A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston

Title: A Life in Parts

Author: Bryan Cranston

Genre: Autobiography

Though occasionally repetitive in his advice, Bryan Cranston's autobiography, A Life in Parts, is an interesting read spanning his life so far - from childhood through his success with Breaking Bad. He shares the path of his journey mostly organized by the various gigs he's landed (hence the title). It is told candidly with some wry humor and a steady enough stream of drama to keep the reader interested. If you select the audiobook format, you have the added benefit of hearing the book read by the actor himself. 

- Sarah R.

Check out A Life in Parts @ the library.

Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub

In the late 1930’s, seventeen year old Elsa Emerson leaves her Door County home, headed for Hollywood intent on a movie career. Within ten years she has become Laura Lamont, a glamorous star with an Academy Award.  Married to a powerful movie producer, mother of three, best friends with a wacky red-headed television star, Laura seems to have it all. But this success has come with a price. She is unable to escape the nagging guilt that her fame and good fortune should really belong to a talented older sister who died when Elsa was a child. Her father’s death and mother’s disapproval give her second thoughts about the wisdom of leaving Door County. Her husband’s death leaves her unmoored and drives her career into a tailspin. Faced with dire health, family and money problems, she rallies, simplifies her life style, swallows her pride and takes any work she is able to get. From that point on, her story becomes one of triumph over adversity.

Emma Straub has said that Laura Lamont is based on actress Jennifer Jones. Readers who are familiar with movie and television stars of the black and white era will enjoy identifying the other stars characterized in Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures.

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty

When respectable wife and mother Cora Carlisle agrees to go to New York as chaperone to 15-year-old Louise Brooks in the summer of 1922, Louise is not yet the famous silent film actress she is destined to become. Impetuous, stubborn, combative, arrogant, and an unapologetic flirt, Louise is still just an enormously talented young dancer auditioning to join the Denishawn dancers.  Cora more than has her hands full keeping Louise in line.  But chaperoning an impossible, clever teenager is not the only reason Cora has come to New York.  Leaving her handsome, much older lawyer husband and twin sons at home in Wichita, Kansas, Cora is desperate to unlock the secrets of her past.  Raised in the New York Home for Friendless Girls, Cora was put on an orphan train at the age of six and taken in by a Kansas farm family.  With only a brief memory of a dark-haired woman with a shawl, Cora has no idea who her parents were, how she ended up in an orphanage, or even if she may still have living relatives.  The answers, she is sure, lie in New York - which is why she must keep headstrong Louise in check long enough to find the answers she seeks.  The clashing mores, bright lights, busy streets, dance halls and rising hemlines of 1920s New York come alive in The Chaperone, an engrossing read that fans of Boardwalk Empire and the Oscar-winning film The Artist will love to curl up with this fall!

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Porto Vergona, Italy, 1962.  Young Pasquale Tursi has come home from university in Florence after the death of his father to care for his mother in their tiny fishing village on the Italian coast.  He dreams of making his father's tiny hotel over into an elegant pensione that wealthy American tourists will flock to.  It is one morning, Pasquale standing waist deep in the bay, tossing rocks to build up the breakwall so the waves will not wash away his tiny beach, that the lovely American actress appears from the sea.  From the set of Cleopatra in Rome, Dee Moray is frail, dying, and has been sent to Porto Vergogna to wait for a man.  Pasquale is instantly in love.

Hollywood, California.  Present day.  Claire Silver is contemplating quitting her job as chief development assistant to legendary Hollywood producer Michael Deane.  Once a force to be reckoned with, Michael is a washed up relic of golden age Hollywood, and Claire spends her days listening to terrible movie pitches.  But when an elderly Italian man turns up on the lot, looking for an American actress he last saw in Italy fifty years ago, Claire believes she may have found the story she's been waiting for.

Beautiful Ruins is a tangle of interconnected stories that unfold across time and over continents that offers a glimpse at the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.  Wry, funny, heartbreaking and brutally honest, this engrossing novel will have you craving a trip to the sun-soaked cliffs of the Italian seacoast.  Stretching from the second World War to the nerve-racking and more than slightly ridiculous production lots of modern Hollywood, this surprising adventure is at its heart an epic love story you definately want in your beach bag this summer!