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Here is a book called the Last Days of Dead Celebrities. Can tabloid journalism get any lower? The author Mitchell Fink takes a group of famous people, all they have in common is the fact that they are no longer with us. Then he invades their privacy by describing the ways in which they died. But you know what, this isn't what it sounds like. It turns out to be a decent not too gossipy book that connects attitudes toward death with attitudes toward life. And it suggests that if celebrities' lives reveal anything about our own experience, maybe their deaths do to. This is not to say that you won't wanna hide this book in a brown paper wrapper, if you're reading it in a public place. It just means that even the most unlikely sounding subject matter can take you by surprise.
Take Ava Gardner, Lee Server's biography of one of the most beautiful and headstrong women ever to appear on a movie screen. This author wrote an earlier book about Robert Mitchum, so he knows a thing or two about hard-living Hollywood stars. So do we. We know that they behave with wild abandon and then pay for the error of their ways，except that's not what happened to Ava Gardner. She fell for bullfighters, fought epic marital battles with Frank Sinatra, drank so much that she couldn't work after lunchtime and managed to stay gorgeous and footloose no matter what. She worked often but not very hard.
And you might think creating a legend like hers required some exertion, but in Doing Nothing, Tom Lutz reveals that slacking, loafing and procrastinating are part of a great tradition, one that has shaped more famously industrious figures than you might imagine.
If there is anything more satisfying than relaxing with a good book is being told by the author that you are right to take it easy. When Dora, the heroine of the disarming novel Literacy and Longing in L.A., wants to take it easy, she doesn't engage in stereotypical California behavior, she binges on books. And the authors Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack make Dora's book habit a surprisingly fresh angle, for what looks like another chick-lit candidate for beach reading. It’s surprising to find a novel this fizzy, full of lines like 'Well, I got a little sidetracked, and I don't mean with Thomas Pynchon.' (Thomas Pynchon is a best - selling American author)
There hasn't been a thriller as showily literate as the King of Lies by the lawyer-turned author John Hart since Scott Turow came along. This book isn't interested in quick turns of fate, its author has cooked up a claustrophobic North Carolina crime story, and he wants you to dwell on every little gothic nuance. The King of Lies would be the mystery story with the most baggage this season if it weren't for Matthew Pearl, who has now created a 2-book franchise on the cusp of mystery, literature and historical fiction. First he worked Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes into the Dante Club. Now in the Poe Shadow, he teases a globe-trotting 19 century mystery out of this summer's most surprising "It" guy, Edgar Allan Poe. But when he comes to surprise value nothing rivals revisionist history, nothing has more preconceptions to shatter or more unexpected questions to ask. So in Rough Crossings, Simon Schama wanders what became of American Slaves who chose to align themselves on the British side of the Revolutionary War. The answer is complicated, wrenching and remarkably unexpected, in light of the fact that the terrible events described here are so fundamental to our past. The revisionism in Nathaniel Philbrick's gripping Mayflower is even more surprising, since the story of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock is so utterly familiar, anyone brought up to think that the pilgrims arrived in a pristine new land may be surprised to hear how many native Americans already lived there, and how many European vessels were already fishing off the New England coast. Enjoy your summer reading.
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headstrong 刚愎的
bullfighter 斗牛士
fall for ＝fall in love
procrastinate 延迟
binge on informal to do much of sth
chick-lit book about young women and the typical problems they have with men, sex, losing weight
sidetrack to make someone stop doing what they should be doing, or stop talking about what they started talking about
dwell on 细想
cook up 虚构，伪造
claustrophobic 幽闭恐怖症的,导致幽闭恐怖症的
Gothic 哥特式的
nuance 细微差别
wrenching 被扭曲的
Revisionism 修正主义
Plymouth Rock a large rock on the coast at Plymouth, Massachusetts. According to old stories, the Pilgrim Fathers took their first steps in America when they landed there in 1620.
gripping appealing
Pristine extremely fresh or clean
disarming relaxing
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