Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Aging

One last move for a beloved mother

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The delightful Miss Peggy—singer, writer, speaker, pastor’s wife, loving mother, treasured friend—has spent most of her life moving. As her son, Robert, recollects his family’s nomadic ways, he recalls that Miss Peggy has lived in 19 homes over the course of her life. With grace, humor and love, he warmly and tenderly tells us the story of moving her to a new home and a new life in Moving Miss Peggy.

As neighbors, co-workers, friends and family start to notice Miss Peggy’s forgetfulness and actions that could endanger her and others, Benson and his family get together to discuss how best to move her. Anyone living with a family member afflicted with dementia will recognize the slow, sometimes humorous, mostly painful, but eventually redemptive process of making big and little decisions that involve slowly taking away a loved one’s independence.

Benson’s brother Michael, a pastor, visits his mother in order to persuade her to give up driving. “He seemed always to find the right words to persuade her that the next thing that had to be done was the right thing to do, not just for her family but for her own sweet self.” As difficult as surrendering her car keys and her independence is for her, “giving up the burden of it may well have been a gift.”

Finding a new home for Miss Peggy prompts several questions, such as “Can you see your mother living there?” and “Can you see yourself going there to see her?” Once the family locates the right place, they begin the process of packing and moving, hauling away objects that will be divided among family members, strangers and the trash, all of which represent memories of home and mother for them. In the midst of their efforts to move Miss Peggy, Benson discovers that “if we could each do what we did best, there might just be enough to go round to be all the things Miss Peggy might need her children to be for her. Wherever two or three, or even four of us, were gathered, Someone More would be among us.”

Settled in her new place, Miss Peggy’s wandering days seem to be over. Yet, Benson reflects, “in another way, her wandering days have just begun. She has begun to wander her way into a new life, and she will spend a portion of the rest of her life wandering and wondering her way along from day to day, singing more and more about the sea.”

Benson is a graceful storyteller, and his elegant little meditation offers a powerful parable on the unity of a family coming together to face loss with love and courage.

The delightful Miss Peggy—singer, writer, speaker, pastor’s wife, loving mother, treasured friend—has spent most of her life moving. As her son, Robert, recollects his family’s nomadic ways, he recalls that Miss Peggy has lived in 19 homes over the course of her life. With grace,…

Biography

Letters, legends and lies

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In the middle of May 1536, over a thousand spectators gathered at the Tower of London to witness the execution of Anne Boleyn. Anne has become perhaps Henry VIII’s most famous wife, in part because of his notorious treatment of her and in part because of her own strong personality.

Part biography and part cultural history, Susan Bordo’s riveting new study, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, brings Anne to life through a close reading of existing sources contemporary to her, as well as through a lively exploration of the many cultural representations of Anne, from the 17th century to the present, that have made her a pliable figure, defining her personality by the mood and temperament of the time.

Bordo reminds us that the historical record on Anne is almost nonexistent. In his efforts to eradicate Anne completely from his life and the memory of the court, Henry purged all letters—except for 17 from him to her that are housed in the Vatican—and portraits of her. We know very little about her appearance, and apart from a few inscriptions in prayer books and two letters which may be from Anne to Henry, almost all of our knowledge of Anne is secondhand, coming from “malicious reports of Eustace Chapuys and other foreign ambassadors to their home rulers and various ‘eyewitness’ accounts of what she said and did at her execution.”

Bordo vividly recreates an almost moment-by-moment account of the events leading from Henry’s decision to execute Anne up to her death. Why was Anne executed in the first place? Bordo points out several theories: Her miscarriage might have led Henry to suspect that she was guilty of witchcraft; Henry eagerly embraced Cromwell’s suggestions that Anne was an adulteress; Cromwell acted without Henry’s instigation because Anne had publicly opposed Cromwell’s policies.

In most 20th-century novels, Anne is depicted as a “strong-willed young woman with personal qualities that are quite attractive.” By the early 21st century, Bordo points out, novels such as Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall depict Anne as “selfish, spiteful, vindictive” and a “scheming predator.” Yet, on many websites devoted to Anne and the Tudor period, Bordo discovers that young women view Anne as “neither an angel nor a devil; she was [a] human . . . who was ambitious and intellectual.”

Bordo’s eloquent study not only recovers Anne Boleyn for our times but also demonstrates the ways in which legends grow out of the faintest wisps of historical fact, and develop into tangled webs of fact and fiction that become known as the truth.

In the middle of May 1536, over a thousand spectators gathered at the Tower of London to witness the execution of Anne Boleyn. Anne has become perhaps Henry VIII’s most famous wife, in part because of his notorious treatment of her and in part because…

Medicine

Exploring the spectrum

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Although some medical statistics point out that one in 88 people has some form of autism, the diagnosis is still very little understood. Is it a psychological condition? Is it biological? Are children born autistic, or does their environment contribute to, and perhaps cause, their autism?

In this brilliant book that is part memoir and part scientific study, best-selling author Temple Grandin, one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism, probes the causes of the condition, encouraging us to think differently about it and to embrace the strengths autism bestows.

When Grandin’s mother noticed her young daughter exhibiting symptoms that we now label autistic—destructive behavior, inability to speak, sensitivity to physical contact—she took her to a neurologist rather than to a psychologist. The doctor diagnosed the young girl with brain damage, and Grandin’s mother carried out a program of intense individual therapy, engaging with the young Grandin one-on-one, a therapy now commonly practiced with autistic individuals today. Grandin points out that, given the rapidly changing views about autism and its causes, a mere decade later a doctor might have told her mother that the problem was all in the child’s mind.

Drawing on extensive and in-depth examinations of the science of the brain and contemporary genetics, Grandin challenges the idea that autism is “all in the mind” and merely a psychological condition that can be accurately diagnosed for every individual case. Indeed, there is no single cause or single symptom for autism. The search for causes for autism “involves the observation of neurological and genetic evidence and looking for each symptom along the whole spectrum.”

She points out that every case is widely different and no two people with autistic tendencies can be treated the same way. The spectrum of autistic individuals includes what she calls “three-kinds-of-minds”: pattern thinkers who are able to see and understand the forms behind the words but who have difficulty with reading and writing; picture thinkers who excel at understanding shapes and learn from hand-on activities; word-fact thinkers who perform poorly at drawing but interact with the world through their stellar writing skills. Prepared with this knowledge, schools and therapists should never ask an autistic individual to learn in a way that he or she can’t understand.

In The Autistic Brain, Grandin revolutionizes our way of thinking about autism, urging us not to fall into labeling or believe that we can only ever respond in one way to an autistic individual.

Although some medical statistics point out that one in 88 people has some form of autism, the diagnosis is still very little understood. Is it a psychological condition? Is it biological? Are children born autistic, or does their environment contribute to, and perhaps cause, their…

NonfictionMemoir

The perils of a promised land

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

On August 31, 1984, Anchee Min hurtled through the night into the unknown, flying alone away from the familiarity of family and home into an uncharted territory full of adventures and challenges. “Sitting in the airplane crossing the Pacific Ocean, I felt like I was dreaming with my eyes wide open. I tried to imagine the life ahead of me, but my mind went the other way.”

In her powerful and compulsively readable new memoir, The Cooked Seed, Min pulls back the curtains on her most intimate fears and hopes, inviting us to join her as she travels from her life in China, by turns wretched and loving, to her life in America, often miserable yet ultimately triumphant. Desperate to escape the privations of life in Communist China, where she toils in a labor camp as a young girl and is shipped off like a package to work on propaganda films in Madame Mao’s Shanghai Film Studio, Min tirelessly and haltingly learns English in order to seek a new life in America. Despite her lack of a secure grasp of the language, she applies for a visa, fearful of being turned away and surprised (yet secretly excited) when her application is approved.

Woefully underprepared for coming to America—she is not fluent in English, and she has no friends or family in this new place—Min faces one challenge after another when her plane lands in Chicago. She is almost turned away at customs, but a kindly translator recognizes Min’s talent and potential and allows her through; her first roommate, Takisha, teaches her lessons about the racism and poverty that exist even in the midst of wealth and plenty in American society. She struggles constantly with her inability to understand English, her lack of money—she works five jobs—and her dream of discovering her true identity and embracing it. About a photo taken during her first months in Chicago, she writes, “I looked confident and attractive. . . . The real me was depressed, lonely, and homesick. I craved affection, and I dreamed of love.”

