Alison Hood

NonfictionFood & Drink

Dirt

Review by Alison Hood

Bill Buford (author of Heat) again chooses a single-word title for his new book, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking, a funny, irreverent and obsessive account of his five-year odyssey to discover everything about French food—from learning how to cook it to exploring the medieval origins of the much-revered cuisine. France, he writes, “was secretly where I had wanted to find myself for most of my adult life. . . . But I could never imagine how that might happen.”

Through a connection at New York’s French Culinary Institute, Buford comes to know many influential French chefs, among them Michel Richard, Daniel Boulud and the legendary Paul Bocuse. What follows is a familial move to Lyon, the terrors (or, shall we say, “terroir”) of parenting twin toddlers in a gritty French city, sadistic “stagiaires”—essentially apprentice chefs—in famed Lyonnaise restaurants (pot-throwing, anyone?) and food-sleuthing expeditions to remote areas in France, where Buford comes to appreciate the soil that grows the unique wheat responsible for the country’s finest bread. Dirt sometimes ventures into the weeds in its excavation of culinary history and lore, but this may be forgiven in light of Buford’s honest hunger for knowledge and personal evolution: “I wanted to re-examine my assumptions about the kitchen, to restart my education, to get as elemental and as primary as possible. Heat. Water. Labor. Place. And its dirt.”

This book doesn’t offer any recipes, per se, but if perused closely, readers can find instructions for assembling perhaps the grandest concoction of them all: a life well and fully lived, seasoned with curiosity, perseverance and humor—and a dash of adventure.

Bill Buford (author of Heat) again chooses a single-word title for his new book, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking, a funny, irreverent and obsessive account of his five-year odyssey to discover…

Nonfiction

The history of an invisible world

Review by Alison Hood

Breathing: Most of us don’t even think about it as we go about our daily doings. Every day, 24 hours a day (and every four seconds), each of us 7.5 billion humans on planet Earth takes a breath in and then expels it. But what exactly are we breathing in and where does our breath go when released? And who cares?

Science writer Sam Kean cares, and, with fizzy (sometimes irreverent) humor and an exuberant enthusiasm for scientific ephemera, he entices us to explore the alchemy of air and atmosphere in Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us.

Kean kicks off the expedition with the intriguing thought of an intimate human interconnection—that “the ghosts of breaths past continue to flit around you every second . . . confronting you with every single yesterday.” He asks, “Is it possible that your next breath—this one, right here—might include some of the same air [molecules] that Julius Caesar exhaled when he died?”

Not content to limit his dissection to stories about breathing, Kean moves beyond the mere tracing of how air molecules travel and transform to “tell the full story of all the gases we inhale.” In three sections, each packed with three chapters, interspersed with historical vignettes, the author explicates the nature of gases (and why we should care about them), our human relationship with gases (from the first air balloon flights to the use of gases in World War I), and how our relationship with air has evolved in the past 30 years (read: atomic warfare). For good measure, Kean appends voluminous, quirky end notes to each chapter, ensuring that we are fully briefed on the competitive science around steam power and, in a nothing-is-sacred tell-all, the story of French entertainer Joseph Pujol, the “fartomaniac,” who flabbergasted audiences with his Moulin Rouge nightclub act in the 1890s.

Caesar’s Last Breath is a rollicking, zigzag romp through the science of air—one that gives us pause to consider our immortality beyond an earthly existence: “Some tiny bit of you—molecules that danced inside your body . . . could live on in a distant world.”

Science writer Sam Kean entices us to explore the alchemy of air and atmosphere in Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us.

Nonfiction

Matters of life and death

Review by Alison Hood

Theoretical biologist Josh Mitteldorf and writer and ecological philosopher Dorian Sagan have teamed up to give us a thorough examination of human aging in Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old—And What It Means for Staying Young. The subtitle is somewhat misleading, though: This is not a book on how to reverse aging or achieve immortality. Rather, the authors show us how various life forms age and offer a reflective look at how aging serves as a biological means of maintaining species survival (read: zero population growth).

“Aging,” Mitteldorf writes, “is built into our bodies. . . . Aging doesn’t just happen, but is regulated and controlled by our genes.” This fact, which evolutionists have a hard time making sense of (why, after all, would the body produce a process of weakening and dying that runs contrary to humans’ more robust genes for growth and sexual reproduction?), is the engine of the book, which is also fueled by the tension between what we now know about genetics and the various postulations about human evolution and longevity.

