Anna Christensen

NonfictionTrue Crime

The Good Girls

Review by Anna Christensen

The past several years have ushered in a wave of social upheaval and, in turn, a people’s revolution, whether by marching in the streets or by quietly but decisively reforming outdated values. These changes aren’t limited to the United States, however. India has also seen its share of shifting attitudes, particularly toward women, girls and sexual violence.

In 2012, though India was listed as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be female, its citizens were shocked into outrage by the rape and murder of a young medical student as she returned home from watching a movie. Mass protests and publicity stirred the government to reconsider how its justice system tried sexual crimes. 

In the wake of these events, journalist Sonia Faleiro traveled to India to investigate and document the status of Indian girls and women. Before she arrived, however, a second incident tore through the country: Two teenage girls in Uttar Pradesh, a low-caste, high-poverty farming region, were found hanging from a tree in an orchard not far from their homes. What erupted afterward lay bare caste divisions, family strife, political corruption and stubborn attitudes toward women, girls and sexual purity.

The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing is a thoughtful, careful narrative of these events and an examination of the many issues influencing this tangled case. Faleiro reconstructs scenes using multiple thorough interviews with the people who were present, and she takes care to never insert herself into her retelling. Through her, however, the reader comes to know the people involved. Padma and Lalli (renamed in the narrative due to Indian law prohibiting the release of the names of victims) were two girls who bear so many of the utterly familiar hallmarks of teenage girldom. Their families, friends and neighbors, in whom love, tradition and despair interweave, become familiar as well. The reader also comes to know the cultural topography of India as a country in flux, where tradition and the rigid “safeguarding” of women hold fast in some corners, while in others women wear jeans and ride public transportation while their parents plan to send them on to higher education.

Even as corruption and hope vie with one another politically and poverty touches everything, The Good Girls never loses sight of the human heart of its story. It brings us close to these people and their problems and heartaches and, in so doing, makes us examine our own.

When two teenage girls from a low-caste, high-poverty farming region in India were found hanging from a tree, it lay bare caste divisions, family strife, political corruption and stubborn attitudes toward women, girls and sexual purity.
NonfictionMemoir

The Night Lake

Review by Anna Christensen

Liz Tichenor’s The Night Lake: A Young Priest Maps the Topography of Grief surprised me. I felt surprise at the grace with which Tichenor shares her walk through shadow. I was surprised by how deeply Tichenor’s articulation of her experience of faith resonated with my own, and by her brushes with the mystical divine that jolted me and left me feeling uncertain. Some might feel surprise at priests cursing in the face of unimaginable grief.

Whatever your experience of grief, and whatever your experience of faith, The Night Lake will manage to surprise you, too. But it’s not easy reading.

On the night Tichenor raced to the hospital behind an ambulance carrying her 1-month-old son, she was a fledgling priest in her late 20s, living with her husband and their two young children at an Episcopalian summer camp. This was her first job flying solo, and her life seemed to be at that early stage when anything could blossom at any moment. But in truth, Tichenor was already acquainted with hardship before she found her son unresponsive in their bedroom. Her mother, after years of dealing with pernicious and unrelenting alcoholism, had taken her own life only a year before.

So when Tichenor’s son died suddenly due to an undiagnosed medical condition, she plunged into the deep end. In the months that followed, she was buoyed by the love and support of her husband, daughter and community of friends, but Tichenor could not always keep her head above the waves of depression, her own relationship to alcohol and an emotional hangover from years of being mothered by an addict.

As Tichenor moved through her grief, she longed simply for someone to sit with her in her pain. Early in the book, she discusses the roots of the word “com-passion” (to suffer with) and in so doing reveals an important truth: To live in connection with others in an imperfect world, we must suffer with them. Readers practice that com-passion with Tichenor as they read her story. None of its events are hurried, and so you feel suspended with her in each stage of her grieving.

This is not simply a book for those who have found themselves mired in such grief. It teaches all of us how to be with those who are going through tragedy, how to be vulnerable and how to practice com-passion.

Whatever your experience of grief, and whatever your experience of faith, The Night Lake by Liz Tichenor will manage to surprise you.

