Jim Kelly

5 days ago | airmail.news | Jim Kelly

No one will ever describe Ron Chernow as a miniaturist. He has written brick-size biographies of John D. Rockefeller, Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton (read the book, then see the hip-hop version!), plus histories of the Morgan and Warburg banking dynasties. Mark Twain is his latest subject, and the book is an absolute delight to read, written with flair (no surprise there) and keen psychological insight about a surprisingly complicated man prone to depression.

5 days ago | airmail.news | Jim Kelly

Read Looking for a Story At the age of 94, the creative-nonfiction pioneer John McPhee is still writing. Good news indeed. Here is more good news: in Looking for a Story, Noel Rubinton has tracked down pretty much everything written by McPhee—college papers, teleplays, short fiction, and hundreds of unsigned stories he did at Time before he joined The New Yorker, in 1963. The excerpts illustrate how he turned Time magazine’s pithiness into prose that shines—and occasionally stings.

1 week ago | airmail.news | Jim Kelly

READ Trouble Is My Business Credit Arvind Ethan David, Ilias Kyriazis, and Cris Peter with the inspired idea to turn Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business into a graphic novel. After all, Chandler is as much about atmosphere and description as he is about plot, and these gentlemen bring his words to vivid life. There is a slight tinkering with the opener, but that only deepens the story.

2 weeks ago | airmail.news | Jim Kelly

READ Theater Kid It’s hard to beat Moss Hart’s Act One for best Broadway memoir, but Jeffrey Seller’s Theater Kid is very much in the running. Yes, reading about the man who has produced three Tony Award–winning shows (Rent, Avenue Q, and Hamilton) is interesting enough. But what makes Seller’s story sing is his vivid recollection of a deprived childhood with demanding parents, his first job as a booking agent, and his coming out during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

3 weeks ago | airmail.news | Jim Kelly

Read The Golden Hour There are countless memoirs about Hollywood, but what makes The Golden Hour special is that the bittersweet tale is told by Matthew Specktor, whose father, despite being in his early 90s, still works as a top talent agent. A word to the wise: Do not become an agent if you do not want your heart broken by a longtime client who defects (Good-bye, Danny DeVito) or if you are not larcenous enough to steal a client (Hello, Robert De Niro).