Hilary's Book Blog

Christopher Moore (whom I’ve never read–I just stumbled across his website) has a list of “funny books” he recommends, and I liked enough of the ones I knew to try ones I didn’t, like this one. A real bear and a failed novelist exchange lives accidentally. The bear finds the writer’s manuscript, gives himself the name “Hal Jam,” and heads to New York, where he’s an overnight success. We meet agent Chum Boykins, publisher Elliot Gadson, publicist Zou Zou Sharr, etc…all broad caricatures, literary phonies who see in Hal not a wild animal but a rough-hewn genius like Hemingway, their ticket to success. Meanwhile the writer is meeting weird country types like Vinal Pinette in the Maine Woods. There are flashes of laugh-out loud humor, especially the bear’s attempts at conversation (he learns a few words, which combined with emperor’s-new-clothes syndrome gets him as far), but basically it’s the meat of a mildly funny short story dragged out into a contrived novel.

[Paperback title is Family on Beartown Road, which confuses the heck out of people who think one is a sequel to the other…]

Cohen lives in Binghamton, our closest city, and writes a column for the paper. The column’s never struck me as anything special, so I wasn’t expecting much from this book. I read it both for local interest, and because the topic of Alzheimer’s fascinates me (I spent several years as a home health aide working with Alzheimer’s victims). House on Beartown Road surprised me–it’s got some flaws, but on balance it’s a terrific memoir.

Cohen moved to Binghamton & bought a big country farmhouse with her husband. They had a daughter and shortly thereafter her father, whose Alzheimer’s was rapidly worsening, moved in with them. Nine weeks later, the husband left. As the book opens, winter is coming on and Cohen is responsible for a one-year old, an elderly man who needs almost as much care, dogs, cats, and a drafty farmhouse. Pretty scary. The present-tense, straightforward narration gave me the claustrophic impression of being trapped, stuck, overwhelmed right along with Cohen. Many of the short chapters have clearly been reworked from newspaper columns, and there’s some repetion of the background, but that actually adds to the immediacy, the way the brain runs over and over an awful situation. Sometimes the journalistic style reveals sloppiness (reliance on cliches, egregious mistakes like “enormity” for “enormousness”), but there’s also plenty of compelling writing, and the brisk pacing works.

The situation is as hard as you would imagine (harder if you’ve never experienced a winter in this area!), but there’s humor and happiness too. Cohen herself isn’t that appealing as a character, primarily because through most of the book she’s in thrall to a deep depression. But her daughter and her dad are both captivating. Little Ava adopts everything.

I have to fight her over the stub ends of celery and carrots. She wants to take them back to her room, where she lines them up in rows on the wood floor and talks to them in baby gibberish. Then she tucks them in bed and bids them goodnight. They have names. They get sleepy and hungry. I find her trying to feed a piece of an old cookie to a chewed ear of corn she’s pilfered from the dinner table.

Sanford’s “word salad” (constructions people with Alzheimer’s come up with to work around words they’ve forgotten) are often poetic or funny. His love for Ava, even though he doesn’t really understand who she is and calls her “this little guy,” is heartwarming. Cohen understands the way the world seems to him and her intelligent sympathy (even when the practical and emotional problems drive her to the edge) help us feel how her dad is still a whole person. And despite all the difficulties, it’s wonderful how well the combination of a tiny child and someone with dementia works. Ava and Sanford understand and accept each other.

The brain of my father and the brain of my daughter have crossed. On their ways to opposite sides of life, they have made an X. They look upon each other with fond familiarity. And they see each other heading to the place they have just come from. On his way out of this life, Daddy has passed her the keys.

Instead of thinking about him losing the abilities to speak, to walk, and to negotiate the world, I like to think he has given them to her.

It’s hard to keep quality and momentum through eighteen books, let alone 26. Grafton is holding her own, by moving away from the standard whodunit into psychological explorations of character. So although the later books in the alphabet aren’t as twisty as the early ones, if you ever liked Kinsey Milhone, you’ll want to know what she’s up to. Despite the slow start, R has a gripping finale.

