Anna Christensen

NonfictionSocial ScienceHistoryAmerican History

Dig into death with two morbidly fascinating nonfiction books

Feature by Anna Christensen

★ All the Living and the Dead

We are not born with the innate knowledge that we, and all those around us, will die. At some point, someone has to tell us. A beloved pet or grandparent might pass into the great beyond, prompting a bedside conversation with a parent about the finitude of life. Alternatively, if you are journalist and writer Hayley Campbell, you might absorb the concept of death while sitting in your father’s drawing studio as he studies the decomposition of a kidney. In the background, perhaps crime scene photos of the long-ago victims of Jack the Ripper stare down from a bulletin board.

As the daughter of the artist who created the classic graphic novel From Hell, which fictionalizes the brutal Whitehall Chapel murders, Campbell grew up fascinated by death. In All the Living and the Dead, she takes readers on a tour of the professionals of the death industry, interviewing embalmers, executioners, midwives who work exclusively with stillbirths and more.

All the Living and the Dead audiobook cover
Read our starred review of the audiobook, narrated by the author.

In one chapter, Campbell assists two employees in a funeral home as they care for a body and prepare it for burial, and she is moved by their admission that they got into this line of work because of their desire for a meaningful occupation. Most of her subjects are driven by this kind of loving kindness for the deceased and their bereaved, but not all of them. In another chapter, she interviews the boss of a death cleanup crew that scrubs blood from carpets and removes other physical signs of death from a home. This business posts exploitative photos of gruesome and sad scenes to Instagram for shock value and advertising.

But for the most part, All the Living and the Dead shines a light on those with a tenderness for death, and Campbell is an equally entertaining and sensitive guide to these interesting people and their grisly but indispensable jobs.

Over My Dead Body

It is this same appreciation for the dead, as well as for history, that drives journalist Greg Melville as he explores America’s cemeteries in Over My Dead Body. Melville escorts us through 17 of America’s most notable burial grounds, from the mossy colonial graveyards of New England to sparkling Hollywood memorial parks, all with a perfect balance of geeky joy, deep reverence and a meticulous knack for research.

Melville’s prose is pure pleasure mixed with wry asides. A running theme throughout is the difficulty Melville has in convincing any of his friends or family to accompany him on his explorations (Melville, if you are reading this, I am available), but even among his most amusing anecdotes, he never loses sight of the gravity that still vibrates through the stories of the dead. Upon visiting segregated cemeteries across the American South, underfunded and unmapped, Melville’s writing grows hot and indignant. The same tone arises again when Melville visits Arlington National Cemetery: A veteran himself, he flatly rejects the notion of war providing a glorious death, and he is not afraid to challenge this very American idea.

Though one covers the bodies of the dead and the other covers the ground they are laid to rest in, Campbell and Melville meet in their shared belief in the continuing importance of lives that have ended, and in their willingness to examine the complexities of the death industry. For them, the dead continue to speak to us from beyond the grave. Are you listening?

Dying leaves, dying crops, the dying light of a crackling fire. If October fills you with macabre joy, you will find kindred spirits in the authors of these books.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Saving Freud

Review by Anna Christensen

“Finis Austriae” was the only entry in Sigmund Freud’s journal on the day the Nazi army flooded over the Austrian border. In Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom, former Newsweek foreign correspondent Andrew Nagorski maps the Nazi takeover of Austria and the urgent operation to rescue Freud, one of Austria’s most famous and most devoted Jewish sons, along with fifteen other people, including his personal doctor, in-laws and other family members.

Nagorski is masterful at juxtaposing the evolution of the global emergency that became World War II with the deep interiority of a man whose passionate life work concerned people’s half-hidden thoughts. The father of psychoanalysis downplayed the threat the Nazis posed, clinging to his optimism that humans would turn back to the light and all would be made right, until it was almost calamitously too late. Saving Freud is the sort of book that, though you know the outcome of the events, still makes you hope with Freud that something might take a turn for the better. Nagorski has a gift for revealing that everything—worldwide emergencies, far-away news, political decisions—is, in the end, about people. This is wonderfully appropriate for a book about Freud, who laid the groundwork for interrogating and understanding the inner self.

