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      Thomas Hoobler, Half of a Prolific Writing Couple, Dies at 82

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      He and his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books, most recently one about presidential love letters, “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?”Thomas Hoobler, who with his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books across a vast range of subjects, including young-adult biographies of Margaret Mead, mystery novels set in 18th-century Japan and, most recently, a book about presidential love letters with the attention-grabbing title “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?,” died on Feb. 22 in Manhattan. He was 82.His wife and their daughter, Ellen Hoobler-Banavadikar, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a stroke. His death was not widely reported at the time.The Hooblers were journeyman writers, contributing to series that will be familiar to any pre-teenager or parent of a pre-teenager, including Penguin’s wildly successful history books known by fans as “Big Heads” for their cartoonish covers, which bore titles like “Where Are the Great Pyramids?” (2015) and “What Was the San Francisco Earthquake?” (2016).The couple also wrote their own series. They were proudest of the 10 “American Family Albums” they wrote for Oxford University Press, starting with “The Chinese American Family Album” in 1994. The series, which drew on diaries, photographs and newspaper clippings to tell the story of the American immigrant experience, won a slew of honors, according to the Hooblers’ website, including three awards from the Parents’ Choice Foundation, a nonprofit guide to children’s media and toys.The Hooblers wrote 10 “American Family Albums” for Oxford University Press, starting with “The Chinese American Family Album” in 1994.Oxford University PressSuch recognition was typical of the Hooblers’ output for young readers, which drew on extensive research but presented history and personalities in compelling, age-appropriate language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Books With Celebrity Cameos

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      A memoir of Greenwich Village; an Argentine story collection.Cardi B, climbing into a car in New York City.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersDear readers,To live in this city is sometimes to be subject to random, unheralded encounters with the great and the good: a sitcom star fumbling for her MetroCard; a famously misanthropic novelist, happy as a clam in the stands at a Yankees game; a disgraced former governor looking entirely too unbothered at the bagel store.A true New Yorker, of course, metabolizes these moments and moves on, cool cucumbers in the face of all but the most outrageous disruptions (a professional sports rival, maybe, or an actual Beatle). Still, I never get tired of the low-wattage zing those run-ins can add to a routine and colorless day, like finding a flamingo on the subway.In literature, as in life, a clever writer can do the same, taking real historical figures of some renown — the kind whose main-character energy usually fills a room — and weaving them neatly into someone else’s story.Though they hail from wildly different genres, identities and points of view, both books here approach their famous-person cameos with satisfying restraint: just a few flamingo feathers, judiciously used.—LeahWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Flannery O’Connor’s Artworks Finally See the Light

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      “I don’t know how to write,” Mary Flannery O’Connor once said. “But I can draw.”She had just become a cartoonist for her high school newspaper, at Peabody High School in Milledgeville, Ga. There, and later at Georgia State College for Women, she hoped to place her linoleum-block-print satires of campus life in The New Yorker.Instead, she left for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Yaddo residency in New York State, shed “Mary” from her name and published two finely tuned novels about religious belief, the perversely funny “Wise Blood” (1952) and her grave “The Violent Bear it Away” (1960), then a collection of short stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955), whose staring contest with belief and tradition in the modernizing South placed her at the front of new regional literature until her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39.A framed photograph of the interior of the Andalusia farmhouse in Milledgeville, Ga., where O’Connor made paintings that decorated the walls during her lifetime.The Andalusia farmhouse today is a museum devoted to O’Connor’s life. The exhibition of her paintings is at an interpretive center on the premises.Since the republication of those newspaper cartoons, in 2012 — and a deeply researched biography in 2009 — an academic scavenger hunt for the true Flannery O’Connor has taken off. Her prayer journal and unfinished third novel were recently published, a documentary and biopic released. On March 25, for the centenary of her birth, her alma mater, now the Georgia College & State University, will exhibit 70 newly acquired artworks of a different sort, which some O’Connor scholars have heard about but far fewer have seen. Then on March 27, the exhibition moves to the Andalusia Interpretive Center, an exhibition space nearby run by the college.Comprising painted woodcut caricatures from her childhood along with regional oil paintings from the peak of her writing career, the artworks might shed new light on a literary vision cut far too short, a Roman Catholic theology that scholars have debated for 70 years and infamously protective gatekeepers — her mother and cousin — who may have resisted access to O’Connor’s artwork.On a balmy afternoon during Lent, Seth Walker, the college’s vice president of advancement, led me up two flights of stairs of a peeling Federal-style foursquare house in downtown Milledgeville, where O’Connor, age 13 and a self-described “pigeon-toed” only child “with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex,” moved from Savannah with her parents, and where she would reside until age 20.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert E. Ginna Jr., Whose Article Bolstered U.F.O. Claims, Dies at 99

