Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

NonfictionNatureAnimals

The Blue Wonder

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Although oceans cover over two-thirds of our planet’s surface, we’ve spent more time and money probing the deep blue of the stratosphere than we have diving into the waters that lap at our shores, to our detriment. With a passionate love for and fervent desire to educate us about the depth of the ocean’s resources, as well as about our lack of understanding and mismanagement of them, Frauke Bagusche’s captivating The Blue Wonder: Why the Sea Glows, Fish Sing, and Other Astonishing Insights From the Ocean plunges us into the mysteries of the ocean. Along the way, Bagusche shares stories of the fascinating creatures that dwell there, as well as the increasing dangers the oceans face from human misuse.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Summer reading 2021: 9 books to soak in this season

As Bagusche points out, many of us only see the ocean from the sands of a beach and therefore never discover the teeming life and unbelievable animals that swim beneath that surface. Guiding readers below the waves, Bagusche introduces them to the microplankton that move, often in phosphorescent schools, throughout the waters, providing food for animals from shrimp to blue whales. She takes us on a journey to the coral reefs, the nurseries of the sea, where we meet clown mantis shrimp and learn about the appendages they develop to help them adapt to the reefs. We also learn why some seas taste saltier than others and about the difficult but wondrous journey of sea turtles, the singing of whales and the giant squids and isopods that are the denizens of the bathysphere, the ocean’s deepest and darkest waters.

The Blue Wonder takes its place alongside Carl Safina’s Song for the Blue Ocean in revealing the marvelous marine world and the urgent need to preserve a dazzling ecosystem we too often neglect.

With a passionate love for the ocean, Frauke Bagusche plunges readers into the dazzling mysteries of the sea.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

The Life She Wished to Live

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Although Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel The Yearling is well known—it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939—its author has yet to receive the same level of attention. A contemporary and friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway (with whom she fished) and Thomas Wolfe (with whom she shared the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins), Rawlings captured the raw beauty and untamed wilderness of north central Florida and its denizens long before the area cut down its orange groves to make way for unbridled commercial development. Ann McCutchan offers an absorbing, affectionate and long overdue portrait of Rawlings and her writings in The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling.

Drawing deeply on Rawlings’ archives, McCutchan chronicles the details of Rawlings’ life, from her childhood in Washington, D.C., where she won a prize in a writing contest for her story “The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty”; to her college years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she edited the literary magazine and met Charles Rawlings, who would become her first husband; to her early years as a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York; to her eventual move to Cross Creek, Florida. There, she established herself as a writer, creating enduring, memorable portraits of rural Florida and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman.

McCutchan looks closely at Rawlings’ letters, stories, novels and memoirs and mines the ways they reveal Rawlings’ writerly mind, her desire to probe the relationship between men and women, families and individuals, and her ability to evoke a sense of place, especially the paradise of her corner of Florida. Rawlings was also, according to McCutchan, cosmically conscious, which led her to write about the interconnections between all living things. The Life She Wished to Live is the biography that Rawlings has long deserved.

The Life She Wished to Live is the biography that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has long deserved.
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

Crying in H Mart

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

“Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” From the moment we read the opening sentence of Michelle Zauner’s poignant memoir, Crying in H Mart, we’re hooked. It’s a rare gift; Zauner perfectly distills the palpable ache for her mother and wraps her grief in an aromatic conjuring of her mother’s presence.

The daughter of a white father and Korean mother in a rural area outside of Eugene, Oregon, Zauner felt closest to her mother when shopping for and eating food together. She shares fond memories of them prowling the aisles of H Mart, the Asian grocery store and food court where she discovered kimchi, rice cakes and tteokguk, a beef and rice cake soup. Growing up, Zauner found that her mother could be distant, but she soon learned that “food was how my mother expressed her love.”

As a girl, Zauner traveled with her mother to Seoul, South Korea, where Zauner met her aunts and grandmother and celebrated life and family with hearty meals. When Zauner was in her 20s, she moved from Philadelphia back home to Oregon to take care of her mother as she died of cancer. As Zauner recounts her mother’s slow, painful decline, she recalls the highs and lows of their life together, often in stories of meals shared with friends and family. After her mother’s death in 2014, Zauner struggled to accept it. She writes, “Maybe we hadn’t tried hard enough, hadn’t believed enough, hadn’t force-fed her enough blue-green algae.”

Crying in H Mart hardly ends in defeat, however. As difficult as her grief is, Zauner celebrates her mother in the very place they shared their most intimate joys, losses and pleasures: H Mart.

Michelle Zauner perfectly distills the palpable ache for her late mother and wraps her grief in an aromatic conjuring of her mother’s presence.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMusic

A Little Devil in America

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Both of Hanif Abdurraqib’s earlier books—They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest—skillfully weave memoir and cultural criticism. He’s known for unraveling our ideas about music, history and culture and then using threads of commentary and insight to stitch a totally original pattern.