It is dizzying to think of everything that had to be achieved to move a large, wealthy and well-known Jewish family out of Nazi territory and into the relative safety of the broader world, which was still often unwelcoming to both Jews and immigrants. Yet Saving Freud tells the story of a group of people—including Freud’s daughter Anna and her lover, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (heiress to the Tiffany & Co. fortune); the U.S. ambassador to France, William Bullitt; and Marie Bonaparte, princess of Greece and great-grandniece to Napoleon—who did just that. Motivated by love and towering respect for a man and his work, the unlikely team cooperated seamlessly to achieve the near impossible. It is a tale of good-heartedness, of human devotion and of people who unhesitatingly rushed in to do the right thing. In this way, it feels like a relief to read. Far from being a dry historical account, the book’s emphasis on the personal creates a compelling, page-turning narrative that is wholly engrossing and difficult to put down. Nagorski has written a book for our time, reminding us of the potential for good and adherence to higher ideals in moments of global emergency.

Far from being a dry historical account, Saving Freud is a compelling, page-turning narrative of the urgent operation to rescue Sigmund Freud from the Nazis.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

All of This

Review by Anna Christensen

The final separation of death is so frightening, so thorny and so difficult for humans to grasp that we tend to distill it into something simpler, with easy-to-follow directives and guidelines. Perhaps the most well-known guideline is that we do not speak ill of the dead. Instead, we rewrite history. Fights and foibles are mysteriously erased. Troubling moments dissolve into nothingness. We loved them, we say. We miss them every day. We do not know how to go on without their goodness. We would give anything to have them back again.

But in Rebecca Woolf’s case, her relationship with her late husband wasn’t just imperfect but toxic. Her memoir, All of This, eschews any such flattering postmortem revisions in favor of the messy, freeing truth.

Woolf had been planning to leave her husband, Hal, when he was diagnosed with an advanced form of pancreatic cancer and given only months to live. With four children, they had hacked it as far as they could through a relationship riddled with acrimony, casual cruelty and Hal’s control issues, which left Woolf feeling desperate and stifled. Their impending divorce felt like a rapidly approaching springboard to freedom for Woolf, until Hal’s diagnosis threw up a confusing and painful wall. Suddenly she found herself fulfilling the wedding vow she had been determined to escape: that she would stay until the end.

Woolf does not mince words or deal in niceties in this memoir. Hal was frequently difficult to like even as he was dying: He was demanding and childish about the fast-moving course of his illness. He was distant from his children, and the stress he caused his wife seemed deliberate. Shortly after his death, Woolf began looking for new partners, mostly brief hookups, as her joy and relief became braided with her grief. Along the way, Woolf reveals more of Hal’s humanity, showing that within the strife and heartbreak of their marriage, there were bright moments as well. Aptly titled, All of This is an all-encompassing portrait of a marriage that didn’t work, and Woolf is as unflinchingly honest about that marriage as she is about the experience of loss that terminated it.

“I loved this man once and then I hated him and then I loved him and then I hated him and then I loved him and then I hated him and then I loved him again, and then he died,” Woolf writes. “This was our love story.”

In All of This, Rebecca Woolf is as unflinchingly honest about her marriage as she is about the messy, freeing experience of her husband’s death.
NonfictionTrue CrimeScienceLiterature

Agatha Christie looms large in two true-crime books about the science of murder

Feature by Anna Christensen

A scream in the night. A tangle of clues. Befuddled police being led by the nose as a sharp-eyed and unlikely detective examines the evidence. The drawing room denouement. All these are, of course, well-known tropes of the classic murder mystery—a genre made famous in part by the queen of the sleuthing story herself, Agatha Christie.

Christie’s works are so engrossing, and enduring, because they manage to tread that thin line where the cozy mystery and the high-stakes whodunit meet. While readers are wrapped up in the fantasy of an English country home or hamlet, the imminent danger is truly spine-tingling. Somewhat less examined, however, are Christie’s reputation as a meticulous researcher of forensics, a field that was newly developing in the early 20th century, and her medical and pharmacological background. A perfectionist who volunteered as a nurse and pharmacist during World War I, Christie was businesslike about blood and gore, more than aware of the effects of certain chemicals on the body and keenly curious about the new scientific methods being used to investigate real-life murders. Her appetite for the crossroads of science and crime was so great, in fact, that she co-founded the Detection Club, a social club of crime writers who gathered for supper and lively discussions on murder.

