Well, the title is a little longer than that, but you get the general idea.

Fabulous Finds: How Expert Appraiser Lee Drexler Sold Wall Street’s Charging Bull, Found Hidden Treasures and Mingled with the Rich & Famous is a quick little read (under 200 pages) about art appraisal — determining the value of all sorts of art objects for insurance, estate and sale purposes. She has visited the homes of the rich and famous, of hoarders and eccentrics, and looked at all of their stuff. This is high up on my list of very cool jobs.

It’s a challenging job, putting a price tag on artwork and collectibles. How do you put a price on a one-of-a-kind object, like the Wall Street Bull?* What do you compare to Prince’s guitar to get a comparable price? Interesting questions — but mostly I want to walk around people’s houses and look at their stuff.

For the most part, I enjoyed Fabulous Finds. Drexler has some great stories — not surprising, considering what she does. I love the idea of getting up close and personal with pieces of great art. My favorite was the story of a collector client who scores an amazing find at a church tag sale — I dream of something like that! And how about finding a masterpiece behind a bird cage?

There were a couple of things that bothered me. First, Drexler occasionally defines words for the reader — I hate that! Now, if they are obscure art terms, you might assume that readers find them unfamiliar, but you can still find a way to make them plain without putting a definition in parentheses. When you do that with a fairly common word, like monochromatic, you’re likely to insult your readers.

The other thing that bothered me was the name-dropping — there wasn’t enough of it! If you’re going to name names in the good stories, like Candace Bergen fixing you a cup of tea, then I think you need to come clean on the bad guys as well. Who begrudged you a few slices of lettuce? It’s not fair to deliver only half the goods.

Folks who enjoy Antiques Roadshow and similar shows will enjoy Fabulous Finds: How Expert Appraiser Lee Drexler Sold Wall Street’s Charging Bull, Found Hidden Treasures and Mingled with the Rich & Famous. It’s got some fun stories, a few tips for would-be art collectors, and some interesting background on appraising. My copy was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

*Last week, I posted a short interview with Lee Drexler and I mentioned the Wall Street Bull. Did you know the Bull has a Twitter account? And guess who got a direct message from him!

Every Step You Take: A Memoir is a look back for Jock Soto at his family and his career, sorting through the influences that made him a unique figure in the ballet world. The writing took great courage, as some of his family history must have been hard to face — some unpleasant truths about his father, in particular, and his mother’s family. He has an amazing life story, a story that I don’t think could even happen today, and his telling of it is quite humble.

Jock got interested in ballet at the ripe old age of four, while watching Edward Villella dance on the Ed Sullivan Show. (He was performing a piece from Jewels, by George Balanchine, who Jock would later dance for at the New York City Ballet.) His parents took his request seriously and enrolled him in ballet classes. At 12 years old he auditioned for the School of American Ballet and was awarded a full scholarship. After a brief interruption in his training, he returned to New York with his family and at 14 years old, his family left, leaving Jock alone in New York City, with no income (other than his school stipend) and no adult supervision.

Who does that? Who leaves their kid alone in the big city like that? It’s crazy! I don’t think you could get away with that today. But he roomed with other dancers, couch-surfed a bit, and eventually built a family for himself among the dancers there. This new family of his is a theme throughout the book, the way he drew together with people who could give him the support and understanding that his family could not.

Jock’s family is interesting. His mother is Navajo and his father is Puerto Rican. They met in Philadelphia and when they ran off together, Jock’s mother dropped out of school and his father left behind a wife and infant son. Throughout his life, it was clear that his father carried on affairs with other women — he also has another half-brother from one of these liaisons. His father was very macho and not terribly accepting of his gay son. His mother was virtually disowned by her family for a number of reasons, not the least of which was marrying a man outside the tribe. While he obviously loved his family very much, there is a sort of disconnect. They really lived in different worlds.