NonfictionPhotography

America the Beautiful

Review by Anna Christensen

As the holidays approach, it may seem harder and harder for some of us to find the sense of easy joy we associate with this time of year. The discourse within our country feels more fraught than it’s ever been, traveling for the holidays is out of the question for many families, and sometimes in our most frustrated moments, it can seem like there’s little worth celebrating.

America the Beautiful: A Story in Photographs reminds us of the incredible landscapes and rich heritage that are more than worth holding on to. Photographs spanning decades have been pulled from National Geographic’s vast archives to honor each American state and region, while beloved citizens as diverse as Maya Rudolph, Mitt Romney, Jewel and Nick Saban share statements and stories of how their home states have shaped them. Thick, glossy spreads showcase the mountains of Colorado and the white sands of New Mexico. On other pages, the lens closes in tight on a vineyard worker gathering grapes in Oregon, Tejano elementary school students smiling brightly into the camera in Texas and a pineapple harvester in Hawaii ending her day with a cigar.

This beautiful hardcover book feels like a loving reminder of the best our nation has to offer.

This beautiful hardcover book feels like a loving reminder of the best our nation has to offer.

NonfictionBiography

Red Comet

Review by Anna Christensen

These days, Sylvia Plath is often considered part of the intense realm of the teenage girl. Her name comes up again and again alongside figures such as Lana del Rey in articles referencing the “sad girl aesthetic.” When my daughter saw my copy of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath lying bricklike by my chair, she reacted with surprise: “Oh! They sing about her in the Heathers musical!” Somehow this poet, named a genius in her lifetime, is now deemed “confessional” and relegated to a literary space where intellectuals raise their eyebrows knowingly and dismiss her work to 16-year-old-girl-land. (There is, of course, the larger question of why we label art consumed by teenage girls as unintelligent and lesser.)

Biographer and Plath scholar Heather Clark lifts the poet’s life from the Persephone myth it has become and examines it in all its complexity. In the massive effort that is Red Comet, Clark admirably identifies and resists the morbid tendency to look at every moment, every work, as a signpost on the way to Plath’s tragic suicide. She also liberates the supporting cast of Plath’s life from the damning and one-dimensional roles they often occupy as part of the death-myth of Plath’s life. Her husband, Ted Hughes; his lover, Assia Wevill; Plath’s mother, Aurelia Plath—they are not villains but people who created art of their own, who loved and fought with Plath, who were not always good or right.

Clark’s detailed, multidimensional treatment gives Plath’s life and work its dignity, character and sense of interiority. We get the full scope of Plath’s incredible talent here, rightfully established as complicated, radiant and worthy of deep consideration. Plath was a genius. She was a woman living in a time of great social restriction for women. She had complicated and human relationships. She was mentally ill, and this mental illness both illumined her work and colored her perspective. All of these things are held alongside one another without conflict in Clark’s book.

Considering Plath in this complexifying light, Clark unlooses some of the bonds that have held back this incomparable artist. Neither a wronged icon nor a goddess of perpetual angsty teenagerhood, Plath is presented to us as a complicated woman who achieved great things both despite and because of those complications, who had meaningful and loving relationships, who could sometimes be difficult, who struggled and who overcame as often as she faltered. Red Comet allows Plath to emerge from the shadows, shining in all her intricacy and artistry.

These days, Sylvia Plath is often considered part of the intense realm of the teenage girl. Her name comes up again and again alongside figures such as Lana del Rey in articles referencing the “sad girl aesthetic.” When my daughter saw my copy of Red…

NonfictionNatureEssays

Vesper Flights

Review by Anna Christensen

In her follow-up to 2015’s H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald examines intersections—of the natural world and the global one, of the scientific and the spiritual, of human and animal, of the modern world and the ancient, enduring one. Her literary pupil contracts and dilates over and over throughout Vesper Flights. An avid observer of minute detail, she makes an exact science of drawing a personal moment into tight focus before whooshing out to take a view so wide it engulfs the entire present. 