Looking for love and acceptance amongst the harsh realities of her new home, Min falls into an unhappy marriage, becomes pregnant, almost dies giving birth and gets divorced. “I was broken yet standing determinedly erect. I could be crushed, but I would not be conquered.” In the midst of all this, she discovers her talent for telling stories and blossoms as a writer, going on to write six novels in English as well as a previous memoir about her life in China (Red Azalea).

Min’s soulful tale of despair and hope stirs our hearts and souls with its moving, harrowing and often heartrending stories of one young girl’s coming of age in a land of threat and promise.

On August 31, 1984, Anchee Min hurtled through the night into the unknown, flying alone away from the familiarity of family and home into an uncharted territory full of adventures and challenges. “Sitting in the airplane crossing the Pacific Ocean, I felt like I was…

Memoir

The flowering of a friendship

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Like an Aegean zephyr, Marlena de Blasi’s breathless, poetic voice caresses us and carries us along in swooping currents though her newest adventure in the Tuscan region of Italy. Picking up where her previous memoirs (Tuscan Secrets, among others) leave off, Antonia and Her Daughters begins with de Blasi and her husband, Fernando, contemplating their new home in Orvieto. Now that the renovations to their home at 34 via del Duomo are complete, she has lost the solitude and silence in which to write her books, so she sets off to find a quiet pensione in the countryside where she can work in peace, with weekly visits from Fernando.

Soon after she arrives at the guest house, de Blasi meets Antonia, the matriarch of a large family, set in her ways and suspicious of outsiders. Antonia is “startlingly beautiful,” but “if a cold fish could speak, it would have her voice.” While de Blasi at first wonders just what kind of life she has stumbled into, Antonia’s daughters, Filippa and Luce, welcome de Blasi warmly, seducing her with their winsome stories of life with Antonia.

Very slowly, Antonia warms to de Blasi, welcoming her to meals, walking through the countryside in search of wild herbs and regaling her with story after story. “We’d throw open the windows to the night, swaddle the rising bread with quilts against the breeze and . . . Antonia would tell us things. Things we’d forgotten or would never understand about food, about men, about the panacea of bitter weeds.”

Eventually, de Blasi and Antonia grow so close that they walk arm in arm over the hills and through the woods. “Up the hill, back down the hill. As she bends her head down nearer to mine, I incline towards Antonia’s shoulder and we are a triangle, one side shorter than the other, making our way up the slope of the white road.”

De Blasi’s vivacious, seductive and gorgeous voice radiantly evokes the haunting beauty of the Tuscan region, as well as the deep friendship that evolves between her and Antonia.

Like an Aegean zephyr, Marlena de Blasi’s breathless, poetic voice caresses us and carries us along in swooping currents though her newest adventure in the Tuscan region of Italy. Picking up where her previous memoirs (Tuscan Secrets, among others) leave off, Antonia and Her Daughters…

NonfictionMemoir

Making the most of the time that is given

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

As a teenager, Elizabeth Scarboro pictured herself as an international journalist, moving from one country to another, and from one boyfriend to the next. Then one summer she met Stephen, a friend of a friend who was older than his years, with a happy-go-lucky attitude toward life and living with cystic fibrosis, and her dreams vanished as she fell slowly, raggedly and wholeheartedly in love with him.

From the beginning, Scarboro resisted her feelings for this man with a life expectancy of 30 years whose medical condition lurked always in the background. After high school, she set off for the University of Chicago, and he headed off in the opposite direction to Berkeley. As she writes, “We were supposed to be setting out. Whatever we did, we were not supposed to compromise for relationships. . . . I had ambitions and the urge to experience all kinds of freedom, and the last thing I wanted to be was a girl following some guy around.” In the end, however, Stephen’s illness called her bluff, and she realized that, compared to Stephen, “most things would be there [later]. If I wanted him, I had to hurry up.”