Kinsey’s got a guy, a good one for a change! Her 87-year-old cutie landlord, William (my favorite recurring character), is trying to date–and being clobbered by his older brothers. Those are the subplots–the focus is Reba Lafferty, an impulsive ex-con who’s a daughter of privilege. Her dad has hired Kinsey to shepherd her from prison back to a regular life. Reba is entertaining but not completely in focus–I don’t really get why Kinsey likes her so much. Naturally, Reba has not entirely left her criminal past behind her, and soon she’s dragged Kinsey into the middle of a money-laundering scheme being investigated by the FBI.

The weird thing about this series is that since time is passing much more slowly in Kinsey’s world than in ours, she’s falling further and further into the past. R supposedly takes place in 1987 (which means William is most likely dead by now–aww…), which is easy to forget because mysteries generally take place in an unspecified present. Yet whenever I’m reminded of the year, I can’t help but watch out for anachronisms, and second-guess “would a shopping mall really have been anchored by a bookstore that early?”

Binchy is one of the few novelists whose newest books I always make a point to read. She’s classic comfort food–not great literature, but decently-written, heartwarming stories that don’t leave a sticky or soggy aftertaste. One of the best things about her books is that the central characters always change for the better in a believable way. They may be in sad situations, but over the course of the novel they somehow find the courage to grow and overcome their personal flaws a little bit. Love, kindness, and hope are always central. I can make these generalizations because Binchy’s books are not wildly different from each other. It’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s why they are comfort food–you pretty much know what you’re going to get.

Nights is middle-grade Binchy. She’s left the precincts of her native Ireland again, which can be nice for a change (although it’s unintentionally hilarious when she puts Irish idioms in the mouths of supposed Americans, eg having one of them say to another, “Will we do X?” where an American would really say, “Let’s do X.”) There’s a motley assortment of characters whose fates intertwine: four tourists stuck in the small Greek village of Aghia Anna, after a terrible boat accident paralyzes traffic in and out. We have a young woman in love with a jerk, a young man who’s escaping from his smothering family, a woman running away from her lover, and a recently-divorced dad who’s agonizing over relations with his son. They join Andreas, the elderly proprietor of the tavern where they meet, who is alienated from his son, and Vonni, an Irish ex-pat who sees the fix for everyone’s problems but her own.

And that’s the lever that moves all the action: each of the characters can see how silly or blind the others are being, and gently help them react to their own situations differently. The power of friendship is another nice Binchy emphasis. Inevitably, as these random people become friends, they care about each other and we care about them. The satisfactory happy endings come as each person finds the strength to deal with his or her problems, and the reader is left with a feeling of optimism about ordinary human beings. Now that’s my kind of fiction!

The resilience of kids is a byword, but at the age of eight Kevin Sweeney came up with a novel way of dealing with the loss of his father. He decided to choose three men to be his surrogate dads–without telling them, he’d observe and emulate them. A terrific premise, but alas this book doesn’t deliver quite as much as it promises. It’s still an occasionally touching look at a hardscrabble San Francisco Irish childhood.

Sweeney explains in the introduction that the book grew out of an essay he wrote for Salon in 2001. (The original essay says he was 7 when he came up with his plan; presumably he subsequently found the correct age in the journal he kept.) The deaths of many young fathers on 9/11 prompted him to think about his coping strategy, and he wanted both to reassure families left fatherless and to encourage other men to be role models. I just read that essay, and it’s wonderful. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t very succesfully flesh out the essay, and what’s been added to pad it out to full length is just not as compelling as the original.

Memoirs are as thick as dandelions these days. If the author’s not a household name, doesn’t have a truly compelling and unusual story to tell, or doesn’t write like an angel, it’s tough for yet another autobiography to stand out. The Sweeneys are averagely interesting people with an averagely interesting story; what’s compelling is Kevin’s idea, but we don’t learn much about what prompted him to come up with it. He describes being eight years old, lying in bed and worrying that he won’t know how to be a good father, a good man, because he doesn’t have “the classic reference point–my old man.” Isn’t that in itself a rather remarkable train of thought for an eight-year-old? But as an adult, Sweeney has difficulty reconnecting enough with his child self to explain it to us. “My scheme had a formality and simplicity that makes me wonder now about why I felt this need so clearly,” he says. The idea was his first journal entry, but reading one’s old journals can sometimes be like reading that of a stranger’s–it isn’t always possible to reconstruct the self who wrote them.

