Pearl's Picks Non-Fiction Staff Picks
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A Perfect Union : Dolly Madison and the creation of the American nation
Author: Catherine Allgor
I have a distinct memory of reading about Dolly Madison in one of those orange covered books in the “Childhood of Famous Americans” series when I was a child. I remember being totally fascinated with her romance and marriage to the much older James Madison, as well as her thrilling experiences during the War of 1812, in which she saved a portrait of George Washington from the burning White House. (I didn’t know then that it was the famous portrait of Washington by Gilbert Stuart.) So I was thrilled to reacquaint myself with her life and times in A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation by Catherine Allgor. Madison was loved and admired by all (with the exception of her husband’s political enemies) for the three decades she spent in the public spotlight; she was the first First Lady to carve out an important role for herself in the everyday workings of the new nation. Collaborating with her husband to bring the still fractious states (and their leaders) together, Dolley turned the White House into a salon, where men from all sides of the political spectrum, as well as foreign diplomats, kings, and potentates, could come together and, mellowed by good food and wine and an attractive and charming hostess, begin to work out their differences. She was a true partner to her husband – one political opponent believed that Madison never would have won the presidency without Dolley at his side. Allgor’s lively biography brings this vivacious and intelligent woman back into the spotlight she so deserves.
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Barrow’s Boys
Author: Fergus Fleming
Fergus Fleming's Barrow's Boys: The Original Extreme Adventurers: A Stirring Story of Daring Fortitude and Outright Lunacy tells the stories of a diverse group of 19th century British explorers all sent out on their various journeys by a fascinating man named John Barrow, second secretary to the British Admiralty, who for over 30 years chose the best and brightest men from the British Navy to go out to the farthest reaches of the known world to bring back knowledge and riches for the glory of the British Empire. Brave (we might call them foolhardy) men such as John Franklin, James Clark Ross, and William Edward Parry, among many others, discovered the magnetic north pole, charted hitherto unknown areas of the Arctic and Africa, endured nearly unimaginable hardships, and, if fortunate, returned to England to tell about their adventures, only to go forth again and again until their luck finally ran out. (Very few died at home, in bed.) Chatty, entertaining, and historically accurate, Fleming's book makes great reading for any armchair traveler or history buff.
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Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw : travels in search of Canada
Author: Will Ferguson
In Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada, Will Ferguson writes about his native Canada with humor, affection, and occasional exasperation. He describes places and people from Victoria to Newfoundland, and includes tales of early explorers like Samuel Hearne, who, in 1770, walked from Prince of Wales Fort, on the shores of Hudson Bay, to the Arctic Ocean, and back again, a distance of some 5600 kilometers, looking for the Northwest Passage and copper (and finding neither). He also describes his own experiences watching polar bears from about as up close as anyone would want to get. Reading Ferguson’s sometimes laugh-aloud essays is a good way to remind ourselves of just how vast and varied our neighbor to the north is.
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Best American Essays of 2006
Author: Lauren Slater, guest ed.
One of the best ways to discover new writers is to settle down with one or more of the books in the ongoing series’ of Best American something or other (you fill in the blank – spiritual writing, poetry, stories, travel writing, etc.) Year after year, I come away from reading these collections, which are composed of contributions selected by a guest editor who’s a leading practitioner of the genre, with a sense that I’ve read widely and well. And always, by the time I turn the last page, I’ve compiled a long list of books and authors I want to check out. This was definitely the case with The Best American Essays of 2006, edited by Lauren Slater. I was especially moved by Marjorie Williams’ “A Matter of Life and Death,” (which first appeared in Vanity Fair and later, under the title “Hit By Lightning,” in her collection of essays, The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate) her account of her life following a diagnosis of cancer. Lily Tuck’s “Group Grief,” about her experience with a support group following the death of her husband, will hit home with many readers. On a lighter note, try Michele Morano’s “Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood,” which will have you considering language and usage in a way you might have simply overlooked before.
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Book of Lost Books
Author: Stuart Kelly
In The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read, Stuart Kelly describes misplaced, destroyed, or possibly never-even-begun-to-be-written works by major writers. Kelly looks at the (non)books of (arranged chronologically) Anonymous to Georges Perec, pausing, along the way, at Ovid, Alexander Pope, Jane Austen, T.E. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound. My advice is to read about the fate of one of the works, and then put the book down and go on to read something else (or get a good night’s sleep), otherwise I fear you won’t be able to keep straight whose manuscript was misplaced at a train station (Hemingway) or whose was possibly maliciously destroyed by a surviving spouse (Plath), as well as all the other examples of the ways books have been lost to us. Kelly’s writing is witty, his literary analysis is short but keen, and the description of each author’s works makes you want to rush out and read everything that he so enticingly describes. This is a perfect gift for English majors or, indeed, any reader worth his or her salt.
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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Author: Dale Brown
History, it’s said, is always written by the victor. Thus, most of us grew up with a particular view of the opening of the American west to white settlement. A good – even necessary – antidote to that one-sidedness (and an excellent companion read to Berger’s novel) is Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, another older title that shouldn’t be missed. Its systematic (and well documented) undermining of the mythology of westward movement was controversial when it was first published (in 1970), but Brown’s retelling of the events from about 1860 to 1890 is now generally accepted by many historians. From the expulsion of the Navajos from their lands in Arizona in 1863 to the U.S. Army’s battle with the Sioux at Wounded Knee almost three decades later, readers get one heartbreaking account after another of broken promises, double crosses, and unprovoked attacks (the Sand Creek massacre is particularly painful to read about) after another. Book discussion groups might want to read Berger’s novel one month and Brown’s history the next – together they offer us a pretty complete view of a particularly important period in American history.
