No one talks much about LeRoy Neiman today, but during his heyday, in the 1960s and 1970s, the cigar-smoking, mustachioed artist was as famous for his playboy persona as he was for his splashy, colorful depictions of sporting events and high life in general. Art critics despised him, but like Peter Max and Thomas Kinkade, he found riches by catering to wealthy collectors who adorned their dens with his Technicolor version of the world they all wished to inhabit. Travis Vogan does a masterful job bringing both Neiman and his times to vibrant life, never sparing in his critique but appropriately sympathetic to a self-made man who produced high-gloss schlock.
He created many of his works live on ABC as the sporting events unfolded, with Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath as particularly favorite subjects. “I’m not just loved. I’m superloved,” he once boasted, and that affection allowed him to own up to 10 apartments in Manhattan’s Hotel des Artistes. He was devoted to his wife of 55 years, who made sure he looked his dapper best as he went out to events with a much younger woman on his arm. LeRoy died at age 91 in 2012, his grave in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery marked by a large slab with his trademark, loopy signature boldly engraved above the words “Rest in Peace. Forever Remembered.” His best memorial is this book, which so persuasively and elegantly places him in the center of late-20th-century American popular culture.
Spare us yet another book inspired by Instagram, unless of course it is this one, which grew out of the author’s obsession with chronicling and photographing a landmarked building every day for years on his Instagram account, @landmarksofny. Tommy Silk is an engaging writer as well as a skilled photographer, and even the most jaded of New Yorkers will find fresh delights discovering such places as the Montauk Club in Park Slope, designed after a Venetian palace, and Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island, a collection of five Greek Revival buildings that once served as dorms for retired sailors. Yes, the firehouse featured in Ghostbusters is here, as is the Dakota and the Little Red Lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge. The true joy of the book is Silk’s highlighting of places that are a bit out of the way and add to the serendipity of walking around New York with eyes open and smartphone tucked away.
Take one part Winesburg, Ohio, one part Dawn Powell, throw in a pinch of Dorothy Parker, and stir it with a Wes Anderson swizzle stick and, well, that is the best way to describe this wonderful concoction by Daniel M. Lavery, who once wrote the Dear Prudence advice column for Slate. The setting is the Biedermeier, a women’s hotel in Manhattan, the time is the 1960s, and the residents are faced with both the declining quality of their hotel and the circumstances of their own lives. Lavery creates an environment so detailed and evocative that the book seems like a documentary, but with a wit and compassion that could come only from the author’s heart.
If Aesop had had an agent, he would have made a mint on how often “The Tortoise and the Hare” has been retold, re-purposed, and ripped off. Of course, Aesop would have to be found to receive the royalties, and there is no proof that a singular Aesop existed in Greece hundreds of years before Christ. What we do know is that there are more than 700 fables deemed Aesopian, and Robin Waterfield does a superb job translating and annotating 400 of them—a “ragbag,” as he calls them.
They offer no consistent social message but rely on metaphor to sometimes establish a moral, sometimes not. What could be more entertaining than to derive lessons or just a smile from talking frogs and cranky dogs and wise cows and dancing camels and, of course, foxes. And then there is the rich Athenian who was on a ship with others when it capsized. As others swam to shore, the Athenian stayed in the water, praying to Athena, “promising her the earth if he lived,” whereupon one of the others swam to him and said, “Why not help Athena by moving your arms?” Who needs a self-help book when you have Aesop?
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl
