Susannah’s Fall, Winter Reading List…2022-2023

Read for pleasure. Read to enlarge your lives. Read history, read biography, learn from the lives of others. 

David McCullough, The American Spirit…2017

  I thought it apt to begin with a quote from one of our greatest teachers who passed away at 89 on the 7th of August, 2002.

  I’m not ashamed to say I wept, at once hauling out all of his books that sit in pride of place on my shelf…The Great Bridge (1972), Mornings on Horseback (1981), Truman (1992), John Adams (2001), but what ended up warm in my hands was his The American Spirit (2017) dedicated to his nineteen grandchildren.

  A collection of his college commencement speeches along with when he spoke at the White House’s 200th Anniversary, in Dallas on November 22, 2013, the 50th Anniversary honoring John F. Kennedy, along with a history of the United States Capitol every American should read since, and to quote Mr. McCullough once again…

 How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don’t know anything about where we have come from…

 bringing me to one of the greatest reporters of our time.

Piecework…Pete Hamill, (1996), a  selection of his best journalism recapping our poignant past, along with lofty profiles of JFK, Frank Sinatra and dance man Bob Fosse in the section…The Talent In The Room.

 There’s even an essay on Mr. Trump before entering politics, Pete making you want to run out to buy a newspaper when truth had its place…

 and since one book leads to another…

  Why Sinatra Matters…Pete Hamill (1998), another grand slam, making my list often, read whenever aching to hear a jukebox sitting on a barstool at the legendary P. J. Clarke’s Saloon, where it opens, Frank holding court wrapped in his own melodies, coating the room with a time long gone.

    The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, Martin Gottfried (1990). This reads like a rollercoaster ride, Fosse’s life exactly the way it was shown in his film, All That Jazz, actor Roy Scheider playing him with scary realism. Talk about drugs, women and rock and roll, in his case on Broadway, Bob giving bad boy behavior a whole new kick, pun intended.

  The Bronx Zoo…Sparky Lyle and Bob Golenbock (1979). Keeping with a New York theme, a funny but bitchy tell-all by a Yankee pitcher with an axe to grind about his beloved team winning the 1978 World Series Championship, his reader, a fly on the wall its wings trembling, Sparky with Bob’s help, taking no prisoners.

  Tooling over to Paris…

  The Perfect Meal: In Search Of The Lost Tastes Of France…John Baxter (2013).     

  With the exception of the late, great Anthony Bourdain, I’ve never enjoyed a food writer more whose wry wit wraps around each page one could call a mouth-watering read. He even makes me want to cook.

    Hard to leave the land of bouillabaisse once you’re there…

  The Paris Bookseller…Kerri Maher, (2022). Historical fiction, the best of both genres, about Paris’s legendary lady, Miss Sylvia Beach, in 1919 opening her iconic bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, supporting the likes of an unknown Ernest Hemingway while publishing James Joyce’s groundbreaking book, Ulysses, gallantly fighting her way through the 1929 Depression.

Parisian lore, beautifully told, its lovely cover saying it all.

  Justice…Dominick Dunne, (2001).     Let’s toss in some true crime, a series first published in Vanity Fair of murder trials that will make your hair stand on end including the trial of Dunne’s own 22 year-old daughter, Dominique, killed by a jealous boyfriend in 1983.

  I warn you though, true crime is like crack…a hard habit to break.

Final Draft…Katy Tur, (2002).              Another passionate reporter who’s not afraid of a little truth, including her own; reading fast and furious, her journalist showing, getting to the point sooner than later.

   I liked it so much, then read her first book, Unbelievable, (2017), when she covered the 2016 Trump campaign, the circus that it was with all its bells and whistles, our author often harassed by the man she was honorably following.

 All I know is, that Katy sure can write.

Dispatches From The Edge…Anderson Cooper, (2005). Sticking with reporters, I loved this, since I always thought his fame came on the coattails of the name Vanderbilt, courtesy of his famous mom, and couldn’t have been more wrong.

  This man worked his tail off witnessing some of the most horrific events in our history, including a tsunami in South Asia alongside New Orleans’s Hurricane Katrina while trying to heal from the deaths of his father and older brother who took his life at 23.

  A humbling, impressive read.

 A favorite series of mine, The Last Interview, and Other Conversations (2022). Dying at the age of 87 in 2021, it made me remember what an amazing writer she was, full of insight, courage and candor especially in the latter part of her life, rereading her two heartfelt memoirs, the first,  The Year of Magical thinking (2005) about her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, dying of a sudden heart attack in 2003 while at the dinner table reminding me, if you’re going to write memoir, you better be willing to spill your guts. On its heels came,  Blue Nights (2011), the death of her only child, Quintana Roo, dying in 2005 of a phantom infection at 39.  

   As a wife and mother, the last one standing, her ashes, alas, now reunited in the crypt at Manhattan’s The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine with the two people she loved the most.

   Allow me to end the way I started, with the man who inspired much of this list.

   Two men actually…David McCullough and President John Adams, McCullough wrote about in 2001, earning him the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the following year.

   They both loved to read, Adams saying, I discovered books, and read forever.

   McCullough, urging all the college graduates he addressed, to never be without one...to make the love of learning central to your life…and remember, even the oldest book is brand-new for the reader who opens it for the first time.

   Like Mr. Adams told his young son John Quincy, before he too, took on the world…

  You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. 

  And to leave lightly with one of my favorite McCulloughisms…

  Whenever you check out of a hotel or motel, be sure you tip the maid.

  Happy reading everyone.

David McCullough (1933-2020).

  R.I.P. sir, and thank you for all that you taught me.

   SB