Books in Brief My Name is Bill by Susan Cheever (Simon & Schuster, 306 pp., $24.00). Bill Wilson is the most influential American you've never heard of--unless you're a recovering alcoholic. Wilson, a near-hopeless drunk, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. The key to sobering up, he had learned, was not sheer will power but finding God.
"In Bill Wilson's story it is clear that alcohol is astonishingly powerful and that the only thing which can stop its course for an alcoholic is an experience of God, a spiritual awakening, a surrender of the rational mind," explains Susan Cheever. The daughter of novelist John Cheever, she wrote about her own struggle with alcoholism in Note Found in a Bottle. But this book is all about Wilson, not her. It's an admirable biography, both readable and revealing.
Wilson had a roller-coaster life. Born in Vermont in 1895, he had his first drink as an Army officer in World War I, was a shrewd stock analyst and investor in the 1920s, and lost everything because of his drinking. He formed AA with an Ohio doctor named Bob Smith, also a drinker seeking to stop. AA grew slowly until Wilson's book, Alcoholics Anonymous, was published in 1939 and AA began to get favorable press attention during World War II. Wilson was a tireless proselytizer and mesmerizing speaker. His second book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, came out in 1953. When he retired as head of AA in 1955, it was an international organization.
Wilson was no saint. Rumors of womanizing dogged him for years, and he tried LSD in the 1950s. Wilson was a conservative Republican throughout his life and a Christian of sorts, but not a churchgoer. But with the twelve-step approach he instituted and popularized worldwide, Wilson may have saved more lives than anyone in the twentieth century.
--Fred Barnes
Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America by Steve Gillon (Free Press, 344 pp., $27.50). The subtitle tells you everything you need to know about Boomer Nation. It's entirely true, and utterly uncontroversial. Every new generation is larger and richer than the one that precedes it, at least in modern times. And every generation changes America. Boomers are just particularly enamored with examining the results of their handiwork.
Boomer Nation is just the latest contribution to the literature on how "boomers discovered sex, drugs, activism, and self-absorbed television programming." Only the occasional neat factoid--"In 1940, only 11 percent of women and 20 percent of men agreed with the statement, 'I am an important person.' By 1990 over 60 percent of both sexes agreed with the statement"--keeps the reader from abandoning Boomer Nation altogether. The interesting statistical tidbits do flow freely, though: The word "lifestyle," for example, first appeared in Webster's dictionary in 1961. Another double-take inducing line: "By the time they were age 21, most Boomers had seen more than 300,000 commercials."
Gillon looks at the boomer phenomenon through the groovy John Lennon glasses of six individuals: four semi-famous, two relatively obscure. They seem to have muddled along, as most real boomers do. Still, "the largest and richest generation ever" continues to generate interesting statistics: "In the three weeks following its introduction in 1998, the little blue pill [Viagra] accounted for 94 percent of all doctor prescriptions in the United States."
--Katherine Mangu-Ward
Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, 355 pp., $24.95). The cover jacket of Hiaasen's latest romp in the cultural backwaters of Florida appears to have been designed to match the contents of a beach bag. Pink-bordered with a pastel palette, its one image is of a tired-looking blonde bobbing in the ocean--the drawing cleverly suggesting that under the water, she is, like, totally naked.
Another tip-off that this book wants to be liked is how likable its characters are. The damsel in distress--true-hearted, smart, and great looking--has but one flaw: a weakness for jerks, like her husband who tried to murder her by throwing her off the deck of a moving cruise ship. But since this is the opening event of the book, one never has to witness her, say, making house with such an inconsiderate spouse. Her collaborator in revenge is another person too good for the cards he was dealt, a sweetly grizzled retired cop women routinely fall for, and then try to change.
But if Hiaasen makes money with his congenial characters, he makes art with his uncongenial characters, like "the man called Tool." A large fellow, Tool is semiretired from his job as a crew boss mistreating Mexican hands for a corrupt corporate farm business. He lives in a trailer on a half acre of land, which he decorates with little white crosses taken from those highway-side memorials people build to mark where their loved ones perished. The reason Tool is semiretired is that a bullet remains lodged in his buttocks from a hunter who mistook him for a bear.
