By Ian Halperin and Max Wallace
Birch Lane Press; 214 pages; $19.95.
As you look at the jacket and title of Ian Halperin and Max Wallace's book "Who Killed Kurt Cobain?" you may find yourself perplexed: Aren't the victim and perpetrator one and the same? Finish the book and you may not be so sure.
In April 1994, Cobain - the lead singer-guitarist-songwriter of Nirvana - died of what, officially, was ruled a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head.
But Halperin and Wallace, two Canadian journalists, assemble a patchwork of evidence that suggests - but does not state - otherwise.
It is a strange journey, and the boat of evidence has more than a few holes in it. It's not helped by fairly pedestrian writing and an inability to explain what made Cobain so important and Nirvana so good.
To be sure, the authors do not offer, nor do they claim to have, any evidence implicating Courtney Love, Cobain's widow, or anyone else in foul play. This is a book about suspicion, implication, possibility. They write that their intent is, simply, to get the case reopened. It might prove interesting if it were.
- By Jim Sullivan
The Boston Globe
`Another Season'
By Gene Stallings
Broadway; $12.
New in paperback is this memoir by the former coach of what were then Phoenix Cardinals. It combines the story of Stallings' coaching career - Bill Bidwill fired him before his contract expired, and he ended up at the University of Alabama, where his team won the 1992 national championship - and that of raising his son, John Mark Stallings, who was born in 1962 with Down syndrome and a heart defect.
There was little information about Down syndrome available in those days, and Stallings and his wife, Ruth Ann, stumbled through John's early years, bewildered and isolated. But they had decided, Stallings says, that Johnny was "what God gave us, and we were going to do everything we could to make his life as happy as we could." His book is full of the worries, disappointments and ultimate joys of raising a special boy.
- By Anne Stephenson
The Arizona Republic
`The Most Wanted
By Jacquelyn Mitchard
Viking; $24.95; 407 pages.
Jacquelyn Mitchard has to be one of the luckiest writers alive. Her freshman novel, "The Deep End of the Ocean," launched Oprah Winfrey's book club in 1996.
Oprah's championing of the book - about a family's pain when their son disappears from a crowded hotel lobby - vaulted it to the bestseller lists and made a celebrity of Mitchard. Even so, the book's success said more about the power of Oprah than it did about Mitchard's abilities as an author. "Deep End" was a laborious read.
Mitchard, however, has given readers a better idea of her writing talents with her second novel, "The Most Wanted," a much more authentic and human account of love and maternal instinct.
- By Greg Morago
The Hartford Courant