Best books...chosen by Christopher Bonanos
Christopher Bonanos is the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author
of Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, now in paperback. Below, New York
magazine’s longtime city editor recommends six great New York City biographies.The Book List^ ARTS 23
Winchell by Neal Gabler (1994). The most
powerful and popular newspaper columnist of
the 20th century—of all time, really—was a self-
aggrandizing creep, and his late-in-life comeup-
pance was dramatic and humiliating. Gabler’s
irreplicable research (because Walter Winchell’s
archive has since been broken up and sold)
makes this definitive.
De Kooning by Mark Stevens and Annalyn
Swan (2004). An evocative biography of Willem
de Kooning that broadens out to become a visit
to the New York art world when it was still
small and weird. The authors pair superior art
criticism with great storytelling.
In Our Time by Susan Brownmiller (1999). A
history of the feminist movement of the 1970s by
the reporter turned activist who was at its center,
this is a great memoir whose valuable lesson is
that social movements are nonlinear and messy,
with internal factions and squabbles and rifts, as
people argue their way to enlightenment.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro (1974). It
feels a little duh to include Caro’s Robert Moses
biography—but really, it is as unskippable andunforgettable as everyone says. Nobody digs
through a paper trail as doggedly as Caro does;
nobody has ever done a better job explaining the
ways in which a single person formed the modern
metropolis, or the ways in which power both
emboldens and entrenches.
Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010). Punk legend
Patti Smith was also Robert Mapplethorpe’s
muse, and he was hers. The two were lovers
who eventually, after his coming-out, remained
the closest of friend-collaborators until his 1989
death. I can’t imagine a more vivid and romantic
description of what it was like to be young and
artsy and hungry and fearless in the broken-
down New York of the ’70s.
The Man in the Glass House by Mark
Lamster (2018). Here’s all 98 years of the life
of that wily rich-kid-aesthete-fascist-turned-
corporate-smooth-talker Philip Johnson, who
never met an architectural trend he didn’t glom
onto. What a career! At one point in the 1980s,
he proposed a Manhattan skyscraper entered via
a drawbridge over a moat full of alligators. It
was designed, you will perhaps not be surprised
to learn, for Donald Trump.Also of interest...in servants and underlings
Javier Marías
Javier Marías never could
hold his tongue, said Giles
Harvey in The New York
Times Magazine. The 67-year-
old Spanish novelist, who
enjoys, across Europe, “a kind
of cultural prestige that makes
even America’s most success-
ful literary
writers look
like obscure
hobbyists,”
began speak-
ing out in his
20s against
apologists
for Spain’s
36-year fling with fascism.
In 1999, when Nobel laure-
ate Camilo José Cela tried
to brush off queries about
his fascist past, Marías drew
fire for pressing the case.
But today, as a new genera-
tion pushes for an overdue
reckoning with the misdeeds
of dictator Francisco Franco
and his enablers, Marías can’t
simply applaud the effort. He
has dismissed as “a fairy tale”
the idea that Spain has “the
people” to thank for establish-
ing democracy after Franco’s
1975 death. “In reality,” he
wrote in his weekly news-
paper column, “the people,
with some exceptions, were
devoted to the dictatorship
and cheered it on.”
In Marías’ latest novel, Berta
Isla, about the wife of a spy,
the title character at one point
unloads on “the people,”
calling them as stupid and
untouchable as the despots of
the past. “They have the pre-
rogative to be as fickle as they
please,” she says, “and they
don’t have to answer for how
they vote.” Like many Marías
novels, this one wrestles with
how past horrors are best
addressed, giving final word
to a character who argues
against fetishizing them.
“Some things are so evil that
it’s enough that they simply
happened; they don’t need to
be given a second existence
by being retold,” Marías says.
“That’s what I think on some
days, anyway. Other days I
think the contrary.”Author of the week
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“The protagonists of acclaimed
women’s fiction these days tend to be
glamorous, self-centered, and cynical,”
said Josephine Livingstone in The New
Republic. Not so the heroine of Lila
Savage’s remarkable debut, a 29-year-
old home health aide whose difficult day-to-day
work “has illuminated corners of her soul that,” for
most young people, “usually stay dark.” Ella cares
for a brain-damaged woman who seems to dislike
her, and we expect the work will be enervating.
That Savage casts it differently feels “quite radical.”Say Say Say
by Lila Savage (Knopf, $24)
Novelist Nina Stibbe is “a pitch-
perfect observer: clever, confiding,
sublimely weird,” said Leah Green-
blatt in Enter tain ment Weekly. In the
third of a series of comic novels that
began with Man at the Helm, Stibbe’s
heroine Lizzie Vogel has turned 18 and secured a
measure of independence by talking her way into
a job as an unqualified dental assistant. Her boss
is a racist, and her crush prefers bird-watching to
sex, but “there’s unexpected resonance, too, in
the story’s final, bittersweet pages.”Reasons to be Cheerful
by Nina Stibbe (Little, Brown, $26)Think of Ruth Ware’s “superb” new
thriller as a 21st-century Turn of the
Screw, said Margaret Cannon in The
Globe and Mail (Canada). From the
first page, “we already know that it
doesn’t end well,” because we are
reading a letter from a young nanny insisting
that she didn’t kill a girl in her charge. She soon
describes events at a country house in Scotland
bristling with surveillance technology, and the
tale that unfolds proves “irresistible from first
page to last line.”The Turn of the Key
by Ruth Ware (Scout, $28)
“I thought I had this one figured
out after the first chapter, but I was
wrong,” said Elisabeth Egan in The
New York Times. Karen Dukess’
debut novel is set in 1987 Cape Cod,
where Eve Rosen, a young research
assistant, has joined a fading literary lion and
his wife at a vacation home that’s a magnet for
artists and writers. “After some initial wobbly
pacing, Dukess delivers a spare, bittersweet page-
turner” that culminates in a revealing end-of-
summer party.The Last Book Party
by Karen Dukess (Holt, $27)