High Notes: Selected Writings

Gangsters, smut peddlers, divas, and newspapermen burst from these sparkling essays by the celebrated pioneer of New Journalism. Talese (Thy Neighbor’s Wife) includes pieces culled from Esquire, the New Yorker, and other magazines over 70 years of observation and reportage, from a sketch of his boyhood idylls in New Jersey during WWII to a recent tableau of a piquant duet between crooner Tony Bennett and a flirty Lady Gaga. In between, he offers a meditative portrait of mobster Bill Bonanno waiting out the 1964 disappearance of his father, Mafia chief Joseph Bonanno; an account of the role of a 1950s nude model in the lustful reveries and career path of a Chicago sex-shop entrepreneur; an intricate narrative of mid-20th-century power struggles at the New York Times; an indelible portrait of an under-the-weather Frank Sinatra; a vibrant picaresque of imperious Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya as she takes the world by storm; and shorter New York vignettes of eateries and a woman who’s homeless by choice. These pieces really amount to superb character studies that unfold less through journalistic quotation than through the novelistic accretion of well-observed details of action and setting. Talese gives readers real life raised to the level of high literature. [em](Jan.) [/em]