First, let me say I enjoyed this book very much. I loved the glimpses into the life of a dancer — not just a prima ballerina, not just a principal dancer, but the day-to-day life of a dancer in the corps — and the way his life changes as he moves through the ranks. He was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet for 20 years — the list of ballets and dancers and choreographers he knew is huge. It prompted me to spend a lot of time at Wikipedia and YouTube, looking up Balanchine, Wendy Whalen, Heather Watts, Peter Martins and others. I loved his stories about the dancers he admired:

“My mother found out where to send mail for [Mikhail] Baryshnikov so that I could write a letter to him — he actually sent me an autographed picture all the way to Arizona. (I still have that autographed photo, but I have never told Misha about it. When he and I see each other these days he says, ‘Hi, old man,’ and I say, ‘Hi, older man.’)”

This is a man who danced for George Balanchine, took class with Rudolph Nureyev, hung out in nightclubs and was painted by Andy Warhol. It is an amazing story of success from humble beginnings, taking an unexpected path.

I did find the writing a little clunky in places. The narrative jumps around a lot, going backwards and forwards in time. Jock occasionally gets a little lost trying to describe the emotion of being a dancer. That’s a really hard thing, to try and describe his connection to the ballerinas he danced with, being swept up in the music and the dancing, and some attempts are more successful than others.

Overall, an interesting memoir and a pretty compelling look at a very interesting life. My copy of Every Step You Take: A Memoir was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

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Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy by Paula Butturini is just the sort of book I love…and just the sort of book I normally avoid. I love books about travel and Italy is high on my list of places that I absolutely must go. There’s a lot of food in this book and a great love for cooking and shared meals. However, I don’t have any personal experience with depression and memoirs about depression are not usually high on my list. Still, I was enchanted by this book. I devoured it (very appropriate) in one sitting on a short flight with a long delay. I have highlighted several recipes that I plan to try in my own kitchen. And I was very moved by John’s struggle with depression, by his wife’s unceasing love for him, and the support of their family and friends.

Paula and her husband, John, met in Rome. They were both foreign correspondents (she had recently moved to Rome and he was based in Bonn, Germany), and they fell in love with each other and the city:

“Can you love a city for its pink mornings and golden twilights? For the screech of its seagulls, the flitting of its swifts? Can you love a city because it is a riot of ochres and earth tomes, all of them drenched by a fierce, rich light? Can you feel sheltered by the earth-hugging chaos of a city’s skyline, exhilarated by its church domes floating like balloons across a deep blue sky?”

Apparently, the answer is yes.

Their marriage got off to a rocky start. Just two weeks before the wedding, Paula was severely beaten during a protest in Czechoslovakia. Less than a month after the wedding, her husband was shot while on assignment in Romania and nearly killed.  Months later, as they are starting to settle in, the injury triggers a serious bout of depression that takes years to conquer. Paula has to deal with family tragedy, worry for her husband’s health, for their financial survival, her career and her hopes for a family. They get by on the support of their families, their loving friends, and their deep and abiding love for each other.

There are some wonderful anecdotes about the food they ate growing up, both from Italian families, but families with different approaches to food. One of my favorites was the story John tells about grating cheese:

“You absolutely have to whistle while grating the cheese,” he announced, raking the cheese across an old-fashioned hand grater and explaining that in a household with four large, hungry boys and a very large, hungry father, Parmigiano always had a way of mysteriously disappearing during the grating process in their Jersey City kitchen. His mother, he said, could only keep to her budget if she required her helpers to whistle while they grated, for as long as they were whistling, they could not be eating it while her back was turned.

There is also mention of one of my very favorite foods mentioned – we called it speck, they call it sutni szalona. Basically, a chunk of bacon fat, scored and grilled over an open fire. Take slices of rye bread and layer them with thinly sliced onions and tomatoes, salt and pepper. When the bacon fat it blackened and dripping, drizzle it over the bread and vegetables. I admit that it did not sound appetizing the first time I tried it, but we went through at least 3 loaves of rye bread that evening. Rustic and fantastic.

