A look at this week’s books of interest, reviewed around the world:
Oprah by Kitty Kelley (Crown Publishers, 2010).
After penning unauthorized accounts of the lives of everyone from Nancy Reagan to the British royals, writer Kitty Kelley is as infamous as her subjects are famous. Taking on Oprah Winfrey in her latest work, Kelley has incurred the usual skepticism from reviewers, alongside curious awe. In the New York Times Janet Maslin calls the book “disjointed,” suggesting that Winfrey may be too confessional about her life to warrant a tell-all. In the Washington Post, Louise Bayard poses the same question: “Hasn’t Winfrey told us all we need to know about herself?” That Kelley says she knows who Winfrey’s biological father is seems to be the only jewel of real gossip, yet Kelley, with uncharacteristic delicacy, refuses to divulge his identity.
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) by David Remnick.
Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from my Father, did a lot to contribute to his reputation and arguably his victory in the 2008 election. In his “exhaustively researched” book, reporter and New Yorker editor David Remnick both supplements and debunks Obama’s account of his own coming of age. While Obama portrayed his mother as naïve, Remnick proves her to be a confident intellectual; Obama’s account of his grandfather as a marginalized “houseboy” is challenged by Remnick’s evidence that he was “a respected village elder and property owner, who left his native town for Nairobi to cook for British colonials, and then traveled with British troops to Burma, bringing back their Western clothes and ways to his village.” In the New York Times, historian and author Gary Willis writes that “Remnick rightly sees that memoir as a bildungsroman in the specifically black form of a ‘slave narrative,’ a story of the rise from dependency to mature self-possession,” and views The Bridge as a compelling document that will be used to predict and explain Obama’s presidency, in spite of its focus on his life before the election.
Crossing the Mandelbaum Gate (Scribner, 2010) by Kai Bird.
A memoir from former Nation editor Bird tells of his Middle East childhood in, among other places, Maadi, as well as East Jerusalem where he moved in 1956. Although “meandering,” the “earnest” book “illuminates a common experience among expatriates who crisscross the Middle East without being emotionally bonded to any side,” writes Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times.
Beatrice and Virgil by Yan Martel (Spiegel & Grau. 13 April, 2010).
The follow-up to Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Life of Pi, a holocaust allegory whose protagonist is a writer similar to Marterl himself, has garnered some decidedly negative reviews from both Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, and Ron Charles of the Washington Post. Charles writes, “Beatrice and Virgil is so dull, so misguided, so pretentious that only the prospect of those millions of “Pi” fans could secure the interest of major publishers and a multimillion-dollar advance.” And Kakutani levels her own criticism bluntly, also comparing the new volume to Martel’s earlier success: Beatrice and Virgil “is every bit as misconceived and offensive as his earlier book was fetching.”
Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Jonathan Cape, 2010) by Fatima Bhutto.
A memoir by the niece of the late Pakistani Prime minister is a worthy effort, if a little formally misguided. Writes Brenda Maddock in UK paper The Times, “The purpose of this painful biography is admirable and touching. It is a daughter’s loving recollection of her murdered father, Murtaza Bhutto, political leader of a radical party, shot dead by police in Karachi in 1996.” The book does not go far in the way of making sense of the Bhutto family’s political history and strife; but its successes lie in its emotional and private insight, particularly regarding the author’s relationship to her aunt, whom she refers to affectionately as “Wadi.”
