Weekend books.

This week's "Holiday Books" issue of the New York Times Book Review includes a roundup of brief reviews of Hollywoodish books by Ada Calhoun:

• Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I Breen and the Production Code Administration, a "surprisingly entertaining and rigorous biography."

• I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski and What Have You, a "punch-drunk tribute worthy of 'the Dude.'"

• Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times: "If you don't exactly know Nicholson at the end of this opus, you certainly suspect you don't want him to date your daughter."

• Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood's Russians: Biography of an Image: "Affectionately and in great detail, [Harlow] Robinson describes the careers of several Russian filmmakers, as well as Hollywood's changing portrayal of Russians, in all their poorly accented, grossly caricatured glory."

"Couldn't dance. Couldn't, for all practical purposes, act. Couldn't sing with the kind of nuance we expect of singers today. Was only moderately good-looking early, and later became a bit of a fright. No wonder it takes two biographies to try to put across why Ethel Merman was one of the biggest and most enduring stars Broadway has ever known." And of course, she appeared in more than a few movies, too. Neil Genzlinger reviews Ethel Merman: A Life and Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman.

Liesl Schillinger reviews Steve Erickson's " fascinating piece of phantasmagoric Hollywood homage," Zeroville (excerpt).

Peter Keepnews on Michael Palin's Diaries 1969 - 1979: The Python Years: "This charming and at times revelatory book is exactly what its name says it is: not a memoir or a history but simply excerpts from the diary Palin began keeping in 1969. A voice of (relative) sanity in the eye of a comedic storm, Palin paints so vivid a picture that the reader becomes a Python by proxy."

Reviewing Steve Martin's Born Standing Up (excerpt), Alex Witchel puts her finger on the comedian's onscreen appeal: "[H]e makes you root for him without ever seeming to ask. In between laughs, there is a sweetness mixed with something wistful that places him just on the outside and makes you do the reaching."

I'll mention Sia Michel's review of Lynn Goldsmith's Rock and Roll and David Kirby's review of Dave Marsh's The Beatles' Second Album in order to segue into an online browsing tip: Allan Tannenbaum's photos of John and Yoko in Vanity Fair.

And once again: the top ten, the 100 notables and the notable children's books of 2007.

The Independent's got a year-end best-of-07 collection, too, introduced by Boyd Tonkin; look to the right for the big roundups, including Michael Arditti on books by or about Noël Coward, Laurence Olivier, Miriam Karlin and William Shakespeare.

And the Washington Post chooses its best books of the year. From its rich collection of nonfiction highlights, I'd just point out that they've gone for Jürgen Neffe's Einstein: A Biography rather than Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe. Here's Michael Dirda's review of both from April. Also: best fiction and Jonathan Yardley's top ten.

"Positively, usefully, a sense of relativism-as-virtue was what [Joseph] Conrad was all about," writes Giles Foden in a terrific piece for the Guardian's Review. "It was what he valued. On the 150th anniversary of his birth and the centenary of the publication of The Secret Agent, such a value seems worth exploring again. In a networked global culture, in which the differences between moral beliefs are constantly thrown into sharp relief, it seems more necessary than ever."

Also, Elizabeth Cowling, herself the author of Picasso: Style and Meaning, walks us through John Richardson's "engrossing" A Life of Picasso: Volume 3: The Triumphant Years, 1917 - 1932 and Simon Callow on Cecil B DeMille and the Golden Calf:

In a fascinating aside in his wonderfully entertaining biography, Simon Louvish notes that the French film theorists of the New Wave ignored Cecil B DeMille in favor of what he provocatively, but not inaccurately, calls "the journeymen of the studio factories": Walsh, Ford and Hawks. But DeMille was much more of an auteur than any of them, controlling his own films - all 70 of them - to the last detail. Louvish's book is a major act of reclamation of an overlooked oeuvre, as well as a 3D, Cinemascope portrait of one of the most prodigious figures ever to call "Action!".

Tim Lucas introduces a new novel by a Video Watchdog reader, David White: Fantômas in America, "the first new Fantômas novel to appear since the last of the Marcel Allain novels."

In an excerpt from A Jesuit Off-Broadway at Busted Halo, James Martin, SJ recalls an unusual gig as a theological consultant: "During the first two weeks in January 2005, the cast of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which featured actors like Sam Rockwell and Eric Bogosian, traveled painstakingly through the text, as they sat around the plastic tables in New York's Public Theater. All along, Philip Seymour Hoffman offered, like any good teacher, insight, encouragement, and direction when needed."

And the book is reviewed by Eileen Markey. Via Bookforum.

Look who's making Michael Atkinson happy: "They're loving Flickipedia - in the New York Times, the Boston Phoenix, Newsday, Library Journal, Oklahoma Gazette, School Library Journal, Bookgasm, Tribute, Books On, O, Daily Local News, Bozeman Daily Chronicle..."

Posted by dwhudson at December 1, 2007 2:55 PM