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Here’s something you’d never expect in a 700-page book about Mrs. Abe Lincoln: hot sex. San Francisco writer Janis Cooke Newman’s first novel, a massive and well-researched fictional autobiography by one of the country’s most intriguing first ladies, serves up plenty, along with a gripping tale of scandal, war, intrigue, and séances. From Mary’s unhappy childhood in a slaveholding family to her first meeting with her future husband (“I could not cease staring at him, held by his startling homeliness”) to her own fraught motherhood, political ambitions, and compulsive spending, this is a Mary Lincoln seen through modern eyes—part budding feminist, part shopaholic, part desperate housewife. You won’t find much historical depth or political analysis here, but for sheer page-turning fun, Mary is perfect. As fickle August gives way to September and the Bay Area’s true summer, here are two more words you’d never think to associate with the Lincolns: beach read. B+ | San Francisco–based jazz singer Jacqui Naylor divides the 15 songs on her fifth CD among originals, jazz standards, and rock classics. Five tracks are examples of what she calls acoustic smashing, mashing the lyrics of a jazz standard and a rock melody, or vice versa. That means you get Naylor belting out Gershwin’s classic “Summertime” over the rollicking riff from the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post” and saucily crooning U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” over Miles Davis’s swinging “All Blue.” She’s equally impressive when reworking a single tune: delivering a smoky, Madeleine Peyroux-ish version of “Blue Moon,” slowing down REM’s “Losing My Religion” to a spooky, funereal pace. Elsewhere, she flits from gorgeous piano ballads (“Here’s to Life”) to funky Rod Stewart covers (“Hot Legs”) to overly slick Norah Jones-ish folk-jazz hybrids (“Easy Ride From Here”). The only problem is that Naylor sounds different on every track. By trying to be everything to everybody, she leaves no one fully satisfied and everyone wanting more. Then again: nice trick, that. B | Blame it on the Victorians or all those Craftsmen up in the Berkeley hills, but the Bay Area hasn’t been much known for its modernist architecture. Yet Berkeley architect and theorist Pierluigi Serraino has unearthed a coffee-table book’s worth of treasures (and their often unheralded creators) from the 1940s and ’50s, from suburban houses to city office towers, that are every bit as iconic as L.A.’s modernist set pieces. The cantilevered, glass-walled home that Beverley (David) Thorne designed for Dave Brubeck in Oakland shows an improvisatory flair that the legendary pianist must have loved. Anshen + Allen’s diamond-shaped, redwood-sided Moore House sits atop a Carmel cliff like a bird of prey. While Serraino occasionally lapses into architect-speak, he tells some great stories: of Hatfield and McCoy–style feuds between competing modernist schools, of neophyte architects schmoozing their way into designing a Standard Oil exec’s 6,000-square-foot mansion in Woodside. Finally, though, it’s the | Critics and audiences could easily agree on the greatness of Ballets Russes, San Francisco filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s bright, anecdotal history of the legendary troupes that popularized ballet for American audiences in the ’30s and ’40s. That’s probably because, in an era of increasingly self-important documentaries, this one manages modesty. How breezily it dances through decades’ worth of company tribulations—not least the “ballet wars” between rival leaders Wassily de Basil and Leonid Massine for the very soul of the original Ballet Russe. What Geller and Goldfine have done is to illuminate an art form’s self-discovery. Plus, the movie’s many reflective participants are great fun to be with; even the proudest and most regal performers never take themselves too seriously. Following their cue, Ballets Russes radiates wit and majesty, but in an easygoing way. The DVD special features include copious archival footage and handsome stills. A | Blogging is by its very nature self-indulgent, but blogging about your kids takes it to a new level. Berkeley writer Ayelet Waldman ignited the burgeoning mommy blogger community with her comment in the New York Times last year that writing about one’s children “is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.” Not surprisingly, she gave up her seminal mommy blog soon after. Nonetheless, the Bay Area has dozens of mommy blogs now. On Mom Writes, Mary Tsao argues that, being “a selfless person in the service of small children who demand juice almost incessantly,” there’s very little in her life that’s about her except for her blog. Jenny Lauck’s hilarious entries on Three Kid Circus are anything but self-aggrandizing, making it easy to see why Mommybloggers.com recently made her a featured columnist. Then there’s Grace Davis’s no-holds-barred State of Grace, in which, between conveying the grisly details of giving birth and dishing on her teenage daughter, Davis raises money for hurricane victims. Even if you’re not a mom, these well-written and accessible blogs transport you into a world with unique challenges and amusements, and the best of them are pretty darn entertaining. B+ |