Part of the fun of any summer is choosing the books you might finally have some time to read. Here’s a small sampling of some terrific possibilities
Story Time
FOUR people meet on a rooftop in London, on New Year’s Eve, to kill themselves. OK, maybe you’re thinking suicide isn’t the stuff of light summer reading. But this is Nick Hornby’s new novel, A Long Way Down (Riverhead Books, 333 pages, $24.95), and that means morbid plot or not, it’s worth a look.
Maureen is the mother of a sick child. She thinks she can’t help him anymore and wants to die. Jess is 18 and upset about breaking up with Chas. Martin is a married father and former morning TV-show host, who’s disgraced himself so thoroughly that jumping off a building seems the right thing to do. And J.J. is an American rock musician working as a pizza deliveryman, who has given up.
They all meet up on the same roof, on the same night, and for the same reason, and this lively and engaging story proceeds from there.
Wanna know if they buy the farm as planned? Buy the book.
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LOVERS of fine fiction can rejoice this summer, because Mark Helprin has a new novel out. Freddy and Fredericka (Penguin Press, 553 pages, $27.95) is the allegorical tale of the Prince and Princess of Wales, who, after being pilloried daily by the British press for one faux pas and embarrassing gaffe after another, are sent to colonize America – just to get the heck out of Dodge.
Their travels from far out New Jersey across the rest of the continent are a series of adventures and misadventures, which teach them life lessons, remind them to love one another and, ultimately, show them how to be great rulers. Helprin is back, telling a great story on a grand scale. Amen.
Presidents
‘THIS man’s survival skills are of a different order.” That was Jesse Jackson’s description of President Bill Clinton in 1998, when Clinton was emerging from the fog of his impeachment, and it was clearer by the day that he had survived a political scandal the likes of which the country had never seen before.
Indeed, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House by John F. Harris (Random House, 444 pages, $29.95) is all about Clinton’s ability to stay in the game and ride out any and all political and personal storms, most of which were of his own making.
Clinton was consumed with the question of his legacy. Thankfully, Harris doesn’t really try to address that issue. Instead, he offers readers a careful and engaging look at a recent president who is seriously tough to understand. As Paul Begala said of Clinton after their first meeting, “Is this guy for real?”
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ANOTHER president who has caused historians and critics a lot of trouble is Ronald Reagan.
Gil Troy’s Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton University Press, 406 pages, $29.95) offers readers a cultural history of Reagan’s times.
The 1980s was when Bill Cosby was the king of television by presenting a successful black family within the multicultural fabric of American life. Troy argues that Reagan believed he’d contributed to that success with his economic programs. As Reagan told the NAACP, “The well-being of blacks – like the well-being of every other American – is linked directly to the health of the economy.”
Troy’s book is a fun skip through the age of New Coke, “Dynasty” and Cabbage Patch Dolls, with a little nostalgia and Reagan adoration thrown in for good measure.
Sporting Stuff
‘HIS time was the Great Depression and he was a man of his time,” wrote Red Smith. He was talking about James J. Braddock, the subject of ESPN anchor Jeremy Schaap’s new book, Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer and the Greatest Boxing Upset in History (Houghton Mifflin, 336 pages, $24).
If the title sounds familiar, it’s because a major movie of the same name starring Russell Crowe will open this summer. But don’t miss Schaap’s book just because you can see the story on a big screen.
This is a gritty boxing story of a complete underdog who becomes heavyweight champ. Schaap’s done a terrific job of setting the scene and keeping the action moving. Readers will cheer for Jimmy Braddock, who went from welfare to world champ, and shed a tear for Max Baer, who lost the toughest fight of his life. It’s a terrific yarn, and even better, it really happened.
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HAVE you ever come out of the West 4th Street subway only to find a huge crowd gathered around the basketball courts there? Well, you might be lucky enough to have stumbled upon the annual Pro-Classic basketball tournament, hosted for its 30-year history by a limousine driver from Brooklyn named Ken Graham.
