Book Reviews

January 6, 2011 For every Scorsese and Coppola and Spielberg, for every DeMille and Capra and Hitchcock, there’s a little-celebrated figure known as the production designer—the man or woman “behind the curtain,” to borrow a famous phrase from the beloved film The Wizard of Oz. These artists are as pivotal to engineering movie magic as the directors and film actors who have become brands unto themselves, yet their names are rarely known by filmgoers. In a comprehensive new book, Designs on Film: A Century of Hollywood Art Direction, Cathy Whitlock honors their work and details the highlights of their contributions to a century of American moviemaking, from the early silent films right up to the latest blockbusters.

January 5, 2011 When Bobby Hoppe pulled the trigger, was it a premeditated act of murder or a split-second reaction in self defense? In 1957, nobody knew but Bobby Hoppe himself, and nobody else really wanted to know: Bobby was a Chattanooga football hero. In 1988, new evidence and an aggressive new investigator reopened the cold case. A Matter of Conscience is Sherry Lee Hoppe’s memoir about her husband’s long-hidden anguish—and about the trauma of exposure.

January 4, 2011 In the fall of 1979, Bob Cowser Jr. was a nine-year-old baseball enthusiast in a suburb of Martin, Tennessee, when his friend Cary Ann Medlin was abducted, raped, and murdered by a misfit—in the purest, Southern Gothic sense of the word—named Robert Glen Coe. The last time Cowser saw his playmate alive was through the chain link fence of a public swimming pool where he had spent much of his summer. The girl called out his name and asked, “What are you doing here?” In Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, & A Boyhood Between, Cowser, a thoughtful essayist and author of three previous works of creative nonfiction, explores the myriad implications of the question. What is he doing here?

December 30, 2010 Composed, the new memoir by Rosanne Cash, could just as easily be titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Whether James Joyce’s novel served as a template (one of Cash’s favorite words) for it, Composed invites comparisons to Joyce’s coming-of-age masterpiece. Written with grace, generosity, and restraint, the memoir chronicles Cash’s struggle to come to terms with her famous musical pedigree while simultaneously creating an enduring artistic legacy of her own, separate but still threaded to the past. The book appears on Publisher’s Weekly‘s list for Best Nonfiction of 2010.