Much of the book is about the power of food. Cooking together, sharing meals, preparing the foods that comfort us and make us feel loved — Paula has a tremendous understanding of the way that foods from our childhood and even the simple act of preparing a meal and sharing it together can bring us peace in our worst moments.

“The tomatoes and broccoli; the baby artichokes and spinach; the mozzarella and scaloppini they sold me; everything that I carried home, cooked, served, then ate three times a day at the tiny oak table in our dining room became my lifeline to normality. For even though John could not talk, he could eat, and the two of us — somehow — managed to eat most of our meals in a silence that was at least companionable. For the entire year we were there, those quiet meals at our narrow oak table were a thrice-daily truce. Not once did John experience a panic attack at the table.”

Paula and John have led a really amazing life together. The travel, the adventure, even the danger and heartache — I would much rather have a life full of those things than something stable and predictable. Their love for each other shines through on each page. Keeping the Feast was truly a pleasure to read.

My copy of Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

How do you transfer a comedy routine to the printed page? It’s not easy and it is bound to lose something in the translation. For some comedians, the joke is in their body language, or their facial expressions. Or their voice.

In the case of Rubber Balls and Liquor, it’s pretty simple: if you find Gilbert Gottfried’s comedy entertaining, you’ll probably enjoy the book. Lots of self-deprecating humor, a lot of dick jokes, lots of jokes about being Jewish, and some good celebrity stories. I thought it would be a pleasant change to get the funny stuff without the annoying, grating voice, but it didn’t really matter. I heard the voice in my head anyway.

The book starts with an introductory section on why he’s writing a book and he’s got pretty modest goals:

“I want the book to be the literary equivalent of a slice of pizza and a grape drink. That’s all. It might not be a gourmet meal, but it should at least be filling.”

That’s aiming pretty low, but that’s familiar territory for Gottfried. This is, after all, the guy who lost the AFLAC job after offensive tweets about the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It’s not really highbrow humor…but it is funny.

There are some great celebrity stories in the book. He pissed off Marlon Brando with a joke on Hollywood Squares. He convinced Harrison Ford he didn’t recognize him.  But the one that really made me laugh was the story about being in the row behind Kiefer Sutherland on an airplane:

“A couple minutes later, the stewardess stopped at Kiefer Sutherland’s row, and asked in her most professional, hostess-y voice if he would like a set of headphones.

‘What’s the movie?’ Kiefer Sutherland asked.

‘Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride,’ the stewardess answered.”

If you don’t know why this is funny, you need to brush up on your celebrity break-ups.

This book is probably not going to be a big hit with people who aren’t Gilbert Gottfried fans. Like I said, I heard Gottfried’s voice inside my head. The book is full of dirty jokes, foul language and ethnic slurs. I find that funny, but not everyone will. It’s best read in small doses — no comedian is funny after hours and hours of material — but it was still a pretty good read.

Curious about the title?  Check out Urban Dictionary for an explanation.

And now…the Giveaway!

So, wanna check it out for yourself? I have a signed copy of Rubber Balls and Liquor to give away to one lucky reader! Just fill out the form below (don’t worry – it doesn’t show up in the comments, so your email and info is safe).  Here are the rules:

1. Contest runs through Wednesday, June 8th at 5:00 pm EST.

2. Contest is open to readers with US and Canadian mailing addresses.

3. You get one entry for filling out the form. You can get additional entries for tweeting or blogging about the contest (you must include a link to this post) or for talking this up on Facebook. Please let me know in your entry form what extra entries you have earned.

4. The winner will be notified by email, so please make sure you provide a valid email address. You will have 48 hours to respond or I will choose another winner.

Good luck!

A special thanks to the folks at Zeitghost Media for providing my review copy and the free giveaway copy!