Macdonald's bite-size essays offer meditations on home, placelessness, the refugee crisis and climate change, all projected through animals who appear in dual form: as their biological selves, examined, explained and marveled at; and their ancient, archetypal manifestations. For every paragraph detailing the flight instincts of swifts, there is another ruminating on the lessons humans derive from these creatures. The essay “Deer in Headlights” vibrates with dark, forested strangeness. Touching on the mystical meaning of deer in a distant time, the unfortunate but ordinary event of a car crash with a deer is transmuted into something terrible and Dionysian. The entire essay becomes shot through with a violent divinity, nodding to the darker feelings that feather around the edges of our emotions surrounding these accidents.

These animal depictions, two-sided and meditative, act as a relational vehicle to carry us through the shock of the Anthropocene, where we’ve come to think of animals as mere creatures. Macdonald espouses a more holistic approach to connecting with animals—one that marries natural science to the heartfelt stirrings that humans have long felt in a furred or feathered presence. “Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done,” she writes, “and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Love audiobooks? Check out Vesper Flights and other nonfiction audiobook picks.

In her follow-up to 2015’s H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald examines intersections—of the natural world and the global one, of the scientific and the spiritual, of human and animal, of the modern world and the ancient, enduring one. Her literary pupil contracts and dilates over and…

NonfictionMemoir

Inferno

Review by Anna Christensen

Inferno is a memoir of Catherine Cho’s harrowing journey through postpartum psychosis. Postpartum depression and psychosis exist in some of the most taboo corners of the haunted space assigned to mental health, conjuring headlines of drowned children and marring the virtuous, sunny, false picture of new motherhood. Cho’s story begins with a loving husband, a smooth pregnancy and only moderately overbearing new grandparents. But one morning, time and self began to unspool amid paranoid fantasies, and soon Cho’s husband is visiting her in the hospital, pleading with her to eat, trying to connect in any small way and finding that he cannot. 

In Cho’s hands, the story of her psychosis is also one of her growing up and knitting together her sense of self, even as that self is coming ferociously undone. The Korean fairy tales of her grandparents intermingle with the classical mythology loved by her father. Together, these stories suggest meanings to her that she can’t quite discern. The identities of her ancestors, herself and her son become mutable and bleed into one another. She feels overcome with love for her husband, convinced they have entered hell and she must save him. Cho seems to experience time as a divine being might, skidding back and forth and in between, realities crisscrossing and intertwining. There is a sublime quality to this temporal movement. Her illness looms large and mythic, even in its terror.

Those grandiose episodes flatten into periods of lucidity when Cho returns to herself in the ward and moves through her days without information, without contact with her family, carefully negotiating her relationships with the other patients. Even in these moments of clarity, postpartum psychosis treads around her edges like an animal, pressing a soft muzzle with hidden sharp teeth into her mind.

Though Cho dwells apprehensively on the intertwining of love and pain in the Korean culture of her upbringing, it’s the resilient thread of devotion in her life—to her husband, her family, the curious memory of her son—that laces through the pain and draws her back into the world. Cho’s expression of her experience of madness is poetic, and like much good poetry, it points its finger to the lies in our so-called reality: that our health system is healthy; that our expectations of motherhood are rational.

Inferno is a memoir of Catherine Cho’s harrowing journey through postpartum psychosis. Postpartum depression and psychosis exist in some of the most taboo corners of the haunted space assigned to mental health, conjuring headlines of drowned children and marring the virtuous, sunny, false picture of new…

NonfictionEuropean History

Love in the Blitz

Review by Anna Christensen

In the English summer of 1939, Eileen Alexander’s life seemed sun-dappled. A recent graduate of the University of Cambridge and the only daughter in an upper-class Jewish family with powerful political connections, she was beloved in her circle of brilliant friends and embarking on a promising future. Even a hospital stay after being flung from a car could not blight her charmed life; she began a correspondence with the guilt-stricken driver, which quickly blossomed into flirtation, and then romance. As the course of her life shifted abruptly and against her will that year, like the lives of so many at the onset of World War II, Alexander responded with unflappable humor and irrepressible intellect, both of which shine through in Love in the Blitz, a collection of her letters to her paramour and eventual husband.

Alexander’s letters were purchased by chance in an eBay auction, and they detail not only her romance with their recipient but countless other moments of humanity and hopefulness in the face of harrowing circumstances. England was under siege, and Alexander illustrates some of the worst of it: air raid warnings in the night, the stress of being packed with family into a small shelter, the heartache of lost friends and classmates. That Alexander’s sense of humor remained so resolutely intact throughout only serves to highlight the occasional glimpse of sadness or weariness, and you admire her all the more for it.