Mitteldorf and Sagan convincingly defend the positive argument for natural selection. The “death program” in our genes prevents limitless life spans, thus circumventing unsustainable population levels, a teardown of ecological systems and eventual species extinction. But there is a secondary, paradoxical theme upon which the book revolves: Though aging is inevitable (despite all the human genome tinkering now going on in many quarters, such as California’s J. Craig Venter Institute), “clever humans can defeat nature’s death program and gain . . . much longer and healthier lives.”

Though modern medicine and science are gaining ground against the delay of debilitating disease and frailty, we humans, the authors say, must address “the fundamental mortality of our physical bodies: Infinity is not part of physics, let alone biology.”

Theoretical biologist Josh Mitteldorf and writer and ecological philosopher Dorian Sagan have teamed up to give us a thorough examination of human aging in Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old—And What It Means for Staying Young.

NonfictionSelf-Help

A revolution to embrace vulnerability

Review by Alison Hood

Social work research professor Brené Brown is not your run-of-the-mill academic. Eschewing the ivory tower, Brown puts her research—enhanced by her personal story and the stories of others—out into the world for all to see (catch her TED talk on vulnerability—millions have!). She’s ready to rumble with the tough stuff of life, including failure, imperfection, vulnerability, shame and courage.  

This outspoken, “lock-and-load” Texan and best-selling author categorizes her previous two books as a “call to arms,” exhorting readers in The Gifts of Imperfection to “be you” and, in Daring Greatly, to “be all in.” Her latest book, Rising Strong, completes this triumvirate with an inspiring message: “Fall. Get up. Try again.”

Brown’s motivation for her research and writing is “to start a global conversation about vulnerability and shame.” This, she avows, is a step toward the authentic, wholehearted life we all yearn for.

There are three phases in Brown’s rising strong theory (“the reckoning, the rumble, the revolution”), which is predicated on the power of leaning in to our hurt, of not denying our stories. These tales are what we must “reckon” with, employing self-acceptance and curiosity to see essential truths about our lives. The second phase is to “rumble” with those truths, owning them and deciding how the story will play out. The third phase is nothing short of a “revolution” that signifies a life transformed and aligned with courage.

“Revolution,” says Brown, “might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance.” ¡Viva la revolución!

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Social work research professor Brené Brown is not your run-of-the-mill academic. Eschewing the ivory tower, Brown puts her research—enhanced by her personal story and the stories of others—out into the world for all to see (catch her TED talk on vulnerability—millions have!). She’s ready to rumble with the tough stuff of life, including failure, imperfection, vulnerability, shame and courage.
NonfictionEnvironment

Measuring mankind’s impact

Review by Alison Hood

Ah, we humans, what have we wrought? Essayist and naturalist Diane Ackerman (author of A Natural History of the Senses, The Zookeeper’s Wife and many other books) tackles this musing—and not merely rhetorical—question in The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, examining what geologists are calling our current epoch, the Anthropocene, or Human Age.

This is serious ground, but Ackerman treads it with her customary graceful, imaginative and witty prose, infusing this manifesto-like look at the positive and negative impacts human beings are having on the planet with realism—and optimism. “Today, instead of adapting to the natural world . . . we’ve created a human environment in which we’ve embedded the natural world. . . . Without meaning to, we’ve created some planetary chaos that threatens our well-being,” she writes.

Ackerman avows, however, that she holds enormous hope for man’s future: “Our new age, for all its sins, is laced with invention.” And, true to her statement, the author takes us on a breathtaking tour of our “sins,” our successes and the incredible work and explorations that are shaping a new vision of life.

Five impressively researched sections frame our Anthropocene impacts (with considerable focus on climate change); discuss the innovations that might ameliorate those impacts; enumerate man’s interaction with (read: manipulation of) and influence upon nature; outline the intersection of our technological advances and nature; and explore our mind-boggling tinkering with the human body and psyche.

Ackerman’s immense knowledge of the natural world and her poetic and ethical sensibilities embellish an incredible journey that shows us orangutans playing with iPads, oceangoing farmers experimenting with mariculture, a botanist-artist who fashions living, breathing walls of plant life in cities; a project that puts animal DNA on ice for the future; and the newest work in the modeling of human body parts (3-D printing) and in epigenetics.

Who, what and where will we be as we lurch onward in this human-driven age? Perhaps all depends upon our ability “to think about the beings we wish to become. What sort of world do we wish to live in, and how do we design that human-made sphere?” Spoiler alert: This book ends optimistically, but with a caveat: “We still have time and imagination . . . and a great many choices. . . . [O]ur mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.”