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A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family made me hungry. Really hungry. I love Asian food of all sorts, and listening to author Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan describe these family favorites in such loving detail made me want to try to make them myself, because I just knew takeout was going to be a disappointment. Dumplings, soups and special desserts, often tied to holiday celebrations and memories of family dinners, are all on the menu in her book, subtitled “A Memoir of Food and Family.” Her attempts to reconnect with her family and childhood through not just recipes but the act of preparing them, will be achingly familiar to many readers.

Tan had a comfortable childhood in Singapore. It seems her parents were expecting a boy, but instead, they got a feisty, independent daughter who left for America at 18. In her home, cooking was a task left to the maids, but she has vivid memories of the cooking that went on in the homes of her grandmothers and aunties. As a professional journalist, living in New York, she begins baking as a sort of therapy:

In this cloud of cinnamon-scented zen, the pressures of New York would melt away. Outside the kitchen, life was complicated and meandered in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. But with my mixer in hand and two sticks of softened butter before me, the possibilities were thrilling and endless and the outcome was entirely governed by me.

She shares some incredible stories about her family history, many of them stories that she never heard until she began spending time with her aunties. Cooking is a great distraction; you have something to do with your hands, something to concentrate on, so you speak more freely, less self-consciously, so I’m not surprised that it led to some great conversations. Besides, you have to do something while you’re waiting for dough to rise or rice to cook. Gossip and story-telling are a great way to kill time.  One auntie tells the story of her brief stint as an opium courier. There are the stories about what Singaporean fiances have to do to win their wives (mainly: bring money and eat disgusting things). Talk about the festivals in Singapore, what one feeds a Hungry Ghost, and why cats have to be shooed away from funerals. It’s a small whirlwind of Singaporean culture, with a side of chicken rice.

It’s the descriptions of the food that really got me. My stomach rumbled just reading them:

One of the dishes I desperately wanted to know how to make was tau yew bak, a stew of pork belly braised in dark soy sauce, sweet and thick, and a melange of spices…When done well, the meat is so tender you feel almost as if you are biting into pillows. The gravy is salty, sweet, and gently flecked with traces of ginger, star anise, and cinnamon — just perfect drizzled over rice.

In some ways, Tan comes off as a little selfish and  spoiled, with all the talk of ignoring her aunties’ hard work and leaving the cooking to the maids, but these are stories of her childhood. Being laid off from her job at the Wall Street Journal gave her the time and freedom to spend time in Singapore with her family, learning to cook the old family recipes, but my poor practical heart screams, “what about job hunting? those flights are expensive! what about your husband, stuck at home?” If you can manage it, that’s great and I am desperately jealous, but it’s hard for me to imagine.

All in all, A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family is a wonderful book about food and family and all of the things that “family” encompasses. It made for very pleasant reading – but have a snack handy. You can check out some of Tan’s recipes and other writing at her website; there are also recipes in the back of her book (although not one for tau yew bak, I’m sad to say). I even found a place on-line to order pandan leaves, just in case I get really ambitious.

My copy of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family was provided free of charge by the publisher.

 

I picked up Writing Out The Notes: Life in Great Big Sea at a Great Big Sea concert in Kent, Ohio a few months ago. I confess: I am a folk music fan. I have a tremendously eclectic taste in music; my iTunes library has everything from the Sex Pistols and Einsturzende Neubauten to Bobby Golodsboro and Glenn Gould and all points in between, which makes for some disconcerting segues when you put the whole mess on shuffle. A friend sent me some YouTube links to a couple of Great Big Sea songs a few years ago and I was instantly hooked. I love songs that tell a story, and I love songs I can sing along with — if I can’t crank them up in the car and sing as I’m racing down the highway, what fun are they? Folk music reminds me of the songs my father used to sing with his guitar on the front porch on summer evenings. Folk songs may tell some amazing stories, but folk music isn’t exactly cool or hip, so what makes a young musician choose folk music? What sustains them as they make a career of it? Writing Out the Notes tells a bit of that story.