Alexander’s unassailable wit makes her an accessible narrator, someone in whom we see pieces of our friends, our sisters and, we hope, ourselves. She flirts salaciously with her lover, making references to their “mollocking,” gossips cheerfully and good-naturedly about their friends and offers hysterical observations at every turn. For a book of war correspondence, it’s peculiar to note that it’s a laugh-out-loud sort of work, but Alexander’s candor makes her wartime experience real to us. When she shows up for work only to find her workplace bombed, we feel the impact of that moment as though we’re standing next to her. When she stops in her tracks in one letter to wonder if she will ever forget the things she has seen, we pause with her.

After reading Love in the Blitz, events on the 20th-century world stage no longer seem so removed from our own age. We can only hope to conduct ourselves as Alexander did: with tenacity, optimism, tenderness and a perfect zinger for everything.

In the English summer of 1939, Eileen Alexander’s life seemed sun-dappled. A recent graduate of the University of Cambridge and the only daughter in an upper-class Jewish family with powerful political connections, she was beloved in her circle of brilliant friends and embarking on a…

NonfictionNatureMemoir

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

Review by Anna Christensen

As honeybees’ numbers dwindle alarmingly, it’s obvious that they’re affected by the ongoing events in the world; but in person, they seem entirely undisturbed. Watching them, you lose touch with the stress of your own life as you observe these tiny aliens thrumming along, utterly separate from the troubles around them. Their blithe business of flower inspection and bustling communal life are the sort of things you’d want to sink into as everything else falls into disorder. And if you can’t literally sink into a honey-sweet bee colony, sinking into Helen Jukes’ A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees is surely the next best thing.

After moving to Oxford, England, for a job, Jukes was grappling with a life of obligation and slow death by cubicle. The hard-driving, unforgiving and often inhuman corporate culture of her work had left her drained and brittle, but still she craved wildness, connection and patterns more life-giving than what her professional life provided. Beginning at a place of exhaustion and tightness, A Honeybee Heart Has Openings unfolds over a year into ease, sweetness, rhythm and flow.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read Helen Jukes’ beautiful behind-the-book essay about finding a sense of home during the year that inspired A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings.

Anyone who has experience with anxiety can identify the tremulousness in Jukes’ voice as the book opens. Then, as Jukes begins keeping honeybees in her garden, she settles into a routine and becomes part of the communal organism of the hive. The bees provide Jukes and the reader alike with a new interpretation of work. Community counts, we learn. Connection, trusting others and trusting ourselves are all part of the true, valuable work of a life. Interacting with the bees—learning the delicate balance between “keeping” bees and trusting their own innate expertise, leaning on the accumulated knowledge of an old art—draws Jukes into community with those around her, and we receive a portrait of a heart opening to pursuits that are truly nourishing.

Still a young voice in the world of nature writing, Jukes joins the ranks of pros like Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald as she brings sharply into focus the details of the natural world that gleams and hums all around us.

As honeybees’ numbers dwindle alarmingly, it’s obvious that they’re affected by the ongoing events in the world; but in person, they seem entirely undisturbed. Watching them, you lose touch with the stress of your own life as you observe these tiny aliens thrumming along, utterly…

NonfictionMemoir

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

Review by Anna Christensen

Funny things start happening when Russian American author Alex Halberstadt begins digging into his family’s murky unhappiness in Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. Beginning with childhood memories of his parents’ troubled marriage and divorce, resentment toward his absent father and embarrassment over grandparents who made no effort to conceal their foreignness, Halberstadt twitches aside the dismissive curtain we tend to drape over the older members of our families.

What he finds is startling but ought to be familiar in its own way to each of us. “I was coming to see that all four of my grandparents had lived in a country and a time when the buffer between history and biography became nearly imperceptible,” writes Halberstadt. Distressingly, there is a grandfather who served as a bodyguard to Stalin, and who becomes known to Halberstadt as a fragile man who still wrestles with the truth of the atrocities he at least witnessed, if not perpetrated. His son, Halberstadt’s remote father, was a college student in Soviet Russia, liberal-minded, prone to seeking out contraband literature and music and ardently opposed to his own father and the KGB.

