Category: Entertainment

One by One

25/12/2020

Ruth Ware: Harvill Secker $32.99

CORPORATE retreats are divisive. People generally either love them or loathe them – but in the case of music-tech start-up Snoop’s week-long outing to an exclusive French Alps resort, the participants’ loathing is directed more at each other rather than at the bonding exercise itself.
The company’s co-founders, Eva and Topher, are openly feuding, one determined to accept a lucrative buy-out offer while the other is doggedly opposed to relinquishing control. The shareholder group is split exactly down the middle with a single vote still swinging, guaranteeing that the leaders’ time at Chalet Perce-Neige will be spent lobbying and/or bullying in an attempt to sway their former colleague’s decision. With a billion dollars at stake, neither side is going to concede defeat while ever there’s a chance of claiming former personal assistant Liz’s all-important support.
Chef Danny and hostess Erin are the only onsite staff, responsible for catering to their visitors’ every whim – and there are whims aplenty among these privileged millennials with their unfathomable job titles, demanding diets and haute couture skiwear. Not only do the Snoopers arrive with an extra person to be accommodated without warning but now the weather forecast is dire, derailing their plans to spend the first afternoon out skiing.
It’s a scenario that could easily turn murderous – figuratively, at least.
There’s nothing figurative about one woman’s sudden disappearance, however: one minute she’s there in their midst, right among them on the slope, and the next she’s gone. Trying to trace when and how she vanished is thrown further into chaos when an avalanche sweeps down the mountainside, cutting the party off from any chance of seeking help.
Alone, hungry, cold and at loggerheads – and with one of that morning’s breakfast companions now missing, presumed dead – the Snoop team members and their hosts are living an Agatha Christie-like nightmare.

One To Watch

18/9/2020

Kate Stayman-London: Hachette Australia $29.99

LOVE comes in all shapes and sizes – or does it? Certainly not in the highly unrealistic world of ‘reality’ TV, where contenders on the top-rating Main Squeeze bear absolutely no resemblance to LA-based fashionista Bea Schumacher and her social media followers.
As 25 single women or men vie on screen for the attention of a potential husband or wife, Bea is frustrated to see that season after season the line-up is all but identical: tall, swimsuit-sculpted, white.
When a series of tequila-fuelled comments catches the eye of the Main Squeeze production team, the studio decides to turn the program on its head by introducing its first ever plus-sized romantic heroine. Can Bea be convinced to step into the role?
It’s horrible timing for the self-employed blogger, who has been in emotional freefall since her one-time best friend and love interest decided to ghost her.
Now, faced with having to choose a possible life partner in front of a national prime-time viewing audience, she is all but paralysed by self-doubt and indecision. Could any one of these so-called suitors truly be attracted to Bea or are they more likely merely going through the motions with a view to boosting their own public profiles?
Is chef Luc, professor Asher, farmer Wyatt or soccer coach Sam really Bea’s ideal match? All four men are physically perfect – and the reflection Bea sees in her mirror is not that of someone whose natural place is standing beside one of these god-like figures. After all, she reasons, there never has been a fat fairytale princess.
Will Bea’s lack of trust in the process derail this opportunity to find love?
Far from being a froth-and-bubbles glimpse into the world of The Bachelorette et al, One To Watch is a thought-provoking conversation starter that questions societal attitudes to weight, femininity and appetite.

Talking As Fast As I Can

5/5/2017

Lauren Graham: Viking $32.99

SHE'S played Craig T. Nelson’s daughter, Alexis Bledel’s mother, David Sutcliffe’s wife, Ray Romano’s fiancée and her real-life boyfriend’s sister in a Hollywood career that has rarely allowed more than a moment’s downtime.
Fans of her two incredibly successful and long-running television dramas, Gilmore Girls and Parenthood, have been aware for years of Lauren Graham’s ability to regurgitate rapid-fire dialogue at a pace that would leave the average actor completely tongue-tied.
What they might not have realised is that Graham – an accomplished writer and producer – has spent a disproportionately generous share of her precious off-screen hours jotting down equally hilarious and irreverent prose of her own.
In her latest book, a collection of vignettes revisiting some of her favourite showbusiness memories, the woman known by millions of viewers as Lorelai Gilmore and/or Sarah Braverman delivers a sassily witty commentary on her experiences both in front of and behind the studio camera.
Graham recalls her excruciatingly awkward first meeting with Peter Krause, the man who would much later become her off-screen partner as well as her brother on Parenthood.
She shares details of her unconventional upbringing in Japan and the Caribbean, her deep and genuine friendships with castmates and her disregard for the celebrity lifestyle, mocking the so-called ‘benefits’ of fame. She confesses her distaste of the outdoors and her constant struggle to meet writing deadlines.
Graham weaves into her commentary a walk through the popular culture of the 1990s and early 2000s (Filofax organisers, videotapes, BlackBerry PDAs) and pokes fun at her nationally televised failing as a fashion judge.
And as a highlight for Gilmore Girls aficionados, she includes diary excerpts from the period in which – a decade after Lorelai was officially retired – she returns to the set of fictitious Stars Hollow to reprise the character for the series’ exclusive Netflix reboot.

