Books: This and that from Joan Didion, Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, Emmett Till and more
The good news: Joan Didion has a new book! The bad news: It’s not exactly new. Read on; I’m Carolyn Kellogg, books editor of the L.A. Times.
THE BIG STORY
Joan Didion is known and claimed by both Angelenos and New Yorkers, but she gets out of town(s) in her new book, “South and West,” primarily to New Orleans and the Deep South. The contents are basically notes from trips in the 1970s for projects that never came to fruition. Reviewer Michelle Dean writes, “the Didion style is there, in the close attention paid to the sound of the words…. [but] ‘South and West’ is a book for the completists and hardcore fans.”
REBEL REBELS
Steve Jones is the co-founder of the Sex Pistols; it’s his guitar you hear on their seminal punk songs. Writer Tony DuShane sat in with the 61-year-old as he hosted his radio show “Jonesy’s Jukebox” on KLOS-FM, then talked to him about his memoir “Lonely Boy,” which — while full of sex, drugs, rock and roll, stealing and outrageous fashion — is honest and vulnerable.
Jump forward a generation or so and you get Cat Marnell, the talented writer and former Conde Nast beauty editor who became publishing’s favorite bad girl for her notorious behavior. Marnell, who has blogged openly about her drug use, talks to — and finishes the wine of — writer Lauren Christensen about her memoir, “How to Murder Your Life.”
NONFICTION REVIEWS
Rebecca Solnit follows up her notable essays collection “Men Explain Things to Me” with a new suite of essays, “The Mother of All Questions.” Solnit, an avowed liberal feminist, has held tight to hope even after the election of Donald Trump as president. Solnit’s “vision of progress holds that history is neither linear nor predictable; that trying matters and often yields results, even if they’re not exactly the ones you wanted or expected; and, crucially, that as progressives face such uncertainty, they must celebrate their victories,” writes Ellie Robins in our review.
Critic at large Rebecca Carroll tackles a difficult history in reviewing “The Blood of Emmett Till.” Author Timothy B. Tyson reveals that the former Carolyn Bryant, the woman who accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of whistling at her and grabbing her that fateful day in 1955, has said it never happened. But Till, a Chicago boy visiting Mississippi, was pulled from his bed and brutally killed over the encounter. Bryant’s husband and his half-brother were tried for the killing, acquitted, and then admitted to it, a sequence of events that fed into the civil rights movement. Yet history repeats itself, Carroll notes, recalling that Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by police in 2014, was just 12 years old.
BESTSELLERS
Entering our fiction bestseller list this week at No. 1 is George Saunders’ novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” which combines grief, longing, deep empathy and a delightfully strange sensibility.
BOOK NEWS
This week Barack and Michelle Obama scored a rumored $60 million book deal; Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen, whose Spy Magazine pilloried Donald Trump in the 1980s, are writing a book satirizing Trump, “You Can’t Spell America Without Me”; and Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore on the East Coast.
Every year, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles holds its Stay Home and Read a Book Ball fundraiser which eschews red carpets for a comfy couch. For those considering attending, Agatha French has some great fashion tips.