In The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie, Carla Valentine, a longtime mortician, curator of a museum of Victorian pathology and voracious Christie reader, expertly moves through the study of fingerprints, toxicology, ballistics, blood spatter and wounds. (A memorable example: The practice of “gloving” involves the autopsist wearing the skin of the deceased’s hand like a glove in order to collect fingerprints.) Christie ignited Valentine’s own curiosity about the forensic sciences, and with the enthusiasm of the true fan, Valentine illuminates Christie’s meticulous genius by dissecting some of her most famous fictional murders and illustrating how both the crime and the solution are supported by science. It’s an engrossing read for any Christie lover, or simply any true-crime obsessive. However, a strong stomach is recommended; Valentine, like Christie, has no qualms about gore.

The best murder is the well-researched murder. Happy reading.

Of all the ways there are to kill a person, poison is the one most inextricably associated with Christie. Dispatching over 30 of her victims in this way, Christie was well versed in toxins from her wartime days in a pharmacy. In fact, she wielded her toxic substances with such descriptive accuracy that her novels have been used to detect symptoms of poisoning in real murder attempts. Author and toxicologist Neil Bradbury pays homage to this fact in his book A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them by opening three of his chapters with excerpts from Christie’s novels. All together, this is a book that Christie herself would have found excellent fireside reading material, as Bradbury devotes a chapter each to 11 major poisons used throughout history, including real-life murder cases in which they were used and, sometimes gruesomely, how they work on a molecular level to kill their victims.

Bradbury’s poisons run the gamut from the unexpected (insulin) to the gothically romantic (belladonna and wolfsbane). There’s even a section on polonium, the radioactive poison carrying a very famous victim count of one. Far from being dry molecular science, A Taste for Poison makes the reader horrifyingly aware of the devastating effects these substances have on the body’from corroding their organs to interrupting their essential electrical impulses to death. Yet it is with an excitement and love for his subject matter that Bradbury discusses these baneful materials, frequently reminding us that they are themselves blameless and often used in smaller doses to heal.

Christie’s murder mysteries were so steeped in science and so brilliantly complex that some think her novels were used as manuals to carry out attempts at the perfect murder. (Note: The would-be criminal masterminds failed in every known case.) Both Bradbury and Valentine seem to nod at this with their own warnings to readers who might use the knowledge their books impart to nefarious purposes. Forensic science will catch you, warns Valentine. Bradbury absolves himself in the appendix with a note informing us that his book is educational in nature and strictly not for the encouragement of murder. However, as Christie knew, the best murder is the well-researched murder. Happy reading.

Poison, fingerprints and toxicology—oh my! Carla Valentine and Neil Bradbury reveal how murderers have wielded chemistry and biology.
NonfictionNature

Sounds Wild and Broken

Review by Anna Christensen

In Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction, David George Haskell admits that, in all his formal training as a biologist, he was rarely asked to use his ears as an evaluative tool. This may come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with Haskell’s work, which often focuses on the sonic offerings of the natural world. Visit the website of this Pulitzer Prize-nominated author and scientist, for example, and you’ll find links to symphonic soundscapes recorded from each of the sylvan subjects of his 2017 book, The Songs of Trees.

In his latest book, Haskell continues to delve into aural worlds that often go unnoticed, beginning with the breathtaking story of the evolution of sound. Haskell describes the complex apparatus of hearing in all its minute, sensitive brilliance. From vibrations picked up by single-celled organisms, to the childlike babbling of newly hatched birds, to the astounding invention of the first human instruments, played in cave chambers selected for their resonance, this tale brims with enchanting facts you won’t believe you never knew. 

Haskell’s prose is suffused with enthusiasm and poetic in form. The way in which he loads each sentence with information is so animated, it’s fair to say this is a book that would talk with its hands if it could. Even so, his descriptions of bacteria that “murmur” and “purr,” or the “voices of tree elders” heard in the polished wood of a symphony, are lilting, spellbinding and songlike in themselves.

