Deborah Mason

NonfictionTrue CrimeEssays

Evidence of Things Seen

Review by Deborah Mason

Sarah Weinman’s 2020 true crime anthology, Unspeakable Acts, used the true crime genre as a startling, sometimes terrifying mirror to accurately reflect humanity’s desire to both enact and consume violence. Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning now extends the themes explored in that anthology, confronting the thorny question of what we should do with this knowledge of society’s darker impulses.

The book’s title is a riff on James Baldwin’s 1985 essay on the Atlanta child murders, “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” which examined how, in a city “too busy to hate,” racism still blinded police, media and politicians to the humanity of the victims, their grieving families and the accused. In this vein, every essay in this book takes it as a given that forces such as social media, misogyny, racism and classism play essential roles in how we perceive crime, from the commission of the crime itself and our perceptions of the victim to the penalties for the wrongdoers. Then the essayists explore the implications of those truths.

For example, Samantha Schuyler’s “The Short Life of Toylin Salau and a Legacy Still at Work” links the invisibility of Black victims of rape and murder to the violent and racist policing of communities of color. In “Who Owns Amanda Knox?” exoneree Amanda Knox asks how and whether the wrongly accused can regain their lives and privacy in the era of social media sensationalism. Mallika Rao’s heartbreaking “Three Bodies in Texas” details the destruction of an immigrant family in Frisco, Texas. And Sophie Haigney’s confessional “To the Son of the Victim” questions whether intrusions into private grief are justified by the public’s “right to know.”

Weinman’s sensitive selection of these and other articles in the anthology will provoke a wide range of reactions—sorrow, anger, indignation and even optimism. Perhaps they will also provoke a reckoning with how true crime lovers engage with stories of transgression and justice.

Sarah Weinman’s second true crime anthology confronts how social media, misogyny, racism and classism shape how we perceive crime.
NonfictionAudioMemoir

This Isn’t Going to End Well

Review by Deborah Mason

Daniel Wallace (Big Fish) idolized his brother-in-law, William Nealy—an artist, author, outdoorsman and renegade—until the day he died by a meticulously planned suicide in July 2001. In This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew (6.5 hours), Wallace paints a double portrait of his friend: the heroic mask he presented to the world, and the traumatized, troubled man behind it.

This story is painful. The audiobook begins with information on how to contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), and listeners should be prepared for a frank exploration of Nealy’s lifetime of suicidal ideation. But Wallace’s tale of loss, anger and absolution is also redemptive and beautiful, and Audie Award winner Michael Crouch’s sensitive and convincing narration gently leads the reader toward Wallace’s reconciliation with his beloved friend.

Daniel Wallace shares more about his discovery that writing a memoir is “very, very, very hard.”

Daniel Wallace’s tale of loss, anger and absolution is painful yet redemptive, and Audie Award winner Michael Crouch’s sensitive and convincing narration gently leads the reader toward Wallace’s reconciliation with a beloved friend.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Goodbye, Eastern Europe

Review by Deborah Mason

In Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land, journalist and historian Jacob Mikanowski manages to pull off the nearly impossible: An accessible and detailed history of Eastern Europe that spans 2,000 years in under 400 pages. 

The book’s subtitle reveals both the greatest challenge he faces and the advantage he brings to the task. Eastern Europe is indeed a divided land. Numerous migrations, invasions and empires have led to hundreds, if not thousands, of ethnic groups living cheek by jowl across the lands between Western Europe and Russia. Their languages, religions and customs have co-existed, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. Over the centuries, their countries have merged—as loose confederations, united republics, and vassal countries or regions in larger empires—and broken apart. 

The resulting complex and haunting history is also tragic. During the early 20th century, wars smashed through Eastern Europe, leaving millions dead or displaced while setting the stage for Soviet domination over the region. 

