The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man; Touching from a Distance

 

I'm a big fan of Paul Newman's movies. As a person...maybe not so much. No, I'm kidding. He did a lot of good in the world through charity. He just made some bad decisions and hurt people, but at least he was honest about it, unlike some people (cough, cough, Eric Clapton, cough). 

Paul led a very interesting life. He married young and had three children with his first wife, Jackie, at least one of which was conceived after he'd begun his affair with Joanne Woodward. After Jackie and Paul divorced, he and Joanne married and had three more kids together. He acted in and directed a bunch of movies and then in his later years started racing cars and put out the Newman's Own line of food products with the profits going to his various charities. Apparently the book was culled from interviews done with Paul and people close to him while they were still alive, in the late 80s and early 90s, but then Paul pulled the plug on the whole thing. It's too bad, I would have liked to have heard his perspective on his later years. 

I'm not quite sure what to say about "Touching from a Distance". I'm not a *huge* Joy Division fan (although I do love "Love Will Tear Us Apart"). Written by Deborah Curtis, Ian's wife, it was super short, just barely over 100 pages. Ian and Deborah met in their teens and started dating. Right away, there were giant red flags. Ian was dictating what she could and couldn't wear, forbade her to wear makeup, cut her off from all her friends. I'm literally screaming at her to RUN! Of course she didn't, she got engaged to him. Her parents threw them a party and he got super jealous when she danced with her uncle. And then to make things worse, after they got married they were dead broke and Deborah decided she wanted a baby, so they had one.

Good grief. 

Ian was diagnosed with epilepsy and suffered seizures frequently while the doctors adjusted his medication. Apparently some of his bandmates and friends blamed the medication for his suicide, but he talked his whole life about dying before he was out of his early twenties, so it sounds like it was more than the medicine. He might have been suffering from something much worse than epilepsy. It was a sad story about two very sad people and their terrible decisions. 

These Old Shades

I wanted something light and fluffy (I'm currently slogging through a 1,000 page book about Abraham Lincoln. It's good, but boy is it slow), and Heyer always fits that bill nicely. This was one of her earlier ones. It was pretty good, although I will admit I didn't like it as much as some of her others. 

The Duke of Avon is playing the long game when it comes to taking revenge on his old nemesis, Comte de Saint-Vire. He spies a young man on the streets of Paris who looks suspiciously like the Comte, and immediately buys him from his older brother in the hopes that his hunch was right. It was--and the story takes a lot of amusing twists and turns before arriving at the inevitable Heyer happy ending. It's a hard book to summarize without spoiling a lot. 
 

Sister to Sister

I loved "Wife After Wife", Hayfield's book about King Henry VIII (modernized and set in present day), so I was excited to hear she wrote a sequel about Elizabeth and Mary.

It was pretty good. Not what I was expecting. Maria and Eliza clash early on about how to run Rose Corp. after their father, Harry, is forced to retire, but Maria exits the company early on, leaving Eliza to rule the roost by herself. The book was more about Eliza and her friends, Will and Kit, and her love interest, Rob. She has a hard time trying to figure out how to run a successful company and still make time for the other people in her life. There were definitely some clever bits but I thought she really could have done with less Kit and Will and more family drama. Still, all in all, I enjoyed it.