In My Foreign Cities, Scarboro invites us to accompany her on every mile of her joyous, often terrifying, sad and exalted journey of love. A natural storyteller, she brings vividly to life her struggles both to protect Stephen, who has a “lightness about him,” and to keep him at her side as long as she can so that they can embrace life to its fullest. She leads us down the path where his medical condition consumes every waking minute of their lives—including a lung transplant, its results and Stephen’s eventual decline—and shares her agony, her joy, her anger and her indecision with us.

In the end, Scarboro hardly feels sorry for herself or the young man who died too soon: “This was what we wanted, to live out being together for as long as we could. It’s hard to explain—the life was difficult but not lacking.”

As a teenager, Elizabeth Scarboro pictured herself as an international journalist, moving from one country to another, and from one boyfriend to the next. Then one summer she met Stephen, a friend of a friend who was older than his years, with a happy-go-lucky attitude…

NonfictionHealth & Fitness

Say it again, that’s my bad ear

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When Sergeant Vince Carter bellowed, “I can’t hear you!” to Private Gomer Pyle in the ’60s TV show “Gomer Pyle,” he wasn’t admitting that he was hard of hearing but making fun of Gomer’s hard-headedness. Today, however, “forty-eight million Americans, or 17 percent of the population, have some degree of hearing loss,” writes Katherine Bouton. “Nearly one in five people, across all age groups, has trouble understanding speech, and many cannot hear certain sounds at all.”

When she was 30, Bouton, former senior editor at the New York Times, joined this group of Americans when she suddenly lost her hearing in one ear. In Shouting Won’t Help, her deeply poignant book that is part memoir and part scientific study, she compellingly chronicles her own struggles with admitting and accepting the severity of her hearing loss. When she first experienced the roar of silence in her left ear, she ignored it; 10 years later, her hearing loss was serious enough to affect her daily life, and by the time she turned 60 she was functionally deaf.

Although Bouton searched for a clue to her sensorineural hearing loss, caused by a defect in the hair cells, doctors could not isolate a cause for the defect, and she slowly and reluctantly started to adjust to her hearing loss. Using her own experience as a starting point, Bouton explores the mechanics of hearing and the numerous ways it can be impaired; the causes of hearing loss, such as noise in restaurants, concerts, subways, airports; and the various conditions (heart disease, dementia, depression) associated with hearing loss. Bouton eventually had a cochlear implant placed in her left ear and now uses a hearing aid in the other ear, and she explores the advantages and the limitations of each technology. Each chapter also features short profiles of individuals, ranging from musicians and composers to nurses and medical publishers, who share their own experiences with a variety of levels of hearing loss and their attempts to come to terms with such loss.

Carefully researched and elegantly written, Bouton’s page-turning book issues a loud and clear call to find solutions to this disability that affects more people every day.

When Sergeant Vince Carter bellowed, “I can’t hear you!” to Private Gomer Pyle in the ’60s TV show “Gomer Pyle,” he wasn’t admitting that he was hard of hearing but making fun of Gomer’s hard-headedness. Today, however, “forty-eight million Americans, or 17 percent of the…

Social Science

Required reading for banishing bullying

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When Monique McClain entered seventh grade in Middletown, Connecticut, she encountered taunts, slurs and insults and eventually physical aggression from her classmates. In the eighth grade in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher endured physical and verbal attacks for over a year because he is gay. In a highly publicized case, Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old student at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, committed suicide after enduring online and in-person taunts and physical attacks at the hands of several of her fellow students, including Flannery Mullins, who later faced criminal charges in Prince’s death.

In her absorbing book, Sticks and Stones, Slate’s senior editor Emily Bazelon captivatingly narrates the stories of McClain, Lasher and Mullins in an attempt to reveal the various ways that bullying affects the victims, the bullies, the families and the communities involved in such cases. She points out that bullies taunt and attack others because they feel that their behavior will elevate their social status, either by distancing themselves from a former friend they now see as a loser or by impressing members of an in-crowd. “How can families and schools dismantle that kind of informal reward system?” she asks. More importantly, “How can you convince kids that they can do well by doing good?”

Bullying comes in all shapes and sizes, but it must satisfy three criteria, as Bazelon explains: “It has to be verbal or physical aggression that is repeated over time and that involves a power differential—one or more children lording their status over another.” She also offers profiles of five types of bullies: the bully in training; the kid who acts like a bully, not out malice but because he’s clueless; the kid who is both a bully and a victim; popular bullies whose subtle taunts create insecurities in victims; and the Facebook bully.