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Cancer Vixen
Author: Marisa Acocella Marchetto
What’s a 43 year old seemingly terminally single, very attractive New York cartoonist to do when, after decades of dating, she finally meets Mr. Right; when her career finally seems to be taking off (her cartoons are appearing in both The New Yorker and Glamour, for example, with some regularity); when she discovers a lump in her breast, is diagnosed with cancer, realizes that she’s let her health insurance lapse, has surgery, and undergoes chemo and radiation? Why, write a graphic novel about the whole experience – from joy to tears and back again. Which is what Marisa Acocella Marchetto does in Cancer Vixen, a book that combines Sex in the City with General Hospital, and does so with grace and humor, managing to be heartwarming yet not soppy.
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Dead Reckoning : great adventure writing from the golden age of exploration
Author: Helen Whybrow
If you’re interested in exploring the genre of armchair travel and adventure, Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from the Golden Age of Exploration, 1800 -1900, edited by Helen Whybrow, is the perfect place to begin. Whybrow has included excerpts from the writings of a diverse group of travelers, both the familiar (Meriwether Lewis, Charles Darwin, and Sven Hedin, among others) and the not so familiar (including Mrs. Alfred “Mary” Mummery, who climbed one of the most difficult mountains in the Alps with her husband in 1880, and Mary Kingsley, whose trip to West Africa in the 1890s included friendly encounters with cannibals, fighting off crocodiles, and summiting Mount Cameroon, where she left her calling card). Among other travelers whose tales we share are George Kennan (who nearly froze to death in Siberia), Mark Twain (in the American West); John Wesley Powell (on the Colorado River), Fridtjof Nansen (at the North Pole); Robert Louis Stevenson (journeying with a donkey in France); and Francis Parkman (on the Oregon Trail). There are thrills, chills, and excitement galore in these stirring accounts of men and women who roamed the world o’er.
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Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the
Author: Brad Matsen
Brad Matsen’s Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss takes us back more than 70 years to the great story of naturalist William Beebe and wealthy adventurer Otis Barton’s successful attempts to go deeper into the ocean than anyone had ever descended before. Barton designed a “bathysphere,” a steel ball with a four-and-a-half-foot circumference, hanging from a wire rope, which depended for its ventilation on the two men waving a palm leaf fan during their submersion in the ocean. In the years between 1929 and 1934, Barton and Beebe, in more than 20 dives, explored the ocean down to a depth of nearly half a mile, many times deeper than anyone had ever gone before. Matsen writes well, and he captures not only the sense of adventure (and real danger) that these two men faced, but also explores their personal relationship, which was quite dicey (in fact, they ended up not speaking to one another). (In one of those examples of the unexpected joys of reading, I learned that one of wives of womanizing Beebe was none other than Elswyth Thane, the author of a series of historical romances that’s high on my list of guilty pleasure reads.)
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Encyclopedia of an ordinary life : volume one
Author: Amy Krouse Rosenthal
There are so many memoirs being published these days that the ones I read sometimes blend into one gigantic life story in my head, but there’s no way I’m going to confuse Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life with any other memoir any time soon. I had a delightful time meeting this self-described ordinary person, learning her quirks and hang-ups, her likes and dislikes, her everyday (and not) adventures (including the inspired way she attempted to get out of paying a parking ticket – you’ll love it, trust me), all arranged, encyclopedia-style, from A (“Amy,” “Anxious, Things That Make Me Anxious,” “Ayn Rand” to Y (“You”), with appropriate cross-references and clever drawings to supplement the text.
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Epileptic
Author: Daniel B
If you’ve been curious about the phenomenon of graphic novels, you’ll want to take a look at Epileptic by Daniel B, an outstanding example of the genre. It’s the (true) story of the author’s troubled childhood in France when his older brother developed grand-mal epilepsy as a pre-teen and his parents fell prey to a disastrous series of alternative healers and spiritual gurus in a futile attempt to cure their son. In response to the deteriorating circumstances of his family life, Daniel, then known as Pierre-Francois, began drawing the demons that he imagined were leagued against him and his family. Appropriate for older teens and adults, this moving coming-of-age tale is not to be missed.
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Fowl Weather
Author: Bob Tarte
It’s clear that Bob Tarte, author of Fowl Weather, and his wife, Linda, aren’t your run-of-the-mill animal lovers. They aspire to a level of devotion generally only found, at least among those who write about it, in the British, i.e., Gerald Durrell and James Herriott. The Tartes live in a small Michigan town near Grand Rapids, along with a veritable menagerie of animals. The cast of characters very helpfully listed at the front of the book includes a few of the two legged variety, but many more who have four legs or wings, and are feathered or furred. Whether he’s engaged in a physical argument with a duck, dealing with a supposed master gardener who doesn’t know flowers from weeds, hand-feeding a spider, trying to evade a pesky former classmate who somehow knows the fate of everyone in their elementary school (as well as unsavory facts about Linda’s old sow, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle), or trying to cope with his dad’s death and his mother’s growing dementia, Bob’s voice is self-deprecating, humorous, and completely believable.
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Human cargo
Author: Caroline Moorehead
Caroline Moorehead’s Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees should be required reading for both policy makers and anyone with even a shade of an opinion on the topic of exiles, immigrants, and refugees. Moorehead notes that millions of people all over the world are forced out of their homelands by some variety of war, devastation, or persecution (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates about 17 million people fall into this category). She discusses not only how the situation might be handled, but also how various scenarios play out politically and economically. One of Moorehead’s most important insights is that where once the refugee was seen as the victim (after World War II, for example), he or she is now defined as the problem – and that way of framing the issue changes how we go about finding a solution. Moorehead begins her book by putting the whole “refugee issue” in an historical context and looking at its economic and geo-political implications. But equally valuable are the accounts of the refugees themselves, Palestinians, Iranians, Liberians, Mexicans, and others, all looking for a better life for themselves and their families. Thoroughly readable, Moorehead’s book is a wake up call to action on the part of those who can still feel outrage at the injustices we do to one another.
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Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
Author: Simon Houpt
Did you know that, according to Interpol, over 20,000 works of art – including paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Munch, Picasso, and others – have been stolen, never to be seen again? Simon Houpt’s conversationally written and aptly named Museum of the Mi
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Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
Author: Simon Houpt
Did you know that, according to Interpol, over 20,000 works of art – including paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Munch, Picasso, and others – have been stolen, never to be seen again? Simon Houpt’s conversationally written and aptly named Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft describes daring daytime heists, wartime (or archaeological) lootings, and various and sundry other devious schemes (a two-ton bronze work by Henry Moore was taken) that deprived the true owners of their possessions. He also invites us to consider what a gallery of these missing works of art would contain, and the last part of the book includes reproductions of many of these works of art. A perfect choice for art lovers.
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My Life in France
Author: Julia Child
Even devoted non-cooks (I am one) will likely adore Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France, and foodies will certainly relish this lively dish. Begun as a series of talks over a period of months with her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme, the finished product reads like a lively monologue, covering Child’s marriage, their move to Paris, France following World War II, her growing love of French food, the great restaurants of the 1950s, her first tentative forays into cooking, and how the classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her subsequent television program came about. What shines in these autobiographical sketches is Julia’s joie de vivre, her honesty (she doesn’t hesitate to express displeasure with a number of people, including Senator Joe McCarthy, her father, the head of Paris’s Cordon Bleu school, and her co-writers on the first book). The narrative is sprinkled with Julia’s characteristic interjections: “Whew!”, “Delicious!” “Ouf!” “Hooray!” These add to the sense that you’re sitting down listening to a really interesting woman tell you about the highlights of her life. I finished the book feeling as though I’d missed out on something special, only meeting Julia Child through this memoir, on television, or in her cookbooks. And it almost convinced me to go fire up the old cook stove and try a cassoulet, a bouillabaisse, or even an omelet, à la Julia Child. Almost, but not quite. Once a non-cook, always a non-cook, I’m afraid.
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No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World’s 14 Highest Peaks
Author: Ed Viesturs with David Roberts
In No Shortcuts to the Top, Ed Viesturs describes the circumstances and events that first took him from flat lands of his childhood home in Rockford, Illinois to Seattle, Washington, and then on to the summits of all fourteen of the highest mountains in the world. All of these 8,000 plus meters-high peaks are in either the Himalaya or the Karakoram mountain ranges in Asia (just think of the frequent flyer miles he must have racked up!) and include Everest, K2, Kangchenjunga, and Annapurna. (According to Everestnews.com, Viesturs joins an elite group of twelve other climbers who have also reached the summits of these mountains.) Fans of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and other accounts of the tragedy that occurred on Everest in 1996 will be especially interested in the part Viesturs played in those events, but any reader with even the tiniest bit of adventure-lust in their hearts will be stirred and inspired by Viesturs’s accomplishments, the respect he has for the mountains, and his strong belief in the importance of making the world a better place.
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One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
Author: Nathaniel Fick
When Classics major Nathaniel Fick applied for Officer Candidate School following his junior year at Dartmouth, it came as a shock to his friends, classmates, and family. Yet it made perfect sense to Fick. In One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, he describes his yearning “to go on a great adventure, to prove myself, to serve my country.” Almost a year later, following his graduation in 1999, he joined the Marines as a Second Lieutenant and was thrust into the fog of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fick uses words like “duty” and “justice,” “courage” and “compassion” without irony. At the same time, there’s no simple-minded patriotism or political message here. Fick says, “War for freedom, war for oil, philosophical disputes were a luxury I could not enjoy. War was what I had. We don't vote for it, authorize it, or declare it; we just had to fight it." Red state or blue state, any reader interested in the experience of an honorable, thoughtful man at war will be engaged by Fick’s story.
