Actor Laurence Luckinbill has underscored his career by performing stellar showcases, breathing life into a trio of important historical icons: Clarence Darrow, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ernest Hemingway. Then there’s, perhaps most famously, Theodore Roosevelt who has helped the actor begin a new chapter in his career: Luckinbill, along with Eryck Tait, has whittled his popular one-man play Teddy Tonight! and has turned it into a graphic novel.
Teddy (Dead Reckoning, $24.95) tells the tale of the 26th and, not quite 43, youngest President in the nation’s history (1901-1909). Roosevelt is here tonight giving a speech to a rapt crowd. Woodrow Wilson is now president, yet Roosevelt, half deaf and blind in one eye, takes center stage: “Bully! I’ve always said I’d rather wear out than rust out.” Teddy rants and raves. His youngest son Quentin had been captured by the Germans. He brings us back to his asthmatic childhood: “From age four I had to fight to love. My father taught me how. He got me breath. He got me lungs. Strength. Life.” His father is the impetus of much of Roosevelt’s drive: “My father taught me that I had to work for my bread, and work hard. He also taught me that I had to finish everything I started.”
We learn much, including Roosevelt’s obsession with nature and biology: “I supposed myself a naturalist, and outdoorsman, having collected and classified hundreds of specimens from birds to snakes to seals all my life. My rooms were a forest of dead skins … embalmed critters…and jars and boxes full of bits and pieces of them.”
He enters the legislature at Albany “as the only thing a man of my background and upbringing could be—a Lincoln Republican.” He was despised and learns, quickly, the meaning of disdain.
Roosevelt suffered double tragedy: The deaths of his mother of typhoid fever at 48 and his first wife Alice of renal failure following childbirth at 22.
Roosevelt heads West. The Rough Riders, (mis)adventures, the presidency. Pages remind readers of Roosevelt’s demands: “Equality of rights between men and women . . . old age pensions, sickness and unemployment insurance, public housing, shorter work hours. Aid to farmers and regulation of large corporations. We must protect and celebrate the glorious natural beauty of our land.”
He leaves the presidency after seven and a half years. As he ends his speech to the crowd: “Life and death are both part of the same adventure…and the worst of all fears…is the fear of living.”
Luckinbill and Tait have crafted a flawed yet flawless man who emerges out of history with a vision he refuses to lose.
Though the book is “officially” geared toward readers age 8 to 12, Teddy is important for all ages. Tait’s gray and black and white illustrations, at once dramatic and daring—extreme closeups of a moustache-less, single-chined Roosevelt, thick eyeglasses, shadowy cemetery visits—accentuate Teddy’s recollections and reminisces.
Not a word is wasted; not a stroke of the ink pen misleads.
A graphic novel that’s indeed novel.
Having hit the heights with simple songs of despair, depression, and tainted love, he would, with that outlaw swagger, become in death a template for the rock generation to follow. Mark Ribowsky’s Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams (Liveright, $35) examines Williams’ music while also re-creating days and nights choked in booze and desperation. Ribowsky traces the miraculous rise of this music legend from the dirt roads of rural Alabama to the now-immortal stage of the Grand Ole Opry, and finally to a sad, lonely end on New Year s Day, 1953. But unlike those other musical giants who never made 30, no legacy endures quite like that of the “Hillbilly King.”
Cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with “bad blood” that informs every page of Dracula.
It has all the sex and drugs you’d expect from a rock icon, but Page is widely considered to be a mysterious figure and Martin Power’s biography will shed light on the man who made music.
The conventional story goes that Lyndon married Lady Bird for her money and demeaned her by flaunting his many affairs, and that her legacy was protecting the nation’s wildflowers.
The book reveals what drove him to extremes, why he drank to excess for many years and hated authority, but it also describes a man who was fiercely intelligent with a great sense of humor and huge energy. Giving full weight to his extraordinary career, this is an insightful, funny and moving tribute to an iconic actor who made a monumental contribution to theatre and cinema.
And he did write golden words. Before his death in 1964 he produced 14 best-selling Bond books, two works of non-fiction and the famous children’s story Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Fleming’s output was matched by an equally energetic flow of letters. He wrote constantly, to his wife, publisher, editors, fans, friends and critics; his letters also reflect his friendship with such contemporaries as Raymond Chandler, Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham. Enjoy 
Cranston chronicles his unlikely rise from a soap opera regular, trying to learn the ropes and the politics of show business on the fly. Discussing his failures as few men do, describing his work as few actors can, Cranston has much to say about innate talent, its benefits, challenges, and proper maintenance, but ultimately the book is about the necessity and transformative power of hard work.
Whether he’s talking about his childhood, his band mates or his own inner demons, Wilson’s story, told in his own voice and in his own way, unforgettably illuminates the man behind the music, working through the turbulence and discord to achieve, at last, a new harmony.
Included are an eyewitness account of that first meeting between Lennon and McCartney, the inside story of how Ringo replaced Pete Best, an exploration of the brilliant but troubled soul of manager Brian Epstein, and the real scoop on their disastrous first visit to Germany and the death of Stu Sutcliffe.
Janis reveals the full story of the daughter she loved. As the world watched the rise of a superstar, then the freefall of an addict to her untimely death, Janis simply saw her Amy, the girl she’d given birth to in 1983; the girl she’d raised and stood by despite her unruly behavior; the girl whose body she was forced to identify two days after her death-and the girl she’s grieved for every day since.