 

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ah, we humans, what have we wrought? Essayist and naturalist Diane Ackerman (author of A Natural History of the Senses, The Zookeeper’s Wife and many other books) tackles this musing—and not merely rhetorical—question in The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, examining what geologists are calling our current epoch, the Anthropocene, or Human Age.
NonfictionMemoir

The anti-anxiety book

Review by Alison Hood

The American people are, it seems, a fretful and anxious lot. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting 40 million adults. [These] disorders are highly treatable, yet only about one-third of those suffering receive treatment.”

A lack of treatment is not the issue for Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic, who chronicles his jumpy and jittery journey through life in My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind.

“I have since the age of about two been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. And I have, since the age of ten, tried in various ways to overcome my anxiety,” he writes. In his quest for relief, Stossel has tried a passel of therapies, drugs and alcohol, with little effect (“Here’s what worked: nothing.”). His current therapist, Dr. W., has advocated facing down these mental disturbances head on, and Stossel admits that perhaps writing this book could be “empowering and anxiety reducing.”

Years in the writing and impressively researched, My Age of Anxiety rigorously examines the “riddle” of anxiety, delving into the history of the disorder and its permutations (i.e., depression, performance anxiety, separation anxiety). He cites the thoughts of teachers, medical experts and philosophers through the ages, from Hippocrates to Spinoza to Freud. Along the way, he embellishes his reporting with accounts of his personal trials (many of which are imbued with dark humor).

Stossel’s final chapter on “Redemption and Resilience” is especially poignant. For while the author realizes that the book’s focus might be viewed as narcissistic, he also hopes that divulging his “unhealed wound” might just be “a source of strength and a bestower of certain blessings.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Scott Stossel for My Age of Anxiety.

The American people are, it seems, a fretful and anxious lot. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting 40 million adults. [These] disorders are highly treatable, yet only about one-third…

NonfictionMemoir

The promises of crossing borders

Review by Alison Hood

The Pew Hispanic Center recently reported that “the U.S. today has more immigrants from Mexico alone—12 million—than any other country in the world has from all the countries in the world.” 

In the last 40 years, these Mexican immigrants, desperate to escape a harsh landscape of grinding poverty, left their homes and families to come to el otro lado, or the “other side,” the name writer Reyna Grande says her people use to refer to the United States.

Grande, an award-winning novelist, has written a courageous memoir, The Distance Between Us, that chronicles her “before and after” existence: her life in Mexico without her parents, and her life in the States as an undocumented immigrant with her alcoholic father and indifferent stepmother.

Grande tells the heart-rending story of how first her father, then her mother, left her and her two siblings to find work and better wages in the U.S. After enduring repeated parental abandonment, fear and physical and emotional deprivation, Grande finally escapes over the border into California with her father and siblings. In Los Angeles, she soon finds a new set of challenges—from the secrecy she must maintain as an illegal immigrant to navigating public school and trying to find love and security in a chaotic home life. She longs for a soul connection to her birthplace—a shack with a dirt floor—under which was buried the umbilical cord of her birth, a “ribbon” that her sister said lessened “the distance between us,” the void of their mother’s continued absence.

Grande’s salvation, however, would come through her discovery of books and writing, and in the friendship of a teacher who gave her a home and mentored her. Unlike her siblings, Grande completed her education and was the first in her family to graduate from college. Her compelling story, told in unvarnished, resonant prose, is an important piece of America’s immigrant history.

The Pew Hispanic Center recently reported that “the U.S. today has more immigrants from Mexico alone—12 million—than any other country in the world has from all the countries in the world.” 

In the last 40 years, these Mexican immigrants, desperate to escape a harsh landscape of…

NonfictionHealth & Fitness

Tending a garden of the sick

Review by Alison Hood

As the 2010 Affordable Care Act marks its second anniversary this spring, the arguments about so-called Obamacare continue. Our overly complex—some say “broken”—healthcare system might function a lot better if every single American citizen, healthcare professional, politician and legislator would read Victoria Sweet’s insightful, beautifully written and moving book God’s Hotel.

When Dr. Sweet—now a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco—came to work at San Francisco’s old-fashioned, “low-tech” Laguna Honda Hospital, it was only for a few months. But she fell in love with the place and its patients, residents of America’s last almshouse, and stayed on for more than 20 years.

