AudioBooksReview: HarperCollins

Showing posts with label HarperCollins. Show all posts

Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

read by J. D. Vance

Anyone looking for an explanation of why poor white working-class Americans voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US election will be disappointed by J. D. Vance’s bestselling autobiography. It is a classic American rags to riches tale of social opposites and is slated for Hollywood endorsement in the glory days of the Trump first term.

But it does not explain how the American poor came to believe Trump’s promises or could possible identify with a man who inherited his wealth from his father, avoided conscription to the war in Vietnam and allegedly employed cruel and bullying tactics to harass rent-controlled tenants from a building he wanted to redevelop overlooking New York’s Central Park.

Vance, a Yale law school-educated investment manager, who has espoused Republican values with a vengeance, rather like the alcoholic who becomes a proselytising teetotaller, gives us his special take on the family and people he has left far behind, the so-called hillbillies of the Appalachian Mountains, and charts the highs and lows of his early life and the lives of his absent father and his substance-abusing mother. His childhood and adolescence are startlingly similar to those of that Californian hillbilly the late Charlie Manson. Vance credits his ability to move away from his roots to the relative stability of his grandmother Mamaw, and a certain amount of luck.

With his wife Usha, Vance is now on the other side of the tracks, and his antipathy and disdain for the so-called ‘Welfare Queens’, the recipients of welfare who have been the enemies of Republicans since the days of Ronald Reagan, is uncompromising. Of those on welfare, he recalls, ‘I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.’

Vance himself was helped first (and probably most) by joining the marines, in a military much less class based than the British, and then by government loans. From the comfort of his now moneyed life, Vance is able to share the uncomprehending anger he has instinctively felt in his new life, particularly with regard to his wife, details of whose background he chooses not to share with his readers, and episodes such as when he spits out Italian sparkling water at a formal dinner, thinking he had been given, possibly unkindly, something unspeakable to drink.

It is not difficult to understand quite why this book has become so garlanded: it seems to confirm everyone’s prejudices, left and right, liberal and conservative. And the sad fact is that little will change in the USA, with the rich getting more and the poor losing more, until everything comes to a breaking point and dissatisfaction with the status quo leads to riot and revolution: Manson’s oh so prescient ‘Helter Skelter’.

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Buy Hillbilly Elegy

Amanda Knox, Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir

Read by Amanda Knox

Amanda Knox’s story has been picked at by print and television almost to tedium and there can be few people who are unaware of the details of Knox’s flatmate Meredith Kercher’s brutal death, and the trial and appeals of Knox, fellow accused Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede. Guede was tried separately at a fast-track trial, found guilty in October 2008 of having sexually assaulted and murdered Kercher, and is now (in 2014) apparently eligible for day-release from prison, having served over five years of his sentence. Meanwhile, Knox and Sollecito were tried and found guilty; acquitted at a second-level trial and released; found guilty once more at a retrial; and are currently waiting for a further appeal to be heard – Sollecito in an Italian prison, Knox at home in America, protesting her innocence and vowing never to allow herself to be extradited.

Knox is now a celebrity, something it is hard to believe would have been so had she not been such a young and attractive woman, with her side of the case argued for by some indefatigable and expensive American public relations people, and now her own story told for (almost) all to read in a six-figure book and audiobook deal.

The book and audiobook are not on sale in Europe, although copies can be shipped unhindered from America, presumably because lawyers for publishers HarperCollins believe that some of the comments Knox makes with regard to the Italian prosecutors and police might be deemed actionable. And, concurrent with the first retrial of Knox and Sollecito was a libel case initiated by the Italian police challenging the allegations Knox made of police brutality in her interrogations, some of which were apparently not recorded or videoed.