The Princess Diarist

6/1/2017

Carrie Fisher: Bantam Press $34.99

MORE often than not the story of an affair lasting only a handful of months between two no-name actors 40 years earlier would remain unremarkable and untold; it would certainly not be material on which to base a potentially best-selling book.
Yet by the time Carrie Fisher rediscovered three diaries kept during the filming of Star Wars in 1976, she and co-star Harrison Ford had become known the world over for their portrayal of two of film’s most iconic characters: Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, a displaced royal rebel fleeing the destruction of her beloved home planet, and Han Solo, a roguish smuggler-pilot turned would-be hero who finds distressed damsel Leia more than capable of saving herself.
Fisher’s notebooks resurfaced early last year, not long after her fourth on-screen incarnation as Princess Leia had premiered. The day had come, she decided, to reveal her short-lived infatuation on a film set far, far away with a then-34-year-old married co-star.
When the cameras started rolling on little-known director-screenwriter George Lucas’s low-budget project near London in 1976, Fisher was aged 19. She was already familiar with showbusiness, however, having grown up as the daughter of one of ‘old Hollywood’s’ most glamorous but ill-fated pairings: entertainers ‘cheating cad’ Eddie Fisher and ‘America’s sweetheart’ Debbie Reynolds.
Her revisiting of her big career break and what followed is wide-reaching, comprising entertaining yet sensitive musings on fame, hairbuns, metallic bikinis, unemployment, aging, relationships and, of course, Ford (a quiet, emotionally distant, stoney-faced man who smiled seldom, Fisher wrote, but always treated her well).
The Force deserted Fisher early last week, leaving this simultaneously hilarious, introspective and thoughtful memoir and one more yet-to-be-released Star Wars sequel as the final chapters of her substantial public legacy. Fisher herself narrated the audio version of Diarist in her distinctively raspy, expressive, at-times cackling voice.

Bathing and the Single Girl

9/9/2016

Christine Elise McCarthy: Multum in Parvo Publishing US$9.99

THINK Sex and the City for the average lonely, directionless suburban woman: abundant sass, bawdy humour and a generous dose of outrageous sexual misadventure but without the extravagances of Manolos, Cosmopolitans and a Manhattan bachelorette pad all apparently paid for by a couple of hours’ work per week.
Ruby Fitzgerald is an actor. Correct that: was once an actor, and might one day be again, if only she can land an audition leading to an actual on-screen speaking role. However, it’s been more than a decade since Ruby last had a proper paying job and her finances are stretched almost as thinly as the wrinkle-free skin on a Hollywood celebrity’s face. Overweight and 40, she knows her odds are close to nil.
Ruby’s quest for love, cash and self-esteem, set against a backdrop of image-conscious LA and supported by a line-up of charismatic oddballs, is close to the author’s heart.
If “Christine Elise” sounds familiar it is almost certainly for the new novelist’s part in the biggest Aaron Spelling TV hit of the ’90s, Beverly Hills, 90210, the series in which she played pill-popping high school wild child Emily Valentine. Less well known is that she cut her writing teeth behind the scenes of the same show, creating characters, storylines and complete episodes.
90210 also introduced Elise (actually her middle name – McCarthy is her surname by birth) to the cast member with whom she would share a five-year real-world relationship: Jason Priestly, at the time one of television’s fastest-rising young stars.
Post-90210 she went on to appear in ER and an array of films, including the one on which this first book is based.
Although fictional, Bathing & the Single Girl draws loosely on the author’s parallel life in the studio fast-lane and on three of her personal passions: photography, dogs and vegan “food porn”.

