What People Magazine is Reading This Week (Nov 21st Issue)

For those Kindle readers who, like me, read for entertainment, scanning the book reviews in People magazine is good way to check out new people-related books - celebrity bios, popular novels, absorbing nonfiction - just hitting bookstore shelves. Featured in the November 21st issue of People:

11/22/63, by Stephen King. Scribner, 2011. Print Length: 866 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (123 reviews). People's slant: "At 849 pages, this is a mammoth but entertaining book..." Kindle edition $16.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination...Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students - a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald..." - Publisher.

Shockaholic, by Carrie Fisher. Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print Length: 176 p. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (6 reviews). People's slant: "Fisher is a girl who knows how to tell a story." Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"It’s been a roller coaster of a few years for Carrie since her Tony- and Emmy-nominated, one-woman Broadway show and New York Times bestselling book Wishful Drinking. She not only lost her beloved father, but also her once-upon-a-very-brief-time stepmother, Elizabeth Taylor. And as if all that weren’t enough, she also managed to lose over forty pounds of unwanted flesh - not by sawing off a leg (though that did cross her zapped mind) but by doing what might be termed 'wishful shrinking,' all the while staying sober and sane-ish. And she wants to tell you, dear reader, all about it...and more." - Publisher.

God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem, by Darrell Hammond. Harper, 2011. Print Length: 308 p. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (11 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"From his harrowing childhood filled with physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his parents, to a lifetime of alcoholism and self-mutilation, psychiatric hospitalizations, and misdiagnoses, to the peak of fame and success as the longest-tenured cast member of Saturday Night Live, Darrell Hammond delves into the darkest corners of his life, both in front of and behind the camera, with brutal honesty and fierce comic wit. On the back of his hilarious dead-on impressions of Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Chris Matthews, and a hundred other prominent figures, Hammond was invited into the inner sanctums of the country's political leaders, including three presidents, all the while suffering debilitating and largely undiagnosed mental anguish...His long fight for sobriety, filled with heartbreaking relapses, was propelled by a desire to do right by his young daughter and to set the record straight about how he fell so low while achieving such heights." - Publisher.

Briefly Mentioned:

The New Kids, by Brooke Hauser. Free Press, 2011. Print Length: 320 p. NONFICTION. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (9 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Some walked across deserts and mountains to get here. Others flew in on planes. One arrived after escaping in a suitcase. And some won’t say how they got here. These are 'the new kids': new to America and all the routines and rituals of an American high school, from lonely first days to prom. They attend the International High School at Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, which is like most high schools in some ways - its halls are filled with students gossiping, joking, flirting, and pushing the limits of the school’s dress code - but all of the students are recent immigrants learning English. Together, they come from more than forty-five countries and speak more than twenty-eight languages. A singular work of narrative journalism, The New Kids chronicles a year in the life of a remarkable group of these teenage newcomers - a multicultural mosaic that embodies what is truly amazing about America." - Publisher.

The Garner Files, by James Garner and Jon Winokur. Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print Length: 290 p. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (21 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"After suffering physical abuse at the hands of his stepmother, Garner left home at fourteen. He became Oklahoma's first draftee of the Korean War and was awarded with two Purple Hearts before returning to the United States and settling in Los Angeles to become an actor. Working alongside some of the most renowned celebrities, including Julie Andrews, Marlon Brando, and Clint Eastwood, Garner became a star in his own right, despite struggles with stage fright and depression. In The Garner Files, this revered actor and quintessential self-made man recalls 'trying to decipher' William Wyler with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, breaking Doris Day's ribs, having a "heart-to-heart and eyeball-to-eyeball" with Steve McQueen, being 'a card-carrying liberal—and proud of it,' and much more." - Publisher.

The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir, by Randy Fertel. University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Print Length: 288 p. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (10 reviews). Kindle edition $15.40. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Ruth Fertel was a petite, smart, tough-as-nails blonde with a weakness for rogues, who founded the Ruth's Chris Steak House empire almost by accident. Rodney Fertel was a gold-plated, one-of-a-kind personality, a railbird-heir to wealth from a pawnshop of dubious repute just around the corner from where the teenage Louis Armstrong and his trumpet were discovered. When Fertel ran for mayor of New Orleans on a single campaign promise - buying a pair of gorillas for the zoo - he garnered a paltry 308 votes. Then he purchased the gorillas anyway! These colorful figures yoked together two worlds not often connected - lazy rice farms in the bayous and swinging urban streets where ethnicities jazzily collided. The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is a New Orleans story, featuring the distinctive characters, color, food, and history of that city - before Hurricane Katrina and after. But it also is the universal story of family and the full magnitude of outsize follies leavened with equal measures of humor, rage, and rue." - Publisher.

