Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, edited by Carol Brightman (Harcourt Brace, $16).
Reading other people’s mail, like eavesdropping, is always entertaining. This odd couple, who met at the Murray Hill Bar in Manhattan in 1944, rattle on about everything from the Warren Report (“unsatisfactory,” snaps McCarthy) to food at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club (“so bad that one can’t eat it,” snaps Arendt).
McCarthy is “so enthralled” with Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” that “I’ve been absorbed for the past two weeks, in the bathtub, riding in the car, waiting in line at the grocery store.” Arendt confesses she passed up a lecture by theologian Paul Tillich to stay home and write McCarthy. Some wonderful gossip.
Gertrude Stein’s America, by Gertrude Stein (Liveright, $10).
She lived most of her life in France, but Gertrude Stein always said she “remained firmly born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.” Gilbert Harrison, former editor of the New Republic and one of Stein’s publishers, culled this assemblage of Stein’s thinking on such back-home matters as railroad stations, mailboxes, cities, farms, five-and-dime stores, drugstores, food, landscape and speech. A French newspaper once asked her to tell them why she lived in France. “Well,” she wrote, running her words together, “the reason is very simple their life belongs to them so your life can belong to you. . . .”
Philip Johnson: Life and Work, by Franz Schulze (University of Chicago Press, $16.95).
This book, as Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin once noted in an article, began with a phone call in 1986 from celebrity New York architect Philip Johnson to Franz Schulze, a professor of art at Lake Forest College and author of a definitive look at the great Chicago architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The idea, both men agreed, was to reveal Johnson, warts and all, but to hold off publishing until Johnson, then 80, died. After waiting eight years, Schulze weighed in with his readable take on a man, now 90, who is not the world’s best architect, but is prolific and (in not always pleasant ways) colorful.
I Sing the Body Electronic, by Fred Moody (Penguin, $12.95).
This book chronicles a year in the life of a Microsoft design-and-development team. Despite great insider access, much of Fred Moody’s material “came to me through e-mail, a medium that combines distance and intimacy,” like a confessional booth. There are severe pressures, impossible deadlines, ego wars and contention. Moody, quiet as a mouse, keeps readers on track.
Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer, by Andrew Ritchie (Johns Hopkins University Press, $15.95).
Long forgotten, Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor was the second black athlete, after boxer George Dixon, to be recognized as a world champion. Born in Indianapolis, Taylor worked in a bicycle shop, learned racing and won the world title in Montreal in 1899. A bicycling historian, Ritchie understands the technical and personal skills of a man who mastered the tempestuous world of international professional bicycle racing a century ago.
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, by Kenzaburo Oe (Grove, $11).
Winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for literature, Kenzaburo Oe wrote this, his first novel, when he was 23. It concerns 15 teenage reformatory boys evacuated during wartime to a mountain village where the local peasants hate them. Plague breaks out. The villagers flee. The boys, blockaded inside the deserted town, try to make the best of it. Most of them are doomed. Oe is best known for “The Silent Cry,” which he rewrote after reading the religious thought of Romanian scholar-poet Mircea Eliade, then teaching at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School.
