately enough, originally presented by the Morgan Library in New York. In Palm Beach, the Wally Findlay Gallery is showcasing the exhibit through March, and it serves as a reminder that not all clubwomen were sipping tea and attending socials.
What Morgan did was organize women of her class. Her recruits had to speak French, have a driver’s license, buy their uniforms at B. Altman, and be able to pay their own expenses, which amounted to around $1,500 for a six month tour of duty.
We didn’t have the Encyclopaedia Britannica in my house. We didn’t even have the World Book. We had Funk & Wagnall’s, which I seem to recall cost $2 a volume for 20 weeks at the local A&P.
The crisis came when you missed a week because you got there after the new volume was sold out, which meant somebody had to go scavenging among all the other A&P stores for the missing volume.
I didn’t see an Encyclopaedia Britannica until I went to high school. When I dove into it – which honesty compels me to admit I did sparingly – the entries seemed weighty, like a chemistry textbook translated from unyielding Greek.
But there it was: authority, properly vetted, edited and re-edited within an inch of its life. And now it will be gone, at least as we used to know it: Britannica officials announced last week that it will discontinue the print edition and produce it only online.
The Britannica wasn’t so vulgar as to bring out an edition every year. Decades would go by with the scholar/squirrels writing and updating. Everybody seems to agree that the 11th edition, from 1911, was the gold standard, combining scholarship and literary style.
Certainly, you knew everything in it was factual, because the Britannica hired authorities to write their entries: Lon Chaney wrote the entry on makeup, and other contributors over the years included Albert Einstein and Leon Trotsky.
CAMOUFLAGE, by Bill Pronzini. Forge; 269 pages; $24.99.
From the beginning of Bill Pronzini’s Camouflage, there is a comforting classicism to the storytelling: a man walks into an office and tells the detective his problem.
In this case, he wants the detective to find his ex-wife and get her to agree to an annulment of their long-ago wedding.
It’s an unusual request, but it seems the man’s fiancée is Catholic and can’t have the church-sanctioned wedding she requires unless his previous wedding is annulled.
This apparently simple task is the proverbial loose thread that gradually unravels until we’re confronted with child abuse and a pile of dead bodies, including the aforementioned prospective husband, who turns out to have bad luck in all things.
Camouflage is Bill Pronzini’s 35th novel featuring The Nameless Detective, a character who made his first appearance in a short story in 1967 – another world ago.
The very name The Nameless Detective promises a sort of smoky noir world of disguises and double-disguises, but he’s not nameless because he’s hiding something, he’s nameless because his first-person narration never gets around to mentioning his last name. (His first name is Bill.)
Jane Powell, who will be in Palm Beach on Thursday to host a fundraising lunch, worked with Fred Astaire in 'Royal Wedding' in 1951.
Jane Powell was a girl soprano in Portland, Ore., when she was discovered on a radio show. Hollywood beckoned shortly thereafter in 1944, when Powell was only 15. Her brilliant coloratura attracted the attention of MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer, who had a weakness for opera, and she spent more than 10 years at the studio, starring in such classics as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Royal Wedding.
Powell worked opposite legends such as Fred Astaire, as well as the occasional picture with a non-legend such as Wallace Beery, reputedly one of the most obnoxious people in the movie industry.
Powell, who lives in New York City with her husband, former child star Dick Moore, will be here Thursday to host a luncheon at Club Colette in Palm Beach that benefits the nonprofit, Career Transition for Dancers.
Q. What exactly is Career Transition for Dancers?
A. It’s a national organization, and as a matter of fact a lot of dancers from Florida have been part of it – about 1,500 dancers. Dancers are like athletes in that they only have so much time to their careers. This organization finds them different occupations when their dancing days are over. They’re trained and advised and it’s been very successful
Q. You were primarily a singer, but you had to learn to dance as well. When you worked with Astaire, how did he compensate for the difference in your expertise? On screen, it’s not noticeable.
A. Astaire was a very good partner, because he wanted to show off everybody, not show them up. He was a very giving man. It was about the number and the movie, it wasn’t about him. There was actually very little ego about Fred. He was probably insecure about something. He was certainly a very quiet man, highly sensitive – his dancing was sensitive.
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