Where Sounds Wild and Broken truly glows, however, is in the way it invites readers to imagine the listening experiences of others, breaking down the assumption that we all hear alike. With the long history of sound in his grip, Haskell’s definitions of hearing, communication and song become expansive and inclusive. A favorite moment is when he addresses a high-handed philosopher of music who said that animal noise is but a “yowling of cats” and only humans create music. Haskell mounts a graceful and entirely sound argument that the yowling of cats may be music if the felines who are listening experience it as such.

Haskell also examines the ways Indigenous peoples, often experts in the soundscapes of their ancestral lands, are pushed out of the business of forest management and land stewardship. He does not shy away from indicting a certain colonial and corporate refusal to hear. His examination of sound, after all, is grounded in the seriousness of what it means when things go quiet. Thankfully, scientists are leveraging soundscapes in new ways to more responsibly manage these forested and oceanic philharmonics. Haskell’s warning is cradled in awe as he holds up for us the magic and delight we stand to lose.

Throughout Haskell’s body of work, his invitation has always been, “Pay attention! Isn’t it amazing?” Sounds Wild and Broken expands this invitation: Listen carefully. Listen to others. 

Sounds Wild and Broken offers an invitation: Listen to nature carefully. Consider all sounds and all songs. What you will hear is astonishing.
NonfictionLiterature

The monstrous feminine

Feature by Anna Christensen

The harrowing realities of being female in a wicked world have inspired horror, gothic and speculative fiction for centuries.

In late 2018, prominent horror film producer Jason Blum came under fire on Twitter for defending his production company’s failure to hire female directors, saying it was the result of women’s disinterest in exploring horror. Women, it turns out, not only like the dark just fine, they’ve staked it out as their own. Indeed, it’s largely due to women that the horror genre developed as it has. When literature that was gothic, dramatic and shocking was thought to be trash unfit for the highbrow male, women writers and readers flooded the macabre void. Through horror, they began to write the dark side of the female experience: endangered, haunted, preyed upon.

In Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction, scholars of the weird Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson trace the genealogy of women who’ve dealt in the unsettling, from the 17th century into the present. This book is inspired not only in the way it explores what the off-kilter, the monstrous and the half-known has meant to women for centuries but also in how it illuminates the often unusual lives of the women who crafted these dark worlds. Amelia Edwards was a swashbuckling explorer who traveled Egypt with her female partners in the Victorian era and wrote stories about mummies. Daphne du Maurier enigmatically referred to herself as a “disembodied spirit” throughout her childhood. Shirley Jackson was whispered to be a witch. As rebels within the male-dictated feminine role, were these women writing themselves as monsters? Or was it the world around them that was malformed, menacing?

Sady Doyle would answer, “Why not both?” The engrossing Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power embarks on a fascinating exploration of the women we make into monsters in film, in literature and in life. (Behind every male serial killer is a bad mother, society would say, as Doyle rolls her eyes.) When a woman steps outside her prescribed role, Doyle argues, suddenly everyone’s a Puritan minister, signing the cross and hissing, “Witch.” What is Lucy Westenra from Dracula if not a woman who consumed as she pleased? What were the protagonists of the film The Craft but disempowered girls who finally stood up? Doyle uses these tales to examine what feminine power can mean to us now.

It’s thought that Mary Shelley wrote her Creature as a metaphor for womanhood—a trod-upon and mistreated thing that famously stated, “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!” upon discovering that being nice got it nowhere. Doyle might agree. In an era that seems to reflect renewed violence against women, it might be time to sweetly remind those around us that we are dangerous. Monsters, after all, have claws.

It’s largely due to women that the horror genre developed as it has.
NonfictionCrafts, Hobbies & HomeAnimals

Gift books: For homebodies who are secretly glad their plans got canceled

Feature by Anna Christensen

If you can’t convince your introverted friends to come out to your holiday party, just leave one of these comfy, cozy, beautiful books on their doorstep instead.

I was not surprised when BookPage asked me to write their gift guide for homebodies. I work from home. I have been known to go a few days without speaking aloud to anyone but my cat. One of the most satisfying endeavors of my year was redecorating my house in the endlessly comfortable style of a 1940s absentminded Oxford professor, creating an atmosphere that I would never, ever want to leave. If you have a recluse in your life who is dear to you, upon whose doorstep you intend to leave a gaily wrapped package expressing your affections, I am the expert called in to help. 

