Al Jaffee's Mad Life A Biography by Mary-Lou Weisman Illustrated by Al Jaffee

Al Jaffee's Mad Life A Biography by Mary-Lou Weisman Illustrated by Al Jaffee

Al Jaffee is a cartoonist for Mad magazine.  He also has over sixty cartoon books he has written.  He is best known for the fold-ins at the back of Mad Magazine.  He illustrated this biography with a mix of slice of life comics about his own life and light humor comics.  I like the slightly exaggerated style of the cartoons.  They remind me a bit of a kind of slightly guilty pleasure.  This book covers his whole life.

The story starts with his childhood which is quite poignant and hard.  It starts with him moving from Savannah Georgia to live with his mother in a Lithuanian shtetl (small jewish town).  Then it covers his return to live in New York city.  The story is one of hardship and suffering.  He ends up leaving his mother behind as the Jewish holocaust starts.

This biography has quite a bit of mature themes in it; his brother going mad, another brother having extreme disabilities, and being separated from his mother.  He often describes himself as a cut up and a bit out of control.  This is illustrated by a variety of escapades throughout his life which can be both ridiculous and shocking

The thing which ultimately saves him is humor.  He describes reading comics his father sends him as a child and deciding that there is a career for him in comics when he sees advertisements by Dr. Seuss.  There are quite a few cartoons from Al Jaffee's early career in this book including many from Mad magazine.  The juxtaposition between everyday life and silly humor fits well with the writing.

In what I consider the second half of the book, he gets his break when he is accepted for the New York High School for Music and Art as it is first opening.  There he meets Harvey Kurtzman and some of the early figures in comics.  This biography describes his work for many important people in the comics industry.

The second half of the book touches on the history of comic books.  It is quite entertaining.  I rather liked a few of the wordless comics on page 180.  I also like the inventiveness in this book. Al Jaffe attributes this to having very little when he was a child.  He had to make his own toys.  There are interesting cartoons of home made fishing poles, rafts, a toy truck and other toys.

This book is not in the least bit academic in style.  It is full of anecdotes, humor, and sad stories. There is no index and no lists of recommended titles.  There are some photographs from the authors life, many cartoons in full color from both the auhor's life and Mad magazine.  The book is printed on heavy stock paper.  It is published by Harper Collins under the itbooks imprint.  This is a story that makes you think.

The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

This is a very in depth biography of Patricia Highsmith. Joan Schenkar draws from interviews, books, and the 38 Cahiers (spiral bound notebooks) and 18 Diaries of Patricia Highsmith kept at the Swiss Literary Archives. The book itself is 683 pages long with notes, bibliography, index, a map of where she went in Manhattan, diagrams, a timeline of her life, and two extensive sections of black and white photography. It has a feeling of completeness to it.

Patricia Highsmith is best known for her suspense novels and short stories. The most prominent of these is The Talented Mr. Ripley. She also had many of her books turned into films. The most famous film based on her stories is Stranger on a Train directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She won numerous awards both in the United States and internationally.

This book exposes many parts of her life that are not that well known. Patricia Highsmith also wrote the lesbian novel, A Taste of Salt. This book describe Highsmith's many affairs with women both married and unmarried. She was quite passionate and ended up moving from one relationship to the next in short order. Joan Schenkar describes Patricia Highsmith as a driven woman with a predilection for strong drink, younger women, tight control of her money, cats, and odd habits.

One of my favorites parts of the book is the description of Patricia Highsmith as a comic book script writer. Patricia Highsmith tried to hide this all her life. She wanted to be a writer for Vogue and other fashion magazines, or literary magazines like the New Yorker. What she ended up following was the classic path of the mystery writer. First she started by writing comics like The Destroyer, Fighting Yank, and Black Terror. Then she started writing for the pulps (in her case, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), then she started writing mystery novels. This is the same pattern which Mickey Spillane followed whom she met and did not like.

There are points where this book feels a little bit too revealing. Her family life is one of constant fighting with her mother, Patricia Highsmith has strong prejudices and outright hatreds, and her personal habits can be quite unsettling. She keeps snails, loves cats, hates dogs enough to describe them being killed in her novels, and has a strange sense of humor which is often macabre.

Even when Joan Schenkar describes Patricia Highsmith's success it is not one to be envied. Patricia Highsmith is described as having left the United State having traveled and lived throughout the United States, France, England, Germany, Mexico, and Algeria. She has left her native country, the United States and dies in Switzerland. Her travels have a brooding up and down feeling to them.

Even her professional life is fraught with intrigue and arguing. She jumps from agent to agent always trying to get the best money possible, eventually moving her rights to Europe. She seems to often not like the films made from her books as well.