After describing his family–how his father died when Sweeney was three, leaving six children, how his mother worked tirelessly and his oldest brother became the male head of the household–Sweeney goes on to introduce the three men he chose to be his subsitute fathers, but that only takes a few pages for each. The rest of the book is taken up with Sweeney’s youth: inheriting his brother’s paper route, playing baseball, pranks and mischief (he and his friends used to collect gunpowder from used casings at the Navy base and use it to blow things up), learning to drink in high school, and so forth. We hear a little bit about his interactions with his chosen fathers, notably the one “man to man” talk which got him off the path towards excessive drinking. But until the conclusion, which briefly analyses what he learned from each of the three, it’s not really much about them. There’s some insight into the damage repression of grief does; the family doesn’t talk about their dad and his death until the kids are grown.

As a side note, Father Figures has an arrestingly hideous cover–extreme closeup of a boy sitting and holding an enormous orange balloon(?) in front of him, cropped so that all you see is one dirty scabbed knee, ugly shorts, a bit of T-shirt and arm, and one quarter of an orange circle taking up most of the cover. It’s unsettling in a way the book absolutely isn’t, and I think it might make people who might enjoy the book hesitate to pick it up, while suggesting some dark tale of child abuse to others who would then be disappointed.

Lerner is among the best of the self-help authors–she’s pragmatic, insightful, funny, literate, and avoids one-size-fits-all/magic pill claims. (Of course, the downside of realism is missing the excitement of “this will solve ALL my problems!”–which is what drives bestsellerdom.) Lerner gives a brief overview of the book’s layout in the first chapter, which ends:

…the brief epilogue reveals the six secret, simple, specific steps you can take to banish unwanted anxiety, fear, and shame from your life forever. Just kidding, but yes, that would be nice.

This book is a good exploration of emotions that fuel unhappiness, with some practical exercises, though it’s not as structured as the most detailed self-help books. Lerner’s primary technique is to weave anecdotes and reflections together into a narrative. It’s a more philosophical approach than most, and more enjoyable to read and think about.

Lerner draws interesting distinctions between behaviors in the face of stress, like underfunctioning and overfunctioning (I can see that I do both in different circumstances). She does describe a sort of “magic” solution which is pretty cool. A man was terrified of asking a co-worker out on a date. Lerner asked him to go to a shopping mall in a city he was visiting and collect 75 rejections in a row by asking women out to coffee. The process helped him realize that it would be easier to just ask out his co-worker than to finish!

The chapter on public speaking, and how its principles can apply to difficult private situations, is especially good. I also found the section on dealing with anxiety in organizations particularly novel and useful.

But my favorite aspect of Fear and Other Uninvited Guests is Lerner’s bracing and refreshing realism. When she shows people talking to their parents about sensitive topics, for example, there’s no “Honey, you’re right–thank you for pointing that out!” conclusion. Instead, the parents storm out and the adult child is left shaking with nerves. But the focus is on having the courage to speak up respectfully and constructively, and the participants end up feeling better even if there’s no huge breakthrough. The epilogue is titled “Everyone Freaks Out,” which encapsulates the whole approach. Anxiety, fear, and shame won’t go away, but facing them with courage and calm can help.

An assortment of essays, mostly quite good, about commitment & relationships. It’s sort of a sequel to The Bitch in the House, which I haven’t read, and similarly marketed as “representatives of the opposite sex reveal the TRUTH about how they feel.” As I say, these are good essays, some even brilliant, but if they strike you as containing any earth-shattering revelations, you haven’t been paying enough attention to the aforesaid opposite sex as people, instead of stereotypes.

Which leads to the most striking passage (to me), in the foreward, where Cathi Hanauer (editor of Bitch in the House) describes the reactions people had to the concept for this book:

I was told, “It’ll never work.” “Men don’t think.” “Men have no interest in self-exploration or revelation.” “Men don’t feel things.” “Men won’t say anything negative about their wives.” “Men have no interior lives.” “Men just want to watch TV and read the paper.” I didn’t believe it. Okay, I believed some of it. But not all of it, not really.

Now take those sentences & replace “men” with “women,” “blacks,” “Asians,” “gays,” or any other group, and add whatever negative stereotypes you think of. (Although it’s kind of tough to imagine something more sweepingly insulting than “don’t think” and “don’t feel things!”) Can you see the new paragraph appearing as-is in a book issued by a major publisher, with no more emphatic commentary than the last bit?

