S

A

i l a

who was a consultant on the film. In his
new memoir, The Agent: My 40-Year

Career Making Deals and Changing the
Game (Thomas Dunne Books), Steinberg
delves into both his astounding sports deals
(at one point, half the starting quarterbacks
in the NFL were his clients) and the losses
he's endured since: his divorce, bankruptcy,
alcoholism, losing his agent license and,
most painful, the loss of his father.
Comic novelist (Absurdistan, Super Sad
True Love Story) Gary Shteyngart's first
work of nonfiction, Little Failure (Random
House), is a memoir of his family's move
from the Soviet Union to Queens, N.Y., in
1979 and all that ensues.
Face the Music: A Life Exposed
(HarperOne), a memoir by Paul Stanley,
co-founding member of the iconic rock
band KISS, takes readers on a journey from
his rough-and-tumble New York City child-
hood to his up-and-down experiences with
the band — on and off stage.
Positive: One Doctor's Personal
Encounters with the U.S. Healthcare
System (RTM Ltd.), by Michael Saag, M.D.,
traces the Jewish doctor's life on the front
lines of researching and managing AIDS for
patients while also shining a light on the
dysfunctional U.S. healthcare system.
Author of the food blog Orangette,
Molly Wizenberg has written a mem-
oir, Delancey: A Man, A Woman, A
Restaurant, A Marriage (Simon and
Schuster), recounting how opening a res-
taurant with her husband sparked the first
crisis of her young marriage and how two
young people learned to give in and let go
in order to grow together.

■ "Reading

is one of
the great pleasures
that solitude can
k,afford you."

-_

Harold Bloom

TV writer Carol Liefer (Seinfeld, Devious
Maids) has written a memoir/life guide,
How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Crying: Lessons From a Life in
Comedy (Quirk Books), offering straight
talk on everything from interviews to net-
working.
Bette Midler's reissued 1980 memoir, A
View from a Broad (Simon and Schuster),
highlighting her early career, is updated
with a new introduction.
In The Unlikely Settler (Other Press),
Bengali journalist and filmmaker Lipika
Pelham, married to a Jewish Englishman
active in Israel's peace movement, writes
about the challenges and evolution of her
life in Jerusalem.
My Salinger Year (Knopf), by Joanna
Rakoff, is a memoir about literary New
York in the late '90s, when a young woman
who dreams of being a poet takes a job
as assistant to the literary agent for J. D.
Salinger and finds herself entangled with
one of the most enigmatic figures of the last
century.
In Diary of a Mad Diva (Berkley; July
1), comedian Joan Rivers is back with a
"delightfully vicious" look at her everyday
Jerusalem: Conflict and Cooperation
life — from a family vacation in Mexico to
in a Contested City (Syracuse University
trips between New York and Los Angeles,
Press), edited by Madelaine Adelman
and Miriam Fendius Elman, examines
where she mingles with the stars, never
missing a beat as she delivers blistering cri-
the culture, traditions, history and poli-
tiques on current events and her signature
tics of this multicultural city.
insights about life, pop culture and celebri-
In The Fantastic Laboratory of Doctor
ties.
Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled
There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and
Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (W.W.
Roll (Riverhead) is a mixture of history,
Norton), Arthur Allen writes of two bril-
criticism and revealing stories from music
liant Polish immunologists, one Christian
(Rudolf Weigl) and one Jewish (Dr.
journalist Lisa Robinson, who documents
her four decades embedded with the big-
gest stars of the pop/rock world.
In Moose: Chapters From My Life
(Authorhouse), Robert B. Sherman (one
half of the songwriting team with his
brother Richard of the scores for Mary
Poppins, The Jungle Book and more),
4$0
tells his life story — from the horrors
There are no faster or
he saw as a frontline liberator in World
War II to his successful career alongside
firmer friendships than
Walt Disney in the 1960s; the book was
those formed by people
edited by his son Robert J. Sherman after
Robert B. Sherman's death in 2012.
who love the same books."
Filmmaker Cameron Crowe modeled
his lead character in the movie Jerry
- Irving Stool
Maguire on super-agent Leigh Steinberg,

