Nearly six decades after his death, there has never been a biography in full of John F. Kennedy. (Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life came closest, and it was published more than 15 years ago.) The Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard scholar Fredrik Logevall has begun to redress this somewhat astonishing absence with the publication this year of the first in a two-volume biography, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956.
Paradoxically, the more one thinks one knows about the life of JFK, the more immediately and forcibly one is struck by how much is new—and importantly new—in Mr. Logevall’s telling. The story of Kennedy’s development of his Harvard senior thesis—published later as Why England Slept—is both scholarly and compelling. Here for the first time we see the independent thinker Kennedy is to become. At the moment where Mr. Logevall concludes this chapter with, in effect, a long one-paragraph book review—pinpointing both the analytical strengths and youthful weaknesses of the thesis—I found that I had to stop reading, just to think about what he was saying. This book is a superb beginning; now the joy will be in anticipating the second volume.
• Peter Guralnick is by far the best writer on popular music we have. (Born a couple of months after I was, he was seized in his teens by the blues, as I was by doo-wop rock ’n’ roll.) He’s the author of the transcendent two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, as well as a magisterial life of Sam Phillips and one of Sam Cooke. He’s also published several collections of essays, the latest of which is Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing.
The essays in this book range far and wide, from the story of Ray Charles’s breakout smash hit “I’ve Got a Woman” at the end of 1954, to a lovely little meditation on Johnny Cash, to a piece on the legendary songwriting team of Lieber and Stoller. Along the way, there are studies of undeservedly less well-known artists like Bill Monroe, Solomon Burke, Howlin’ Wolf, and even a couple of novelists. But the long essay on Peter’s gingerly pursued relationship with Elvis’s manager “Colonel” Tom Parker is alone worth the price of the book. One reads Guralnick as much for the writing as for the personalities and the music—which explains why I have to read everything he writes at least twice. He is an American national treasure.
• I don’t read widely in sports, but I always try to pay attention to really superior sports writing. That explains why I was all over Tom Callahan’s Gods at Play: An Eyewitness Account of Great Moments in American Sports. That subtitle is—deliberately, I suspect—somewhat hyperbolic. For this is less a book about moments as it is a personal memoir: 50-odd years of great writing by one of the premier sportswriters of my generation.
Yes, here are such things as Roberto Clemente’s 3,000th and last hit, the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, and Secretariat in the Belmont. But here too are Arthur Ashe’s news conference at which he disclosed that he had AIDS. Joe Morgan whispering thanks to an almost-blind Jackie Robinson on the field at the 1972 World Series. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saying he was more interested in being a good man than in being the greatest basketball player.
As is the case with Guralnick, any writer—or anyone seriously appreciative of good writing—has to read Callahan twice.
• The great art book publisher Taschen is out this year with a magnificent—and very reasonably priced—Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890: The Complete Paintings. (I got it from my son and daughter-in-law for my birthday, or else I might not have known of it; could the same be said of the art lover on your holiday list?)
In addition to bringing together all 871 of van Gogh’s paintings—the overwhelming preponderance in color—this volume contains a richly detailed monograph on his life and art. But for me the book’s greatest accomplishment is to show the paintings chronologically. For the first time, it was borne in on me how wildly prolific he was in the last year of his life—from the summer of 1889 until he killed himself in July 1890. If possible, this presentation has the effect of magnifying the tragedy.
© 2020 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. All these books were reviewed upon publication in Nick’s monthly newsletter Nick Murray Interactive. You may download a sample issue at www.nickmurraynewsletters.com.