Bibliostyle by Nina Freudenberger
While the love of books doesn’t belong exclusively to those who are quiet and inward, it’s true often enough that Nina Freudenberger’s Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home With Books is a safe bet. Pages upon pages of towering, impressive personal libraries, alongside interviews on reading habits and cataloging techniques from their owners, are enough to move any bookworm to tears. I was awed by these aspirational collections and comforted to learn that the endless to-be-read list is a universal problem. And as an object itself, Bibliostyle is lovely. A weighty tome in dark green with gold lettering on the cover, it sits very seriously and beautifully on my coffee table, marking me as a literary sophisticate who is deeply serious about her books.

Board Games in 100 Moves by Ian Livingstone
Of course, I would only be noted as such by those select friends who chanced to see it. Yes, reader, I do sometimes host a little gathering. As any homebody will tell you, such evenings call for a board game, and when you aren’t discussing strategy over your game of choice, you can wow your guests with the encyclopedic knowledge of games you picked up from Ian Livingstone’s Board Games in 100 Moves: 8,000 Years of Play. Fill your cozy evening in with conversations about what the games we have played through time say about humankind (Germany, for example, lost their taste for war- and battle-based games after World War II), and keep the interesting conversation flowing.

Girls and Their Cats by BriAnne Wills
That, however, is only for the rare social night. Most nights of the week, my most constant companion is a sentient piece of black fluff named Jonas (in homage to author Shirley Jackson). Cats are often found living alongside introverts. They share a distaste for loud noises and a fondness for watching the neighbors through the windows. For the homebody who shares their home with a familiar of the feline variety, Girls and Their Cats by BriAnne Wills cannot be more fervently recommended. Cat lovers are known for being somewhat obsessive in their devotion, and here is a book filled with like-minded people (and their cats!) telling their “how we met” stories. It’s also a handsome book in its own right, with a velvet spine that’s almost as nice to pet as your cat.

★ Cosy by Laura Weir 
Homebodies are always in pursuit of an ideal: of a dream of quiet, of peaceful evenings in the bath or under blankets, of restorative reflection, of (as our friends across the pond term it) “cosy.” In Cosy: The British Art of Comfort, Laura Weir moves to take back the simple pleasures of a Sunday in one’s pajamas or a long evening walk, especially now that interior designers have savaged the Danish notion of hygge. There’s no need to whitewash your floorboards or purchase a sheepskin rug. After all, decorating all in white inevitably leads to more cleaning, when you could be relaxing under something woolen with a book and a nice piece of cheese instead. Gently dragging us back from the wild-eyed edge of consumerism, Weir reminds us that simply taking the time to cook a meal can be enough. Forget giving this one for Christmas, actually. Give it before. We’ll all need it.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Laura Weir, author of Cosy.

If you can’t convince your introverted friends to come out to your holiday party, just leave one of these comfy, cozy, beautiful books on their doorstep instead.
NonfictionFood & DrinkEnvironment

A down-to-earth approach to environmentalism

Feature by Anna Christensen

The perilous state of our planet is a grim subject that often makes us feel powerless. Is it even possible as an individual to mount much of a defense against such a complex global threat? Two books help cut through the anxieties of climate change and suggest a place to start.

In The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac urge readers to push back against overwhelmed, hopeless mindsets. Far from ill-informed but earnest optimists, the authors led negotiations for the United Nations during the Paris Agreement of 2015 and are the co-founders of Global Optimism, working to incite environmental change from the personal level and extending globally. Their book is indeed a manifesto, but an elegant and hopeful one that acknowledges difficult realities while refusing to sink beneath them. They present a faultless argument supported by hard science and, alongside it, paint mesmerizing images of a potential future—reforested cities, shaded and carless streets, skyscrapers trailing vines and wall gardens, and neighbors who come together to grow food and share resources.

Equally appealing is their argument that, far from an austere world where we miss the extravagances of our past, a clean future would not only be healthy for the planet but would also provide mental and physical advantages for human beings. Greater community, better health through more exposure to the beauty of nature and more flexibility for spending time with loved ones are all benefits of their vision of a new society.

