OUT OF MY MIND: An Autobiography
By Kristin Nelson Tinker
Abrams, 230 pages, $35
The daughter of sportscaster Tom Harmon and actress Elyse Knox and the former wife of rock ‘n’ roller Rick Nelson looks back at her life through words, photos and paintings. The account has its blissful moments, among them the author’s 1988 wedding to producer-director Mark Tinker, but it is also, to a great extent, one of unhappiness–of frustrations and confrontations with family, a troubled marriage to Nelson and an ongoing struggle to realize artistic ambitions. The text–a collection of diary entries, recollections, song lyrics and poems–accompanies more than 100 of the author’s frequently autobiographical naive-art paintings.
CLASSICS: The Best the World Has to Offer
By Mon Muellerschoen and Peter Steinfeld
General Publishing Group, 144 pages, $30
The jacket flap describes this as “a photographic treasury of excellence” that “focuses on many of the most endearing classic objects, items that possess those rare qualities of timeless design, usefulness and originality.” In part, that would include PEZ dispensers, Oreo cookies and John Deere tractors. Traveling both tony trails (Louis Vuitton luggage, Hermes handbags) and pop paths (Barbie dolls, Levi Strauss jeans), the relentlessly celebratory “Classics” anoints more than five dozen products as “icons of perfection,” giving each two facing pages of text and photos.
TEENAGE CONFIDENTIAL: An Illustrated History of the American Teen
By Michael Barson and Steven Heller
Chronicle Books, 132 pages, $16.95 paper
Moving briskly from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, “Teenage Confidential” starts out recalling Mickey Rooney’s “Andy Hardy” movies, the birth of Seventeen magazine and vintage Archie comic books. But this generously illustrated, selective survey of adolescence as portrayed (or sensationalized) in movies, magazines and other mass media saves most of its energy for the topics of delinquents, rock ‘n’ roll and dating/romance/sex. It also shows a distinct fondness for movie posters and paperback covers along the lines of “High School Hellcats” and “The Young Hoods.”
SAUCER ATTACK!
By Eric Nesheim and Leif Nesheim
Kitchen Sink Press/General Publishing Group, 127 pages, $16.95 paper
This look at “artifacts and images of the Golden Age of flying saucers” offers up a colorful fleet of saucer illustrations–most from the 1950s and ’60s–that originally appeared in science fiction magazines such as Astounding and Fantastic Universe, in the “true stories” publication Fate and on the jackets of “nonfiction” books such as “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.” In addition to depictions of spacecraft (saucer-shaped and otherwise) and drawings of aliens (nasty and benign), the cavalcade of extraterrestrial conveyances takes in saucer-related movie posters, comic book covers and toys.
THE RHINO HISTORY OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL: The ’70s
By Eric Lefcowitz
Byron Preiss Multimedia/Pocket Books, 208 pages, $24.95 paper
After exploring the roots of the “happy face culture” of the early ’70s, this “interpretative” survey goes on to visit selected aspects of ’70s music such as “shock rock” and lengthy “mega-songs”–and sometimes stretches uncomfortably to impose organizational order (Bonnie Raitt, Alex Chilton and Can getting lumped together in a section on musicians who struggled to get their music heard). Inside the book is a CD with, fittingly, eight tracks: six songs by Yes, Alice Cooper and others and two “National Lampoon Radio Hour” bits.
ELTON JOHN’S FLOWER FANTASIES: An Intimate Tour of His Houses and Garden
By Caroline Cass, photos by Andrew Twort
Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown, 144 pages, $35
A photographic foray through British pop star Elton John’s country house and London home–where, among other items of decor, you’ll find an 18th Century French tapestry, a 19th Century French harp, Lalique vases and a painting, some 200-plus years old, acquired from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Of equal or greater concern in the photos, though, is the striking array of floral arrangements supplied to the homes (with an occasional trip outside to admire stands of marigolds, salvias and geraniums in garden areas), and the subject of flowers figures prominently in text and captions.