Halberstadt’s maternal grandparents have their own journey, different in nearly every way. Comically absent-minded and timid in old age, they are revived in Halberstadt’s research as young Eastern European Jews, each of whom barely escaped the Nazis with the clothes on their backs in their own separate, desperate flights, losing almost everyone they loved in the process.

As Halberstadt weaves his familial background out of several trips across Russia and Eastern Europe in a quest for information, a curious effect occurs. Time becomes less linear and seems to lie around us, piled in no particular order, like snow. The past is still present with us; nothing is truly left behind. What seems obvious is that the wounds that are inflicted upon us are alive and will continue to fester, infected, if not confronted. So too, however, does the good that survives: the love that struggles through dark and horrifying circumstances, while imperfect, grows and strengthens. 

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Alex Halberstadt and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

Funny things start happening when Russian American author Alex Halberstadt begins digging into his family’s murky unhappiness in Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. Beginning with childhood memories of his parents’ troubled marriage and divorce, resentment toward his absent father and embarrassment…

NonfictionMemoir

The Escape Artist

Review by Anna Christensen

Family is a tricky animal. Even when things seem ordinary and well adjusted, no one outside truly knows what happens behind closed doors. Far more than a set of partnerships and responsibilities knit together by love, there’s often something more going on within a family: a gravitational pull toward one another, blurring the boundaries of each individual and creating a collective entity with overlapping fears, desires and traumas. In The Escape Artist, Helen Fremont unravels the individual threads knotted together in her own family, untangling the agreed-upon tales her family made up—to survive, to retain their image of themselves—from the realities she experienced as a daughter and sister in that family.

This tragic and unsettling (but also humorous and wry) memoir opens with an event that becomes the impetus of Fremont’s attempt to make sense of it all. Weeks after attending her father’s funeral, she receives a letter informing her of her own disinheritance. Legally speaking, she had been killed off like a character written out of a series, listed as having predeceased her father in a codicil to his will.

Expelled from the family narrative—one that included deeply buried secrets, shame over sometimes violent mental illness, her parents’ escape from genocide and the subsequent burial of their own identities—Fremont realizes she can only rely on her own individual narrative. That narrative, composed of Fremont’s memories and research into her family’s fugitive past, diverges wildly from the face her family portrayed to everyone else: the successful, Catholic doctor, beautiful housewife and two driven, intelligent daughters. Concealed within this image, as Fremont reveals, is a Jewish refugee, a traumatized survivor and children wrestling with mental illness and nervous collapse for their entire lives.

One would be hard-pressed to find a family without secrets. Even when the secrets are small, the strain of carrying them, and of maintaining the facade that permits such complicated, lifelong relationships to survive, can be exhausting. No one could accuse the family in The Escape Artist of keeping only small secrets, but in its truth-telling, it serves as a catharsis for anyone who has ever spent time hiding the skeletons of others.

Family is a tricky animal. Even when things seem ordinary and well adjusted, no one outside truly knows what happens behind closed doors. Far more than a set of partnerships and responsibilities knit together by love, there’s often something more going on within a family:…
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Imperfect Union

Review by Anna Christensen

As a native of the Great State of Texas (™), I grew up on tales of Western heroes. But even outside of Texas, our country has a tendency to lionize those who embodied the Wild West mythos of America: white men who did stupid or awful things at least as often as they did brave ones, whom frontier legend has polished and absolved. The trouble is, our history hurts us when we make it into a self-congratulatory story. It can only teach us if we also include the moments when we failed.

Steve Inskeep, particularly aware of our current cultural moment in his role as the host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” has given us a history to learn from in his book Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War. Present are all the things we like in an American tale: frontier adventure, fame and a conflict that’s cast as tragic and romantic. But Inskeep, wise to the lure he has set out, doesn’t give us the story we expect. Failures and near misses are rife. John Frémont was a famed explorer who delivered California to the United States, true. But he was indecisive and short-sighted, and though he came down on the right side of the slavery argument, he was unapologetically racist. His wife was the brilliant political force behind him—an abolitionist who was wildly popular with the American people but, because she was a woman, was barred from achieving her own ambitions.

