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book We Are the Weather. Invoking
his family’s history as Holocaust
survivors, his relationships with his
children, and the history of social
movements that overcame public
apathy against all odds, Safran Foer
offers a moving response to the
individual’s responsibility regarding
the dying planet. (Most experts, it
should be said, place the greatest
responsibility on reining in fossil fuel
companies.) With Inconspicuous
Consumption: The Environmental
Impact You Don’t Know You Have,
New York Times reporter Tatiana
Schlossberg takes a more diagnostic
approach, meticulously examining
the hidden environmental effects
of everyday decisions—from the way
we wash our clothing to where we
store our data.
Samantha Power also looks at
the consequences, big and small, of
her decisions in her lively, sprawling
and strikingly personal memoir
The Education of an Idealist,
which takes us from her middle-
class Irish upbringing, where her
dad’s favorite local pub was a kind
of child’s playground, to her days
as a freelance war correspondent
in Bosnia and her crash-test
months as a foreign-policy adviser
to presidential candidate Barack
Obama. Power won a Pulitzer
for her first book, A Problem from
Hell, about genocide, and she
writes vividly about her turn in the
international spotlight, serving as
ambassador to the U.N. during two
crises—wars in Libya and Syria—
that would test her mettle. She
emerges more determined than ever
that the U.S. can, and should, be a
force for good in the world.
Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago was
a kind of literary statecraft, and
its journey out of the Soviet Union
is examined in Lara Prescott’s
enthralling debut novel, The Secrets
We Kept. Among the cast of postwar
characters who aid the manuscript’s
journey to its first publisher in Italy:
the brilliant female CIA operatives
plunked back into secretarial
jobs after more ambitious wartime
assignments; Pasternak’s long-
suffering mistress, who spends three
bone-grinding years in the gulag;
and two unlikely female spies—one
an old hand, the other her protégée—
who leave their male colleagues in
the dust. This is the rare page-turner
with prose that’s as wily as its plot. @
In 1968, a frail, exhausted, and
broke Judy Garland traveled to
London for a sold-out five-week engagement
at a popular nightclub called the Talk of
the Town, reluctantly leaving her two young
children at home with their father in Los
Angeles. Her plan: to make enough money
to get off the road once and for all. Instead,
six months later, at age 47, she was found
dead of an accidental overdose. In Judy,
adapted from Peter Quilter’s musical
End of the Rainbow and directed by Rupert
Goold, Renée Zellweger plays the legendary
singer in her twilight, battling insomnia,
loneliness, impatient club managers, and
an ex-husband, Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell),
fighting for custody of their kids—all
while getting onstage every night to deliver
performances ranging from humiliating
to sublime. Zellweger never asks us to pity
Garland; instead she inspires admiration
for her strength and resilience. As the movie
unfolds, we see her befriend diehard fans,
marry her fifth husband, Mickey Deans
(Finn Wittrock), and generally
try to carve out a normal-seeming
path for herself despite the
demands placed upon her as a
national treasure. Zellweger’s
heartfelt renditions of Garland’s
hits capture the galvanizing
extremes—the power and fragility,
vulnerability and determination—
that forged the icon’s indomitable
spirit, making her the patron saint
of hope over experience.
“I’m really exhausted with this
Sapphic pageant,” complains
MOVIES
She Could Be Heroes
GET HAPPY
RENÉE ZELLWEGER
AS JUDY GARLAND IN
JUDY (LEFT); GEMMA
ARTERTON AS VITA
SACKVILLE-WEST
(BELOW LEFT) AND
ELIZABETH DEBICKI
AS VIRGINIA WOOLF
IN VITA AND VIRGINIA.
Vita Sackville-West’s husband in Vita and
Virginia, Chanya Button’s deliciously
intimate portrait of the mutual fascination
between the free-spirited, scandal-prone
aristocrat Sackville-West (played by Gemma
Arterton) and the intellectual, bohemian
Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki). Of
course, the parade was made possible by the
openness of both women’s marriages, which
provided love and friendship in addition
to respectability. The film covers the years
between Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf ’s first literary
success, and Orlando, her first commercial
one. (Orlando is also a fictional biography of
Sackville-West that features an Elizabethan
nobleman who mysteriously changes sex
and lives on for another 300 years.) Arterton
and Debicki make for a satisfyingly odd
couple as the fashionable humorist and the
Modernist author, whose surface differences
are vastly overshadowed by their physical
and emotional connection. The electronic
soundtrack by Isobel Waller-Bridge (sister
of Phoebe) lends an aura of urgency to
the love affair, while the snippets from their
letters, read aloud to the camera, deepen
the sense of affinity. It’s rare to see a film
about a female artist that doesn’t punish her
for her talent and independence but rather
shows what it’s like to stay true to herself in
a rigid, hypocritical world. Two feels like an
embarrassment of riches.—carina chocano
Two biopics follow the
tangled lives of Judy Garland
and Virginia Woolf.
VLIFE
JUDY:
AVID HINDLEY COURTESY OF LD ENTERTAINMENT AND ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS.
VITA AND VIRGINIA:
COURTESY OF MONGREL MEDIA.