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Poet’s Choice
Author: Edward Hirsch
Beginning in early 2002, the lucky readers of the Washington Post Book World were treated to poet and teacher Ed Hirsch’s insightful discussions of some of his favorite poems in the “Poet’s Choice” column, many of which are now collected in Poet’s Choice. Hirsch’s three great strengths when it comes to writing about poetry are that he’s not a snob (he understands that there are readers out here in the hinterlands who are not (or were not) English majors and while we value helpful insights into better understanding a poem, we don’t appreciate being talked down to); he’s not American-centric (almost half the book discusses poems and poets from around the world); and, most importantly, he loves what poetry is and can do and enjoys sharing that love and knowledge with us. Readers will discover old favorites (W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Amy Lowell) and might well discover new ones along the way, such as Adam Zagajewski, Nicanor Parra, and Marie Howe.
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Queen of the Oddballs
Author: Hillary Carlip
Most of the memoirs being published these days leave me feeling somewhat depressed and totally lethargic – they’re so soggy and energy draining in their descriptions of blighted lives and unfulfilled dreams. So I was delighted to read Queen of the Oddballs and Other True Stories from a Life Unaccording to Plan by Hillary Carlip. This always entertaining, frequently laugh-out-loud memoir offers scenes from Carlip’s life as a stage- and star-struck kid and adult on the fringes of Hollywood. Beginning in 1965, when she was age 8, and concluding in 2004 (with a look back on her appearance on Oprah), Hillary relates her experiences being on The Art Linkletter Show, taking ballroom dancing lessons with Jamie Lee Curtis, trying on various personas to see which is most interesting (everything from a dancer on Hullabaloo! to Wednesday on The Addams Family to Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s), delivering singing telegrams, and coming out as a lesbian. Each chapter begins with a list of some of the major events of the day and ends with photographs, reproductions of newspaper stories, and even a letter from singer Carly Simon. Fans of Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy will want to check this one out, too.
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Reading Like a Writer
Author: Francine Prose
I’ve always admired Francine Prose as a novelist (Bigfoot Dreams and Hunters and Gatherers are two I really enjoyed), but I was blown away by how good her new nonfiction book for readers and writers is. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them is an excellent addition to the personal library of anyone who is a writer or dreams of writing, but it’s also a terrific choice for anyone who loves to read. Prose believes that the best way to learn to write good prose is to read good prose. In chapters devoted to the building blocks of narratives (i.e., words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character, dialogue) she describes how the great writers handle each of them through liberal use of quotations and examples. One of the best aspects of this book stems from the fact that Prose is an omnivorous reader, so the examples she uses range from John Le Carre to Isaac Babel, from Scott Spencer to Katherine Mansfield.
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River of doubt : Theodore Roosevelt's darkest journey
Author: Candice Millard
It’s seemingly extremely difficult to write a bad (or dull) book about Theodore Roosevelt, because he was such an interesting, larger than life character, and The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard is no exception. Taking place shortly after Roosevelt lost his third-party campaign for President in 1912, it’s the story of his literally, death-defying trip down a previously uncharted river in the Amazon rain forest, accompanied by his 24 year old son Kermit and Candido Rondon, the noted Brazilian explorer, among other daredevils and adventure-seekers. Necessary reading for armchair adventurers, those who love presidential biographies, and nature-lovers, this book has it all: it’s fast-paced, well written, and difficult to put down. Plus, you’ll want to read more about Rondon, a fascinating character in his own right, who really deserves a new biography of his own. (If Roosevelt interests you, don’t miss David McCullough’s marvelous – really, his best book ever, Mornings on Horseback.)
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Shadow of the Bear: Travels in Vanishing Wilderness
Author: Brian Payton
From the earliest cave paintings at Lascaux to nursery stories, bears have co-existed, often (usually) uneasily, with mankind. In Shadow of the Bear: Travels in Vanishing Wilderness, Brian Payton goes beyond the art and folklore and journeys throughout the world to find the eight remaining bear species before – as he fears – they all become extinct. His trips take him from the spectacled bears of the mountains of Peru to the polar bears of Canada, from the giant pandas of China to the Malayan sun bears in Cambodia, from the sloth bears of India to the brown bears of India, as well to France and the black bears of the western United States. This is a fine work of narrative nonfiction, sure to please anyone interested in natural history.
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Stuffed : adventures of a restaurant family
Author: Patricia Volk
Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family, Patricia Volk delivers a hymn of love to both family and food. In a series of vignettes, Volk lovingly describes her adored extended family. There’s her great-grandfather, who was the first to import pastrami to New York; her grandfather, who invented the wrecking ball; her mother, forever trying to improve her daughters (“Mom made me, and now she will make me better”); her magnetic father, who finally closed the last family restaurant in Manhattan; her longtime embittered aunt Lil, who embroidered a pillow with the phrase, “I’ve never forgotten a rotten thing anyone has done to me.”; another aunt, known for her talent for mamboing, and more. Volk's family is sufficiently odd enough to engage anyone's attention, while her writing (she's also the author of a novel and two collections of stories) is both witty and tender. As I turned the pages of this lovely memoir, I found myself wishing that I, too, could be part of the whole Volk/Morgen clan.
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Sunday money : speed, lust, madness, death.