Final Chapters

22/4/2016

Jim Bernhard: Skyhorse Publishing $19.00

AUTHORS often deal with death as a subject in their creative efforts but how much is recorded – when the pen is laid down one last time or the keyboard falls silent – of an individual writer’s own demise?
In Final Chapters Jim Bernhard presents the gruesome, garish and occasionally amusing details of more than 100 well-known authors’ ultimate days.
Arranged chronologically, the chapters begin with the Classical Age and span the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Romantic, Victorian and modern eras.
Bernhard’s preface refers to the morbid curiosity humans feel for death and the questions people ask: “When?”, “Where?”, “Why?” and, most vigorously, “How?”
He also notes: “Even though average life expectancies have substantially lengthened in modern times, writers do not seem to have benefited from the improvement.” To the contrary: the average age at death of classical Greek and Roman writers was about 70 years yet in more recent centuries it has fallen to 65.
Murder, execution, torture and medical conditions ranging from malaria and tuberculosis to leukaemia have felled their share of wordsmiths, as have heart disease and the abuse of alcohol (18 shots of whiskey in a single sitting in Dylan Thomas’s case).
Perhaps the most bizarre death of all was that of Aeschylus, fatally injured when an airborne eagle dropped its prey – a turtle – onto his bald head, intending to crack it open against what the bird apparently mistook for a rounded rock.
At the other end of the scale was Plato, who had as pleasant an end to his life as any tired old biographer could possibly seek: he simply “drifted peacefully into death” either while conducting music or attending a wedding feast.
Final Chapters is a convenient collection for anyone seeking short, sharp sections that can be read in a few minutes each.

Elvis & Ginger

1/4/2016

Ginger Alden: Berkley $27.99

TO MUCH of the world Priscilla Beaulieu was the one true love of Elvis Presley’s life. In reality, however, that marriage held together for just short of five years, and several other significant girlfriends moved through the superstar’s orbit, most notably Ginger Alden, Presley’s fiancée of seven months at the time of his death.
Alden was only 19 and living with her family in Memphis when she first accompanied her older sisters to Graceland. Far from being overshadowed by the two grown women, Alden sparkled, catching their 42-year-old host’s attention.
Almost immediately Alden was whisked from her middle-class suburban upbringing into a tornado-like whirl of concerts, penthouses, private planes and hired help.
Within weeks of their initial meeting Presley presented Alden with a diamond engagement ring; the couple began finalising plans for a Christmas Day wedding less than 24 hours before he died in August of the following year.
Alden was not one of the many relatives, employees and former ‘friends’ who profited by selling sensational reminiscences after he was found dead in the bathroom of the suite they shared; rather, she kept her memories private, choosing to open up to the world only now that her son is a young adult.
In her own words, almost 40 years later Alden recounts Presley’s thoughtful, tender actions (underlining passages in her parents’ Bible, playing practical jokes on her siblings, singing at her grandfather’s funeral) and incredible generosity (epitomised by lavish gifts of cars, jewellery, fur coats and personal keepsakes). She describes in detail Presley’s fascination with philosophy, numerology and religion and recalls the hours the couple spent reading quietly together.
There are terrifying recollections, too, of rages involving guns, thrown food and, on one occasion, domestic violence.
Alden’s portrait, spanning the final nine months of Presley’s life, shows him as an imperfect but invariably optimistic and deeply spiritual human being.

Bendigo Art Gallery and Twentieth Century Fox present Marilyn Monroe

11/3/2016

Tansy Curtin: Bendigo Art Gallery $35.00

FOR decades to come Bendigonians will remember the time when history’s most famous blonde occupied their city – and the current Bendigo Art Gallery exhibition’s accompanying commemorative catalogue is an exceptional keepsake for reading now and then passing down to future generations.
Compiled by the event’s curator, Tansy Curtin, in collaboration with La Trobe University senior lecturer Dr Susan Gillett and gallery director Karen Quinlan, it comprises a thoughtful potted history of the famous actress-singer’s personal life and Hollywood career interspersed with images ranging from formal portraits and promotional posters to candid snapshots and on-set stills.
In her introduction Quinlan puts into context the gallery’s interest in this American icon: “In the global world in which we live, Marilyn belongs to everyone and no one.”
The core of the exhibition is clothing (both on-screen and private), makeup, jewellery and documents now owned by two US historian-collectors, Scott Fortner and Greg Schreiner, and Maite Mínguez Ricart in Spain. Although these artefacts themselves are not reproduced in this book, many of its photographs of Monroe show her wearing the garments, and a full list of the 100-plus items on display is provided.
Readers can be confident that this account of Monroe’s life – unlike some loose biographies of the celebrity – is reflective, balanced, thoroughly researched and, perhaps most importantly, entirely accurate.
It portrays Monroe as a capable, savvy businesswoman who took the lead in defining herself as the world’s most recognisable sex symbol but who despite her phenomenal international success did not amass personal wealth, preferring to share her earnings with the people around her. Her generosity and outer cheerfulness are contrasted with the insecurity and self-doubt that overshadowed her adult years.
Featuring full colour throughout, this catalogue is an elegant, coffee-table-style, softcover memento of arguably the greatest Monroe exhibition yet mounted anywhere in the world.