In the era of social media, when taunts and bullying can become more insidious and damaging, Bazelon thoughtfully urges a fresh consideration of the nature and definition of bullying. We must not overreact, and we must be careful to “separate bullying from teenage conflict that is not actually bullying—from drama.” In a courageous conclusion—courageous because it is idealistic and contrary to popular opinion—Bazelon advocates overcoming bullying by instilling character and empathy in our children, teaching them to see that people’s feelings are more important than status and that kindness should be a value that overrides all others.

When Monique McClain entered seventh grade in Middletown, Connecticut, she encountered taunts, slurs and insults and eventually physical aggression from her classmates. In the eighth grade in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher endured physical and verbal attacks for over a year because he is gay.…

Fiction

A place of their own

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

On July 14, 1912, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, the third child of Charley and Nora Belle Guthrie. The Guthries eked out a hardscrabble existence. When Woody was 15, his mother was committed to Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman, Oklahoma (where she died three years later), and Charley packed up and moved to the Texas Panhandle. Woody eventually joined his father in Pampa, in the arid and treeless Texas country, where he experienced a devastating dust storm in 1935.

Woody started playing the guitar and harmonica to earn a living and married Mary Jennings, the sister of his musician friend, Matt Jennings. An inveterate reader and writer and advocate for the downtrodden, Guthrie used his guitar—on which he famously wrote the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists"—his pen and his voice to give voice to those who could not speak for themselves. In 1940, he wrote "This Land is Your Land" as a rebuttal to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," made famous by Kate Smith. In the final verse, seldom ever sung by schoolchildren, the singer points out that "in the shadow of a steeple/by the relief office, I'd seen my people/as they stood there hungry."

During his life, Guthrie wrote more than 3,000 song lyrics, in addition to scores of letters, journals and diaries. Themes of land, social justice and hope permeate his work. In 1947, he completed this novel, House of Earth, which crystallized many of his persistent concerns for the plight of the marginalized, the threat of big government and the hope for the future of humanity expressed in the ownership of a good piece of fertile land on which a person can build a sustainable shelter.

Guthrie first conceived the novel in the 1930s—likely not long after the apocalyptic dust storm of 1935 that blackened Pampa and shook the thin walls of the Guthrie house—but he did not write it until 1947. The story is simple, but just as each verse of Guthrie's songs build one upon the other, the drama builds with each chapter, so that we feel more and more compassion for the characters as they struggle to build a life for themselves in a harsh environment.

Tike and Ella May Hamlin are tenant farmers eking out a meager existence in the Texas Panhandle. In the treeless country, the couple dreams of owning their own plot of land where they can construct a house that will endure the harsh environment. "Wood rots. Wood decays. This ain't th' country of trees," Grandma Hamlin tells them. One day, Tike carries home an envelope containing a booklet from the government about constructing adobe houses, which will endure dust storms, provide warmth in the winter and remain cool in the summer. But this dream eludes the couple, however, when they realize that they don't own the land on which they want to build. Nevertheless, the birth of their child renews the hope that a new generation will own the land where no one can run the Hamlin's earth house down.

The novel echoes the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, as well as the sexual frankness and paean to fertility of D.H. Lawrence. Guthrie captures the voice of the farmers of the Texas Panhandle, and even though the novel is a protest novel, its lyrical beauty brings Tike and Ella May to life, refusing to let them to be one-dimensional characters standing for ideas.

Brinkley and Depp stumbled upon this novel while doing research for a Rolling Stone project on Bob Dylan. In their insightful introduction to the novel, they chronicle the history of the novel—it languished in obscurity in the archives at the University of Tulsa for more than 50 years—and we can be grateful to them for bringing it out into the light of day to celebrate Guthrie's centennial.

On July 14, 1912, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, the third child of Charley and Nora Belle Guthrie. The Guthries eked out a hardscrabble existence. When Woody was 15, his mother was committed to Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman,…

NonfictionMemoir

A toast to friends near and far

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Sidle up to the bar, order a shot of your favorite whiskey, trade friendly greetings and engage in some warm chatter, then listen transfixed as Rosie Schaap, a kind of Irish bard, regales you with tales of the bars in her life, the regulars with whom she has hoisted a few or closed down the place, the moments of love and affection she’s experienced, and the enduring freedom to be herself that “being a woman at home in a bar culture” brings.

