25 Books You Can't Put Down
Go on, take what you need. A perfect mystery, a mouthful of poetry...;O serves up a smorgasbord of the summer's best reads.
By Cathleen Medwick
Stormy Weather by James Gavin
608 pages; Atria
People told her she wasn't "colored enough." (Ethel Waters, among others, despised her.) They said she had no sense of rhythm, couldn't sing the blues. But Lena Horne's patrician beauty dazzled white audiences, and in the 1940s, her sexy, stylish cabaret and film performances made her a star. James Gavin's Stormy Weather (Atria) tells how this elegant icon—polite to a fault, quietly enraged by Hollywood racism—spent decades getting comfortable in her skin.
People told her she wasn't "colored enough." (Ethel Waters, among others, despised her.) They said she had no sense of rhythm, couldn't sing the blues. But Lena Horne's patrician beauty dazzled white audiences, and in the 1940s, her sexy, stylish cabaret and film performances made her a star. James Gavin's Stormy Weather (Atria) tells how this elegant icon—polite to a fault, quietly enraged by Hollywood racism—spent decades getting comfortable in her skin.
From the July 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine