Book Reviews: GK Chesterton; Marilyn Monroe

"Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life & Impact of G.K. Chesterton"
By Kevin Belmonte (Thomas Nelson, $16.99)
One of the misfortunes of fame is that it may not hit the target you intend. That is, the celebrated, like the notorious, tend to get remembered for one thing. So C.S. Lewis may be remembered for his "Narnia" books and not so much for the clarity [Dash] and prodigious writing [Dash] on Christian apologetics. So, too, it was for G.K. Chesterton, to whom Lewis was deeply indebted.
Remembered, if at all, for his Father Brown mysteries, G.K. Chesterton was one of the most powerful intellects of his time. For a time, The New York Times wrote, Chesterton "cast…his shadow on a considerable part of the world." He wrote prolifically on subjects from poetry, novels, literary criticism, biographies and apologetics. Like Graham Greene, he was a convert to Catholicism. His writings on Christianity are among the most thoughtful and lucid and his literary criticism of Dickens marked him as "the greatest of all Dickens critics," according to The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens.
In his "Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesteron," Kevin Belmonte does not try to give Chesterton the painstaiking examination John Richardson gave to Picasso or William Manchester to Churchill. Instead, he provides a useful, readable introduction to Chesterton that carries with it Chesterton's own sense of humility and humor.
It is a wonderful introduction to Chesterton, amply annotated with Chesterton insights and witticisms. The book's companion, "the Quotable Chesterton: The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton features more than 850 quotations with Chesterton opining on everything from Architecture, to Jesus, to John Bunyan. A personal favorite: "Christianity isn't a failure; it just hasn't been tried yet."
"MM Personal: From the Private Archives of Marilyn Monroe"
By Lois Banner (Abrams, $35)
It's easy to feel a little tawdry thrumming through Marilyn Monroe's check stubs and perfume receipts, but that's part of the guilty pleasure of "MM Personal: From the Private Archives of Marilyn Monroe. "
This gorgeously assembled book, which reproduces the ephemera from Monroe's private archive of letters and documents once believed lost, is a bit like the legend herself. The volume is gorgeous to look at and scandalously gratifying to comb through. But one can't help feeling invasive and prurient, scrutinizing such otherwise banal artifacts as Monroe's budget books.
Like Monroe, stunning but shattered in a thousand different ways, the portrait that emerges is the one with which we are all most familiar: a vulnerable, beauty, anxious, frightened and frantic for approval. Letters from friends, a recipe for bouillabaisse and a receipt from a maternity store (Monroe had three miscarriages) underscore the banality and bathos of Monroe's life.
Desperate to be taken seriously among the intellectual elite, Monroe's own efforts fall pathetically short. One of the most revealing items is a letter Monroe wrote to a friend at the New York Times. Her disjointed conjectures on Castro and democracy seem a cumbersome attempt toward and intellectual gravity that was more aspirational than genuine. Monroe's smarts, such as they were, were intangible and cinematic. The best place to view them on display is in her films. Watch her maintain the flaky indifference to Tom Ewell in "The Seven Year Itch" and then wonder if any other actress, save Judy Holiday, could have pulled it off half as well.
Perhaps some of the most poignant bits are the telegrams and legal documents sent by punctilious studio heads, determined to get Monroe to behave. Clearly, the woman was being pummeled from every angle.
Written by Lois Banner and photographed by Mark Anderson, "MM – Personal" is impossible to ignore and embarrassing to like so much.