Author: Jeff MacGregor
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Tab Hunter confidential : the making of a movie star
Author: Tab Hunter
For whatever reason, I’m not ordinarily a reader of Hollywood biographies or memoirs, but I picked up Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, which Hunter wrote with Eddie Muller. I was immediately and totally hooked by Hunter’s story of trying to balance his life as a movie star (and subject of many a girl’s daydreams) with the reality of being gay at a time – the 1950s - when nobody could get away with admitting he was a homosexual. Hunter describes what Hollywood was like at a time when studios created stars, often from whole cloth (Hunter – who was born Arthur Gelien - was renamed by his agent Henry Wilson, who also christened Rock Hudson and Rory Calhoun), and magazines like Photoplay and Confidential could make or break a career. Readers will come away from this book with a genuine appreciation and respect for a down-to-earth, genuinely nice guy, someone who took care of his mother for her whole life, is sincere in his religious beliefs, and managed to survive a movie career that was often disappointing (his films were mostly B list at best). But, gosh, he was some hunk when he was young!
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The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie
Author: Andrew Eames
In Andrew Eames’s The 8:55 to Baghdad, the author combines his 2002 train journey from London to Iraq with a look back at the life of mystery writer Agatha Christie, who took the Orient Express on the same 3,000 mile journey in 1928. (Fans of the book or movie Murder on the Orient Express will find much to explain its genesis here.) Eames is a delightful travel companion – well read, personable, not whiny, able to remain calm in the face of late trains, and overlook rude behavior and bad food. He revels, as all good travelers do, in good company, good food, and interesting scenery. Since Eames’s journey took him through the Balkans and into Baghdad on the eve of the second Gulf War, there’s enough here to keep political science junkies interested as well. I also enjoyed running across the occasional Britishism in Eames’s writing: describing the Serbian army, he says that they were “put on the back foot straight away,” and talks about people “under the cosh of the Turks.”
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The Bill from My Father
Author: Bernard Cooper
In The Bill from My Father, Bernard Cooper takes a familiar trope – a complex and unreliable parent – and gives it a unique spin as he looks back on his stormy relationship with his father. Edward Cooper was a prominent Los Angeles divorce attorney, once seemingly invincible (at least to the author), but now sinking into dementia, whose constant philandering was hardly a secret from his sons (or presumably, his wife). Now, with his mother and all three of his older brothers dead, Bernard felt it was important to understand the complications of his bond with this most difficult man, which means trying to come to grips with his father’s strong disapproval of both his choice of career as a writer (the elder Cooper wanted Bernard to become a lawyer, as all three of his brothers did) and his homosexuality. As you might imagine, the father/son relationship is not improved when his father sends him a bill for nearly 2 million dollars – the cost of raising him. This moving account is liberally leavened with humor, and presented in a spirit of good humor, so that it never morphs into the oh-poor-me school of autobiography.
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The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial
Author: Susan Eaton
For anyone interested in the state of public education in our country, Susan Eaton’s The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial is a necessary read. Eaton, who is the former assistant director of the project on school desegregation at Harvard (where she received a doctorate in education policy), spent four years observing classes at the inner-city, all-minority, Simpson-Waverly Elementary School in Hartford, Connecticut. Interweaving the ongoing progress (or lack thereof) of Sheff v. O’Neill, a civil rights lawsuit originally filed in 1989 by a group of 19 schoolchildren and their families against the State of Connecticut in response to the de-facto segregation of Hartford’s schools, with the story of one particular teacher and her students, Eaton shows us the depressing reality in which the “No Child Left Behind” law is played out. Readers will root for Ms. Luddy, and all the kids in her classroom, but most especially for Jeremy Otero, whom we first meet as an eight-year-old ecstatic about checking out a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from the library. Not since Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age and Herbert Kohl’s 36 Children – classics of the 1960s - has there been such a vital, informative, important book about public education in the U.S.
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The Eiger Obsession
Author: John Harlin III
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The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
Author: John Vaillant
Deep in the woods of the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia stood an immense golden spruce, a 165 foot tall tree that for more than three centuries was an object of veneration for the Haida Indians and an awesome sight for anyone who was fortunate enough to see it. In a counter-intuitive move to protest the clear-cutting of old growth forests, Grant Hadwin, Canadian logger-turned-eco-terrorist, chopped it down, and then vanished from sight. (He’s presumed dead, but no one knows for sure.) In telling Hadwin’s story, John Vaillant expertly weaves together many strands and subjects, including the economics of the timber industry; the culture of the Haida, one of the First Peoples of Canada; and the development of the environmentalist movement. Not only is his book, Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed informative, but it reads like a thriller.
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The Great War for Civilisation
Author: Robert Fisk
Thorough, intense, absorbing, graphic, magisterial, angry, overwhelmingly detailed, infuriating, depressing, stimulating, exhausting, and riveting are just some of the adjectives readers will find applicable to Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. It took me months to read, but it was worth every moment I spent with it. Fisk, a British journalist, is a war correspondent’s war correspondent, and this book is the perfect choice for any interested reader willing to invest a lot of time and emotional energy in a political history of the modern Middle East. Early in the book Fisk says, “It is the fate of journalists to be in the right place at the right time, and, more frequently, in the wrong place at the wrong time.” From a front row seat at the birth of Khomeini’s Iran in the late 1970s to Abu Ghraib in 2003, from an early interview with Osama Bin Laden in 1993, when the leader-to-be of al Qaeda was describing himself as a construction engineer, building highways in Sudan, to reporting from Fallujah in Iraq, Fisk has been there, done that, met everyone who’s anyone in the region, and written about it. Fisk doesn’t equivocate regarding his views of the current crisis in the Middle East, or the many missteps he judges world leaders to have made from World War I to the present, but whether one agrees or disagrees with his analysis and conclusions, Fisk’s clear exposition and deep understanding of the complex culture and history of the area make this an important contribution to an informed debate about the fate of the Middle East, and, as the title implies, of civilization as we know it.