Laguna Honda, a public institution that cares long term for people with severe and debilitating medical conditions, the chronically ill and the dying, was originally modeled on the medieval European “hotel-Dieu” that ministered to the sick in the Middle Ages. Its unique layout, consisting of long, open wards, each functioning like a “separate minihospital,” was like nothing Sweet had ever seen. What hospital, she marveled, had an orchard and greenhouse, an aviary and a barnyard? Here, she found she could “practice medicine the way I’d been taught . . . and the way I wanted.”

As Sweet begins her practice of “slow medicine,” caring for a diverse population of patients with complicated and often horrible medical problems, she also studies pre-modern medicine, focusing on the work of medieval healer and monastic Hildegard of Bingen. The doctor, according to Hildegard’s doctrine, should be seen more as a gardener than as a mechanic: a healer who takes time to observe the body’s “garden”—with its natural cycles, functions and ability to heal itself. As she began applying this philosophy to her own work, Sweet learned that simply taking the time to talk with and observe a patient could effect profound solutions to terrible mental and physical suffering.

Yet God’s Hotel also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the politics and policies of the 21st-century healthcare model and its sometimes cold, clinical approach to providing care while keeping a constant eye on the bottom line. Indeed, the “old” Laguna Honda Hospital now is gone, replaced by a modern, new facility. “It was beautiful, but it wasn’t warm,” writes Sweet, regretting the loss of a place where she had “discovered the hospitality, community and charity that were in the walls and the air”: a place where she could “just sit” with patients and accept “the gift” of God’s Hotel.

As the 2010 Affordable Care Act marks its second anniversary this spring, the arguments about so-called Obamacare continue. Our overly complex—some say “broken”—healthcare system might function a lot better if every single American citizen, healthcare professional, politician and legislator would read Victoria Sweet’s insightful, beautifully…

NonfictionHistory

An oral portrait of London

Review by Alison Hood

Buildings and roadways no more define a city than mere walls and aisles could ever define a church. Architecture and infrastructure are byproducts of the human story—embodiments of our historical and present-day sagas captured in rip-rap, wood and stone. In his new book, Londoners, Canadian journalist (now London resident) Craig Taylor set out to define the city of London and its inhabitants through a collection of ordinary people’s stories. The end product is not a guide or an authoritative historical tome, but a unique 21st-century “snapshot of London here and now.”

Londoners has been likened by other reviewers to the oral histories of Studs Terkel, but Taylor’s curation does not frame decades long past; it mines the voices of those now inhabiting London. Over the five years of what he called his “London Chase,” Taylor interviewed more than 200 people from more than 600 square miles of the city environs. He sought not the usual “official” voices, but ordinary people inhabiting London’s “Victorian pubs and chain cafes, sitting rooms and offices.” The result is a sometimes weird, often wonderful and always emotionally resonant narrative of 83 voices telling stories of love, disgust, ennui, lust, delight—tales about being a resident, whether permanently, temporarily or formerly, of today’s London.

In sections grouped under quirky headings such as “Arriving,” “Getting on with It” and “Gleaning on the Margins,” Taylor’s interviewees run the gamut of sensibilities, proclivities and eccentricities. There’s a bird’s-eye description of London from on high from a commercial airline pilot; nostalgic reminiscences and incisive observations from Smartie, a London cabbie; bizarre stories of passenger mishaps from Dan, the rickshaw driver; and insights into lustful London from dominatrix Mistress Absolute. And if you’ve ever wondered if the voice intoning “Mind the Gap” in the London Underground stations belongs to a real person, here’s your chance to find out.

Londoners is a truly unique “non”-taxonomy. In a departure from his original intention, Taylor never reached an absolute classification of the inhabitants of this iconic city, but instead produced something much better: a true-to-life exploration of the constantly shifting landscapes of people’s hearts and minds, their despairs and desires—all centered on the streets and structures of foggy London town. Says Smartie, “I like the idea of escaping all the nonsense of London, but . . . my heart and soul are here in the city . . . that’s where I’ll always be.”

Buildings and roadways no more define a city than mere walls and aisles could ever define a church. Architecture and infrastructure are byproducts of the human story—embodiments of our historical and present-day sagas captured in rip-rap, wood and stone. In his new book, Londoners, Canadian…

NonfictionAnimals

A big leap for a loveable horse

Review by Alison Hood

America, it seems, loves a good horse story. In the wake of the huge success of books and movies like Seabiscuit and Secretariat comes Elizabeth Letts’ poignant chronicle, The Eighty-Dollar Champion.

