Usually, celebrity autobiographies are pretty boring. Even if you like the actor, it’s tedious to listen to them blather on about their craft and how lucky they are and blah blah blah (the obvious exceptions are the WW2 celebrities, who made movies and punched Nazis). Neil Patrick Harris gets this-not enough to resist the urge of writing an autobiography-and makes his book pleasant and clever-and surprisingly heartfelt. Framed as a Choose Your Own Adventure book, the reader is an active participant in the book, flipping […]
The True American Horror Story
Stephen King is considered to be the master of modern American horror, but with all due respect, that’s not true. Haunted hotels, telekinetic prom queens and evil clowns (or just, you know clowns) got nothing on human depravity. Pet Semetary may have freaked me out, but it’s Toni Morrison’s story of the dead child coming back to life that’s going to keep me up at night. Sethe was born a slave but escaped to the free state of Ohio before the Civil War. Haunted for 18 years […]
Angry people making pretty dresses
It was a fashion battle of the bands. In November 1973, American and French designers went head to head in an ostentatious and outrageous fashion show in Paris. The competition, set up by American fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert with the assistance of French aristocrat Marie-Helene de Rothschild, was held in the Theatre Gabriel in the Chateau de Versailles. It was ostensibly a benefit for charity; the evening would be dinner and a fashion show between five French (Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, […]
The Ties that Bind Us
During the 1960s Chinese Cultural Revolution an old woman fainted at a train station. While going through her belongings to identify her, police found scraps of paper with strange writing they’d never seen before. They assumed she was a spy and arrested her. But scholars sent to identify the characters realized the script was nu shu-a written language written exclusively by women in remote areas of China. Literally meaning “Women’s Writing” nu shu had very little in common with the “traditional” Chinese characters that men […]
That time a Sheriff tried to lynch Thurgood Marshall
In 1949, a 17-year old white woman didn’t come home one night. The next day, she and her husband said she had been raped by four black men. Two of the men had helped the couple when they were stranded in their car. Two more were nowhere near the scene of the alleged crime-one was being arrested miles away. But that didn’t matter. The accusation of black hands sullying white maidenhood was enough to whip white Southerners in a frenzy. Only three of the accused […]
A Study of Grief and Dysfunction
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. At first glance, Everything I Never Told You looks like a classic thriller. There’s a missing girl, a family with secrets, a lake, and a bad boy who knows more than he’s willing to say. It’s easy to think it’s a familiar story about catching a killer. That’s the first curve ball author Celeste Ng throws at you, but not the last. It turns out discovering who killed Lydia (and did anyone actually kill Lydia?) is […]
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