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The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems
Author: David Kirby
Poet David Kirby’s newest collection, The House on Boulevard St., includes both new poems and those selected from his earlier collections. Kirby writes what I call “kitchen-sink poetry.” He’s not a formalist or a lyricist, or any other “ist” or “ism” by which we traditionally label writers. His is a conversational, more or less stream of consciousness approach to his subjects (which are wacky in their own right); the poems, filled with specific detail, invite readers into often complicated and convoluted stories, and you can never predict from the opening lines just where the story is going to end up. They’re suffused with humor, but they’re not light verse. For anyone who feels baffled and/or put off by poetry, Kirby’s the man to change your mind. You might want to start with these poems: “The Search for Baby Combover,” “The Exorcist of Notre Dame,” and “The Elephant of the Sea,” which begins: Because I make the big bucks fooling around with words, in France sometimes I like to say ”Sylvia Plath” instead of “s’il vous plait,” as when I open the door for Barbara and say, “Apres-vous, Sylvia Plath!” But yesterday the lady in the boulangerie asked me what I wanted, And I said, “Une baguette, Sylvia Plath! Crap…”
and goes on – with great panache - from there.
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The Judgment of Paris
Author: Ross King
Ross King’s The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism is an illuminating history of a fascinating place and period: Paris, from 1863 to 1874. This was a particularly exciting time, because the French art world was torn between two extremes: the very precise, almost photographic and historically accurate paintings of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, probably the best known (and certainly wealthiest) painter of his time, and the slowly growing Impressionist movement, led by Claude Monet and the artist King focuses on, Edouard Manet, whose masterpieces include his six-foot long painting of a French prostitute, “Olympia,” and his mysterious "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe," which depicts an outdoor picnic attended by two men and an unclothed woman. Together, the two M’s challenged the artistic status quo, painting ordinary people rather than historical subjects, outdoor scenes, and the effects of changing light on their subjects. But King, author of Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling and Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, works on a large canvas, so that readers become familiar with the politics, the literature, and the major players of the period as well.
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The Long Road Home
Author: Marth Raddatz
"Only minutes after taking over operations in Sadr City, on a routine patrol, Lieutenant Shane Aguero's First Cavalry Division platoon faced hundreds of Iraqi militants who opened deadly fire. As he led his men to cover in a back alley - wounded and under attack, his gunner shot dead beside him - his wife Amber's warning echoed in his head. "In every war there is always a platoon that gets pinned down," she'd said. "Don't let it be yours."" "Back in Fort Hood, Texas, Amber and the other wives and family members were unaware of the battle when they awoke that Palm Sunday morning. Connie Abrams and her eight-year-old son, Robbie, met with friends for brunch at the officers' club. Angie Upton was preparing to celebrate her twenty-eighth birthday, hoping for a call from her husband, while Allison Cason's family gathered in honor of her grandfather's eighty-first." "Then horrifying reports from half a world away began filtering in about casualties in the First Cav. Within hours, many of the women might receive "the knock on the door" - the notification that a husband or brother or son had been killed or wounded in action. Until then, they could only gather together in terrible anticipation of the awful news." "While the families waited, rescue squads in unprotected, open trucks were picked off one by one as they entered Sadr City. The twenty-four-hour firefight - which would ultimately cost eight Americans their lives and leave more than sixty wounded - marked the beginning of the full-blown Iraqi insurgency. Martha Raddatz's account of the ambush and the courageous effort to save Shane Aguero's platoon offers perhaps the most riveting picture of hand-to-hand battle to come out of the war in Iraq. Yet it is the intimate portrait of the close-knit community of families back home that distinguishes The Long Road Home from other works of war reporting."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Author: Lawrence Wright
Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is probably the most essential book to read this year. It’s a riveting, gracefully written, profoundly disturbing account of the history of 21st century terrorism. Wright begins in the decades following World War II and the creation of Israel, and carries the story up to its flaming conclusion in 2001. After many years of failing in their attempts to set up a theocracy in the Middle East (Egypt was their original target), Muslim fanatics turned their attention, instead, to the western powers, especially the United States. Joining together in a loose confederation under the leadership of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri following the Afghan Civil War, the newly named al-Qaeda embarked on an ambitious and meticulously planned program of death and destruction that included the bombing of the Navy guided missile destroyer U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and various western embassies in Africa. What makes this book so depressing is that it becomes clear that between the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI, the U.S. had all the puzzle parts that – put together – would have prevented the suicide bombers from carrying out their martyrdoms on 9/11. But since not one of the three groups was anxious (or even willing, it appears) to share their intelligence and information, the plot unfolded nearly exactly as Osama and Zawahiri had planned. Sure, we’ve read a lot of what Wright covers in both newspapers and in other books (Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, for one), but never have all the facts been amassed in one place, and never in so much detail. If there’s a hero in Wright’s book, it’s John O’Neill, the all-too-human FBI agent so angry and frustrated by the bureaucracy that prevented an all out push to get bin Laden that he retired from the bureau and started work as the chief of security at the World Trade Center in late August of 2001 and died, age 50, on September 11. The title of the book comes from a chapter in the Koran, “Wherever you are, death will find you,/even in the looming tower,” which bin Laden repeated several times in a speech he gave to his followers in the weeks leading up to September 11.
