Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

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 population, have some degree of hearing loss,” writes Katherine Bouton. […]
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. In a highly publicized case, Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old student […]
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, Oklahoma (where she died three years later), and Charley packed […]
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 whom she has hoisted a few or closed down the […]
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 shaped human culture. Drawing on both his personal experiences of […]
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 in the USA and indict our misguided political and social […]
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 characteristic grace, he invites us to sit in the […]
Biography

The life of a flawed but brilliant writer

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, many of his fans and friends mourned the loss of the brilliant writer, whose fiction and essays wove filaments of energetic, staccato and sometimes lumbering prose around clever and piercing insights about contemporary society. As the details of his death began to emerge and critics began to publish studies of his life and writing, so did details of Wallace's life-long battle with depression, mental illness, addiction and self-abnegation.

In the first biography of Wallace, New Yorker writer Max (The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery) exhaustingly chronicles the details of Wallace's life from his happy and ordinary childhood in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where his father taught philosophy and his mother taught English, his love of, almost addiction to, television, his tennis successes in high school and his terror at leaving home to enter Amherst—which he decided to attend so he wouldn't have to face any more college interviews—to his on-again and off-again college career, interrupted by episodes of depression, and his faltering rise to success and recognition as a writer.

Max points out that as a high school junior Wallace experienced an unforgettable moment when "he clearly saw the danger of a mind unhinged, of the danger of thinking responsive only to itself . . . . [H]e would derive a lifelong fear of the consequences of mental and, eventually, emotional isolation." In spite of the flashes of brilliance in his writing, Wallace could never grow beyond the menace and threat of his own restless, anxious mind, and even the novel for which he is most praised, Infinite Jest, baffles readers with the labyrinthine excess of a soul lost in the funhouse. Although it rose quickly on the bestseller lists, the novel received a mixed response from critics; the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani famously called Wallace's novel a "big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, reminiscences and footnotes . . . arbitrary and self-indulgent." Much the same could be said of Max’s bloated and uneven biography.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story offers unsatisfying readings of Wallace's own writing, but Max provides a sympathetic portrait of a writer who struggled to show the world what it meant to be a human being—though he never managed to live up to his own expectations for the task.

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, many of his fans and friends mourned the loss of the brilliant writer, whose fiction and essays wove filaments of energetic, staccato and sometimes lumbering prose around clever and piercing insights about contemporary society. As the details of his death began to emerge and critics began […]
Memoir

Connecting on a mother-daughter journey

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

As a teenager, Mia Fontaine repeatedly ran away from home, abused drugs and fought fiercely with her mother, Claire. Desperate to save her daughter, Claire tried several kinds of therapies but eventually settled on a boot camp school in the Czech Republic, where Mia's isolation from the rest of the world forcefully drove both her and her mother toward fuller self-understanding and a new relationship. Hoping to offer guidance on the often fraught nature of the mother-daughter relationship, the Fontaines chronicled their harrowing moments in a best-selling book, Come Back: A Mother and Daughter's Journey through Hell and Back.

In Have Mother, Will Travel, a frequently hilarious and often sobering follow-up to Come Back, mother and daughter set out on a very different kind of trip in search of themselves. Spying an ad in USA Today for a global scavenger hunt, Claire convinces Mia that embarking on such an adventure would be the perfect way to celebrate the success of their earlier book and to get to know each other again. Soon, the two set off on a 16-city, 12-country tour through China, Malaysia, Nepal, Egypt, Greece and the Balkans, encountering numerous challenges and misunderstandings as they try not only to navigate each culture but also to discover more about each other.

Told in alternating voices, this poignant and affecting memoir offers a glimpse of a mother trying to sort out her relationship with a responsible adult daughter while also trying to understand her strained relationship with her own mother. Mia's words offer a glimpse of a daughter sometimes struggling with what she feels are her mother's suffocating bonds, but also appreciating a chance to bond with her mom and learn as much from her as about her.

From Mia, Claire learns how to be a good daughter, finding an expression of unconditional love in Mia's accepting and nonjudgmental ways and consequently realizing that she must treat her own mother the same way. Mia embraces the knowledge that she and her mother will continue to connect on new and different levels as they go through life. In her final words of wisdom, Mia speaks for both of them by acknowledging that the mother-daughter relationship continues well past the time your mother passes on and continues to evolve and deepen; if you're lucky enough to have a daughter, she goes on and the relationship lives through her.