It is, most likely, the “underdog” aspect of these stories that accounts for their popularity: America cheers for those who can beat overwhelming odds to achieve their dreams. Letts’ narrative about Harry de Leyer, an impoverished Dutch immigrant, and Snowman, a broken-down plowhorse, fits firmly in this genre, but also adds history and perspective on the devastations of Hitler’s war machine, the horse’s place in American culture and the art, skill, social structure and politics of the equestrian sport of show jumping. Letts’ tale, set mostly in the ’50s, is written in evocative, skilled prose that rings true to the tenor of postwar America, when new social structures were evolving as America was shifting from an agrarian, small-town society to one more mechanized and suburban. This backdrop of social evolution would play an important role in Snowman and Harry’s story.

After the hardscrabble years following his immigration to America, Harry worked as a riding instructor at a private girls’ school, and was able to establish a small horse farm on the side. In the winter of 1956, he was late to a horse auction, where he had hoped to buy a mount for the school’s use. Harry spotted a truckload of horses meant for the slaughterhouse; one skinny white-grey horse in the bunch stood calmly—and looked him straight in the eye. Harry bought the animal for $80 and took him home, where one of his kids piped up, “Look, Daddy, he has snow all over him. He looks just like a snowman.”

Harry nourished the gentle horse back to health, put him to work at the school, then subsequently sold him to a neighbor. But Snowman loved Harry and kept jumping the high paddock fences to return home. Impressed with Snowman’s devotion and jumping talent, Harry trained him and indulged his own love of show jumping, gradually entering the horse in local competitions and persisting until he made the cut for prestigious national competitions.

Amid the high-strung thoroughbreds, the media hoopla and the white-tie-and-tails society that surrounds the show-jumping circuit, Snowman and Harry, humble and homespun in appearance and manners, awed the crowds that were hungry for a champion to cherish. The “teddy bear” horse and his loving owner eventually leapt their way to national and international acclaim. Letts deftly calibrates the emotion and suspense that are an indelible part of this tale, which, at its end, may bring a tear or two.

America, it seems, loves a good horse story. In the wake of the huge success of books and movies like Seabiscuit and Secretariat comes Elizabeth Letts’ poignant chronicle, The Eighty-Dollar Champion.

It is, most likely, the “underdog” aspect of these stories that accounts for their popularity:…

Animals

Living in balance with what sustains us

Review by Alison Hood

What appears on our national and global dinner plates has come under intense scrutiny in the last decade, as many of the world’s food production practices are devastating the natural abundance and health of planet Earth. In the wake of such eye-opening books as Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and, more recently, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals comes journalist Paul Greenberg’s excellent investigation into global fisheries and fishing practices, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.

Admittedly, Greenberg is a fish guy. As a youngster he avidly fished for bass, first in a pristine pond near his Connecticut home; then, as a teenager, he took to the sea in a beat-up aluminum boat. “I thought of the sea,” he writes, “as a vessel of desires and mystery, a place of abundance I did not need to question.”

But boys grow up, and other interests crowd out childhood passions. The allure of fishing faded until Greenberg decided to revive the habit in the early 2000s. Returning to his former fishing grounds, he found that the flounder, blackfish and mackerel that he used to catch in abundance had moved on, dwindled or disappeared. He traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard and down into Florida, “fishing all the way” and meeting many fisherman, all of whom had the same complaint: “Smaller fish, fewer of them, shorter fishing windows . . . fewer species to catch.”

Visiting fish markets (another childhood habit), Greenberg noted that “four varieties of fish consistently appeared that had little to do with the waters adjacent to the fish market in question: salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna.” Over the next decade, he determined to find out why “this peculiarly consistent flow of four fish from the different waters of the globe” was ending up on our dinner plate.

What follows is an extraordinarily attentive, witty, sensitive and commonsense narrative about salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna that covers their origination, life cycles and the ever-evolving saga of their exploitation by humans. Backed by rigorous research and enlivened by Greenberg’s man-on-the-spot reportage, the book charts the history and rise of the world’s appetite for these four fish, the industrial fishing practices and the “epochal shifts” in these fish populations—from habitat damage and overfishing of the last wild stocks to the often dubious farming and aquaculture enterprises that now dominate the fish production marketplace.