The plot is half revenge scheme, half Everglades environmental scandal. But it's the character details that distinguish Skinny Dip, especially the tics of the bad guys--Tool stealing pain medication from nursing home patients, the husband's endless sexual preoccupations--as well as Hiaasen's generally light touch.
--David Skinner
The Untold Story: My Twenty Years Running the National Enquirer by Iain Calder (Miramax, 336 pp., $24.95). American scandal journalism began in 1924 with the New York Graphic, a tabloid sometimes called "the New York pornographic." The Graphic was the creature of Bernarr Macfadden, eccentric bodybuilder and publisher of such journals as Physical Culture and True Story. One of the Graphic's contributions to journalism was the "composograph," a composite picture with the heads of celebrities superimposed on models. The art department maintained a studio that processed such fabrications as Rudolph Valentino on the operating table and courtroom scenes of sensational divorce cases.
Alas, the Graphic died in 1932. But the void in scandal-mongering was filled by Confidential, a scabrous 1950s journal that specialized in smearing Hollywood celebrities. While the Graphic was coarse but good natured, Confidential went for the jugular and was defanged only by a lawsuit brought by the California attorney general.
Which brings us to the National Enquirer, the subject of Iain Calder's new memoir, The Untold Story: My Twenty Years Running the National Enquirer. The Enquirer began life as a spooks-and-gore journal, covering flaky phenomena like UFOs and items of inhuman interest. ("Mom uses son's face as ashtray.") But it eventually began to employ its aggressive technique to dredge for legitimate news. Political strategist Lee Atwater is said to have regarded it as "the pulse of America."
The paper's publisher was Generoso Pope Jr., whose family published the Italian language newspaper Il Progresso. Pope--described by Calder in The Untold Story as a "genius"--gave the Enquirer its format and transplanted it from London to New York, where it ballooned into a phenomenal success. The issue featuring a photo of Elvis Presley's corpse in an open casket, for instance, sold 6.7 million copies--outselling Time magazine by 2 million. To get the shot, the Enquirer bribed one of the mourners and supplied him with a disposable flash camera.
Calder, the tabloid's longtime editor-in-chief, attributes much of its success to morbid curiosity. ("When a celebrity dies in unusual circumstances, people just can't get enough.") The famous dead who inspired sellout issues included Liberace, Princess Grace, John Lennon, and Natalie Wood. Another posthumous sensation was a photograph that revealed Judy Garland's continued interment in an undertaker's morgue eight months after her death. The front-page picture showed Calder pointing at a temporary crypt under a headline that read "Judy Garland Is Still Not Buried." The issue, says Calder, created "an international furor."
The tabloid's talent as a bottom feeder produced some literal scoops. One involved the household garbage of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, inspected by an ingenious Enquirer operative. It was found to contain "hundreds of Secret Service documents." The State Department was outraged. But the only outcome of note was a local ordinance in Beverly Hills making it illegal for unauthorized personnel to pick up garbage.
The Enquirer reached further with its spectacular coverage of the O.J. Simpson case, which was ideally suited to the tabloid's checkbook journalism and saturation reportage. ("We probably spoke to more witnesses than the cops, which is why we regularly uncovered material they missed.") The tabloid found significant material, including the provenance of the murder weapon and O.J.'s designer shoes, and the New York Times acknowledged the Enquirer as "the bible of the O.J. Simpson case."
The Graphic and Confidential are gone, and the Enquirer was a near fatality when it went to press with an unfortunate Princess Di smear on the day of her death in a car crash. The unlucky misjudgment is said to have cost the paper a drop in circulation of 250,000 a week. But National Enquirer survived--indeed, has grown to resemble the mainstream media. Of course, that may be only because the mainstream media have begun to resemble the National Enquirer.
--Martin Levin