Books

New must-reads this week

• While We Were Dancing by Jasmine Guillory (romance)

Ben Stephens has never bothered with serious relationships. He has plenty of casual dates to keep him busy, family drama he’s trying to ignore and his advertising job to focus on. When Ben lands a huge ad campaign featuring movie star, Anna Gardiner, however, it’s hard to keep it purely professional. Anna is not just gorgeous and sexy, she’s also down to earth and considerate, and he can’t help flirting a little…

Anna Gardiner is on a mission: to make herself a household name, and this ad campaign will be a great distraction while she waits to hear if she’s booked her next movie. However, she didn’t expect Ben Stephens to be her biggest distraction. She knows mixing business with pleasure never works out, but why not indulge in a harmless flirtation?

But their light-hearted banter takes a turn for the serious when Ben helps Anna in a family emergency, and they reveal truths about themselves to each other, truths they’ve barely shared with those closest to them.

Like his bestselling novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix’s latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films—movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realised—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up. something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—no matter the cost. Bestselling author Sam Kean tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process.

The Icepick Surgeon masterfully guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra’s dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison’s mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren’t all safely buried in the past. Many of them, Kean reminds us, still affect us today. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to current vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care. Kean even takes us into the future, when advanced computers and genetic engineering could unleash whole new ways to do one another wrong.

literary lives - Princess Lee Radziwill (1933 - 2019) The original celebrity influencer - Part I

Sir Christopher Ondaatje writes about the American socialite and interior decorator who was the younger sister of First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and sister-in-law of President John F Kennedy. Even today, she serves as an inspiration for luxury designers.

“My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn’t a patch on my sister. It wasn’t much fun growing up with her and her almost irrational social climbing in that huge house of my dull stepfather Hughdie Auchincloss in Washington.”

- Lee Radziwill

Caroline Lee Bouvier was born on March 3, 1933, in Doctors Hospital in New York to stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier III and his wife Janet Norton Lee. She attended Chapin School in New York City, Potomac School in Washington, DC, Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, and finally undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College. She was always known by her middle name “Lee” rather than Caroline.

“My father, naturally, spoiled me when I was allowed to see him – flying to New York from Washington, alone, in those terrifying planes. He’d take me to Danny Kaye movies and rent a dog for me to walk in the park on Sunday – a different dog every Sunday – and then to have butterscotch sundaes with almonds at Schrafft’s.”

- Lee Radziwill

When she was in her 20s, in the 1960s, she tried hard to become an actress, but her attempts were hopelessly unsuccessful – although much publicised. She starred as heiress Tracy Lord in the 1967 production of The Philadelphia Story. The play opened at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago and her performance was widely panned. Only 12 months later she appeared in the title role of Laura – a television adaptation of the 1944 film of the same name. Again both she and the television production were badly received.

“I’ve always wanted to be an actress. At school and in college I did some things. But then I married, and then I had children, and then there were the political years.” the marriage was annulled by the Catholic Church in November 1962.

Her second marriage, on March 2, 1959, was to the Polish aristocrat Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill, who divorced his second wife, the former Grace Marian Kolin, when he received a Roman Catholic annulment of his first marriage. (His second marriage had never been acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church so no annulment was necessary.)

On her marriage she became Her Serene Highness Princess Caroline Radziwill. They had two children, Anthony (1959-1999) and Christina (born 1960). This second marriage too ended in divorce in 1974. Before and after the divorce The New York Times reported that Peter Tufo was a frequent escort of the Princess.

While married to Prince Stanislaw “Stas” Radziwill, she owned a London townhouse and a manor, Turville Grange – which she shared with her second husband. Both the townhouse and Turville Grange, which she decorated with the Italian stage designer Lorenzo Mongiardino, were much admired and frequently photographed by Cecil Beaton and Horst P Horst. During her second marriage she worked briefly as an interior decorator. Her clients were always the wealthy and she once decorated a house “for people who would not be there for more than three days a year.”

LEE Radziwell

She frequented celebrity company during her marriage, including travelling with The Rolling Stones and author Truman Capote on their 1972 tour of North America.

“Taste is an emotion.” - Lee Radziwill

But before that was her sister Jackie’s marriage to the ambitious Democratic politician John F Kennedy in September 1953 in Newport, Rhode Island. He was re-elected to a second Senate term in November 1958, and elected President on, November 8, 1960. This opened a huge new world to the Radziwills – the buoyant few years of the Kennedy Presidency ... and the opening up of the White House to artists and musicians.

“I can’t deny those few years were glamorous, being on the presidential yacht for the America’s Cup races, the parties with the White House ‘en fête’. It was so ravishing ... and, as well, Jack’s charismatic charm and enthusiasm for life...

“My life could certainly have been different. Not so much because Jackie married Kennedy,but because he became President. If he’d lost the election, I’d have probably spent most of my life in

England with Stas, whom I adored, as did anyone who knew him, and our children Anthony and Tina. We had this divine house on Buckingham Place behind the Palace, and the prettiest country place in Oxfordshire ... Turville Grange ... that Mongiardino decorated ... simple and original that stays in the mind for ever. Like I Tatti, and Nancy Lancaster’s Ditchley Park, or Peter Beard’s house in Montauk.