As a teenager, Mia Fontaine repeatedly ran away from home, abused drugs and fought fiercely with her mother, Claire. Desperate to save her daughter, Claire tried several kinds of therapies but eventually settled on a boot camp school in the Czech Republic, where Mia's isolation from the rest of the world forcefully drove both her […]
Animals

Safe harbor for an endangered seal

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

KP2's life begins much as any other monk seal pup; after 10 months of gestation, the seal's mother crawls up onto a nursing beach on Kauai, and KP2 slides from between his mother's back flippers, still slippery and wet and covered in thick black fetal fur. As he begins to stretch out his flippers and get accustomed to his new world, KP2's world changes suddenly as a large male seal—perhaps his father—attacks the young seal pup, almost killing him. KP's cries to his mother for help and for food go unanswered for two days before a group of biologists from the Kauai Monk Seal Team rescue the young pup, whisking him off to a safe place and eventually to Molokai, where the growing seal can be weaned from his dependence on humans in order to be released again to swim with the whales and dolphins.

Working in Antarctica, marine biologist Terrie Williams receives an e-mail from the National Marine Fisheries Service asking if she would like to care for and observe an orphaned monk seal pup in her lab in Santa Cruz, California. Although she has a few initial reservations, especially concerning the cost of transporting the seal from Hawaii to California, she accepts the offer and her adventure with KP2 soon begins. She discovers that very little research has been done on the critically endangered Hawaiian monk seals because of bureaucratic red tape. The same law that lists the seals as an endangered species also prevents humans from touching them. Since KP2 is in captivity in Williams' lab, however, she can study his species in detail and through understanding make progress in saving his species.

In her poignant, forceful and very often hilarious memoir, The Odyssey of KP2, Williams shares her attempts to avoid emotional involvement with the lovable seal as she tries to maintain proper distance from the creature in her scientific experiments. After two years of watching KP2 grow from youngster to mature adult, Williams recognizes that this playful monk seal—which is going blind—can never return to the wild, but she also realizes that he must be returned to his islands. The islanders happily greet the adorable and sociable KP2 as he enters his new home at the Waikiki Aquarium.

Even as her encounter with KP2 teaches Williams more about herself and her work, her inspiring memoir teaches us that the more we are able to read the world around us, the solutions for the preservation of the oceans and the conservation of monk seals and the remaining animals of the world will come naturally.

KP2's life begins much as any other monk seal pup; after 10 months of gestation, the seal's mother crawls up onto a nursing beach on Kauai, and KP2 slides from between his mother's back flippers, still slippery and wet and covered in thick black fetal fur. As he begins to stretch out his flippers and […]
NonfictionBiography

A taste for the good life

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In his acclaimed biography, The Beatles, Bob Spitz delivered an intimate and enduring portrait of four rock stars who changed the course of popular culture. Now, timed to coincide with Julia Child’s 100th birthday, Spitz offers an admiring portrait of the woman who became a rock star in her own world, changing forever the way Americans think about food and cooking.

Drawing deeply on Child’s diaries and letters, Dearie exhaustively—and exhaustingly—chronicles her life from her rambunctious childhood and her socially active days at Smith to her early adult life in government service, her whirlwind romance with Paul Child, and her rapid rise to becoming the television star without whom the Food Network and the passion for celebrity chefs might never have developed.

As Spitz points out, Julia Child wasn’t a natural when it came to the kitchen. In November 1948, an extraordinary meal in Paris changed her life, and she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, gaining the skills she needed to prepare everything from sauces to soups to soufflés. In 1961, she published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and though critics called it a monumental work, it was not until Child promoted the book on the “Today” show that it began flying out of bookstores and ended up on kitchen counters around the country. In 1962, Child’s energetic personality and her love of teaching landed her before the camera for her groundbreaking public television show, “The French Chef,” where she cultivated an audience with her down-to-earth ways, her off-color humor, her lack of concern for perfection and her devotion to making sure that everyone—even the unskilled—could cook the dishes she prepared.

As Spitz so cannily observes, Child was determined to stand at the center of her own world. The story of her emancipation runs parallel to the struggles of post-war American women who were frustrated that the demands of being a perfect hostess and a perfect wife kept them from pursuing other dreams and desires. In Julia Child, these women had not only a role model who steered them from beans-and-franks casseroles to Sole Meunière but also a fiercely independent woman who lived above the rules of both the kitchen and culture.