This is not a big book, only about 170 pages, but it made for very pleasant reading — and it will take me weeks to get through my notes on bands I need to look up and music I need to listen to.  Hallett talks at length about the music in his life, everything from the Newfoundland punk rock scene to Beyonce.  I have a hard time imagining him in a punk band, but I think we’d have fun talking about music, considering the crazy turns that my personal collection takes (although I spent a chunk of my time with this book Googling all sorts of instruments — who do you know that plays the bouzouki?).  I’ve got a list of songs and bands to check out, inspired by the music he wrote about in this book: the Barra MacNeils (subject of a terrific party story in the book), Ryan’s Fancy, Figgy Duff, Altan, the  Johnstons.  He writes very thoughtfully about music — I tend to be more of the “oooh, I like that!” sort of fan, so it will be interesting to listen to some of these bands, knowing a bit of history.

One of the themes that really struck home for me was the talk about travel.  I’m writing this from Amsterdam, where I seem to write a lot of my reviews these days, while we are contemplating the schedule for our next round of work in Europe.  (Aberdeen in January?  Brrrrrr!)  Much of my travel is for work, not just as a tourist, which is always a slightly different perspective.  And since I’m working with local people, I tend to think a lot about the way people live in the different places I visit — I hear from my co-workers about their evenings and weekends, their difficult commutes, their complaints about local politicians and a host of other things you aren’t exposed to as a tourist.  (We’ve been staying at the same hotel in Amsterdam so long that Christian, one of my favorite bartenders, has started telling me stories about picking up female tourists in the hotel.  I’m not sure whether to be flattered or insulted, but I am definitely intrigued.)

“I have spent hours looking out the windows of tour buses, watching town after town and mile after mile go by.  More than once I have passed a pleasant afternoon strolling around a supposedly dull residential neighborhood somewhere in a factory town in the US Midwest.  The houses, the trees, something is always different.  It never really gets boring: there is always something to see, some drama, and some subtle different from home that makes it all brand new.

The same questions bother me wherever I go: What is it really like to live here?  What are these people doing here, anyway? Do they like it? Do they like each other? Do they even notice where they are anymore?”

Whether I’m driving back to Amsterdam from Belgium, as I was yesterday, fighting LA traffic, broiling in the Houston sun or shivering in a Minnesota winter, I am always curious about the people who live in a place and what brought them/keeps them there.  I am envious of someone who gets to travel the way musicians do and of the way they get to experience the places they visit.

Writing Out The Notes: Life in Great Big Sea is an interesting look at the life of a folk musician. Fans of Great Big Sea will enjoy the glimpses of the band’s history and folk music fans will enjoy a different sort of history lesson. This one wasn’t a review copy; it’s one that I bought for the permanent collection. I only wish I’d had a chance to get it autographed.

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This book really took me back to my heavy metal roots. I was a fan in high-school and college, saw a lot of head-banging bands play live, and still have the hard rock/alternative stations programmed in the car radio. Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir is a look behind the scenes at how a scrawny kid from La Mesa, California became a rock and roll god. It’s full of great backstage stories and plenty of gritty truth about how Dave Mustaine got to where he is today. It’s a must-read for heavy metals fans.

The book is well-written and easy to follow. There is a ghostwriter involved, Joe Layden, and my guess is that Joe is responsible for a lot of the polish on this prose, but Mustaine’s ego and personality are evident throughout. There’s a lot of interesting history: he was raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses, began selling pot at a really young age and kept selling it to make ends meet when his mom moved out, leaving him with the rent and bills to pay. They cover his early bands, his musical influences, and how he came to really love music:

“When I held a guitar in my hands, I felt good about myself. When I played music, I felt a sense of comfort and accomplishment that I’d never known as a child. When I replicated the songs I loved, I felt an attachment to the musicians who had composed them. And when I started writing songs of my own, I felt like an artist, able to express myself for the very first time.”

