Victoria Wilson’s new biography, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 is impressive, if just for its length and heft. It is just the first half of a two-part exhaustive look into the life and career of one of Hollywood’s most enduring, yet shyest stars. Stanwyck, born Ruby Stevens, started life in Brooklyn as a quasi-orphan. Her mother died when she was quite young and her father disappeared soon after, leaving young Ruby and her brother Byron to be raised by friends and family. Her three older […]
A Gift from a Master Storyteller
Brought to you in living color
You’ve probably already seen a review of Hyperbole and a Half. Cannonball Read 6 already has four, and Cannonball Read 5 had a few as well. But, from what I can tell, I’m the first to review it who only has a passing knowledge of Allie Brosh’s blog of the same name. I mean, I was aware of it. I had read about the Alots (who do not feature in the book), the helper dog and the simple dog, and about Brosh’s bout with depression. […]
Badkittyuno’s Review #9: But Enough About Me by Jancee Dunn
“The process of engaging your celebrity is not unlike being a photographer at the Sears portrait studio. You just need a different version of a squeaky toy so their eyes follow you and they smile occasionally.” Jancee Dunn grew up in suburban Jersey, with two little sisters, a former Southern beauty queen for a mother and a JC Penney exec for a father. She somehow stumbled into a job writing for Rolling Stone, and ended up traveling around the world as she interviewed celebrity after celebrity. […]
Book of Ages by Jill Lepore
Book of Ages was a 2013 National Book Award finalist in the non-fiction category. Historian Jill Lepore pieces together the life of Ben Franklin’s sister Jane and in doing so not only reveals the life of a fascinating “ordinary” 18th-century woman who happened to be the beloved little sister of a Founding Father, but also demonstrates her own prodigious skills as an historian. Lepore’s work is specifically about Jane but more broadly about history and historians, biography and novels, and determining whose lives are worth […]
Anarchy in Italy
Graphic memoirs are in a real danger of becoming an old hat. The genre seemed so groundbreaking in the early 90’s when Art Spiegelman finished Maus, or even in 2000 with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and there are still some interesting work published under the umbrella “graphic memoir.” And it’s a good thing that the new comic book releases shelve in our local library calls to me like heroin calls to Iggy Pop, or I might have missed one of them, namely Ulli Lust’s