Telling this story, which could fill many volumes, within the confines of just one is daunting. It would be tempting to glide over details in the interest of brevity or to rely too heavily on statistics, allowing numbers to tell the story. Instead, Mikanowski deliberately frames his book as an intimate history—intimate, because the story of all these different people is also the story of his family. Like each of us, Mikanowski is a product of history. Polish princes, Lithuanian merchants and Jewish scholars all played a part in his family background, and their lives were shaped, and often shortened, by history. 

This very personal perspective gives depth and humanity to Goodbye Eastern Europe, along with urgency. In this increasingly divided world, Mikanowski reminds us that differences can lead to resentment and violence. But he also points out that countries can embrace these divisions, making themselves and their people stronger as a result. Goodbye Eastern Europe is both cautionary tale and signpost.

Journalist and historian Jacob Mikanowski manages to pull off the nearly impossible—an accessible and detailed history of Eastern Europe that spans 2,000 years in under 400 pages.
Audio

Fatherland

Review by Deborah Mason

In Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets (9 hours), New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger recounts his search for the truth about his grandfather, Karl Gönner, a former Nazi party chief who was credited with shielding an Alsace village from Nazi reprisals—and also accused of being a war criminal who ordered the death of an innocent man.

Bilger’s narration of his book reflects the ambiguity of his family’s history. Raised in Oklahoma by German immigrant parents, Bilger has a barely perceptible Oklahoma twang, softened by years spent away from his birthplace. He also speaks fluent German, a clear legacy from his extended family that sometimes inflects his spoken English. Like Karl, Bilger’s voice is neither purely one thing nor another, but rather an unexpected amalgam reminding the listener that human stories are not drawn in black and white but in complex and varied shades of gray.

Read our starred review of the print edition of Fatherland.

New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger’s narration of his book reflects the ambiguity of his family’s history.
NonfictionMemoir

Unearthing

Review by Deborah Mason

Three months after her father died, Canadian author and artist Kyo Maclear took a DNA test from a genealogy website. Her resulting memoir, Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets, could have taken its subtitle from the test’s disclaimer: “You may discover unanticipated facts about yourself or your family.” Nothing was more unanticipated than the discovery that her beloved father, journalist and documentary filmmaker Michael Maclear, was not her biological father.

Maclear is able to piece together the facts of her biological father’s identity, even the names and locations of her half siblings. But she knows she is unable to uncover the truth of her origins—the hows and whys of her birth—without the help of her mother, her father’s unruly, Japanese ex-wife. And that is where her quandary lies, because her mother is firmly rooted in the present with no interest in reconstructing the past. Furthermore, even if her mother wanted to tell Kyo the entire story of her origins, her ability to piece it together fades as she gradually succumbs to dementia.

As Maclear probes more deeply into her the intertwined story of her three parents—her mother, her father, and her biological father—more questions are raised than can possibly be answered. What is identity? What obligations do we have to people who happen to share our DNA? As her mother’s memory fades, these questions become deeper, more personal. Reconciliation seems impossible to Maclear, though, when the other person will not or cannot break the lifelong silence. Challenging the idea that our life story follows an arc, Maclear instead posits life as a free-form construction of patches of memory, actions and silences.

Maclear’s writing is poetic in the best sense. Using the image of her mother’s wild, rambling garden as a foundation, Maclear examines these questions in detail, without proposing a pat answer to any of them because, ultimately, they are unanswerable. Instead, Maclear allows the reader to struggle with them as she did, granting her audience the space and silence to reconcile the gaps and secrets in their own lives.

When Kyo Maclear takes a DNA test from a genealogy website, her entire family history is uprooted, leading her on a disorienting yet rich exploration of identity.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Cost of Free Land

Review by Deborah Mason

Over 20 years ago, journalist Rebecca Clarren made a life-changing faux pas. While interviewing an Oglala Lakota farmer on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Clarren mentioned that her family had once owned a ranch in South Dakota, in a place called Jew Flats. The farmer said nothing but smiled tightly, and Clarren realized that she had somehow offended him. It would take many years for her to understand fully why the presence of her family’s ranch on Jew Flats would be a source of profound skepticism, anger and sorrow to the Lakota nation.

