Timothy S. Susanin Looks at Walt Disney's Successes and Failures as an Artist and Animator
A review by Charles Solomon
When the extraordinary success of Steamboat Willie made Walt Disney an overnight sensation in 1928, he'd already spent nearly a decade working in animation. During those years, he'd had successes and failures, as Timothy S. Susanin recounts in great detail in his new book Walt Before Mickey. In 1919, while Disney and his friend Ub Iwerks were working as commercial artists in Kansas City, they taught themselves animation. Disney began exploring the medium with the "Newman Laugh-O-Grams," a series of one-minute topical cartoons for local theater owner Frank Newman. He quit his job and started a studio with money borrowed from friends and relatives. Although the studio went broke, Disney completed the live action/animation Alice's Wonderland, then joined his brother Roy in Los Angeles. Distributor Margaret Winkler offered Disney a contract for a series based on Alice that would continue the premise of a live-action little girl in a cartoon setting. The series proved successful...
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Twin: A Memoir by Allen Shawn
 Shortly after his mother's death at 99 in 2005, Allen Shawn -- the son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother of actor and playwright Wallace Shawn -- began writing Wish I Could Be There, a book about phobias grounded in his firsthand experience. To his surprise, his autistic twin ...
Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed by Judy Pasternak
 Studded with vivid character sketches and evocative descriptions of the American landscape, journalist Judy Pasternak's scarifying account of uranium mining's disastrous consequences often reads like a novel -- though you will wish that the bad guys got punished as effectively as they do in...
Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
 When Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994, he made a startling claim: Henceforth, he would abandon the autobiographical style that had previously characterized his work. The fruit of that declaration, a sprawling novel about religious sects and nuclear catastrophe called...
Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline
 With his plus-four knickers, button nose and "squiff" hairdo, Tintin ranks as one of the most recognizable and best-loved characters in comics. However, his creator, Georges "Herge" Remi (1907-83), remains "an elusive figure," as Pierre Assouline notes in this unsatisfying biography: "Most people...
Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream by Leonard Zeskind
 This April, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the media world was briefly ablaze debating whether it was true.
"Rightwing extremists," the report...
Valeria's Last Stand by Marc Fitten
 Since the days of Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, American authors have had a penchant for sweeping allegory, for tales that examine universal human qualities through the presentation of stylized and generalized characters. This tradition is carried on today by authors such as Cormac McCarthy in his...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin
 "Everyone has three lives," Gabriel Garcia Marquez once told Gerald Martin. "A public life, a private life and a secret life." With little help from the novelist himself, who merely "tolerated" him for years before embracing him as his "official" biographer in 2006, Martin has picked through this...
Gimmick #01: Gimmick!, Vol. 1 by Youzaburou Kanari
 In America, comic books have often presented a conservative political message. From the combat missions of World War II GIs to the vigilantism of "The Dark Knight," even anti-heroes have generally fought to preserve the established order. There have been exceptions, of course, but American readers...
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
 Literature has given us many unsympathetic protagonists yet relatively few genuine monsters: Lolita's Humbert Humbert, Shakespeare's Richard III and American Psycho's Patrick Bateman come to mind. In each case, the writer was successful because the reader was drawn into the narrative by the beauty...
Chronic: Poems by D. A. Powell
 There are poets who show us the exterior world and poets who ferry news of their inner turmoil. Yet very few possess the double vision required to do both. Sylvia Plath surveyed and stoked the fires within her; Gary Snyder is far happier scouting for forest blazes in the Sierras.
Until he began...
Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America
by Barry Werth
The Sky Below
by Stacey D'erasmo
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by Franz Kafka
The Norman MacLean Reader
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Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008
by Clive James
AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India
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Goldengrove: A Novel
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Infinite Jest
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The Challenge: Hamdan V. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power
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Alfred and Emily
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Ark of the Liberties: America and the World
by Ted Widmer
America America
by Ethan Canin
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Draining the Sea
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by John Grisham
Yalo (Rainmaker Translations)
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A View of the Ocean
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Fire in the Blood: A Novel
by Irene Nemirovsky
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