1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left.
By Robyn Hitchcock.
July 2024. 224p. Akashic, $26.95 (9781636142067). 780.
Robyn Hitchcock, the English singer and guitarist and former member of the Soft Boys and later the Egyptians, is a sui generis figure. No one quite like him exists in pop culture. His quirky memoir, 1967, focuses on a crucial year in his life—the titular 1967 when he was a precocious 14-year-old boy and left home for the first time to attend boarding school. During that momentous year he first heard Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd. Meanwhile, the Beatles were here, there, and everywhere. Like Hitchcock and his music, the memoir is wild, surreal, and wonderfully weird. At one point in the story, he describes himself as being “on the spectrum”—at the “high-functioning end of autism.” Dylan, more than anyone, speaks to this younger self (“How does it feel, to be on your own?”) “marooned,” as he is, “in this nest of aliens.” These small but important glimpses into his still-developing psyche add up to a portrait of a young burgeoning artist and point the way to the Robyn Hitchcock of this moment. —June Sawyers
1974: A Personal History.
By Francine Prose.
June 2024. 272p. Harper, $27.99 (9780063314092). 810.
Novelist and critic Prose brings all her artistry and astuteness to her first memoir. Prose was 26 in 1974, with one novel published and another on the way. She fled grad school and her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was staying with friends in San Francisco when she met Tony Russo at a poker game and was instantly intrigued with this shambling antiwar hero. Formerly a “respected and highly paid engineer, economist, and data analyst,” Russo leaked the Pentagon Papers with the more polished and charismatic Daniel Ellsberg. Russo was out of work, haunted, agitated, and elusive. He invited Prose along on high-speed, late night drives, during which he would rant and brood. Interspersed with Russo’s wrenching story are incandescent tales of Prose’s daring adventures in Mexico, India, and Afghanistan. She recounts her struggle to understand Russo and herself with breath-catching candor and reflects with keen insights on the timbre of that questioning time, the slipperiness of memory, and what we choose and refuse to perceive in others (and reveal and conceal about ourselves). With Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a touchstone, freshly relevant ruminations on the antiwar and free-speech activism of the 1970s, and illumination of the first steps in Prose’s dynamic writing life, this is a rueful and affecting look-back. —Donna Seaman
Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great.
By Rachel Kousser.
July 2024. 416p. Mariner, $35 (9780062869685). 938.07.
Over the course of his brief life, Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, created an empire stretching from the Balkan peninsula south into Egypt and east to the Indian subcontinent. After subduing Darius III’s formidable Persian Empire, Alexander led his forces east, searching for Ocean, the body of water that his tutor Aristotle believed encircled the earth. Kousser (The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture, 2017) focuses her biography of Alexander on the conqueror’s final seven years, as he drove as far as today’s Pakistan before leading his armies back to Macedon. Culture clashes among Alexander’s forces led to several mutinous uprisings. Kousser details Alexander’s skills at organizing logistical support to keep troops fed, housed, and paid. Alexander’s close relationship with Hephaistion, his comrade in arms and beloved intimate, receives appropriate scrutiny, and Hephaistion’s death so shortly before Alexander’s own echoes Achilles’ and Patroclus’ stories from Homer’s Iliad. Battles are meticulously recounted in all their bloody confusions. Fans of Game of Thrones will find multiple parallels in these ancient war stories that add to their immediacy. —Mark Knoblauch
Ann Sheridan: The Life and Career of Hollywood’s Oomph Girl.
By Michael D. Rinella.
July 2024. 120p. McFarland, paper, $39.95 (9781476694184); e-book (9781476652047). 791.43.
Like many young women in small towns across America, Clara Lou Sheridan of Denton, Texas, dreamed of heading to Hollywood to become a movie star. Winning a 1934 beauty contest came with a six-month Paramount Pictures contract; bit roles followed, and, in time, she changed her first name to Ann. At Warner Brothers, bigger roles came her way, and her sultry beauty and powerful presence inspired the studio’s publicity department to dub her the “Oomph Girl.” Rinella covers her roles in such memorable films as (1938), (1942), and (1949) and highlights her costars James Cagney, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and Humphrey Bogart. When movie roles grew fewer, versatile Sheridan, who excelled in comedies and serious dramas, turned to television, playing in anthology series like and a daytime drama, . Rinella chronicles the ups-and-downs of her love life and marriages. Sheridan died at age 51 in 1967 after completing her first and only season as the star of , a Western comedy.
