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Journalist Caesar (Two Hours) delivers an evocative portrait of the life and times of British adventurer Maurice Wilson (1898–1934), who captivated the public’s attention with his doomed attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1934. Despite the best efforts of the British government to stop him, Wilson flew his Gipsy Moth biplane (which he had only recently learned to pilot) from England to India, hired three sherpas, and walked more than 300 miles to the base of the world’s tallest mountain disguised as a Tibetan priest. Drawing on archival records and love letters Wilson wrote to a friend’s wife, Caesar highlights Wilson’s middle-class upbringing and military service in WWI, where his battalion was nearly wiped out in Germany’s spring offensive of 1918. After the war, Wilson burned through relationships, suffered a nervous breakdown, and traveled the world. Back in England, he turned to fasting, Indian mysticism, and the power of positive thinking to recover from depression and prepare for his Everest expedition. Caesar skillfully explores the political, intellectual, and spiritual movements of the era, as well as Wilson’s psychic scars from the war. Though his climb ended in tragedy, Wilson inspired Reinhold Messner to make the first solo ascent of Everest in 1980. This entertaining, well-researched chronicle is a valuable addition to mountaineering history. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

MSNBC host Maddow (Blowout) and journalist Yarvitz expand on their podcast of the same name in this rollicking study of the 1973 resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew. In their colorful retelling, Agnew’s crimes were simple and sleazy: as Baltimore County executive and governor of Maryland, he took bribes from companies in exchange for awarding them public-works contracts—and kept taking payoffs in the White House. Maddow and Yarvitz convincingly argue that President Richard Nixon and future president George H.W. Bush (then serving as Republican National Committee chairman) obstructed justice by trying to quash a Department of Justice investigation into Agnew’s dealings, and spotlight heroism by the young U.S. attorneys in Maryland who nailed Agnew, and that of Attorney General Elliot Richardson (already overseeing the Watergate investigation), who resisted White House pressure before letting Agnew plead guilty to tax evasion in order to smooth his resignation. The authors style Agnew a proto-Trumpian practitioner of “bruising, know-nothing, confrontational conservatism” who argued, as President Trump later would, that indicting him would be unconstitutional. Maddow’s fans will enjoy this entertaining and well-researched recap of Agnew’s comeuppance and its barely-veiled yearning for prosecutors to haul Trump into court. Agent: Laurie Liss, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

Sportswriter Callahan recalls the most memorable moments from his career with grace and humanity in this resonant memoir. Callahan’s career began in 1966 in the Baltimore Evening Sun’s newsroom, followed by stints at papers in San Diego, Calif.; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Washington, D.C., before a tenure at Time magazine. Rather than focus on individual games, Callahan homes in on anecdotes that reveal the inner lives of the men and women who played them. For example, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explains how, ashamed of his height in his youth, he looked to the Empire State Building as a positive role model; Muhammad Ali told Callahan, “My destiny is at stake,” in an intimate moonlit conversation about an upcoming fight with George Foreman; and baseball great Pete Rose shared that his white teammates disdained him, (“they called him a hotdog for trying to do things he couldn’t”) while his Black teammates “treated me like a human being.” Callahan’s seamless mixture of tales from his own career and wisdom gleaned from the athletes he covered makes for a strong offering all-around. The book works as both a paean to sportswriting’s glory days and a lyrical reminder that athletes have rich lives away from the stadium lights. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

Music critic Hilleary interviews a wide range of fellow critics and journalists in this enlightening if occasionally repetitious collection. He approaches such topics as the way they each got their start in music writing, their approaches to interviewing artists, and their thoughts about pursuing their craft as a career. Reflecting on the role of music in their lives, Hanif Abdurraqib says music was always “a soundtrack to my daily movements,” and Jessica Hopper connects her love of punk rock to her social activism and “will for disruption.” NPR’s Ann Powers attributes her career to an interview with Lester Bangs she completed for a high school assignment, while Chuck Klosterman candidly admits that the biggest contributor to his career has been “luck.” A recurring theme is that critics love interviewing artists because the conversations reveal, as Bonnie Stiernberg phrases it, “the heart of the artist.” Ben Ratliff describes how, since artists can be tight-lipped about their work, often “what a critic says about a work is more interesting than what the artist might say. Because they place it in a context—that’s their job.” If there’s a complaint here, it’s that Hilleary asks each subject the same questions, so the narrative can feel redundant at times. Even so, these candid takes on the craft of criticism provide valuable insights for both music lovers and aspiring critics. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

Journalists Johnson and Maki celebrate the NFL’s 100th anniversary in this impressive ranking of what the authors consider to be the best athletes ever to play professional football. After a preliminary alphabetical ranking of the top 10, (among them Jerry Rice, Deacon Jones, and Tom Brady), Johnson and Maki dive into a century’s worth of star players, and pay ample attention to the less-glamorous positions of centers and safeties. Their focus remains predominantly on stars of the past half century, with Ezekiel Elliott (though allegations of domestic violence against him receive only a scant paragraph) and DeShaun Watson making appearances. Johnson and Maki provide anecdotes about players’ lives, giving opportunities to evaluate the character of each individual beyond his impressive statistics (“37-year-old [Larry] Fitzgerald is a self-proclaimed ‘ student of life ’”). Complete with quality photographs and a thoughtful introduction that marks how the NFL has adapted to cultural changes over the years, Johnson and Maki’s book would be a welcome debate-starter for any NFL fan. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