With so much contradictory evidence and simple mistruths circulating it is impossible to know what really happened that evening in Perugia. The fact that the interrogations and trials were conducted in Italian didn’t help matters for Knox, whose Italian almost certainly was not good enough at the time, neither does the complete foreignness of Italy’s legal system and the conviction, sometimes unspoken, that only the American legal system can give a defendant a fair trial and that all other courtrooms are inferior and worthless. A quick read of Douglas Preston’s excellent Monster of Florence certainly informs one’s view of the Italian police and judiciary, but cashless American prisoners stuck for years in the nightmare of American courts will clearly disagree with this chauvinist nonsense. The only person who could possibly shed light on the whole situation is of course Rudy Guede. But he is keeping his silence and serving out his ever-decreasing time.

Nonetheless, Amanda Knox’s own story, in her own words and narrated by her own self, is very thought-provoking. Far from revealing herself as the Devil with an angel’s face, which many newspapers (especially in the UK) would like us to believe is the true Amanda Knox, ‘Foxy Knoxy’ comes across as simply a naive and ordinary small town American twenty-year-old, who found herself out of her depth trying to grow up quickly in a foreign land with a completely alien culture to one she enjoyed back home.

Whatever Knox’s fate, her story (and that of the victim Meredith Kercher) is a salutary one which perhaps all parents might want their children to read before leaving home.

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Buy Waiting to Be Heard

The Bling Ring by Nancy Jo Sales

read by Kathleen Mary Carthy

Nancy Jo Sales’s The Bling Ring is an account of the background to a series of court cases involving a group of seven school-age friends who stole shoes, clothes, jewellery and more personal possessions said to be worth millions of dollars from the houses of Hollywood actors and celebrities including Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom. They used social networking and showbiz and other websites, such as Google Earth, Twitter and TMZ.com to help locate their targets and to compile a shopping list of what items to take. Sofia Coppola’s film of the same name premiered in Cannes at this year’s film festival.

Sales’s The Bling Ring is rather an oddity in that it is not exactly a book of the film, more a journalistic or sociological tie-in. And fascinating and important though it undoubtedly is, one wonders exactly who is the intended audience. I can’t see the teen movie-goers, keen perhaps to see Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame in more mainstream fare, reaching for this from the bookshelves or on their e-readers. At the same time, I doubt that their parents will want to know so much more about this curious slice of history than can already have been gleaned from the avalanche of magazine and newspaper articles that appeared at the time of the trials and following the release of Sofia Coppola’s movie.

Coppola’s film follows very closely the details reported in Nancy Jo Sales’s original Vanity Fair feature ‘The Suspects Wore Louboutins’, and visually reflects that article’s photograph of Alexis Neiers, one of the members of the so-called ‘Bling Ring’, nonchalantly sipping a Frappuccino. But the book and audiobook are more than extended reworkings of that original piece in Vanity Fair. There is more space for details of the thefts from the celebrities’ homes and there is more time for reflection on the longer-term psychological costs of the thefts for both stars and perps. The teenagers supposedly let themselves in to the homes of the stars on numerous occasions (keys apparently left under mats, doors left unlocked), often carting off suitcases stuffed with shoes, clothes and mementos. The sense of invasion felt by owners or tenants is palpably painful.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the whole saga is the mindless decadence of these modern-days Gatbys, with their exclusive fashion-label lives and the industry that promotes and feeds off ostentation, greed and envy. The Bling Ring members were not unmoneyed; this was not theft for financial gain so much as theft to become for a brief instant a player in the game of wish fulfilment. And Sofia Coppola herself seems not to have recognised and understood the solipsism of her undertaking, coming as she does from that rarefied world of the true Hollywood elite, the moguls and filmmakers, whose dynasties remain fast as the young stars they exploit appear for an instant and then are gone once more, while others queue in the wings for their five minutes of fame. It is here that the true value of this book lies. It provides a profound and sobering snapshot of an ugly world dressed up to the nines.

Fifty years ago, another group of teenagers let themselves in and ‘creepy crawled’ in the homes of celebrities in the Hollywood hills. Their trips had more tragic consequences. Perhaps Charles Manson is cursing and saying to himself right now, ‘If only we had stolen their cars and their beads and kaftans and let them be!’

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Buy The Bling Ring