Griffin Dunne’s The Friday Afternoon Club, Ann Powers’ Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, and Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month.
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1. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne
(Penguin)
7 Rave • 7 Positive
Read an interview with Griffin Dunne here
“Dunne largely bears…slings and arrows with good humor and equanimity, conscious, perhaps, that in retelling them he becomes the hero of the joke. He gets terrific mileage from his own bad luck … What makes these unimaginable events so readable, and allows Dunne to find a kind of grace even amid tragedy, are his unshakable black humor and unfailing nose for a good story.”
–Charles Arrowsmith (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers
(Day Street Books)
8 Rave • 3 Positive
“Remarkably insightful … Keeping a distance pays great dividends here. Powers proves an adroit codebreaker for the uniquely complex cross-pollination of romantic ennui, class consciousness, spiritual striving and occasional narcissism that characterizes the full sweep of the Joni Mitchell enterprise … Astute … It is a great compliment to Powers’s ebullient style that her accruing sense of fatigue and wonder around her subject never reads as less than fascinating. Visceral prose, pure fusion.”
–Elizabeth Nelson (The Washington Post)
3. The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing
(W. W. Norton & Company)
6 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Laing maps the ghosts of gardens and sacred spaces destroyed through war … What makes this captivating book more than an elaborate journal of gardening and its fraught history is Laing’s insistence on Jarman’s idea that ‘paradise haunts gardens.’”
–Lauren LeBlanc (The Boston Globe)
4. Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum
(Random House)
5 Rave • 5 Positive
“The book gives us glimpses into the fraught production of these shows, their divided receptions, and the melancholy biographies of some of the thousands of people who have appeared on these shows … Nussbaum, as always, makes her case for the seriousness of her subject simply by taking it seriously. Attentive not just to the cultural footprint of the reality show but to its ticky-tacky specificity, Cue the Sun! provides a sometimes grim, occasionally gleeful account of the way that television can not just mirror but also create real life … Nussbaum sees these human moments as screen moments and describes them with the same care she might otherwise apply to a prestige drama series.”
–Phillip Maciak (The New Republic)
5. Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius by Carrie Courogen
(St. Martin’s)
5 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Splendid … Revelatory scholarship that gives full measure to this artist who despite obstacles and setbacks (some self-inflicted) is an exalted figure in the comedy pantheon, a distinct voice whose outlier creative life Courogen captures through original research, archival material and scores of interviews … Like its subject, contains multitudes, and it captures the complexities and contradictions of the fiendishly funny and fiercely independent artist.”
–Donald Liebenson (The Washington Post)
