Ars Longa

With the help of Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley, Ian McKellen and other actors, associate director of London's Royal Shakespeare Company John Barton presents Playing Shakespeare: An Actor's Guide. With over 50 of the Bard's plays and numerous U.K. and U.S. theater workshops under his directorial belt, the eminently qualified Barton provides a record of nine Royal Shakespeare Company workshops conducted on television in 1984 with the actors listed above. "Acting is built upon specifics," he writes, and proceeds to give specific advice to modern actors on performing these old—but not antiquated—texts. This thoughtful guide will be embraced by actors and directors alike. (Random/Anchor, $12 paper 282p ISBN 0-385-72085-8; Aug. 28) "[I]t beats thinking," said playwright David Mamet when asked why he writes. Deceptive flippancy abounds in David Mamet in Conversation, in which Westfield State College English professor Leslie Kane assembles 26 interviews with the highly cerebral author of Wag the Dog, Oleanna and the Pulitzer Prize—winning Glengarry Glen Ross. The collection, which spans Mamet's 25-year career, includes Village Voice drama critic Ross Wetzsteon's 1976 interview, "David Mamet: Remember That Name," and interviews with Jim Lehrer, the New Yorker's John Lahr, Fresh Air's Terry Gross and PBS's Charlie Rose. In these engaging, amusing conversations, Mamet discusses the dramatist's social responsibility, his return to Judaism and why men and women can't get along. (Univ. of Michigan, $47.50 256p ISBN 0-472-09764-4; Aug. 27)

As part of its Top Secret series, New Century (P.O. Box 7113, The Woodlands, Tex. 77387-7113; 936-295-5357) presents The FBI Files on Elvis Presley. Editor Thomas Fensch (Conversations with John Steinbeck) introduces the book ominously: "Elvis Presley never committed a crime. Elvis Presley was never accused of any crime. But for decades the FBI kept a file...." The target of death threats, a paternity suit and public complaints about his performances, Elvis Presley kept J. Edgar Hoover and his agency busy. In the dramatically serious tone of Sergeant Friday ("just the facts, ma'am"), Fensch alleges that these files, representing a "microcosm [of Presley's] behind-the-scenes life," will inform Presley's countless devotees about the uglier side of fame. ($35 176p ISBN 0-930751-03-5; Aug. 20)

Besides the auto industry, Detroit is best-known for Motown—the jubilant pop tunes of '60s bands like the Temptations. But Detroit produced music before the '60s, argues Lars Bjorn in Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920—1960, written with veteran jazz broadcaster Jim Gallert. Swedish-born Bjorn, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, explores the city's music scene from its pre—Big Band era to its 1950s "Golden Age" to rhythm and blues. Copiously researched—Bjorn and Gallert interviewed over 90 club owners and musicians—with never-before-published b&w photos and period advertisements, this large-format book will appeal to jazz enthusiasts and Detroit denizens. For the many European fans of American jazz, Plymbridge will make it available in the U.K. and Europe. (Univ. of Michigan, $42.50 256p ISBN 0-472-09765-2; Aug. 13)

Eminent art historian Robert L. Herbert (Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society) is emeritus professor at Mount Holyoke College after a long career at Yale. His commonsense approach to 19th-century art has long been a refreshment; his pioneering method of studying Impressionists, by turning the paintings upside down to see how the paint was applied, remains legendary. Seurat: Drawings and Paintings is a collection of his various articles on 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat, one of his specialties, written over the years for various hard-to-find journals, including a particularly well-reasoned essay on the painting Parade. Often summed up as "the dot painter" for his pointillist style, Seurat in fact had many other intriguing preoccupations as an artist, which Herbert expertly reveals. (Yale Univ., $65 208p ISBN 0-300-07131-0; June)