I can’t say I’m surprised by this, unfortunately, but it bothers me a lot. It’s a symptom of why on the whole I prefer to identify myself as an egalitarian (all humans deserve the same rights and access to opportunities) rather than a feminist (since that focuses specifically on women’s rights, although I don’t discount the importance of the feminist movement in the 20th century). Would the world be a better place if it were run by women? I doubt it; I think it would be bad in different ways (just like when any previously-oppressed group comes to power). We’re all human beings, after all, basically monkeys with language and culture, and we struggle with similar problems and tensions.

Nevertheless, certainly in American culture there are some generalizations that can be made about the roles of men and women (keeping in mind that no generalization should be used to predict an individual’s behavior or attitudes). Over the past 40 or 50 years, there’s been an enormous change in the expectations–both women’s and men’s–of how a man could and should act. The essays in Bastard on the Couch don’t shed any blinding light on this topic, but they do offer some interesting, poignant, and thought-provoking flashlight beams on a few areas.

The twenty-seven essays are divided into four sections: “Hunting and Gathering” (sex/monogamy/adultery), “Can’t Be Trusted With Simple Tasks” (household responsibilities in marriage), “Bicycles for Fish,” (a grab-bag, but mostly about role reversals), and “All I Need,”(sad endings). They’re all interesting the way any honest self-revelations are (except Anthony “Jarhead” Swofford’s essay, which feels narcissistic and fake).

Daniel Jones says in “Chivalry on Ice:”

The gestures of chivalry may have been inherently patronizing and obsolete, but my liberation from having to perform them had the side effect of dulling my caretaking instincts, of turning me into someone who would cheer my wife on in one breath (“You can do it yourself!”) only to brush her off in the next (“You can do it yourself’).

This touches on a problem many of these essays dance around: in the absense of traditional gender roles, it’s easy to flail around instead of doing the work of figuring out how to be kind and helpful and supportive to each other based on what each individual needs and wants.

Funny but fundamentally very sad (how do relationships evolve into this awful dynamic?) is Christopher Russell’s “My List of Chores,” where he shares his wife’s daily harangues and general distrust of his competence, which he passively resists, causing her to go even more over the top.

In “Ward and June R Us,” Rob Spillman describes how he and his wife put an end to constant bickering over chores by switching traditional roles each week, so that they take turns being “June” (in charge of all parenting and domestic duties) and “Ward” (come home, relax, and play with the kids guilt-free).

Robert Skates shows the fallout from divorces around him (his own marriage long over) in “The Hole in the Window: A View of Divorce.” At the end, he generously allows his son and his son’s ex-stepfather to hang out together, commiserating over the shock of that second divorce which has split them apart.

Other standouts are Steve Friedman’s “A Bachelor’s Fears,” funny and finally touching; Rob Jackson’s heartwarming “My Life as a Housewife;” and Trey Ellis, “Father of the Year,” funny and poignant.

The fourth in the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series, and great in yet a different way. The book opens with Aubrey at home in Hampshire, now married to Sophie and finding that domestic living is not all that he had hoped.

This cottage, though picturesque among its ash trees and even romantic, ideally suited for two in the early days of his marriage, was neither large nor comfortable; it had always been low-ceilinged, pokey and inconvenient, but now that it also contained two babies, a niece, a ruined mother-in-law, some large pieces of furniture … and a couple of servants, it was something like the Black Hole of Calcutta, except that whereas the Hole was hot, dry and airless, Ashgrove Cottage let in draughts from all sides, while the damp rising from the floor joined the leaks in the roof to form pools in many of the rooms.

It’s a comic beginning; O’Brian describes the infant twin girls thus: “They had pale, globular faces, and in the middle of each face a surprisingly long and pointed nose called the turnip to an impartial observer’s mind.” But very soon Maturin has arranged what both Jack and Sophie want most, Aubrey’s return to a sailing ship.