While Greenberg believes that we need the oceans’ harvest to feed an ever-increasing human population, he acknowledges that a “primitive” human greed has helped land us in an ecological tangle. But this inspiring book doesn’t just diagnose the problem; Greenberg puts forth an ameliorating set of principles that can help us to live in better balance with the “wild oceans” that sustain us.

What appears on our national and global dinner plates has come under intense scrutiny in the last decade, as many of the world’s food production practices are devastating the natural abundance and health of planet Earth. In the wake of such eye-opening books as Mark…

Family & RelationshipsAging

A sensitive look at caring for an aging family member

Review by Alison Hood

Since publishing her groundbreaking book Passages in 1976, Gail Sheehy has trained her keen eye upon diverse facets of modern American culture and life: everything from war and politics to prostitution and menopause. Now she has taken on caregiving—an exploding social phenomenon that currently affects the lives of nearly 50 million American adults.

The call came one day when Sheehy was sitting in a beauty salon. It was about her husband, Clay. It was about cancer. In the ensuing weeks, her life changed radically: “I had a new role. Family caregiver.” Caring for an elder, once-independent adult—whether a parent, life partner, relative or friend—can be a heartbreaking and backbreaking full-time job, and most often one without pay. Sheehy was her husband’s primary caregiver for the last 17 years of his life, a process she believes is a journey that “opens up possibilities for true intimacy and reconnection at the deepest level.”

As we have come to expect from Sheehy, Passages in Caregiving is well and thoroughly researched, and the straight-talking narrative is a blend of trenchant yet sensitive prose, fact, story and strategy. Sheehy writes from her own “raw experience” of caregiving, weaving her personal story throughout, along with the stories of other families. She likens the caregiving journey to navigating the twists in a labyrinth, a device that, unlike the confounding riddle of a maze, “orders chaos.” She names eight major turnings around the labyrinth, from “shock and mobilization” through to “the long goodbye,” illustrates them with moving and apt personal stories, then offers practical resources and empowering strategies for coping with their challenges. There is, Sheehy says, “life after caregiving,” and Passages in Caregiving is a crucial roadmap to that new life.

Since publishing her groundbreaking book Passages in 1976, Gail Sheehy has trained her keen eye upon diverse facets of modern American culture and life: everything from war and politics to prostitution and menopause. Now she has taken on caregiving—an exploding social phenomenon that currently affects…

Self-HelpFamily & Relationships

Lessons from an exemplary life

Review by Alison Hood

Self-help books crowd the shelves of America’s bookstores, beckoning consumers with all sorts of hopeful promises—from thinner thighs and bigger bank accounts to spiritual and sexual nirvanas. Though Richard Stengel’s publisher has placed his instructive book, Mandela’s Way, in the self-help genre, it stands head and shoulders above the rest of the assistive literary hoi polloi.

Stengel, the editor of Time magazine, collaborated with the liberator and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela on his 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. He spent nearly three years with Mandela, conducting hours of extensive interviews, traveling with him, shadowing his every move. “I kept a diary of my time with him that eventually grew to 120,000 words,” writes Stengel in the book’s introduction. “Much of this book comes from those notes.”

Distilled from those jottings are 15 essential lessons modeled on Stengel’s observations and interpretations of Mandela’s courage and wisdom, exemplary leadership, compassion and love of humanity. From clear words on courage and self-control (“be measured”) to the benefits of presenting a good image, seeing the good in others, keeping your rivals and enemies close (this particular dictum is famously chronicled in the recent movie Invictus) and believing in the difference that love can make, the lessons are seamlessly intertwined with stories from Mandela’s life. This texture is one of the book’s key strengths, but a beautiful grace note is Stengel’s undiluted—yet clear-sighted—regard for the complex man who survived an unspeakably difficult 27-year incarceration and who said of his prison experience, “I came out mature.”

Ultimately, the true light of this inspirational book is the utter believability of these lessons. The hotheaded young Mandela, protégé of a tribal king who turned into a fierce freedom fighter, grew gradually into a man who, literally and figuratively, “found his own garden.” Though at age 91 Mandela is in the twilight of his life, he still personifies this grand lesson plan, these 15 deceptively simple steps to empowering self and others.

Alison Hood writes from Marin County, California.

Self-help books crowd the shelves of America’s bookstores, beckoning consumers with all sorts of hopeful promises—from thinner thighs and bigger bank accounts to spiritual and sexual nirvanas. Though Richard Stengel’s publisher has placed his instructive book, Mandela’s Way, in the self-help genre, it stands head…

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