In today's New York Times,
Margo Jefferson recommends two "books that you will want to keep (or
buy with that nice gift certificate). They are books that sharpen the
mind and stir the heart":
- The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Vivian Gornick (FSG), about one of "that astonishing band of 19th-century American radicals who changed the way we live--among them Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Abolitionism taught the women to fight for justice; feminism challenged the men to expand their vision of what justice means."
- No Applause--Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous by Trav S. D. (Faber & Faber), a "delicious cultural history [that] tracks America's sturdiest entertainment form back to Roman clowns and medieval Feasts of Fools, then forward to snake-oil salesmen and blackface minstrels; magicians and ventriloquists; trained mules and seals; stars like Mae West, Bert Williams, the Marx Brothers, Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers; the comics who ruled 1950's television and those who rule each new season of Saturday Night Live; the avant-garde of Becket and Ionesco and 'new vaudevillians' like Penn and Teller, Bill Irwin and the Bindlestiff Family Circus."