Clarren’s ancestors escaped persecution in czarist Russia to establish that South Dakota ranch in Jew Flats. They braved drought, loneliness and disease, and transformed the ranch into the wellspring of their good fortune. But there is a dark flip side to this Horatio Alger story: The land, far from free, was paid for in the blood and grief of the Lakota Sioux, who had initially lived there.

In The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance Clarren interweaves the story of her family with the timeline of the U.S.policy of destroying the American Indian nations. She documents in harrowing detail not only the many ways the government lied to, battled against and outright stole from the Indigenous peoples, but also how her family, and many others like them, directly benefited from these depredations. The injustices committed by the government against Native peoples are so vast and comprehensive that their reverberations are still felt—and Clarren makes a strong case that all non-Indigenous U.S. residents benefit directly or indirectly from them to this day.

If telling this history were Clarren’s sole goal, it would be worthy and timely, but this book is far more ambitious. Drawing on Jewish traditions of reconciliation, Clarren seeks to find a path for meaningful reconciliation and reparation for the harm done to Native people. Learning our history is a crucial first step, and Clarren’s helpful research resources makes this task easier. But that is only the beginning of the process, and Clarren’s present-day family provides a remarkable model for compensation, repentance and transformation that can begin to heal the wounds from our past.

Drawing on Jewish traditions of reconciliation, Rebecca Clarren seeks to find a path for meaningful reconciliation and reparation for the harm done to Native American people.
AudioChildren's

Coraline

Review by Deborah Mason

Published 20 years ago, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (3.5 hours) is a near-perfect horror story, pitting brave but misunderstood Coraline against a narcissistic monster in a battle for her soul. Sophisticated and profound, this treasure of a middle grade novel, beloved by readers of all ages, is now available in a new audiobook, performed by a full cast for the first time.

All 11 actors contribute to an excellent re-creation of Gaiman’s creepy world, but three standout performers deserve special mention. Julian Rhind-Tutt, whose voice is tailor-made for gothic novels, is excellent as the narrator, and Julian Clary, who clearly understands feline psychology, is totally convincing as a smug but surprisingly helpful cat. But it is teenage actor Pixie Davies’ portrayal of Coraline that gives this audiobook its power. Davies conveys all of Coraline’s complexity—her courage and loyalty, as well as her whininess and selfishness—with skill and confidence. As a result, this audiobook is delightful.

Coraline is sophisticated and profound, a treasure for readers of all ages and now available in a new audiobook, performed by a full cast for the first time.
NonfictionAudioMemoir

Diary of a Misfit

Review by Deborah Mason

All hell broke loose when Casey Parks came out to her family. But amid all their weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, there was a bright spark that came to dominate Parks’ personal and professional life for over a decade, which she recounts in Diary of a Misfit (14.5 hours). Parks’ stern, conservative grandmother took her aside and told her a secret: “I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man.” Parks’ search for this person sent her back to her childhood homes in Louisiana and Mississippi, and her investigation becomes entwined with her own story of growing up gay in the Deep South.

Parks has been deeply wounded by her family and her church, and as both author and narrator, she tells her story at some remove, as if she’s faithfully recounting it to a friend or therapist while trying not to relive her pain. Ironically, her restraint makes the scars she bears more evident—but it also makes her reconciliation with her past more triumphant.

Read our starred review of the print edition of Diary of a Misfit.

As both author and narrator, Casey Parks’ restraint makes the scars she bears more evident—but it also makes her reconciliation with her past more triumphant.
NonfictionScienceHistory

Control

Review by Deborah Mason

Adam Rutherford (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Humanimal) earned his undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from University College London, including several years studying in the university’s Galton Laboratory. This straightforward sentence hides a deep irony. As readers of his book How to Argue With a Racist know, Rutherford is passionately anti-eugenics—while Francis Galton, for whom the Galton Laboratory is named, was the 19th-century scientist who coined the term eugenics and pioneered its ideology.