Killing Monica

26/2/2016

Candace Bushnell: Little, Brown $29.99

SEX and the City rebooted this new novel is definitely not. That said, SATC and Lipstick Jungle author Candace Bushnell’s latest New York City saga is entertaining escapism into a world few mere mortals ever glimpse.
Central character Pandemonia James ‘PJ’ Wallis is (precisely like Bushnell herself) a writer of fantastical female fiction – phenomenally popular chick-lit that has enraptured the male movers and shakers of Hollywood. PJ’s on-paper creation, Monica, is America’s darling – a good-time, can-do, party-hard gal whose life is the envy of book-buyers by the million. Monica has it all: beauty, success, confidence, wealth and a blissful, apparently charmed Manhattan existence – and so too, by extension, has her alter ego PJ.
Being constantly compared with a too-good-to-be-true fictitious invention is not all it’s cracked up to be, however; after years of living in her imaginary heroine’s shadow, PJ has had more than enough of never quite measuring up. Other projects beckon, and the public’s relentless obsession with Monica is a roadblock PJ is desperate to clear.
Alas, breaking free of the Monica-mania isn’t as easy as typing “THE END”, she discovers to her horror, with a publisher, a studio and an entire country baying for further instalments of their idyllic dream girl. What will it take to spring an increasingly frustrated PJ out of her self-made Monica trap?
Readers expecting SATC’s Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda won’t find too many familiar faces in this revisiting of NYC’s cocktail-club scene, populated as it is with franchised versions of Samantha at her most outrageous surrounded by actors, publicists and a suitably oily celebrity chef. While Killing Monica lacks the witty repartee of the Bushnell-inspired HBO TV series, its plot takes all the kinks and dips of an Olympic diving routine before arriving at a genuinely unpredictable and satisfying – if perhaps slightly hurried – climax.

The Man with the Golden Typewriter

31/12/2015

Fergus Fleming (editor): Bloomsbury Publishing $29.99

TO TENS of millions of fans James Bond is a suave, invincible Hollywood spy with a cultured British accent, an eye for a beautiful woman and an unerring ability to hunt out anyone who threatens the security of the West. Well before the arrival of the big-screen version, however, Bond was born in print.
A new compilation of correspondence both to and by intelligence-operative-turned-writer Ian Fleming traces this evolution from the unveiling of the first of his eventual 14 Bond books through the negotiation of several Bond film deals and concludes shortly after Fleming’s death, aged 56, 12 years later. It reveals the insecurities, frustrations and embarrassment of the author, despite his growing stature as one of the greatest ever espionage novelists, and provides an insight into a man who valued accuracy of detail so intensely that no feedback, no matter how trifling, was brushed aside.
Writing frantically over a few weeks each January-February while on retreat from deep-winter Britain to his Jamaican property, “Goldeneye”, Fleming produced a new Bond best-seller every year; two, in fact, had been completed in his final months and were published posthumously. In addition, he created children’s tale Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and wrote non-fiction works The Diamond Smugglers and Thrilling Cities.
The “golden typewriter” of anthology editor Fergus Fleming’s title is simultaneously a reference to the extravagant purchase made by his Uncle Ian as reward for having completed his first full manuscript – Casino Royale – in the northern spring of 1952 and a play on the name of one of the later Bond books.
If there is any slight fault in this collection it is that the correspondence is arranged by project rather than chronologically, producing an at-times disjointed and occasionally repetitive read; this, though, is more than offset by the intimacy of the conversations between Fleming and his publishing colleagues, readers, friends and wife Ann.