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      A founding editor of People, he also served as editor in chief of Little, Brown and produced films. But his public image was defined by a 1952 story for Life.Robert E. Ginna Jr., a founding editor of People magazine, a book editor and a film producer whose 1952 Life magazine article provoked a frenzy by validating the idea that flying saucers might exist and could have visited Earth from outer space, died on March 4 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.His death was confirmed by his son, Peter St. John Ginna. He was 99.Mr. Ginna (pronounced gun-NAY) enjoyed a wide-ranging, eight-decade career. As the editor in chief of Little, Brown, he persuaded the acclaimed novelist James Salter to shift from screenplays to books and discovered Dr. Robin Cook as an author of thrillers. He also produced movies and was part of the team that started People as a highbrow showcase for profiles of cultural figures like Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, but quit when the magazine descended into what he viewed as celebrity fluff.To the general public, though, he was perhaps best known for an article he wrote with H.B. Darrach Jr. for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine. The cover featured an alluring photograph of Marilyn Monroe under the headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”The April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine featured a seductive photo of Marilyn Monroe juxtaposed with the now-infamous headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”Philippe Halsman/Life Magazine, via Magnum PhotosTo Mr. Ginna’s eternal dismay, the article made him a target for U.F.O. buffs and kooks. Headlined “Have We Visitors From Space?,” it examined 10 reports of unidentified flying object sightings, followed by an unequivocal assessment from the German rocket expert Walther Riedel: “I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis.”While reports of U.F.O.s in the late 1940s were often trivialized, Phillip J. Hutchison and Herbert J. Strentz wrote in American Journalism in 2019: “By the early 1950s, however, more substantial human-interest features embraced the idea that U.F.O. reports might correspond to extraterrestrial Earth visitors. A widely cited April 7, 1952, Life magazine feature titled ‘Have We Visitors From Space?’ represents one of the most influential examples of the latter trend.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      J.F.K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?

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      Why the newly released documents won’t put out the fire.On his third day in office in January, President Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Trump declared on the campaign trail, “It’s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.”The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings. The assassinations of the 1960s — President Kennedy’s in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed. Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself.Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there’s a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it.By 1963, we were already headed in that direction. Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the “twilight struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy. Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air.Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy-dog experimental whodunit “V.” are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase “paranoid style” comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper’s in 1964.)That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy’s killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Tina Louise, Escape, Finally, From ‘Gilligan’s Island’

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      Ms. Louise would prefer to not to talk about Ginger, her breathy sitcom character from the 1960s. Luckily, to the children she tutors, she’s just Ms. Tina.The green-eyed TV star with the beauty mark on her cheek shows up at a school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan every Wednesday. For an hour, Ms. Tina, as the students and teachers call her, devotes herself to a pair of 7-year-olds who are struggling with reading. They’ll go through whatever books the teacher gives her, like “All Aboard!” or “How to Catch a Witch.” When her time is up, she’ll head home.None of the children will have any idea that Ginger from “Gilligan’s Island” — in real life, the actress Tina Louise — just spent the best 60 minutes of her week with them.Ms. Louise does not like to talk about the television show that made her a household name. She has no desire to revisit the years between 1964 and 1967, when she was marooned with six oddballs and a trunk full of slinky, sequined gowns.Through its run of 98 episodes, “Gilligan’s Island” was a prime-time success and became a Gen X touchstone in reruns. (The question of “Ginger or Mary Ann?” can still evoke passionate debate among men of a certain age.) As for Ms. Louise, she can barely utter the name of the program, referring to it as “G.I.” or “The Series.”CBS, via Getty ImagesIt’s not that she regrets it, although she and the cast never received residuals. “I’m very grateful for all the things that have happened to me and the opportunities that I’ve had,” she said in a recent conversation from her modest one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. She is the show’s last living cast member, and she recently celebrated a birthday she’d prefer not to discuss. (“I’m 29,” she said coyly.) She still has the signature beauty that made her famous, now on display in jeans and a black T-shirt instead of fancy gowns.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Find the Hidden Book Titles by Irish Authors and Poets

