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Sunday Book Reviews

Written on: July 20th, 2009 by: in Reviews

As always- a read of the Book Reviews Section leaves one spoiled for choice. There are so many good books to read, so many things to find out about!

• Stormy Weather, the Life of Lena Horne, by James Gavin, which tracks the parallel tales of Lena Horne’s rise to stardom and the struggles for economic and social rights by the emerging black middle class in America.
• Satchel, by Larry Tye, which is said to do a great job of reclaiming some credit for Paige for the desegregation of baseball in America- an achievment usually dedicated to Jackie Robinson. Dave Davies of NPR’s Fresh Air recently interviewed the author, and you can listen to the interview here.
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin. I’ve read a number of other reviews recently about this book, which chronicles Ford’s eccentric strategy for cornering the market for raw rubber by colonizing remote tracts of the Brazilian rain forest. You can probably imagine how well this turned out…

However, the best literary feature of this week’s New York Times was not even in the book review section. Today’s magazine had a great profile of science-fiction author Jack Vance, who article author Carlo Rotella claims would be an icon of serious fiction had he chosen another genre, or was blessed with a foreign-sounding name. Vance, now 92, began writing during his Navy service in World War II, and has kept up a furious pace ever since. He is currently working on his autobiography, which should be well worth reading.