Aubrey is appointed temporary Commodore in charge of retaking the island of Mauritius from the French. One of the things I’ve liked about this series from the start is the insights into work relationships. Aubrey is now supervising not just a crew, at which he’s an expert, but other captains, and that’s a whole new set of problems and sensitivities. The showy, competitive Lord Clonfert, who measures himself against Aubrey and resents his success, is a particularly well-drawn tragic character. O’Brian is masterful at allusions (often subtle) which capture the truth of the situation. Here’s Maturin reflecting on what ultimately happens to Clonfert’s rivalry with Aubrey:

Stephen … looked at Jack with his pale, expressionless eyes, looking objectively at his friend, tall, sanguine, almost beefy, full of health, rich, and under his kindly though moderate concern happy and even triumphant. He thought, ‘You cannot blame the bull because the frog burst: the bull has no comprehension of the affair…’

The complex political games and jockeying for position in the Navy and the government at large are also highlighted in this volume. Maturin’s role as a valuable spy for the British gives him the power to turn the wheels to Aubrey’s advantage, another plot thread neatly worked out. Since there are 16 volumes yet to come, and Aubrey is already into middle age and rising fast in the ranks, I wonder what’s in store for him. There are hints that Maturin is seriously depressed; in the first volume I found O’Brian’s opaqueness frustrating, but now it’s part of the charm that leads one on to the next book.

An unforgettable memoir of Patchett’s friendship with writer Lucy Grealy. Of course it’s beautifully-written, as one would expect from the author of Bel Canto, and of course it’s sad, since Grealy died young and suffered physically and emotionally all her life. It’s also an honest, funny, evocative, involving story that is impossible to put down, whose central character is neither Ann nor Lucy but the friendship itself.

Patchett uses the metaphor of the ant and the grasshopper throughout the book; she the ant, valuing stability and middle-class values, Grealy the improvident grasshopper, cavalier about money and obligations.

And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn’t tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter.

Patchett brilliantly shows the evolution of this friendship, where each found in the other something she craved, and the contrast between their characters.

Twelve years of Catholic school had taught me that I would be held accountable not only for what I did, but for everything I considered doing. Twelve years of beating cancer had taught Lucy that she was invincible and that nothing, none of it, was ever going to catch up with her.

Truth & Beauty brings the charming, exasperating Grealy fully back to life; her bottomless loneliness and neediness, her enormous charisma and endearing quirks (like her love of being carried), her zest and zaniness, all make her an unforgettable character. Most of us have probably known someone like her in tone if not in volume. She was the author of Autobiography of a Face, which I read a long time ago and don’t remember much about except that it was good; it’s about her disfiguring bout with cancer as a child that resulted in loss of much of her jaw. Patchett heart-breakingly chronicles Grealy’s many failed surgeries in the quest for a mouth that would work properly.

Patchett herself seems like a rarer find–her unstinting generosity to her friend (primarily emotional, but financial too) is remarkable. She’s creative about it; Grealy avoids her mail by tossing it all in a Hefty bag, and Patchett finally convinces her to ship it to Nashville so that Patchett can deal with it for her. Not long before she dies, Grealy says: “But at least I can make you feel like a saint. That’s what you’ve always wanted.” Patchett responds, “That’s a terrible thing to say,” but it crystallized for me something I’d been feeling through the book; Patchett is such a good friend, such a tower of strength and patience, that I can’t help realizing how in the same situation I would probably fall short of the standard she sets. But by way of explanation, she says early on:

I decided that night I would take all the hours of my life that could so easily be spent worrying and instead I would try to help her. I had been raised by Catholic nuns who told us in no uncertain terms that work was the path to God, and that while it was a fine thing to feel loyalty and devotion in your heart, it would be much better for everyone involved if you could find the physical manifestations of your good thoughts and see them put into action. The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry? I decided then that my love for Lucy would have to manifest in deeds.

A philosophy to live by, no matter what your belief system. It’s a very thought-provoking book, full of beautifully expressed insights and anecdotes small and large, and I copied down a dozen passages I’m tempted to quote.

Ultimately the ant couldn’t save the grasshopper, who felt the ant life was a stifling one. In the last section, Grealy’s early death starts to feel inevitable. We join Patchett in her grief. After reading Bel Canto (in which dozens of people with no common language rely on a translator), this passage was especially meaningful:

Even when Lucy was devastated or difficult, she was the person I knew best in the world, the person I was the most comfortable with. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

It’s also a fascinating window into the literary writing world, including the round of writing colonies and fellowships. One of the best books I’ve read this year!