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      The circle of friends, all in starter jobs and trying to juggle the commitments of their jobs, tried to meet up at least one night a month, knowing it was small things like these get-togethers that made the city better.The gathering always took place beside the Brooklyn Bridge, at a restaurant between the old coffee barge that hosted chamber music and the busy lobster-roll shack that was a haven for hungry sea gulls ransacking the tower of food trash.Just as the table chatter turned to league football, a tiki-bar boat full of baseball fans dancing on deck with Mr. and Mrs. Met blasted by at top volume. “That’s enough to make normal people think they were seeing things,” said Sean.“’Tis,” said Brendan. “The East River may lack the stoic charm of the sea but you can’t beat it for the entertainment.”The circle of friends, all in starter jobs and trying to juggle the commitments of their jobs, tried to meet up at least one night a month, knowing it was small things like these get-togethers that made the city better.The gathering always took place beside the Brooklyn Bridge, at a restaurant between the old coffee barge that hosted chamber music and the busy lobster-roll shack that was a haven for hungry sea gulls ransacking the tower of food trash.Just as the table chatter turned to league football, a tiki-bar boat full of baseball fans dancing on deck with Mr. and Mrs. Met blasted by at top volume. “That’s enough to make normal people think they were seeing things,” said Sean.“’Tis,” said Brendan. “The East River may lack the stoic charm of the sea but you can’t beat it for the entertainment.”The circle of friends, all in starter jobs and trying to juggle the commitments of their jobs, tried to meet up at least one night a month, knowing it was small things like these get-togethers that made the city better.The gathering always took place beside the Brooklyn Bridge, at a restaurant between the old coffee barge that hosted chamber music and the busy lobster-roll shack that was a haven for hungry sea gulls ransacking the tower of food trash.Just as the table chatter turned to league football, a tiki-bar boat full of baseball fans dancing on deck with Mr. and Mrs. Met blasted by at top volume. “That’s enough to make normal people think they were seeing things,” said Sean.“’Tis,” said Brendan. “The East River may lack the stoic charm of the sea but you can’t beat it for the entertainment.” More

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      Book Review: ‘When the Going Was Good,’ by Graydon Carter

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      The former Vanity Fair editor reflects on an era’s power moves and expense-account adventures in a new memoir.WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, by Graydon Carter, with James FoxLorne. Graydon. Keith. Three abiding kings of New York City’s cultural life are the subjects of new books. Lorne is Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” who is examined under the stereo microscope that is Susan Morrison’s biography, “Lorne.” Graydon is Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the stinging magazine Spy in the 1980s and the editor of Vanity Fair during its plumpest and happiest decades, whose memoir is our topic today. Keith is Keith McNally, the proprietor of that consummate French bistro Balthazar — which is so well run, so well lit and so well victualed that surely one idea of a good death is to deliquesce in one of its red leather banquettes — who has a memoir out soon.Lorne is 80; Graydon, 75; Keith, 73. Each is still very much in the game. But to have these books in a clump on my coffee table has given me an Auld Lang Syne-ish feeling. An era is approaching its end.Carter’s memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” runs on two overlapping tracks. It’s the story of an underdog — the hockey-playing, Canadian-born son of an air force pilot — who morphs into a crisply dressed and flamboyantly maned overdog. It is, figuratively, the story of a young man who walks into Gotham barefoot and leaves, whistling, owning the keys to one of its castles.A class journey is described as well. The consumption grows conspicuous and conspicuouser. Thorstein Veblen’s eyes would pinwheel. By the second half, Carter can’t seem to get out of a paragraph without mentioning his possession of the perfect apartment, or vintage car, or bespoke suit, or excursion, or hotel suite, or weekend house, or restaurant table, or friend (Fran Lebowitz), or pajamas or fishing camp.D.H. Lawrence held a class animus against the Bloomsbury group; Pauline Kael distrusted the high-living Joan Didion. Paul Theroux called luxury the enemy of observation. This is another way of saying that Carter’s book will make some readers itchy. I quickly and (mostly) happily consumed it anyway. The journalism stories and the character analysis, as Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call gossip, are first-rate.Let us get three drawbacks out of the way. 1) Although Carter wrote “When the Going Was Good” with James Fox, a co-author of Keith Richards’s electric memoir, the prose is basic. Anyone who comes in hoping for a tincture of the old Spy style — ironic, wised-up, dense with intellect and allusion — will be disappointed. 2) Carter is not one for introspection. There are no “Rosebud” moments. 3) He doesn’t talk about his signature, wide-winged, George Washington-esque hair, with its Nike whoosh up the center.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More