Wight Martindale Jr.’s Inside the Cage: A Season at West 4th Street’s Legendary Tournament (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 275 pages, $22.95) tells the tale of the players, organizers and true basketball fans who love to watch real street basketball played by New Yorkers from Brooklyn to The Bronx in the downtown neighborhood of Greenwich Village. It’s the longest continually running tournament in the city, it receives almost no help from the government and it produces some of the most exciting and intense sportsmanship imaginable. The tournament and the book are not to be missed.
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“GETTING hooked on gambling was the best thing that every happened to me.” With an opening line like that, how could this be a bad book? And indeed, it’s quite the opposite.
Ted McClelland’s Horseplayers: Life at the Track (Chicago Review Press, 263 pages, $24.95) is a zippy, fun and well-written romp around the racetrack. The book includes portraits of all sorts of characters and personalities, McClelland meets through his habit. And McClelland, a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, also offers novices a thorough glossary of terms to help them understand how to watch and even bet on horse races. So not only is this a lively telling of a live subject, it’s educational, too
Stars & Memoirs
ONE of the best lines in The Good, the Bad and Me, In My Anec dotage by Eli Wallach (Harcourt, 293 pages, $25) belongs to the acting legend’s wife, Anne Jackson, who said of her husband’s first scene with co-star Karl Malden in Elia Kazan’s “Babydoll”: “Never have two noses filled the screen so completely.”
The book is a smoothly told tale of Wallach’s Brooklyn upbringing, his Jewish immigrant family and the loves of his life: his wife, his kids and acting. He says that from his earliest birthdays, he remembers closing his eyes to blow out the candles and wishing to be an actor. He certainly got his wish, and now readers have his life story to go along with his legacy on the stage and screen.
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FOR something not completely different, try the new memoir by funnyman Robert Klein. In The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue: A Child of the Fifties Looks Back (Touchstone, 384 pages, $24.95), the Bronx-born Klein gives us his life story starting with his overprotective parents (“Never touch a light switch with wet hands! My God, don’t cut that bagel toward your neck!”), to his summer as a busboy at a hotel straight out of “Dirty Dancing,” and on to his stint in The Second City theater troupe and success as a comedian and actor.
The book is moving and funny, and Klein is a born storyteller. It’s perfect for an evening read on the porch.
Travelogues
YOU want to take a trip to far-away Burma, but can’t afford it? Then pick up Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin (Penguin Press, 294 pages $22.95) and you’ll get an in-depth look at this mysterious country.
“In Burma,” Larkin explains early on, “there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of ‘Burmese Days,’ ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’.” If the country is anything like Larkin’s description, that’s not a joke, it’s more like reality.
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How about a trip to a small town in Israel with a mysterious past?
In Hillel Halkin’s A Strange Death: A Story Originating in Espionage, Betrayal and Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine (Public Affairs, 400 pages, $26), you get to travel to a far away land and to a far away time.
Halkin moved to the town of Zichron Ya’acov in the early 1970s, and almost from the moment he arrived, he started snooping around, trying to uncover the dusty village’s secrets. He manages in splendid fashion, letting us in on the spies, traitors and gossips who populated the seemingly sleepy hamlet, which was the epicenter of a spy ring. He’s also a terrific investigator-narrator-tour guide. It’s a difficult combination to resist.
Odds & Ends
Writer and critic Louis Auchincloss has come up with an interesting question: What is the link between the personality of writers and the fiction they create? In his slim volume Writers and Personality (University of South Carolina Press, 128 pages, $24.95), he tries to uncover whether one can detect the presence of Flaubert in the pages of “Madame Bovary” and if Edith Wharton’s novels really describe herself and the world in which she was raised.
Auchincloss’ answer is a resounding “yes;” and his brief essays on over a dozen great writers offer a keen vision of who those writers were and how and where to find them in their fiction.
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This summer there’s a book for anyone who’s ever spent time in a bunk or cabin, drinking bug juice and making some of the best friendships of their lives. It’s a collection of stories by famous writers, Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp, edited by Eric Simonoff (Riverhead Books, 320 pages, $14). Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris and Lev Grossman tell their best camp tales.
If camp is part of your past, this book is not to be missed because, really, if you’re too old to attend camp, why not read about it and reminisce?
E-mail: awisse@nypost.com