Chief among the benefits Figueres and Rivett-Carnac foresee for us is better health through better eating, and in How to Be a Conscious Eater: Making Food Choices That Are Good for You, Others, and the Planet, Sophie Egan takes a deeper look at the personal and global effects of ethical eating. While acknowledging that individual effort on a collective level creates large-scale change, Egan opts to address her reader one-on-one. A food writer for publications such as Bon Appétit and the Washington Post, she understands the tension between wanting to do what’s right and wanting to preserve what food often means to us. Therefore, she doesn’t guilt readers or hold them to unrealistic standards. With illustrations and a conversational voice, Egan takes note of the many ethical issues associated with the food industry and then lays out the options available to us to improve them.

Though we might think of dedicated ethical eaters as belonging to the ranks of ultra-healthy, well-moneyed vegans—those with resources to burn at the co-op and untold willpower—Egan’s common-sense tone makes eating according to our values an accessible and relatively stress-free realm for everyone.

Celebrate Earth Day with two books that remind us of our own power to honor, protect and save our threatened planet.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Scientific sleuthing: Glimpses of the early days of forensics

Feature by Anna Christensen

In the age of “CSI,” it’s hard to imagine the world of crime solving before the introduction of forensic science. These books transport readers to the birth of the innovative police work that’s still cracking cases today.

In 1932, America was gripped by the headlines coming out of rural New Jersey: 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the son of celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, was stolen from his crib as his parents sat downstairs. His tiny skeleton would later be found on the side of the road, breaking hearts and inciting outrage around the world. The crime shocked the nation and created a ripple effect that echoed through history.

Though certainly the most famous kidnapping of the era, the Lindbergh case was by no means a singular event. In The Kidnap Years: The Astonishing True History of the Forgotten Kidnapping Epidemic That Shook Depression-Era America, journalist and author David Stout recounts the bewildering rash of kidnappings that swept the United States as gangland rose to prominence and much of the country was swallowed by desperate poverty. Interweaving the Lindbergh kidnapping through narratives of lesser-known abductions from coast to coast, Stout examines this wave of crime from many angles: the lives of the abducted, the circumstances of the abductors and the state of a nation in which organized crime flourished because of people’s dire financial circumstances. This movement coincided with the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and the Lindbergh case itself saw the first flickerings of psychology and forensic analysis, including fingerprinting, being used in criminal cases.

It is surprising, then, that in 1951, Hoover would turn down a visit from a grandmotherly figure who seemed particularly insistent upon gaining an audience with him. An unlikely presence in the world of criminal investigation, Frances Glessner Lee was a leader in the emerging forensic sciences and a staunch advocate for the adoption of the medical examiner system. Best known today as the creator of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of dioramas depicting homicides in miniature for officers to practice their observational skills upon, Lee is the subject of Bruce Goldfarb’s 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics. Born to wealth but denied a career because of her gender, Lee employed her considerable curiosity, intellect, willpower and fortune toward the burgeoning field of “legal medicine,” the application of medical sciences toward criminal investigation. The scope of what Lee accomplished in her lifetime is breathtaking, and Goldfarb has written a worthy tribute to the passionate life’s work of a deeply singular woman.

In the age of “CSI,” it’s hard to imagine the world of crime solving before the introduction of forensic science. These books transport readers to the birth of the innovative police work that’s still cracking cases today.

In 1932, America was gripped by the headlines…

NonfictionNatureAnimals

Take a bird’s-eye view of Earth Day

Feature by Anna Christensen

This period of cloistering at home has made bird lovers everywhere more attentive to their backyards. Millions of us have hung bird feeders, ordered bird identification cards and glued ourselves to the windowpane to watch these tiny emissaries of the sky. Yet for all the joy that birds bring us, they face grim and unprecedented dangers as their numbers dwindle. To better appreciate the beauty, delicacy and tenacity of our aerial friends, these books will put you on the right crosswind.

★ A World on the Wing

Scott Weidensaul, a Pulitzer finalist for his book Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds, returns to the topic in A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, though much has changed in the intervening 20 years. For one thing, tracking technology has improved, with devices shrunk to a size that even the smallest songbirds can wear. Weidensaul describes a minuscule transmitter fitted to the small of a bird’s back by two small loops around its legs, and this is charming to think about—first, of birds having a small of the back, and second, of their wearing transmitters like tiny underpants.