Last Days of the Bus Club

23/10/2015

Chris Stewart: Profile Books $22.99

EVER wondered what became of the original Genesis drummer? No, not Phil Collins – the gangly youth who kept the beat for the rock band long before it found both Collins and world-wide recording fame.
Having left the bright lights of school-hall performances well and truly behind him, Chris Stewart is ensconced these days in a ramshackle farmhouse outside Málaga in the hinterland of Spain’s Costa del Sol, where he juggles producing organic oranges with writing hilarious and self-deprecating autobiographical books.
The title of the fourth instalment in his series about life in rural Spain refers to the winding down of his role as taxi-driver to daughter Chloé as she sees out her final year at the local secondary school and moves on to university.
With an empty nest following their only child’s departure, Stewart and wife Ana occupy themselves with shelling waves of homegrown fava beans, scouting for industrial quantities of fine Spanish red wine with which to toast their ever-helpful neighbours and cooking wild boar from their own hillside for a “mystery guest” who turns out to be celebrity TV chef and fellow Brit Rick Stein. Along the way Stewart manages to inadvertently label himself bisexual while trying to extol the virtues of coeducation to Chloé’s schoolmates in a language he has yet to conquer. He is also forced by a stroke of meteorological bad luck to reprise skills learned half a lifetime earlier while still a student as he labours long and hard to create a bridge over the roaring river that separates his family from civilisation beyond their rocky farmlet.
Last Days of the Bus Club is a highly entertaining, fast-paced and colourful continuation of the story launched in Driving Over Lemons and can be read equally effectively as a natural follow-on from its three predecessors or independently in its own right.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2/10/2015

Holly Madison: Harper Collins $29.99

HOW does a quiet, clean-living, modest college student from Oregon’s small-town Twilight zone progress from being thousands of dollars in debt and homeless to finding herself ensconced as the “number one girlfriend” of the world’s most infamous womaniser – all within a matter of months? Inviting herself to move into then-75-year-old Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles is a handy first step, as Holly Madison discovered at the age of 21.
In Down the Rabbit Hole, Madison describes with grit, determination and a remarkable degree of grace and class the events and emotions surrounding her decade-long association with all things Playboy.
This is no titillating, salacious kiss-and-tell tossed together hurriedly by a ghost writer, nor is it a sugar-coated PR branding stunt. Rather, Madison presents a clear-headed, factual and intimate look back over the years of insecurity, intimidation and infighting that characterised life in captivity for the members of Hefner’s harem, revealing her one-time beau as a sly, manipulative, Machiavellian jailer who is mean-fisted both materially and emotionally and actively pits unhappy, bored young women against each other in a never-ending round of high-school-style cattiness. (That, despite Hefner’s immense legal resources as head of the Playboy publishing empire, he did not prevent this book’s release suggests in itself that Madison’s account is accurate.)
She also describes candidly the smoke-and-mirrors tactics that underpin so-called “reality” television; for five years Madison appeared on The Girls Next Door, a carefully manufactured peak into the lives of Hefner’s chosen women, and later had her own primetime show, Holly’s World.
Madison’s story encompasses her experiences outside the mansion’s walls as well, including the challenge of overcoming stereotyping in order to establish an independent stage career.
Does this fairytale-slash-nightmare end on a happy note? It’s well following this Alice in Wonderland-themed adventure with Madison in order to find out.

This is Your Captain Speaking

25/9/2015

Gavin MacLeod: Thomas Nelson $27.99

HANDS up, those who’ve never watched so much as a single episode of The Love Boat. The Mary Tyler Moore Show? No-one?
Aside from being two of the most crisply written, longest-running and most commercially successful US TV comedies of the late 20th century, these international hit series have one more thing in common: now-84-year-old actor Gavin MacLeod.
Raised in small-town America, MacLeod – or Allan See, as he was known then – was from an early age a natural performer. However, his childhood was far from privileged and his transition to working professionally was a challenging and at-times-conflicted process.
Beginning with bit-parts alongside iconic film stars such as Gregory Peck and Cary Grant, MacLeod slowly and steadily earned increasingly lucrative roles. For the diligent, ambitious up-and-comer, these achievements had their drawbacks, though: namely, the frustration of playing unsatisfying peripheral characters. With that boredom came drinking, and with drinking – as MacLeod admits – followed the dissolution of his once-stable homelife and a need to rethink his choices.
This autobiography – just released in paperback – is simultaneously open and honest and heavily optimistic, presenting a glass-half-full account of MacLeod’s relationships on- and off-screen as he regrouped to become pivotal in the ensembles of Mary Tyler Moore (as writer Murray Slaughter) and then Love Boat (as father figure Captain Merrill Stubing). His generally positive, will-do attitude to life is evident throughout as he details his experience as a divorced Catholic who rediscovers Christianity and becomes passionately “born again”. (Warning: the final third of the book is particularly rich with religious references – something that may not always sit comfortably with Australian readers unaccustomed to middle America’s proclamations of faith.)
As one of the world’s most recognisable comedy actors, MacLeod writes with insight on not only himself but also Hollywood peers including Robert Redford, Bette Davis, Aaron Spelling and Marilyn Monroe.

' Books are treasure for the spirit and the soul. '

— VB 2020

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