Of course, it was also about “strutting and getting laid and trying to become famous.” There’s a lot of sex and drugs and rock and roll in this book and not all of it is pretty. It’s amazing to me that someone could function at all, let alone at such a high level (at least when it came to music), doing the amount of drugs Dave and his bandmates were doing. After all, this is a guy who got kicked out of Metallica because of his drug use and volatile behavior. That’s really saying something.

Dave covers his contributions to Metallica, his abrupt dismissal and the grudge he has held ever since in great detail. It has to be a little embarrassing to admit that one of the driving forces behind your career was the desire to show up the guys who kicked you out of their band. No doubt there was fault on all sides, but you can’t help but have some sympathy for him. He paints a pretty balanced picture of Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, in my opinion, telling the good and the bad, and over the years he seems to have mellowed a bit on the topic.

He also talks candidly about the drugs. The drugs – holy cow, the drugs. Pot and quaaludes, coke, heroin, crystal meth, mushrooms. It’s amazing a body could survive all that. He talks about multiple stints in rehab and how little good it did sometimes:

“You see, I’ve learned more about getting loaded, more about how to get drugs, more about mixing drinks, and more about how to bed the opposite sex in Alcoholics Anonymous than anywhere else on earth.”

I didn’t realize until I read the book that Dave had found his way back to God in recent years, but he talks about his faith and how he practices it. He’s a devoted family man, he wants to teach, do some solo albums, spend time with his wife and kids. At the end of a long, bumpy, drug-addled journey, he sounds like he’s doing okay. I found it fascinating to read the story of how he made it.

My copy of Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir is one I bought for myself. I stood in line for about 2 hours, on a day that Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cleveland was full of a lot more black t-shirts and long hair than ever before. I was excited to meet a legend – you simply cannot be a fan and be cool about something like that. I’ve seen the man play live and been absolutely blown away, but I never expected to see him on the New York Times Best-Seller List.

Proust’s Overcoat: The True Story of One Man’s Passion for All Things Proust is an interesting little read — a case study in obsession.  It is the story of a book lover, his connections to the Proust’s family, and his obsession with preserving the author’s writings and possessions.  Author Lorenza Foschini does an excellent job of pulling the threads of this story together into a fascinating — if short — read.

Jacques Guerin grew up in Paris in the early part of the last century.  Born in 1902, his family life was unconventional, to say the least.  His mother, Jeanne-Louise, was married, but not to his father.  Her husband, Jules Giraud, was impotent, and Jeanne-Louis had taken up with a close friend of his, Gaston Monteux.  She had two sons by Monteax, Jacque and his brother Jean, but under the circumstances, they did not live with her.  They lived with a nanny on the outskirts of Paris.   He was described as being very handsome (oddly enough, the first photo of Guerin in the book reminded me strongly of Dwayne Johnson, complete with sunglasses – all he needed was the arched eyebrow). traveled in interesting social circles and managed an extremely successful company, Parfums d’Orsay.  He was a bit of a bibliophile, well read and an occasional collector of rare volumes.  His interest in the writing of Marcel Proust and a case of appendicitis converged to start him on an obsession with all things related to the writer.

As a result of his illness, Guerin came under the care of Dr. Adrian Proust, Marcel’s brother.  On a visit to the doctor’s home, Guerin was quite taken with the various signed books and mementos that were displayed in the home.  Guerin became known to the family, and used his connections to acquire various artifacts — books, papers, furniture, even the author’s hairbrush — over the course of many years.  The lengths he went to included threats, bribery, even haunting the funerals of Proust associates in the hopes of hearing a new anecdote or locating some further piece of memorabilia.  We are fortunate that Guerin was so devoted, considering the attitude of some of his family members, such as Adrian Proust’s wife:

“Madame Proust had an almost strident, nasal voice, and it rose above the din in the room to insist that he not speak to her of such things.  She and her husband were mired in a sea of papers.  There was an unbelievable quantity.  But they were certainly going to deal with those masses of notebooks and endless piles of letters.  They would put fire to everything.  They would burn them all.