Divided into two distinct parts, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics first outlines the history of eugenics, then lays out the scientific, ethical and moral arguments against it. The history is messy indeed. Galton and his contemporaries were brilliant scientists, statisticians and polymaths—but also white supremacists with repugnant ideas. First hailed as a way to promote positive attributes in humanity, eugenics quickly devolved into a racist movement that used mass sterilization and even murder to remove people with “undesirable” traits such as alcoholism, Down syndrome and schizophrenia from the human gene pool. Eugenics laws in the United States inspired Nazi euthanasia laws, and the Nazi classification of races owes a lot to the American model. Most ironically, the pseudoscience of eugenics gave birth to the actual science of genetics.

Rutherford believes this history is not over. He fears the politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs who use eugenic ideas for their own advancement or profit, and this fear gives the second half of the book its power. Rutherford has faith in science. It is genetics, he argues, that provides the best proof that eugenics has never and will never work. Our genome is too complex and intertwined for scientists to cleanly pluck negative traits from or insert positive traits into our biological makeup.

Eugenics is not science, Rutherford explains, but the corruption of science for the purpose of controlling people who are weak, vulnerable and poor. And it is this very corruption, as Control clearly demonstrates, that makes eugenics’ followers unworthy to determine who is and isn’t worthy of life.

Adam Rutherford builds on his previous works in Control, a powerful book that outlines the history of eugenics and offers impassioned arguments against it.
NonfictionAudioSocial Science

All the Living and the Dead

Review by Deborah Mason

From childhood, death neither repulsed nor frightened Hayley Campbell but instead spurred her curiosity. So it was only natural that Campbell, a freelance journalist based in London, would interview people who make a living from death: not just a funeral director and an embalmer but also a crematorium operator, a crime scene cleaner, an executioner and more.

In All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life’s Work (9 hours), author and narrator Campbell is a probing investigator who elicits honest answers from her subjects. She is also an active observer of their work, even dressing a dead man for his funeral. With each interview, it’s clear she is affected by the presence of death, particularly after witnessing the preparation of a baby’s body for a forensic autopsy. 

Campbell’s voice becomes more introspective as she considers how the actions of death workers enable the living to meet death on their own terms. Though ironic at times, she is never ghoulish. Instead, her tone is always even, quietly emphasizing that death is the most natural thing in the world.

Read our starred review of the print edition of All the Living and the Dead.

As author and narrator, Hayley Campbell’s tone is always even, quietly emphasizing that death is the most natural thing in the world.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

Half American

Review by Deborah Mason

World War II is remembered as a conflict between democratic and fascist countries. But during the 1940s, nearly 10% of the residents of the world’s largest democracy were considered second-class citizens because of their race. Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont, a professor of history at Dartmouth College, chronicles how Black Americans had to fight for the right to combat racism abroad because of the racism at home.

The irony of this was not lost on African Americans, who were acutely aware of how segregation kept them from full citizenship. Adopting a “Double Victory” strategy, Black Americans treated the war as a means of defeating foreign fascism and domestic racism. Half American recounts the history of this struggle, from Langston Hughes’ newspaper coverage of the Spanish Civil War to the mistreatment—even murder—of returning African American veterans. Furthermore, Delmont demonstrates that this story is not frozen in the past but is key to understanding—and changing—our present.

This book would have been a significant contribution to our knowledge of World War II history even if Delmont had only focused on the performance of African American combat troops. The Tuskegee Airmen are famous, but fewer people are aware of the Black Panthers, a Black tank battalion that served in Italy, or the Montford Point Marines, who were the first African American marines and fought valiantly at the battles of Saipan and Iwo Jima. But Half American is more than an excellent introduction to this underappreciated chapter of military history. It is also a groundbreaking illumination of African American civilians’ complex involvement in World War II.