Goldin debuts with a disappointing look at how she founded Hint Water, a flavored water company. She traces her ambitious nature to her childhood; as the youngest of five, she writes, she was used to having to push for what she wanted. Post-college, she hustled and wound up working in e-commerce at AOL, but, feeling unfulfilled, resolved to become an entrepreneur. On a health and fitness kick, Goldin started making fruit-infused water for herself and got the idea for Hint. She received plenty of discouragement, including from “an executive at one of the world’s largest beverage companies [who] told me no one would want my unsweetened flavored water.” She proved the doubters wrong with the company’s success after its 2005 founding, marked by milestones that included deals with Whole Foods and Starbucks. Unfortunately, the advice component promised by the title feels peripheral and is limited largely to the titles of the book’s chapters—“Create Your Own Opportunities,” “Know When to Move On.” It’s a decent enough professional memoir, but it comes up short on the kind of substantive guidance aspiring entrepreneurs might hope for. Agent: Carol Franco, Kneerim & Williams. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

Repo romance might not be a genre, but two-time Lambda Literary Award–winner McMan (Galileo) makes a case that it should be with this delicious and hilarious fever-dream of a novel. When Vera “Nick” Nicholson, a struggling, 37-year-old junior legal associate, is dispatched to retrieve a luxury car stolen from one of her firm’s clients, her search launches her into the world of the National Recovery Bureau. Among the bureau’s outrageous assortment of grifters is Frankie Stohler, a Jennifer Aniston look-alike who can get away with just about anything in a blink of her innocent baby blues. Lured by helpless lust and the promise of a larger pay day, Nick partners with Frankie on a rapidly escalating series of improbable heists, including “recovering” a school bus from a Baptist church and a hearse from a shady funeral home. Though she’s afraid of being hurt, Nick can’t deny that being with Frankie feels like “an astronaut’s first bout of weightlessness.” McMan creates a lovable cast comprising crooks with hearts of gold and endearing oddballs, including Nick’s wonderfully campy roommate and Frankie’s goth mortician sister. It’s lighthearted fare that relishes in its own ridiculousness, but McMan grounds the more outlandish flights of fancy in honesty and warmth. Readers are sure to be taken in by the quirky charms of this lesbian love story. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

Set in 1938, Upson’s outstanding ninth outing for real-life mystery author Josephine Tey (after 2019’s Sorry for the Dead) takes Tey to Cornwall, where benefactor Hilaria St. Aubyn is hosting a fund-raising event at her family’s island castle to aid Jewish refugees from Germany. The guests include celebrity Marlene Dietrich, who has been drawing unwelcome attention from the Nazis for her anti-Nazi views. Hilaria, who has asked Scotland Yard’s Det. Chief Insp. Archie Penrose to watch over Dietrich, says he is welcome to invite Tey, Penrose’s close friend. The island, which is cut off from the mainland when the connecting causeway is flooded, becomes the scene of a murder after someone slits the throat of a guest and places the corpse on a stone seat positioned precariously at the top of a castle tower. A horrific filicide case Penrose handled in 1920, revealed in a prologue, looms over the current murder. Upson makes all of her complex characters’ motivations, guilt, and lies understandable while subtly inserting clues into the ingeniously twisty plot. She has few peers, in any era, in imbuing fair-play whodunits with psychological depth. Agent: Gráinne Fox, Fletcher & Co. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

The dozen stories in this welcome reprint collection, most featuring Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Christie’s other series detectives, amply display the author’s storytelling gifts. The strongest is a standalone that originated as a radio play, “Three Blind Mice,” a variation on her classic And Then There Were None. After Molly Davis inherited Monksford Manor from her aunt, she and her new husband decided to run it as a guesthouse. But after they and their four guests become snowbound during a blizzard, the Davises learn that someone in their home is a killer seeking revenge for an old wrong. Poirot recounts one of his rare failures in “The Chocolate Box,” in which his deductions lead him astray, and he also fails to get his quarry in “The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge.” Miss Marple demonstrates her belief that tittle-tattle can be a valuable tool in investigating murder in “A Christmas Tragedy.” While none of these tales could be ranked with the prolific writer’s best work, they provide a sample of her skill at hiding clues. Both fans and newcomers looking for suspenseful escapism will be pleasantly diverted. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink

The first part of this enthralling standalone from Thriller Award-winner Freeman (the Jonathan Stride series) focuses on the disappearance of 10-year-old Jeremiah Sloan, whose abandoned bike is found one day on a remote road in Mittel County, of which the book’s eloquent narrator, Deputy Shelby Lake, says, “This being Mittel County, we say we live in the Middle of Everywhere, but the truth is that we’re closer to the middle of nowhere.” The boy’s parents demand that the FBI be called in to handle the case, and Shelby becomes the local liaison. In the course of the investigation, Shelby uncovers family secrets and hidden tragedies, some of which affect her own life. Jeremiah’s abduction remains unsolved, though evidence discovered in the search for the boy incriminates a local man in the shooting death of his wife. When the boy’s backpack is found 10 years later, his case is reopened. Freeman brings all the characters to life, highlighting their strengths as well as the darkness that lies within each of them, thus adding a delicious sense of uncertainty as to their motives. Readers will have a tough time putting this one down. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider/ICM Partners. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/09/2020 | Details & Permalink