+ i t

t

Weading

Ludwik Fleck), who developed vaccines
against typhus and found heroic ways
to turn their typhus vaccine research
against the Third Reich.
In 1941, as President Roosevelt real-
ized he needed airplanes — and needed
them fast — to fight the Nazis, he
turned to Detroit and the auto industry
for help. The Arsenal of Democracy:

FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to
Arm America at War (Houghton,
Mifflin, Harcourt), by A.J. Baime,
tells the story of how Detroit answered
the call, centering on the anti-Semitic
Henry Ford and his son Edsel, a man
with Jewish friends, who bucked his
father's resistance and helped transform
Detroit from Motor City to the city that
eventually would help the Allies win the
war.
Jewish Artists and the Bible
in Twentieth-Century America
(Pennsylvania State University Press),
by Samantha Baskind, presents case
studies on Jack Levine, George Segal,
Audrey Flack, Larry Rivers and R.B.
Kitaj, exploring how they and a host of
their Jewish contemporaries custom-
ized the biblical narrative in innovative
ways to address modern issues such
as genocide and the Holocaust, gender
inequality, assimilation and the immi-
grant experience, the establishment of
the State of Israel and more.
The Good Spy: The Life and Death
of Robert Ames (Crown), is Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Kai Bird's untold,
true story of an American CIA operative
who brokered peace in the Middle East
for more than 20 years — until he lost
his life to an act of terror.
In What Should We Be Worried
About (HarperCollins), author John
Brockman asks experts what we should
fret about — from parenting (relax) to
finding love (worry a little) to Internet
collapse (worry a lot).
Need help with the b'nai mitzvah
thank-you notes? Laura Brown's How to
Write Anything (WW. Norton) is a prac-
tical guide to everything you'll ever need
to write — at work, at school and in your
personal life, with more than 200 how-to
entries and easy-to-use models.
A Big Fat Crisis: The Hidden Forces
Behind the Obesity Epidemic — and
How We Can End It (Nation Books),
by Deborah A. Cohen, M.D., blames
a transformed food environment for
America's battle with weight and argues
that the most important and modifiable
steps in the chain of events that lead to
obesity are at the point of purchase and
the point of consumption.
In A World Without Jews: The Nazi
Imagination From Persecution to
Genocide (Yale University Press), Alon
Confino draws on an array of archives
across three continents to demonstrate
that the mass murder of Jews during the

"I require books
as I require air."

war years was strongly anticipated in
the culture of the prewar years.
Dan Epstein's Stars & Strikes:

Baseball and America in the
Bicentennial Summer of '76 (Thomas
Dunne Books) explores the year that
saw a clash between the last feel-good
moments and outrageous personali-
ties of the game, as well as the looming
labor angst and the full onset of free
agency, all against a backdrop of the
world events of the time.
U-M grad and award-winning jour-
nalist Meryl Gordon's The Phantom of
Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and
Scandalous Death of Heiress Hugette
Clark (Grand Central Publishing) is the
true story of a Jazz Age socialite who
grew up in the biggest house in New
York as the daughter of the second-
wealthiest man in America, a copper
magnate. When she died a recluse in
2011 at age 104, she had sequestering
herself for decades in an apartment and
then in a hospital room, with only The
Flintstones on TV to keep her company.
In Kabbalah in Art and Architecture
(Pointed Leaf Press), author and archi-
tect Alexander Gorlin "re-reads" many
works of modern architecture, sculpture
and painting through the kabbalistic idea
of genesis, expressed as light, space and
geometry.
ABC news anchor Dan Harris has found
a way to be happier, calmer and nicer —
despite a very competitive career — and
writes about it in 10% Happier: How I
Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced
Stress Without Losing My Edge, and
Found Self-Help That Actually Works (It
Books) — a spiritual book written for, and
by, someone who would otherwise never
read a spiritual book — that is both a seri-
ous and funny look at mindfulness and
meditation as the next big public-health
revolution.
In Think Like a Freak: The Authors
of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your
Brain (HarperCollins), Steven D. Levitt
and Stephen J. Dubner employ their
trademark storytelling and unconventional

Page Turners on page 60

June 26 • 2014

59