A BRILLIANT STREAK

With an apparently infinite fascination with her subject (Samuel Clemens appears in her novel, Alice Rose and Sam, p. 341), Lasky says that “it would only be stretching the truth a little to say that Samuel Clemens had one of the longest childhoods in history.” This intriguing biography of one of America’s greatest humorists and wildest storytellers recounts the story of Clemens’s life until age 30, when he took on his famous pen name. Beautifully illustrated in Moser’s vigorous portraits are the details of Clemens’s mischievous childhood, which began in 1835 in Missouri, the night a comet streaked across the sky. A penchant for stretching the truth with an overactive imagination and a fascination with danger became the basis for great stories of pranks and hoaxes; the man who became Mark Twain came to believe that “his main job as a reporter was not to bore his readers.” His successes are the source of one colorful anecdote after another, which Lasky taps and twirls into an engaging narrative that glimmers with its own brand of brilliance. (Biography. 6-12)