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Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


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A Week of Entertainment: Kindle Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly's November 11th and 18th Issues

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the November 11th and 18th issues include:

Then Again, by Diane Keaton. Random House, 2011. Print length: 304 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant:"...an autobiographical project as idiosyncratic as its subject." Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table. Mom liked to THINK. So begins Diane Keaton’s unforgettable memoir about her mother and herself. In it you will meet the woman known to tens of millions as Annie Hall, but you will also meet, and fall in love with, her mother, the loving, complicated, always-thinking Dorothy Hall. Over the course of her life, Dorothy kept eighty-five journals - literally thousands of pages - in which she wrote about her marriage, her children, and, most probingly, herself. Dorothy also recorded memorable stories about Diane’s grandparents. Diane has sorted through these pages to paint an unflinching portrait of her mother - a woman restless with intellectual and creative energy, struggling to find an outlet for her talents - as well as her entire family, recounting a story that spans four generations and nearly a hundred years." - from the hardcover edition.

Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, by Ann Beattie. Scribner, 2011. Print length: 304 p. LITERARY BIOGRAPHY. EW's slant: "...strikingly original..." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon’s wife: “interchangeable with a Martian,” she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources from Life magazine to accounts by Nixon’s daughter and his doctor to The Haldeman Diaries and Jonathan Schell’s The Time of Illusion, Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon’s point of view. Like Stephen King’s On Writing, this fascinating and intimate account offers readers a rare glimpse into the imagination of a writer. Beattie...packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom boomers came of age. Mrs. Nixon is a startlingly compelling and revelatory work." - Publisher.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion. Knopf, 2011. Print Length: 208 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "What wafts off the pages of this haunting memento mori are undistilled, profoundly human expressions of fatigue, fear, dignity, regret, and vulnerability that are almost - but not quite - under the author's control." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (27 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood - in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced... Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept." - from the hardcover edition.

Shine, by Lauren Myracle. Amulet Books, 2011. Print length: 376 p. YA NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a bleak, artful novel that paints a nuanced picture of hatred..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (58 reviews). Kindle edition $9.32. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"When her best guy friend falls victim to a vicious hate crime, sixteen-year-old Cat sets out to discover who in her small town did it. Richly atmospheric, this daring mystery mines the secrets of a tightly knit Southern community and examines the strength of will it takes to go against everyone you know in the name of justice. Against a backdrop of poverty, clannishness, drugs, and intolerance, Myracle has crafted a harrowing coming-of-age tale couched in a deeply intelligent mystery." - Publisher.

My Long Trip Home, by Mark Whitaker. Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print length: 368 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...less about the journalist's storied career than his gut-wrenching saga of family and racial identity." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"His father, 'Syl' Whitaker, was the charismatic grandson of slaves who grew up the child of black undertakers from Pittsburgh and went on to become a groundbreaking scholar of Africa. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a shy World War II refugee from France whose father, a Huguenot pastor, helped hide thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy police. They met in the mid-1950s, when he was a college student and she was his professor, and they carried on a secret romance for more than a year before marrying and having two boys. Eventually they split in a bitter divorce that was followed by decades of unhappiness as his mother coped with self-recrimination and depression while trying to raise her sons by herself, and his father spiraled into an alcoholic descent that destroyed his once meteoric career. Based on extensive interviews and documentary research as well as his own personal recollections and insights, My Long Trip Home is a reporter’s search for the factual and emotional truth about a complicated and compelling family..." - Publisher.

The Last Testament, by God, with David Javerbaum. Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print length: 400 p. HUMOR. EW's slant: "...the Almighty (with some help from David Javerbaum, former executive producer of The Daily Show) delivers the ultimate telleth-all." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $10.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Over the course of his long and distinguished career, god has literally seen it all. And not just seen. In fact, the multi-talented deity has played a pivotal role in many major events, including the Creation of the universe, the entirety of world history, the life of every human being who has ever lived, and the successful transitioning of American Idol into the post–Simon Cowell era. Now, as the earth he has godded so magnificently draws to a Mayan-induced close, God breaks his 1,400-year literary silence with his final masterpiece, The Last Testament. As dictated to his mortal amanuensis, 11-time Emmy Award–winning comedy writer David Javerbaum, God looks back with unprecedented candor on his time in the public sector. Sometimes preachy, sometimes holier-than-thou, but always lively...sure to appeal to not only hardcore God fans and 'worshipers,' but to anyone who’s ever had total omnipotence." - Publisher.
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Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


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