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The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Author: Daniel Mendelsohn
Ever since he was a child, Daniel Mendelsohn loved to listen to his grandfather’s tales about their family’s long and eventful history. He was especially interested in hearing about his great-uncle Shmiel, whom he closely resembles, and who remained behind in Ukraine with his family when the rest of his family emigrated to the United States. All anyone really knew about their fate was that they were “killed by the Nazis,” as his grandfather told him. As he went through some family mementos, Mendelsohn discovered a series of increasingly frantic letters from Shmiel begging his American relatives for help in getting his wife and four daughters away from Hitler’s rapidly approaching “final solution.” The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is an account of Mendelsohn’s investigation into what happened to Great Uncle Shmiel and his family. His search takes him all the way from Bolechow, the shtetl where the family lived, to Australia, Israel, and Scandinavia. I put off reading this book for a long time, mostly because I felt it would simply be too painful. And, of course, many parts of it are, especially as we discover the fates of each of his six lost relatives, but this impressive and poignant narrative has much to say about loss and remembrance, about the ties of family and the power of memory to animate the past.
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The Ode Less Travelled
Author: Stephen Fry
If you’ve ever had a secret hankering to write poetry, or even to understand it better (how it works, how to “get” a poem), you’ll want to check out Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. It turns out that Fry, who’s best known as an actor (Gosford Park and V for Vendetta, among others) and a comedian, is a secret poet; his newest book grew out of a belief that while talent may be inborn, anyone can learn the techniques of writing verse. Reading Fry’s book, you’ll find yourself both charmed and educated in the ways and means of poetry, including meter, rhyme, as well as the various forms a poem can take. The last chapter includes a must-read section called “Ten Habits of Successful Poets that They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Poetry School, or Chicken Verse for the Soul Is from Mars but You Are What You Read in Just Seven Days or Your Money Back.” Fry includes interesting writing exercises in every chapter that should get that inner poet in all of us revved up to try our hand at an ode, a sestina, a pantoum, a sonnet, a haiku, or a limerick.
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The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
Author: Paul Collins
The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine by Paul Collins tells of the strange events that followed the death in 1809 of his subject, author of the iconic sentence “These are the times that try men’s souls,” which urged the American colonists toward rebellion against England. Collins’ search for the whereabouts of the physical remains of one of our Founding Fathers becomes an exploration of the radical Paine’s influence on American thought throughout the nearly two centuries since he died. His research takes him from America to England, from piano bars to saloons, from well known historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman, to other lesser known (but still real) characters. Collins writes with palpable affection for Paine, and tells an entertaining tale about his odd fate. He’s the unusual sort of historian who chooses to explore the byways of history rather than its highways – and readers are fortunate that he does.
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The United States of Arugula : how we became a gourmet nation
Author: David Kamp
David Kamp’s dishy (pun intended) The United States of Arugula is the perfect gift (or read) for anyone who can identify (and/or cares deeply about) radicchio, chèvre, Jeremiah Tower, grass fed beef, and who invented pasta primavera. Beginning with the big three (James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiburne), Kamp examines the movers and shakers behind the movement to wean American eaters from their Wonder Bread, canned soups, Bisquick, and Velveeta addictions and on to the brave new world of Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, and Mario Batali. But even non-foodies (I am one) will enjoy Kamp’s lively writing and appreciate how he weaves social history into this tale of feuds, love affairs (mainly with food), and the dawn of the age of balsamic vinegar, along with fascinating tidbits of information, such as the two extremely well-known French chefs who worked with Howard Johnson to make Hojo’s menus (and kitchens) classier (and yet the fried clams continue to flourish).
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The Worst Hard Time
Author: Timothy Egan
Most people’s knowledge and understanding of the Dust Bowl is largely shaped by John Steinbeck’s engrossing novel The Grapes of Wrath, his story of American families fleeing the great drought that afflicted our country’s midsection during the 1930s, and their migration westward to California to make new lives for themselves. Now, in Timothy Egan’s National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, we hear, in the words of those who stayed behind, what life was like during the “dirty thirties” in the great plains of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado, an area that, over plowed and over planted, had, literally, gone with the wind. Whether it’s a description of the wind storm of Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, which blew more than 300,000 tons of topsoil off the plains (twice as much dirt as was excavated in the building of the Panama Canal), or an exploration of the effects of the Depression and eight years of drought on the lives of these hitherto unknown men and women, Egan’s superb journalistic talents bring the time, the people, and the place to life.
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This is Your Brain on Music : the science of a human obsession
Author: Daniel J. Levitin
For me, Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession was one of those books that – when you find it – you realize you’ve been waiting for it all your life. Here are the ABCs of music theory and appreciation, for those of us who know nothing about music, but know what we like. Finally, someone to explain to me why songs written in a major key tend to sound happy, while those in a minor key usually seem hauntingly sad (and what the difference is between a major and minor key, in the first place). Levitin, before he became a neuroscientist (he now runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University), was a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, and he puts theory and practice together in a deft and fascinating manner. Beginning with the building blocks of music – tone, pitch, scale, timbre – he proceeds to provide us with answers to all sorts of questions that range from why bits of songs obsessively stick in our heads to whether or not a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it fall makes any sound. This is a book best read slowly, with a piano nearby, and an eclectically stocked music library, so that you have access to all the examples he uses, which span from Wagner to Miles Davis, from Liszt to Ludacris, and everyone in between.
