Oddly, Kevin Bacon's Nowhere to Be Found

Remember how Edward Sorel used to do illustrations of the first encounters between two famous people? (For example, Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams.) Over the weekend, I started dipping into A Chance Meeting, a new book by Rachel Cohen that's combines the "first (and in some cases only) encounter" with the "six degrees of separation" principle to show how Hart Crane connects Alfred Stieglitz to Charlie Chaplin, to pick one case. DoubleTake has her version of the encounter between Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, while the Guardian presents edited versions of three other encounters from the book (including the night Crane met Chaplin). Cohen's personal website offers very abbreviated summaries of each encounter, too.

In the Village Voice, Vivek Narayanan had mixed feelings, but enjoyed the "tidbits of gossip." In BookPage, Robert Weibezahl praises Cohen's "solid assumptions" and admits she makes him want to go back to the authors she writes about. And you can hear what David Kipen had to say about the book on NPR.