Inskeep deepens the tale beyond the traditional American narrative, giving us an insightful look at two people who seem familiar even all these years later: an ambitious and brilliant woman shackled by her gender and an imperfect dreamer who often comes close to doing the right thing. Within the political theater of this pre-Civil War drama, we just might find ourselves.

As a native of the Great State of Texas (™), I grew up on tales of Western heroes. But even outside of Texas, our country has a tendency to lionize those who embodied the Wild West mythos of America: white men who did stupid or…

NonfictionBiography

Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge

Review by Anna Christensen

At the close of 2019, three years will have passed since we lost Carrie Fisher. Planetarily (in more than one sense), we have yet to stop reeling from it. After her death, one friend referred to Fisher on social media as her “space mom,” and I thought how beautifully that encapsulated what she meant to so many of us: a daring, gutsy, wondrously flawed woman we had all grown up with.

Sheila Weller, who is no stranger to writing intricately about the complicated lives of women (she has previously written about Carly Simon, Diane Sawyer, Christiane Amanpour and Joni Mitchell, among others), neither neglects nor glosses over any part of Fisher’s life in Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge. To do so would fly in the face of everything Fisher held to be important. In life, Fisher was brutally honest about her weaknesses, her addictions, about mental illness, about relationships. That honesty was a gift—a handing-down of wisdom. As Weller illustrates so well in her biography, Fisher gave, and gave, and gave in this way, mentoring generations of people around the world just by living large with irrepressible honesty and wit.

Pulling from extensive research and interviews done with everyone from the neighborhood children Fisher grew up with to her extensive group of cherished friends, Weller knits these pieces together into an engrossing and meaningful look at the inner life of a woman who described herself as “a writer who acts.” The result is a project that is breathtaking in its size and scope—Fisher lived a lot, and that is felt in page after page.

But like Fisher’s life itself, A Life on the Edge runs deep. It is less a long book than a very full one. It’s moving, truthful and a fitting tribute to its subject and to her unflappable courage and transparency. Reading Weller’s portrait of Fisher, you will miss her, deeply.

At the close of 2019, three years will have passed since we lost Carrie Fisher. Planetarily (in more than one sense), we have yet to stop reeling from it. After her death, one friend referred to Fisher on social media as her “space mom,” and…

Nonfiction

Medieval Bodies

Review by Anna Christensen

Perusing the pages of Jack Hartnell’s gloriously illustrated Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages, my eye caught on an elegant depiction of a tree, reproduced from a 15th-century German manuscript and surrounded by pear-shaped vials and delicate writing. Enchanted, I stopped to admire it and read the accompanying caption: “A wheel of urine sprouting from a tree.” But of course.

It’s easy to laugh at the Middle Ages, their beliefs and medical practices—easy, too, to forget that the people who lived then were people just like us. While capturing the humor inherent in looking so far back in time, Hartnell points to the common humanity between our modern selves and the men (and women!) who left behind these writings. (Some of this humor was even intentional; in forgetting that medieval people were simply people, we may find ourselves surprised to discover a sense of humor not far removed from our own when we encounter, for example, an illustration of a penis tree in the margins of a French manuscript.) Their bizarre logic seems especially evident when presented alongside the technology that was available then. Indeed, the seeds of modern science can often be found amid what initially appears to be extremely outdated nonsense.

Hartnell’s book isn’t just about the peculiarities of the medical arts in the Middle Ages. Then, as now, bodies were the vehicles through which people experienced life, and so Hartnell’s head-to-toe examination of the medieval body invokes nearly all other aspects of medieval culture and life. Food, literature, music and the prevalence of the spiritual are all present in great detail in Medieval Bodies, and it makes sense: We, on an ordinary day, do not perceive ourselves as a collection of viscera. We understand ourselves, both physically and otherwise, in relation to the things we come into contact with in the surrounding world. This was also true of our long-ago ancestors—and in making this clear, Hartnell’s book provides a most human look into a world that is neither so far away nor very separate from us at all.

Perusing the pages of Jack Hartnell’s gloriously illustrated Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages, my eye caught on an elegant depiction of a tree, reproduced from a 15th-century German manuscript and surrounded by pear-shaped vials and delicate writing. Enchanted, I stopped to…

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