In Drinking With Men, Schaap, a cracking good storyteller, takes us along on her journey as she comes of age, follows her heart, falls in and out of love and discovers who she’s meant to be. From sitting on the bar car (at 15 years old) on the Metro-North train, where she discovers her kind of people—commuters drinking enough to get a little buzzed, telling dirty jokes and smoking—through her years as a Deadhead in search of freedom, and into her college and grad school years, when she finds a local bar that serves as more of a community than her college and where the regulars become like family to her, Schaap gets “another kind of education altogether” in the bars she frequents.

Some expand her horizons: Puffy’s is “a protracted, whiskey-soaked lesson in art history and New York culture, a repository of downtown lore and legend.” Some offer a lesson she’d rather not learn: At Else’s in Montreal, she begins to understand that “self-reinvention has a cost, and it is high, and it is terrible.” Each bar teaches her something about the world she loves to inhabit: “There are loud bars where conversation is not a priority. . . . There are quiet bars, lit low and engineered for tête-à-têtes. And at the Man of Kent, which was neither of these things, but a place both brightly festive and undeniably civilized . . . I started to understand, with greater clarity than ever, how to behave in a bar.”

Schaap delivers an affectionate and loving tribute to the bars she has known—with names as varied as Grogan’s Castle Lounge, The Pig, Good World and The Liquor Store—as well as to the many fellow regulars with whom she has become lifelong friends over a pint or a shot.

Sidle up to the bar, order a shot of your favorite whiskey, trade friendly greetings and engage in some warm chatter, then listen transfixed as Rosie Schaap, a kind of Irish bard, regales you with tales of the bars in her life, the regulars with…

Social Science

An enlightening look at modern communities

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book. In The World Until Yesterday, he pushes us to reconsider the contours of human society and the forces that have shaped human culture.

Drawing on both his personal experiences of traditional societies, especially among New Guinea Highlanders, and in-depth research into cultures as diverse as Amazonian Indians and the !Kung of southern Africa, Diamond convincingly argues that while many modern states enjoy a wide range of technological, political and military advantages, they often fail to offer an improved approach to such issues as raising children or treating the elderly.

Hardly naïve, Diamond acknowledges that the modern world would never embrace many practices, such as infanticide and widow-strangling, embedded in traditional cultures but horrifying to modern ones. Yet traditional societies also value societal well-being over individual well-being, so that care for the elderly is an integral part of their social fabric—an arrangement that “goes against all those interwoven American values of independence, individualism, self-reliance, and privacy.”

Ranging over topics that include child-rearing, conflict resolution, the nature of risk, religion and physical fitness, Diamond eloquently concludes with a litany of the advantages of the traditional world. “Loneliness,” he observes, “is not a problem in traditional societies,” for people usually live close to where they were born and remain “surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.” In modern societies, by contrast, individuals often move far away from their places of birth to find themselves surrounded by strangers. We can also take lessons from traditional cultures about our health. By choosing healthier foods, eating slowly and talking with friends and family during a meal—all characteristics Diamond attributes to traditional societies—we can reform our diets and perhaps curb the incidence of diseases such as stroke and diabetes.

Powerful and captivating, Diamond’s lucid insights challenge our ideas about human nature and culture, and will likely provoke heated conversations about the future of our society.

As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book. In The World Until Yesterday, he pushes us to reconsider the contours of human society and the forces that have…

NonfictionBiography

The heart and soul of America

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Still selling out stadiums, arenas and small halls after more than 30 years, Bruce Springsteen continues, night after night and album after album, to deliver rollicking performances and straight-ahead rock and roll, as well as biting songs that both celebrate the glory of being born in the USA and indict our misguided political and social policies.

Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair as you travel with Peter Ames Carlin down Springsteen’s thunder roads in Bruce, his captivating biography of The Boss. Drawing extensively on interviews with Springsteen himself and his family and friends—including the final interview with his beloved friend and saxophonist Clarence Clemons—Carlin chronicles Springsteen’s life from the day he got his first guitar to the teenage Bruce’s conversion to rock and roll the night he sat spellbound watching Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1957.

