The Kid The Immortal Life of Ted Williams
by Ben Bradlee Jr. (Little, Brown)
We get the feeling that if Ted Williams ever does come back from his frozen state, he won’t be a fan of Bradlee’s 855-page book. Splendid as he was on the field, Williams was an ornery guy who disliked sportswriters and couldn’t figure out why they were interested in his personal life. There’s plenty personal here, most notably the cringeworthy details of the decapitation of Williams’ corpse and freezing of his separated head and body at the Alcor cryogenic shop in Arizona.
Dangerous Women
edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Tor)
Fans clamoring for more “Game of Thrones” on TV just got something to tide them over: a Martin-penned prequel. Part of a fiction anthology of formidible femmes, his “A Princess and a Queen” covers the early history of the fantasy kingdom of Westeros — when the prince and princess of the dragon-riding Targaryen family each claimed the throne. Other authors here include Sharon Kay Penman and Lev Grossman.
Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, 1958-1962 An Oral History
by Zhou Xun (Yale University Press)
To this day, the Chinese government has never officially acknowledged that its policies in Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and the famine they caused, resulted in 45 million deaths. The authorities still chalk it up to natural disaster, but it was the man-made disaster of massive forced collectivization. Among the survivors the author spoke with are peasants, city dwellers, scholars and factory workers. One unforgettable gruesome tale: “In our village there was a man named Wu Xiaofan,” recalled a survivor. “After his daughter died, he consumed her body because there was nothing else to eat. Over here almost every village had cases like that.”
The Heir Apparent A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince
by Jane Ridley (Random House)
This notorious playboy came of age during the sexual liberation of the ’60s — the 1860s. Biographer Ridley delivers a detailed and intimate account of the life and times of the man who became King Edward VII of England. Letters reveal concerns from the philandering prince’s mother, Queen Victoria, not only about his reputation (he counted Lily Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt among his many mistresses) but about his “small empty brain.” Yet Edward became one of the most popular kings in English history.
Heir to the Empire City New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt
by Edward P. Kohn (Basic)
Today, Teddy Roosevelt, dubbed the cowboy president, is known as much for his adventures out West (he had a ranch in the Dakotas) and his post-presidency expeditions to Africa and South America as for his politics. But Kohn looks at T.R.’s formative years as NYC police commissioner (1895-96), when he battled rampant corruption and crime. But not everything he did was popular: Roosevelt closed 97% of the saloons open on Sundays.