Briefly Noted Book Reviews
Giant Love, by Julie Gilbert (Pantheon). Fusing biography and Hollywood history, this book chronicles the creation of Edna Ferber’s novel “Giant” and its transformation into a film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. Ferber, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright (and the author’s great-aunt), spent nearly thirteen years “assembling the stones and bricks and mortar and metal” for her novel, which was set in Texas. As Gilbert recounts Ferber’s duodenal-ulcer-inducing work ethic and her impressions of the state as “bombastic; naïve, brash,” she also delves into the drama behind the 1956 film, directed by George Stevens, which heightened the novel’s focus on racial prejudice by, among other things, featuring a climactic diner fight not present in Ferber’s original text.
Anima, by Kapka Kassabova (Graywolf). This lyrical but unsentimental book is a eulogy for transhumance—the seasonal movement of livestock and the people who watch over them. For the final installment in a quartet of books about the Balkans, Kassabova travels to her native Bulgaria to live in the Pirin Mountains with some of Europe’s last modern pastoralists. What she finds is a world that appears at once out of time—bedeviled by wolf attacks and sheep theft—and entirely contemporary, with industrialization and the pull of consumerism threatening to finally consign the shepherds, and the rare animal breeds they cultivate, to extinction. As Kassabova deepens her relationships with her subjects, she is both confronted and enchanted by their lonely, often harshly beautiful existence.
Illustration by Rose Wong
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