As a teenager, Springsteen had already developed into a hard-working rock guitarist, driving his bands to play tighter and tighter sets. His doggedness paid off when one of his early bands, the Castiles, snagged a semi-regular gig at Cafe Wha?, New York’s famous rock venue. Carlin moves rhythmically from these formative years through Springsteen’s glory days, when he moved from the shadows of Asbury Park to the light of international fame, and into Springsteen’s latest tour and his new album, Wrecking Ball.

Carlin also plumbs Springsteen’s darker moods, his craving for a better understanding of his father, whose vacant stares during Springsteen’s youth troubled him more than his father’s lectures or criticisms, his deep passion for music and his desire to give his fans the very best performances he can give them.

Because this admiring, yet unflinchingly honest portrait of The Boss allows Springsteen to speak in his own words and convey his own ideas about music and life, this definitive biography leaves all other Springsteen books in the dust of its roaring engines, taking us into the shadows of the man that rock critic Jon Landau once called “the future of rock and roll.”

Still selling out stadiums, arenas and small halls after more than 30 years, Bruce Springsteen continues, night after night and album after album, to deliver rollicking performances and straight-ahead rock and roll, as well as biting songs that both celebrate the glory of being born…

Pop CultureMusicMemoir

A memoir with a heart of gold

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

My, my, hey, hey, Neil Young is here to stay in this rambunctious, affectionate, humorous and celebratory memoir of his wild ride through life from the windswept prairies of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in “Mortimer Hearseburg,” his 1948 Buick hearse, to the windblown walls of Topanga Canyon.

With characteristic grace, he invites us to sit in the passenger seat as he drives down the many roads he's veered onto during his remarkable career, stopping along the way to introduce us to his beloved family, the musicians and friends with whom he has created memorable songs for generations, as well as his cars, guitars and ingenious inventions. One is the PureTone player that allows listeners to hear music the way musicians hear it when they're recording; another is the Lincvolt, a repowered 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible that runs on alternative energy sources.

From his first band in Canada, The Squires, to his days with country-rock pioneers Buffalo Springfield, and his short-lived and sometimes contentious association with super group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, to his solo career and ongoing involvement with Crazy Horse, Young has blown through the musical landscape like a hurricane with the force of his creative genius and innovative spirit. Throughout his career, he has embraced various musical styles, tinkering with new sounds and creating enduring songs such as "Cinnamon Girl," "Down by the River," "Helpless," "Heart of Gold," "The Needle and the Damage Done," and "Harvest Moon," among many, many others. Reflecting on the death of his dear friend Ben Keith, the pedal steel guitar player who played with Young from his album Harvest (1972) to late 2009, Young offers his thoughts on the central role of music in his life: "When music is your life, there is a key that gets you to the core. . . . Crazy Horse is my way of getting there. That is the place where music lives in my soul."

Young's life has not always been easy. He recovered after painful treatments from a childhood bout with polio, weathered major epileptic seizures and learned to live with his condition, and raised two sons, Zeke and Ben, with severe physical impairments. Out of this experience with his sons, he and his wife Pegi built The Bridge School that assists children with severe physical conditions and complex communication needs. In the face of such challenges, Young shares his deep gratitude for life: "I accept the extreme nature of my blessings and burdens, my gifts and messages, my children with their uniqueness, my wife with her endless beauty and renewal."

Along this journey, Young offers insights about former band mates, like David Crosby, Graham Nash, Richie Furay and close friend Stephen Stills. "Stephen and I have this great honesty about our relationship and get joy from telling each other observations from our past," he writes.

Young feels like he's massaging his soul when he makes music, and he makes some of his finest music in this lyrical memoir, massaging our souls by hitting just the right chords with his words.

My, my, hey, hey, Neil Young is here to stay in this rambunctious, affectionate, humorous and celebratory memoir of his wild ride through life from the windswept prairies of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in “Mortimer Hearseburg,” his 1948 Buick hearse, to the windblown walls of Topanga Canyon.

With…

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features