In addition to official records, Delmont used archives, oral histories and contemporary coverage from the Black press to document his work. As a result, Half American gives voice not only to prominent African American leaders such as Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall, but also to Black soldiers, factory workers and other everyday people who contributed to the war effort—people who are rarely mentioned in history books, even though they created history.

During World War II, Black Americans had to fight for the right to combat racism abroad because of the racism at home. In Half American, Matthew F. Delmont chronicles that fight.
NonfictionAudio

This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch

Review by Deborah Mason

In This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something—Anything—Like Your Life Depends on It (6.5 hours), Australian journalist Tabitha Carvan offers an exuberant celebration of obsessions. Through her candid exploration of her own fascination with Benedict Cumberbatch, star of “Sherlock,” The Imitation Game and Doctor Strange, Carvan makes the case that women shouldn’t hide or diminish what brings them pleasure—rather, they should embrace it.

Tabitha Carvan
Read our interview with Tabitha Carvan: “When something brings people so much joy, why can’t we just let it?”

Carvan is a witty and ironic writer, and voice actor Tanya Schneider does an excellent job conveying the author’s humorous perspective. Why is it acceptable for a man to plaster his office with paraphernalia for his favorite sports team, but a woman can’t wear her Benedict Cumberbatch hoodie outside her house without embarrassment? Amid the humor, Carvan still takes her subject seriously, and Schneider not only captures Carvan’s perplexity as to why female obsessions remain hidden but also convincingly articulates Carvan’s argument that women need to share their passions publicly. We need to embrace the joy and strength that our passions bring us, Carvan insists.

Both funny and profound, this is a deeply enjoyable audiobook.

Voice actor Tanya Schneider convincingly articulates Tabitha Carvan's argument that women need to share their passions publicly. Both funny and profound, this is a deeply enjoyable audiobook.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean HistoryBiography

One Hundred Saturdays

Review by Deborah Mason

Reading One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank is like watching an artist piece together a mosaic. A splash of blue sea here. A mother’s song over there. The smell of Purim pastries. The flash of first love. But the mosaic is never completed. Instead, a terrible wind descends, leaving the artist to pick up the pieces as best she can and begin a new image.

Here, the artist is Stella Levi, a 99-year-old Jewish woman living in New York City. The mosaic is the Juderia, the main Jewish quarter on the island of Rhodes, where Levi was born in 1923. And the wind is the Holocaust, which reached the Juderia in the last months of World War II and scattered Levi’s parents, family, friends and community. One Hundred Saturdays is the story of that time and place, but it is also much more: a story of friendship, survival, reinvention and courage.

Frank, author of The Mighty Franks and What Is Missing and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, met Levi by chance—or perhaps serendipity—when he rushed in late to attend a lecture, and the elegant older woman in the chair next to him struck up a conversation. The following Saturday, he found himself in Levi’s Greenwich Village apartment, the first of 100 Saturdays that he would spend with her over the following six years. Over the course of those visits, Levi became both a friend and muse as she recounted the minutest details of her life, from its rich beginning to its remarkable present.

Maira Kalman’s illustrations, heavily influenced by Matisse with their deceptive simplicity, rich colors and delicate textures, are perfect complements to Levi’s story, portraying vanished scenes from life on Rhodes before the Holocaust. Together with the text of Frank’s beautiful book, they create a sensitive portrait of an extraordinary woman. Fiercely independent, keenly intelligent and remorselessly honest, Levi refuses to be defined solely by the tragedy of her youth. Her life has been a constant evolution, and her final years are being lived with the same vitality as her earliest ones.

One Hundred Saturdays is the story of a Jewish community before the Holocaust, but it is also much more: a story of friendship, survival, reinvention and courage.

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