She regained her calm demeanor, and then smiled broadly at him.  She seemed rather pleased with herself.”

If not for Guerin’s interference, a portion of history, the thought processes of a great writer, might have been lost forever.

I enjoyed  Proust’s Overcoat: The True Story of One Man’s Passion for All Things Proust, but I was disappointed by the size of the book.  I think there was more to say here — about Marcel Proust, about his eager collector, Jacques Guerin, and about the turmoil in Proust’s family after his death.  Right now, what we’ve got isn’t much more than a long magazine feature story.  It’s interesting and engaging, but too brief.

My copy of Proust’s Overcoat: The True Story of One Man’s Passion for All Things Proust was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

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I love a good memoir! I tend not to enjoy celebrity memoirs as much as I do those books written by relatively ordinary folks who have lived really interesting lives. I’ve reviewed a number of them over the last few years, but The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers is by far the funniest — from the title, which would have made me pick it up all on its own, to Josh’s thanks to Martha Stewart in the Acknowledgments. I started out marking funny passages that I might want to share in this review, but the book quickly became a forest of pink and green Post-It flags.

The names of some characters have been changed, and some are composites of various people, experiences and conversations I had then. If you think that’s unfair, you’ve obviously never lived in a small town and written a memoir about your neighbors.

Josh and Brent are partners, living in Manhattan. During their annual apple-picking weekend, they come across a For Sale sign that changes their life. The Beekman Mansion, built in 1802 by William Beekman, is a lovely, historic place. It has been lived in, abandoned, restored and left unoccupied, but Josh and Brent have no problem seeing the potential. Before they’ve even gotten the realtor on the phone, Josh is imagining their life as gentlemen farmers:

I was already imagining my life at the Beekman Mansion. I concluded that Brent and I would probably be known as the Beekman Boys. Or at least I hoped so. It would be far better than, say, the Fag Farmers.

Both of the (future) Beekman Boys grew up in rural areas, so they aren’t complete strangers to life on the farm, but it has been a long time since they have done any digging in the dirt. Josh is in advertising and his previous career (as a drag queen) and relationship (with a male escort) is not really adequate prep for the role of a Gentleman Farmer. Brent is an MD with an MBA and a familiar face to fans of Martha Stewart as Dr. Brent, her health and wellness expert. Also not farmer material, at least on the surface. Still, they start off determined to breathe some life into the place.

Owning a farm, I felt, would at least bring me back in the direction of my Wisconsin roots. I could grown my own food, support a hard-hit local economy, and metaphorically raise my middle finger at the factory farm industry that was causing so many of our nation’s ills…

At first, the farm is a weekend getaway. They take the train in on Friday nights, armed with a long list of chores, and 48 hours later, they are on the way back to the rest of their lives, in the city. The holiday season means a Thanksgiving dinner made entirely of food grown on the farm, right down to the Thanksgiving turkey, which Josh kills and cleans himself, learning some valuable lessons about the importance of good aim and the usefulness of a bottle of Absolut and a turkey baster.

After a while, weekends aren’t enough. Josh begins to dream about finding a way to quit his job in advertising and live on the farm full-time. That means finding a way to make the old farm profitable, and Brent’s office Christmas gift to Martha — a bar of goat milk soap — provides the seeds of a business plan. These guys have great contacts (come on – Martha Stewart!) and plenty of business sense, but launching the business and keeping it afloat might be more than they can handle.

The book is full of great stories about the farm, the goats, their neighbors, their roosters and their zombie flies. They are overwhelmed by work and their new business; they have to find ways to balance their lives in the city with their lives on the farm. When business is booming, their relationship suffers (I had to remind myself that there must be a happy ending — after all, they’re both in the picture on the cover), but even their darkest moments here are told with great humor. The Bucolic Plague was a joy to read — a story about falling in love with a place, about loving each other, and about living a different kind of life — that never gets too sappy. Josh always has a story about his drag queen days or one of Martha’s parties to keep me laughing.