In 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group proposed that humanity had left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene, an era defined by the ways humans have destabilized the natural world. Weidensaul addresses migratory birds’ changing reality and the scientists who work tirelessly to learn more about them and advocate on their behalf to the powers responsible for decimating these birds’ lives and rhythms. The plight and toughness of both birds and their human defenders will move you in lasting ways.

★ A Most Remarkable Creature

According to Jonathan Meiburg, a South American falcon called the caracara is both the most and least likely animal to survive the world to come. Personable and wickedly clever, the caracara’s greatest strengths are its adaptability, intelligence and ability to forge connections, even with humans. In his debut book, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, Meiburg travels across South America in pursuit of this little-known falcon that seems to either enchant or chagrin anyone who crosses its path.

So intimately does Meiburg acquaint his readers with this inquisitive, curious, sometimes playful thief of a bird that it’s startling when he adds “doomed” to that list of adjectives. Meiburg’s fondness for the caracara is plain, and he can’t help but dream up a plan to rescue this odd winged creature from its steadily shrinking habitat, encroached upon by forces both natural and human-made. What’s more, Meiburg lodges the caracara so deeply in readers’ hearts that by the end of the book, they will feel ready to participate in whatever scheme he proposes to save this peculiar dinosaur-descendant.

The Glitter in the Green

At the other end of the avian spectrum lies the hummingbird, that glamorous, sugar-high pugilist of the garden. Natural history writer, photographer and hummingbird obsessive (within the first hundred pages he crosses both a bear and a puma in pursuit of this tiny, glimmering bird) Jon Dunn has written a book that is both an ode to hummingbirds and a remarkable piece of travel literature. In The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds, we travel with Dunn to Alaska, Mexico and across South America as he follows in the hummingbird’s wake.

Dunn gives us the facts about hummingbirds—for example, their long tongues coil inside their skulls when not in use and split at the end to allow for rapid-fire nectar gathering—but he also explores the places where hummingbirds intersect with the world they inhabit and the people they affect. The story of hummingbirds intertwines intriguingly with Mexican witchcraft, James Bond, plane crashes, economies around the world and the lingering legacy of Aztec power. We come to realize that these familiar visitors are astonishingly mysterious: They perform impressive migrations to arctic climes for breeding, their feathers have been valued as currency, and some cultures believe they bring love and guard travelers. From the narrative of Dunn’s excursion, we learn that a backyard hummingbird sighting is actually an exotic visit from the wide, strange world.

To better appreciate the beauty, delicacy and tenacity of our aerial friends, these books will put you on the right crosswind.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

The Woman They Could Not Silence

Review by Anna Christensen

We’re all familiar with the method of discrediting women by making allegations against their mental health whenever they dare to stand up to a man in power. As Radium Girls author Kate Moore ably demonstrates in her new book, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear, this particularly pernicious tool of the patriarchy has been in use for a very long time.

Elizabeth Packard was a housewife, mother and champion for the disadvantaged and underserved. In the middle of the 19th century, she was involuntarily committed to an Illinois asylum by her husband, a controlling, Confederate-sympathizing Presbyterian minister with whom she had begun publicly disagreeing. At that time, female madness was defined in part as any unladylike behavior, such as arguing one’s case or expressing unhappiness at one’s situation. Anyone who committed these transgressions could be “sent to the madhouse” on nothing more than her husband’s say-so. Packard discovered two terrible truths from her own experience of this tactic: Married women had no rights or legal recourse, and neither did the inmates of asylums.

Once within the walls of the asylum, women were subject to filthy conditions and horrifying physical abuse and torture. As Packard noted, it was as though these asylums were designed to encourage insanity, not heal it. Faced with this seemingly hopeless situation, Packard set out to prove her own sanity and liberate herself and her fellow sisters in a gripping and improbable battle against rich, powerful men.

Packard’s story is, incredibly, not simply one of a woman who survived three years of imprisonment in an asylum for disagreeing with her husband’s religious views. She didn’t throw her energy into merely freeing herself, clearing her name and being reunited with her beloved children. Instead, the brave, brilliant and unshakable Packard went on to pen multiple books on subjects such as emancipation, women’s rights and the rights of people who are mentally ill; to get bills passed asserting the basic human rights and liberties of married women and mentally ill people; and to gain notoriety for confronting injustice no matter the odds.