Travels Grave and Grand

From the Titanic nightmare to Robinson Crusoe's deserted island fantasy, shipwrecks have long been an obsession of adventure literature. The latest in Avalon's outdoor adventure series, Deep Blue: Stories of Shipwreck, Sunken Treasure and Survival presents 13tales of the sea's treachery. Genre fans will have already read pieces by Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, but newer writing from Bucky McMahon, Farley Mowat, Patrick O'Brian and William Golding, as well as firsthand accounts from survivors like Philip Ashton and Rockwell Kent, also appear. Most of the work was previously published elsewhere, so the collection, by Adrenaline editors Nate Hardcastle and Clint Willis (who edited Epic: Stories of Survival from the World's Highest Peaks), though high-quality, breaks little new ground. 15 b&w photos. (Avalon/Adrenaline, $17.95 paper 352p ISBN 1-56025-313-4; Aug.) American book buyers, among the richest and safest people anywhere, can't get enough of survival literature. Where else would we learn to handle wild dogs, jaguars or parasitic catfish—dangers from which no cell phone can save us? Jungle Travel and Survival, bymedical doctor John Walden, who has visited the Amazon Basin 75 times, explains "how to survive in the jungle and get out alive." Walden helps the reader navigate tropical landscapes from rain forests to mangrove swamps, avoid horrible diseases like malaria, build fires and cope with perils both physical (typhoid fever, spine-bearing plants) and psychological (culture shock). He also offers tips on appropriate gear (headlamps, machetes) and appropriate interactions with tribal peoples, who may not appreciate trespassing Westerners. (Lyons, $18.95 paper 224p ISBN 1-58574-249-X; Aug.)

In The Grand Tour: The European Adventure of a Continental Drifter, British travel writer Tim Moore (Frost on My Moustache) entertainingly recounts the history of a civilizing ritual for the backward Brits. Moore dates this privileged—and often quite dissolute—practice to Thomas Coryate, a 17th-century courtier whose travel memoir, Coryate's Crudities, recounts disastrous and ribald adventures. Ensconced in a used Rolls Royce and a red velvet suit, Moore sets out to retrace Coryate's journey. Coryate was no gentleman—Moore says that his book, "[a]s well as sounding really very mad... was clearly an extended fart anthology"—yet as Moore points out, he's an appropriate forefather for the many infamously vulgar English travelers. Moore's own raucous journey will delight American audiences. (St. Martin's/Griffin, $23.95 320p ISBN 0-312-28156-0; July)

Provence has enthralled centuries of writers, from the troubadours, Petrarch, Nostradamus and Frederic Mistral to Sade, Flaubert, Camus, Cather, Beckett and Woolf. Daniel Vitaglione (A Dictionary of Idioms: French-American, American-French), who lives in the region, tracks its eminent history in A Literary Guide to Provence. He provides information both practical (hotels and restaurants) and cultural (festival listings), plus some background on the region's language, Provençal, still spoken "in remote villages and among the older population." Even better, however, Vitaglione provides a town-by-town tour of literary-historical sites: the abandoned monastery outside of Saint-Tropez, for example, where Guy de Maupassant encountered an elderly couple who had been in hiding since their youthful elopement. 15 maps, 35 b&w photos; 36 color photos not seen by PW. (Ohio Univ., $29.95 288p ISBN 0-8040-1035-8; Sept.)

Foreign Affairs

Renowned novelist and lifelong snooker devotee Mordechai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) presents On Snooker, a study of the game's history, development and major players, as well as a lively and amusing personal narrative. Richler's book covers more than a century: from snooker's 1875 inception, as a pastime for British soldiers in India, to its later naming—the word is a corruption of the French word for cadet (neux), which derived from its founders' observation that they were all beginners at the game—to the author's own covert teenage snooker obsession and hustling endeavors in Montreal. This sports-history-cum-memoir, part of which will be published in the New Yorker, should delight both Richler fans and game enthusiasts. (Lyons, $22.95 160p ISBN 1-58574-179-5; July)

Born in 1905, Theodore Buzzeo lived for nearly the entire span of the 20th century. Emigrating to the United States from Italy at the age of 16, Buzzeo lacked formal education, but read Dante and was an opera fanatic. He worked as a dog trainer, a truck driver, a butcher, a professional hunter, a businessman and—at 120 pounds—a boxer. His autobiography, Memoirs of an Immigrant, finished just before his 1997 death and edited by his daughter, Maddalena Buzzeo, is both harrowing and deadpan. When Katie, his former mistress, ends up in Bellevue after slashing her baby's neck and her own wrists, Buzzeo writes, "I do not know how everything ended up. I hope well." A strange, sometimes eloquent, American chronicle. (Vineyard, $19.95 230p ISBN 1-930067-08-9; July)