Some of you may remember the reality series, “The Fabulous Beekman Boys”, which documented their adventures in running a farm and a business. For more information on their brand, check out Beekman1802.com — full of videos and pictures and recipes, as well as the Beekman Mercantile. And for more about Josh’s earlier exploits, check out his first memoir, I Am Not Myself These Days.

My copy of The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers
was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge. It is available as of today, June 1, 2010.

Paul Rudnick is one of those names that I was complete unfamiliar with, until I read his book. As he told his stories, I kept thinking “oh! I remember Sister Act!” “I’ve heard of Allan Carr!” “He wrote The Addams Family? I never knew that!” It was part discovery, part reunion, full of funny bits, a little gossip, and some entirely fictional chapters that were, perhaps, my favorite parts. It is wickedly funny, even — maybe especially — when recounting the worst stories. All in all, it was a pleasure to read.

I Shudder isn’t exactly a memoir, although it’s full of funny stories about his family, his Hollywood contacts, the plays he’s written and the people he’s met. Between these stories, there is also a (hopefully) fictional memoir, “An Excerpt from the Most Deeply Intimate and Personal Diary of One Elyot Vionnet.” Elyot is a bizarre character, a semi-retired substitute teacher living in a perfect studio apartment that almost overlooks Gramercy Park. One worries about what he might be teaching those impressionable young minds:

As this is my most deeply intimate and personal diary, I am assuming that it will one day be introduced into evidence at my trial.

Surely I can’t be the only one who goes to the movies but never remembers the name of the screenwriter. Paul Rudnick was involved with some very funny movies, but I had never heard his name. Frankly, even if I had, it might not have helped. There is a long chapter devoted to his involvement with Sister Act, but his name does not appear when I check my source for all things movie-related, IMDb.com. Still, he tells great stories about bringing the original treatment of Sister Act to producer Scott Rudin and how they originally met with Disney, and snagged Bette Midler in the lead role. A host of meetings later, this nice Jewish boy was on his way to a convent in rural Connecticut for some hands-on research.

In the end, Bette Midler didn’t star, Whoopi Goldberg was very funny as Deloris, but Rudnick has never been able to bring himself to watch it.

Renting a wonderful Gothic apartment that was once the retreat of John Barrymore inspired a play, I Hate Hamlet, about a young actor living in the same apartment, working on the role of Hamlet and being visited by the ghost of John Barrymore. The downfall of the entire play is choosing Nicol Williamson – an unfamiliar name but a very familiar face — to play Barrymore. Rudnick makes Williamson’s utter disintegration both funny and tragic. He gives Allan Carr much the same treatment — Carr is a flamboyant, extravagant character, and Rudnick knows him in both high times and hard times.

In between chapters full of stories so funny you wonder if they’re fiction, you’ll find some actual fiction. The story of Elyot Vionnet is the very best sort of dark, sarcastic humor. His campaign to make Hallie Tesler stop talking on her cell phone is utterly ruthless — and it does not have quite the intended effect. His stint as Mr. Christmas (and his various holiday visitations) require a certain sense of style:

I instantly donned my tuxedo, a garment which still appears sleek and fresh, although it has been passed down through over eighty generations of Vionnet men, and, of course, Great Aunt Vestra Vionnet, who wore the family tux to bewitch half the women of Bucharest. No, Vestra was not Europe’s first lesbian postmistress, but she was the first one to get it right.

In I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey, the fiction and non-fiction go well together. The stories are great — his mother and her crazy sisters, his partner John, his time at the Chelsea Hotel. Chapters sped by and I laughed often enough (and loudly enough) that people at the airport asked what I was reading. I always think that’s a good sign.

My copy of I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey by Paul Rudnick was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.