More interesting than the usual run of celebrity tell-alls, but ultimately somewhat depressing. I don’t know a ton about Sinatra; I respect his singing more than I like it, but he’s fascinating as an iconic showbiz figure.

Like many children of my generation (I was born in 1964), I watched early Warner Brothers cartoons which caricatured famous Hollywood people without having a clue who they were until much later. But the Frank Sinatra chicken in Swooner Crooner made an impression on me. As a teen I laughed at Joe Piscopo’s impression of Frank singing “Under My Thumb” (his only funny skit, as I recall). Many years later, I took care of a lady with Alzheimer’s whose happiest moments were spent listening to Tommy Dorsey records, and so I heard many early Sinatra classics over and over again. I read The Way You Wear Your Hat when it came to the library (don’t remember much about it) because of the wonderful title and cover. The shadow of Sinatra is still everywhere in American culture; from the Ocean’s 11 and Manchurian Candidate remakes to the resurgence of 50s cool (granted, that’s old already, but I’m sure there are better examples), his presence is inescapable. So a book by his valet is a natural draw.

The opening is killer: “Summer 1968. The only man in America who was less interested than me in sleeping with Mia Farrow was her husband and my boss, Frank Sinatra.” Dancing with Mia at a club (& subsequent rumors of an affair) led to Sinatra cutting off Jacobs overnight, as Jacobs had seen him to do so many other people. Then we go to the standard chronological narrative; a brief overview of Jacobs’ life, his employment with Swifty Lazar, and then the day that Sinatra wooed him away in 1953. Until the blow-up in 1968, Jacobs accompanied Sinatra around the world, cooked his favorite food, baby-sat his lovers, ran his errands, put up with awful practical jokes, cleaned up after his tantrums, and befriended his family.

“No man is a hero to his valet,” and yet Jacobs effectively communicates how much he loved “Mr. S.” Frank Sinatra comes across as a guy with many good qualities (generous, thoughtful, humble, basically unbigoted) spoiled by success. Jacobs bore with his temper, insecurity, crude sense of humor, and occasional cruelty for the sake of the “vulnerable, real” person he saw underneath, and of course for the amazing perks and prestige that went with being right-hand man to the Chairman of the Board. Getting fired was a crushing blow for Jacobs, and it’s easy to believe that it was a terrible mistake for the increasingly lonely and isolated Sinatra to get rid of someone who saw him for who he was and yet loved him.

The most interesting part of the book is the inside view of the structure and social distinctions of Hollywood, Mafia, and political circles, and the connections between them. I knew Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father) was unsavory, but Jacobs says of him: “Mr. Ambassador, if anyone had the guts to spit in his face, a bravery that my boss sadly lacked, should have been called Mr. Asshole.” (Just noticed the rather strange sentence construction there–this is mostly a well-written book, but there are some flaws). He backs it up with first-hand observations, and shows that “Joe was mobbed up to his fancy collar pins.” Blech. Jacobs liked JFK himself, but all the future President wanted to talk about was sex.

“What do you want? Jack?” I asked. [JFK had just insisted that Jacobs call him Jack.]

“I want to fuck every woman in Hollywood,” he said with a big leering grin.

The book is stuffed with gossipy tidbits about the many famous people Sinatra knew–Marilyn Monroe, Garbo & Dietrich, the Lawfords, Billie Holliday, Noel Coward & Cole Porter, Lawrence Harvey, Judy Garland, Bogart & Bacall, and lots more. Jacobs shows the long-suffering first Mrs. Sinatra, alluring Ava Gardner (whom he describes as the true love of Frank’s life), and manipulative, ambitious Mia Farrow. It doesn’t feel like Jacobs is dishing dirt in a titillating way, but it ultimately leaves a bad taste. Most of the stars come off like Sinatra–people who might have been decent once upon a time, or if things had gone differently, but whose bad impulses have been allowed to predominate by constant catering-to.

This book straddles the fence in a strange way: it’s too thoughtful and observant to be quite a light-hearted juicy gossip fest, but too emotionally flat and non-judgemental to be as thought-provoking and involving as it could be. I’d like more perspective on why George Jacobs would let Frank Sinatra become his life, to the extent that the “after Frank” section of the book feels hollow. Nonetheless, it’s an enjoyable read and a must for people who like Sinatra and/or Hollywood stories.