In his acclaimed biography, The Beatles, Bob Spitz delivered an intimate and enduring portrait of four rock stars who changed the course of popular culture. Now, timed to coincide with Julia Child’s 100th birthday, Spitz offers an admiring portrait of the woman who became a rock star in her own world, changing forever the way […]
Biography

A history of The Boss

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In the same way that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan recognized and used the power of folk music to prophesize about matters of economic and social injustice, Bruce Springsteen has used rock and roll to urge us to transform our cultural and political landscape. In the words of his song, “Thunder Road,” he’s “got this guitar, and he’s learned how to make it talk.”

In Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Marc Dolan’s fan notes trace the conversation that Springsteen’s guitar has carried on with rock and roll from the moment The Boss first picked up the instrument to his latest album, 2012’s Wrecking Ball. Not a conventional biography, Dolan’s compelling book follows Springsteen’s development as a rock and roll musician song by song, album by album and concert by concert as a way of telling the cultural history of our times. Springsteen has famously said that his role is “to be here now,” and Dolan demonstrates in exhaustive detail how Springsteen’s music has been the soundtrack of our lives from the defaulting of Manhattan in the early 1970s, to the shame and hope of Ronald Reagan’s U.S.A., to the shaky good fortune of Bill Clinton’s America, to the haunting days after 9/11 and the culturally estranged home front of the Second Gulf War.

Springsteen’s glory days began in 1957 when his mother let him stay up to watch Elvis Presley on “The Ed Sullivan Show”; he immediately wanted to play the guitar, and the first song he learned to play was “Twist and Shout.” In 1964, his mother bought him an electric guitar and amp for Christmas, and practicing harder than ever before, Springsteen started his journey down the highway littered with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive. Over the course of the next decade, Springsteen played in several bands around New Jersey and New York, honing his guitar riffs and songwriting licks as well as the canny leadership skills that led to the formation of the E Street Band. Springsteen emerged in an era dominated by introspective songwriters such as Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell, but although many of his songs were covertly autobiographical, what made Springsteen’s songs “personal” was not so much their specific autobiographical detail or insights as the vision that they communicated of the observed world.

Springsteen fans may disagree with many of Dolan’s readings of his lyrics, but they’ll likely agree that The Boss is a remarkable performer who can shape an audience’s perception, just as a remarkable audience can shape a performer’s perception, and that together they can shape and be shaped by the moment itself. After all, that’s what rock and roll is all about.

In the same way that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan recognized and used the power of folk music to prophesize about matters of economic and social injustice, Bruce Springsteen has used rock and roll to urge us to transform our cultural and political landscape. In the words of his song, “Thunder Road,” he’s “got this […]
Social Science

Asking the big questions

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In the modern board game of Life, players come to a fork in the journey very early on: get a job or go to college. If they choose college, they might find a higher-paying job in the long run, but they’ll have to take out loans and pile up debt before ever collecting a paycheck. Players might start a family along life’s road, but whichever fork they choose, unlike real life, always leads to retirement and never to death.

The Mansion of Happiness—the prototype for Life—was the most popular board game in 19th-century Britain, and while it was more moralistic than its later American counterpart, it raised many of the same questions about this journey called life. With her characteristically vivid storytelling, New Yorker writer Jill Lepore uses this British game to embark on a stunning meditation on three questions that have dominated serious reflection about human nature and culture for centuries: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die?

Lepore proceeds by exploring the stages of life from before birth, infancy and childhood to growing up, growing old, dying and life after death. For example, she examines 17th-century physician William Harvey’s discovery that human life begins with an egg (as opposed to the long-held belief that humans germinated from seeds), and illustrates the ways that such an idea came to have significant political consequences for women by the latter half of the 20th century. She focuses on the Karen Ann Quinlan case to show how the definitions of life and death—once the province of religion—were suddenly decided not in a hospital or a church but in a courtroom.

Through these stories, Lepore demonstrates how the contemplation of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, so that scientific narratives of progress now promise a different sort of eternity—right up to the vague idea that one day, when the Earth dies, humans will simply move to outer space. In The Mansion of Happiness, Lepore’s refreshing and often humorous insights breathe fresh air into these everlasting matters.

In the modern board game of Life, players come to a fork in the journey very early on: get a job or go to college. If they choose college, they might find a higher-paying job in the long run, but they’ll have to take out loans and pile up debt before ever collecting a paycheck. […]

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