I cannot say I liked all the parts of the book. There were points where the descriptions became a little unsettling. However, the majority of the book was well written and quite intriguing. This is a very complete and very dark biography of a quirky, talented, and interesting writer with a unique view of the world.

No Limits The Will To Succeed by Michael Phelps with Alan Abrahamson

No Limits the Will To Succeed by Michael Phelps with Alan Abrahamson

Michael Phelps is the epitome of his philosophy of W.I.N., What's important Now? He is the olympian with the most gold medals ever. In the 2008 olympics in Beijing he won eight gold medals in swimming. He set out to beat Mark Spitz's record and succeeded.

He tells you that this takes absolutely dedication and goal setting. He has a goal sheet which he shares with his coach and writes on every day. He practices for four hours every single day. His practice includes swimming, weightlifting, and dry calisthenics. He even trained at altitude to improve his endurance.

He also eats 8,000-10,000 calories a day because he trains so much. It is rather incredible. He does say, he includes fruits and vegetables in addition to everything else. Still it is kind of stunning.

This book is about sports and dedication to sports. He tells you his goal is not just to win at swimming, but to promote the sport for young people as well. He set up a foundation to help young people learn to swim. Michael Phelps wants swimming to be as important as basketball and baseball in the United States.

If you want to learn about building will power and overcoming obstacles this book is inspiring. When he was young, he was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and took Ritalin until he was thirteen. At that point he stopped determined not to need it again.

Every bit of his attitude seems to be focused on getting better at what he does. He gave up other sports like baseball and football to focus on swimming when he was a teenager because tht was where his mother thought he would succeed.

Swimming is a sport where you have to constantly beat yourself: improve your time. He claims that he does not criticize other people, he only focuses on doing better and constantly breaking new records. He wants other swimmers to raise the bar for him.

I like that he is not quite perfect. He was given a ticket for drunk driving. He also listens to the rapper Lil' Wayne and has a dog. He credits a lot of his success to his mother.

This book is about winning and going beyond all normal limits. Training, setting goals, eating, winning in a big way. Even though he comes across as low key, the results are all larger than life. He even has a street named after him, Michael Phelps Way.

Good Morning, Prince of Stories, Hard Times For Book Trade

Artwork by E. Burne-Jones, April 1888, for the first book edition of William Morris' A Dream of John Ball, illustrating medieval equalitarian slogan.

Good Morning

This morning, I finished reading Prince of Stories, The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman on the subway to work. I very much enjoyed many parts of this book. The writing is interesting. There are unique pictures including a complete comic book story called Blood Monster written by Neil Gaiman, artist: Marlene O'Connor, Lettering: M. Kelleher.

The section on movies talked about Beowulf and Mirrormask neither of which I have seen. It made me like the idea of them so much that I reserved them to view. I was previously reluctant to do this because I had mixed opinions on the movie Stardust. My understanding is that the next movie that Neil Gaiman will be scripting is Neverwhere after Coraline.

There is a very long complex interview at the end of the book. Gaiman talks about his early obsession with reading all kinds of fantasy books. He could recite Lewis Carroll's entire Alice In Wonderland when he was six years old. I have a deep appreciation for Alice. He also had a fondness for C.S. Lewis's Narnia books as well as everything written by Michael Moorcock.

It reminds me of a truism that I have experienced, the more you read, the more likely it becomes that you write because to understand reading properly it becomes necessary to write. Also, I love his statement about dreams fueling his writing of sandman, and I especially like this little quote from the interview, " I like [Charles] Bukowski more than I suspect I should."

The last thing I can say about this book is that it is very well designed. Everything falls into place nicely, the interviews, the pictures, the stories, the art work, the original articles, absolutely everything seems to fit just right.

Hard Times For Book Trade

Hard times may be coming for the book trade. This is across the board, libraries, publishers, and bookstores. Books are not an essential item in many peoples mind during an economic downturn. I don't think most people live on books and chicken, or intellectual stimulation.

From Bookselling This Week:
http://news.bookweb.org/6457.html

From Library Journal:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6619406.html

New York Magazine:
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/52761/

New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/business/04publish.html?_r=2

Add in the general malaise in the economy and we are facing some hard times ahead. Peoples reading habits have also changed. This will further cause problems because of the problems with the newspaper industry. Publishing looks to go through a very turbulent period. Online publishing may grow, I am not so sure about traditional books right now.

Maybe, the big companies will throw off the most unsatisfied and create little companies that are lean and mean. We are living in interesting times...

Publishers are already calling the event Black Wednesday for Wednesday, December 4, 2008 when it was officially announced.