The Woman They Could Not Silence is compelling not only because of the way it creates an alliance between the reader and the courageous Packard, but also because of how it forces the reader to examine once more the language and attitudes around women’s mental health. In Packard we see a foremother of the female leaders of today: intelligent, tenacious and impossible to cow.

In the 19th century, a brave, brilliant and completely healthy woman named Elizabeth Packard was involuntarily committed to an Illinois asylum by her husband.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

Out of the Shadows

Review by Anna Christensen

Spirit mediums have been capturing imaginations since the rise of spiritualism in the 19th century. A veiled woman commanding the attention of a room, speaking in the voices of the beloved dead as tables tilt, loud mysterious knocks echo from the corners and unlikely objects materialize out of thin air—such a woman is either an ethereal figure from a ghost story, or she is a charlatan, a silky smooth con artist who exploits the grief of others.

But what if there were a third option, one of revolution and rebellion? In Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, Emily Midorikawa unveils the triumphant, tragic and deeply unconventional lives of six of the Victorian era’s best known spirit mediums.

Midorikawa roots her story in both the history of spiritualism and the powerlessness of Victorian women like the Fox sisters—Leah, Maggie and Kate—who were left to grasp for influence in seemingly manipulative ways. As the book proceeds through the extraordinary lives of Emma Harding, Victoria Woodhull and Georgina Weldon, we witness women masterfully wielding the public’s fascination with the revelations of the dead. They capitalized on this fascination not only to improve their own lives but also to uplift other disenfranchised people across the United States and Great Britain. Strident orations on abolition, women’s rights within marriage and suffrage, which would have been ridiculous coming from a constricted and disregarded 19th-century woman, suddenly gained gravitas when spoken by the all-knowing dead.

Midorikawa breathes life into these long-ago women in ways that make them feel contemporary despite their extraordinary circumstances and distance in time. Her description of Harding enduring an incident of stalking resonates with chilling familiarity. You’ll feel these women’s frustration and conviction, and you’ll cheer at their progressive empowerment.

It’s remarkable that none of these women seems disingenuous. Throughout Out of the Shadows, they occupy a liminal space between genuine belief in supernatural forces and the ingenious ways they used those forces to their own ends. By the book’s end, it no longer matters whether you believe these six remarkable spirit mediums were hoaxes or not; you’ll certainly believe in them.

Emily Midorikawa unveils the triumphant, tragic and deeply unconventional lives of six of the Victorian era’s best known spirit mediums.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

The Soul of a Woman

Review by Anna Christensen

“My anger against machismo started in those childhood years of seeing my mother and the housemaids as victims,” writes Isabel Allende in The Soul of a Woman, her reflection on how feminism has shaped her life. “They were subordinate and had no resources or voice. . . . My feelings of frustration were so powerful that they marked me forever.”

Allende, a fixture of Latin American storytelling since the publication of The House of the Spirits in 1982, is well qualified to deliver a feminist manifesto. Those who have followed her career are familiar with the number of times she has struggled defiantly to overcome roadblocks in her path. The House of the Spirits, which addressed the ghosts of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, was rejected by Chile’s macho publishing culture. (Eventually it was published in Argentina instead, to great acclaim.) While many critics have praised her work, comparing her to Gabriel García Márquez, she’s also had many detractors, mostly male writers who seemed determined to dismiss her. In The Soul of a Woman, Allende describes these experiences and others that imbued her with the grit and tenacity that define her today.

Allende discusses her past matter-of-factly and directly, without losing her piquante humor. Her mother was an unconventional and vivacious woman who grew bitter under the heavy hand of patriarchy and misogyny. Allende decided to adopt a different way of life for herself, despite the misgivings of her mother and stepfather, the Chilean ambassador to Argentina. She details her career from its roots in feminist journalism through the literary pursuits that made her a success in spite of adversity and personal tragedy.

Ultimately Allende tells us of a life lived fully, for better or worse. The passionate choices she has made are boldly laid out without apologies in this slim volume. Allende even reflects on the twilight of her life, though it seems unbelievable that such a vibrant spirit could ever dim. But when it does, the blaze her life leaves behind will illuminate this world for decades to come.

 

In The Soul of a Woman, Isabel Allende describes the experiences that imbued her with the feminist grit and tenacity that define her today.

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