BOOKS
BEST LIFE
QUICK READS
Samples of great new writing, compiled by Kyle Smith
WORD PLAY
Where synonyms
spring eternal
The Book That
Changed My Life
THE
REBELLION
OF RONALD
REAGAN
By James Mann
NONFICTION
It was during the first
one-on-one session in
Moscow that Reagan
engaged in a bold but
questionable endeavor
well beyond his
mandate as president
of the United States.
According to the
transcripts of their
meeting, which have
now been declassified,
Reagan secretly
attempted to persuade
Gorbachev of the
existence of God.…
the original pearls gave
us the credibility to sell
the copies; it certified
and rewarded our
collectors’ faith that
they were getting as
close to the real deal
as anyone could.
By Garrison Keillor
The book was Roget’s International Thesaurus. It not only changed my life, but also
transformed, diversified, and modulated it by opening up the lavish treasure trove of
English, enabling me to dip my pen into glittering pools of vernacular, idiom, lingo,
jargon, argot, blather, colloquialisms, officialese, patois, and phraseology of all sorts.
I discovered Roget’s as a callow youth grazing in the reference books. I opened
it, and it became my guru, master, oracle, mahatma, rabbi, mentor, and also my bible,
and I clung to it and consulted it constantly, feverishly, ever in search of the precise
color and gradation of words. Its effect on me was to transform me from a plain
little nerd from Minnesota to a raconteur and swashbuckling boulevardier, sporting
man, pilgrim, loafer, sometimes a roughneck, sometimes a fire-eating visionary. And
today, thanks to the thesaurus, I am dapper, dashing but unaffected, light-footed,
willowy, urbane, and rather resplendent in my raven tuxedo and alabaster shirt and
ruby hosiery, and—need I mention it?—well-spoken. Women cluster around me in
flocks, packs, sometimes herds, to hear me converse, shoot the breeze, speechify,
soliloquize, and wax rhapsodic. They purchase my writing whether it be belles lettres,
essays, rants, screeds, squibs, feuilletons, or mere scribbling, and thus I earn the
cabbage, moolah, simoleons, shekels, mazuma, and green stuff I need to buy baby
a new pair of slippers, sneakers, loafers, flip-flops, or shoesies every so often. Thank
you, Peter Roget. Gracias and merci.
A reexamination of the
Reagan legacy from
the author of Rise of
the Vulcans, Mann’s
book sifts through the
evidence (including the
little-known advisory
role of Richard Nixon) to
establish what Reagan
did—and did not do—to
win the Cold War.
RUBIES IN THE
ORCHARD
By Lynda Resnick
NONFICTION
Jacqueline Kennedy was
so often photographed
wearing those pearls
that they seemed a
natural extension of
her—an integral piece of
her legendary grace and
charm. She wore them
to state dinners.…But
what you may not know
is that the pearls were
fake. Jacqueline Bouvier
purchased them at
Bergdorf Goodman
in the 1950s for about
$35.…
At $211,000 [at
auction], the pearls
turned out to be a
phenomenal bargain.
We sold more than
130,000 copies at $200
a strand—for a gross
of $26 million. Owning
Resnick, the marketing
guru who built such
brands as the Franklin
Mint, Fiji Water, and Pom
Wonderful, mixes kooky
personal anecdotes
(the Pentagon Papers
were photocopied on
her Xerox machine) with
upbeat tips on how you,
too, can get that billion-dollar knack.
EVERYTHING
RAVAGED,
EVERYTHING
BURNED
By Wells Tower
FICTION
You can’t sit in a little
Datsun car with your
wife’s new lover without
recollecting all the nice
old junk about her that
you’d do better not
to haul up.…But start
playing back all the old
footage, and pretty soon
old Mendocino Barry
steals into the frame,
his bare dark-brindled
haunches in your bed,
candles and an incense
stencher smoking on
the nightstand. You can
see him tucking a yellow
thumbnail under the
scalloped elastic of her
bikini underpants and
shucking them down
slow, maybe with a
word or two about lotus
blossoms. You don’t
want to picture how she
lifts her hips up off the
bed, the openmouthed
anticipatory shivers.…
Keillor’s novel Liberty will be published in paperback in June 2009 by Penguin.
The strange and terrible
ways of lovers and
families inform this
debut of sharply funny,
obliquely devastating
short stories by Tower.