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To rule the waves : how the British Navy shaped the modern world
Author: Arthur Herman
Arthur Herman’s To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World is a rousing history of the British Navy. Among the many subjects it covers are piracy, the sugar industry, the rise of England as an imperial power, the ruthlessness of many naval officers, mutinies, all the famous battles, the Napoleonic Wars, the attack of the Spanish Armada (which the Brits won through luck – weather – rather than smart tactics), Britain’s shameful role in the slave trade, and people such as Francis Drake, Lord Nelson, Sir Walter Raleigh, and many lesser known, but no less interesting, men. Covering from the 16th through the 20th centuries, this is a great choice for history fans, and a must read anyone who loves the Patrick O’Brian novels.
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Truck : a love story
Author: Michael Perry
In Truck: A Love Story, Michael Perry – writer, confirmed bachelor, volunteer firefighter and EMT in his small Wisconsin town – writes about his momentous 40th year, in which he and his brother-in-law restore his 1951 International Harvester pickup truck to working order and he falls in love, for real. It’s hard for me to think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy this heartfelt and humorous tale, filled as it with accounts of gardening (Perry’s description of reading seed catalogs almost made me long to take hoe in hand myself), book tours, deer hunting, a Greg Brown concert, recipes, Roland Barthes, country music, and wedding planning. Perry’s narrative voice - smooth and low-key - invites readers along for what turns out to be a most pleasurable ride.
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Viva la Repartee: Clever Comebacks & Witty Retorts...
Author: Mardy Grothe
In Viva la Repartee: Clever Comebacks & Witty Retorts from History’s Greatest Wits & Wordsmiths, Dr. Mardy Grothe has collected some wonderful examples of funny or nasty or intelligent (or all three) quotes from such diverse folks as Bill Moyers, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Disraeli, Calvin Coolidge , and Dorothy Parker. This is the sort of book you don’t want to read too quickly or too much of at any one time, the better to savor the many great lines, like what John Kennedy answered when someone asked him how he became a war hero – “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” It’s a veritable tutorial on conversational brilliance. Sadly, of course, those of us who aren’t among history’s greatest wits and wordsmiths generally think of the perfect thing to say, if we think of it at all, only after the perfect moment for saying it has passed. (The philosopher Denis Diderot gave this phenomenon a name: l’esprit de l’escalier--the wit of the staircase. And Heywood Broun, the American writer, once defined repartee as “what you wish you’d said.”) However, this delightful compendium will at least give you hours of rib-tickling enjoyment, whether or not you can recall any of the examples when you most need them.
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Walt Disney
Author: Neal Gabler
It’s hard to grow up in the United States – indeed, the world - without having your life touched in some way by Walt Disney and his legacy. Whether it’s through the Mickey Mouse Club, films like Snow White, Fantasia and Mary Poppins, or a trip to one of his theme parks, Disney’s work and influence informs our imagination. Neal Gabler explores the man and the myth in what will surely be regarded as the standard biography for years to come in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. Gabler portrays Disney as a compulsive perfectionist, a visionary who labored under the burden of his sky high expectations for both himself and the people who worked for him. From his early upbringing in middle America, to his first experiments with animation, to his final triumph in Hollywood, Gabler offers insight into the man and his work, including the fact that Disney was in the habit of personally acting out the various parts in his films to give his crew a sense of what he wanted in the final product; an early list of possible names for the seven dwarfs in Snow White (including “Blabby,” “Flabby,” “Burpy,” “Wheezy,” “Lazy,” “Puffy,” “Stuffy,” “Baldy,” and “Hickey” – who was to be afflicted with hiccoughs that showed up at inconvenient times); the reaction of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable at an early screening of Disney’s first feature film (they both wept at the scene of Snow White being poisoned); and the bitter fight to unionize the Disney studio, which led to Disney’s subsequent hatred of both Communists (he became a friendly witness for the early anti-communist government committees) and Jews. Gabler’s book is a triumph of the art of biography.
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War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today
Author: Max Boot
Max Boot’s War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today is one of those narrative histories so compulsively readable that as you’re taking in all the information you forget how long it is (454 pages of text, plus an epilogue, notes, and an awesome bibliography that will add years of reading matter to your “to read” list, altogether totaling 624 pages of almost solid text). Boot describes how technology – specifically technology either designed or adapted for warfare – has had a major impact on human history. In Boot’s view, “technology sets the parameters of the possible,” but doesn’t determine it. In exploring his thesis, he describes four different periods, and how the war-related technological innovations of each one helped steer history along a particular pathway. He includes the age of gunpowder (1500-1700), the First Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century through the start of World War I, the Second Industrial Revolution (1917-1945), and the Information Revolution, from 1970 to the present (with its emphasis on stealth bombers, guided missiles, GPS devices, and the other major weapons systems that played such an important role in both the first and second Gulf Wars). Boot’s book is a must for war buffs, and a good choice for anyone looking for a thought-provoking look at history.
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