With the same ingenuity, Abdurraqib traces the depth and diversity of Black modes of performance in his brilliant A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. Opening with an examination of Black dancers who participated in the dance marathons of the early 20th century, Abdurraqib dispenses prose in motions that shuffle forward, step sideways, leap diagonally and waltz gracefully through five sections exploring different facets of Black performance in America.

Performance can be liberating, like when dance marathons give partners “a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.” It can also provide an opportunity to show off, as in the dance line on “Soul Train.” Performance can demonstrate self-awareness, too—a chance to define yourself by how your body moves when you’re throwing down in a beef, which Abdurraqib vividly illustrates as a kind of performance. He traces the rich history of performance through sketches of Black magicians, dancers and musicians, including Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Josephine Baker, Aretha Franklin and Merry Clayton, who’s most famous for her performance on the Rolling Stones’ track “Gimme Shelter.” Clayton’s chapter may be the best in the book, if only because it gives her the recognition she deserves for her ethereal voice.

A vibrant showcase of sharp writing, Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America attests that Black performance at its root is not simply an outward show of talent but also a means of survival. Read carefully. Abdurraqib’s book is a challenge not to accept the usual explanations for the performances we witness.

Hanif Abdurraqib unravels our ideas about music, history and culture and then uses threads of commentary and insight to stitch a totally original pattern.
NonfictionMemoir

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Searching for one’s identity can be a vertiginous experience, especially for an immigrant shuffling from one culture to another. In Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, Louis Chude-Sokei cannily captures this tumbling free fall through a variety of cultures as he negotiates what it means to be African in Jamaica and the United States.

Chude-Sokei was born in Biafra on July 6, 1967—just past midnight on the day that war was declared between Biafra and the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He learned early that his father, killed in the war, lived on in the country’s memory as a great Biafran hero. His mother—whom he heard referred to as the “Jackie O. of Nigeria,” in part because she always wore dark glasses—moved to the U.S. and sent the fatherless boy away to Jamaica, where he was raised by women and where his quest for a society among men began.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Louis Chude-Sokei shares his experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into his totally original memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way.

Chude-Sokei’s mother eventually brought him to the U.S., where they lived first in Washington, D.C., and then in Los Angeles. In California, he learned what it takes to survive in an unfamiliar culture. He also discovered his love of stories and the music of David Bowie, both of which helped him navigate the rough waters of adapting to a new neighborhood and trying to find himself. Chude-Sokei felt like he had fallen from space, an alien creature in a Black neighborhood that didn’t accept his accent, his Blackness or his love of science fiction and David Bowie. He began to understand the “prejudices and tensions” within Black America and the “pain and promise” of living within them.

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way is a compelling story of the challenges of living what feels like “life on Mars.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

In his totally original memoir, Louis Chude-Sokei captures the prejudices and tensions, pain and promise of being African in Jamaica and the United States.
NonfictionMemoir

Blindfold

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Freelance journalist Theo Padnos only wanted to grab a byline in a prestigious publication for a story about some riveting world event. But as he describes in his harrowing and absorbing Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment, he got much more than he bargained for.

In 2012, equipped with little more than a backpack and a copy of Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, Padnos traveled to Turkey to report on the civil war in Syria. He met up with some young Syrians whom he hoped would help him ease into villages where he could observe the conflict. However, Padnos soon discovered that these men were not journalists as they’d claimed but rather operatives of al-Qaida. They kidnapped Padnos and whisked him away to the first of 13 prisons he would endure over his next two years in captivity.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Theo Padnos shares his experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into his gripping memoir, Blindfold.

Padnos’ exquisitely painful accounts of his torture, and the tortures and deaths of his fellow inmates, both horrify and provoke a strange hope that it can’t get any worse. He survives, in part, by dreaming of a brook in Vermont, letting his mind drift to the most important parts of his life and, eventually, writing a novel on paper given to him by one of his captors. When he’s freed and returns to America, he lives his “first hours of freedom within a bubble of euphoria” before settling into his new life.

Blindfold unfolds at a slow pace with a tedium that evokes Padnos’ own physical and psychic experiences. By the book’s conclusion, we’re drained and relieved that Padnos has survived. With emotional clarity, Padnos endows his captors with humanity, casting them as people struggling to survive in a world turned upside down, just as he is.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Theo Padnos recounts being kidnapped and imprisoned by operatives of al-Qaida in his gripping memoir, Blindfold.

NonfictionMedicineAmerican History

The Doctors Blackwell

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Florence Nightingale and Dorothea Dix loom large as women who reformed health care in the 19th century—in the fields of nursing and mental health, respectively—but Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell have remained largely unrecognized for their roles in medical history. No longer, though, for Janice P. Nimura’s compelling biography The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine reclaims the sisters’ enduring contributions to medicine and to women’s history.

In breathtaking prose and exhaustive detail, Nimura chronicles the lives of the Blackwell sisters—their childhood in England, their immigration to America, the challenges they faced as they made their way in the medical profession and their eventual establishment of institutions that would provide both access to quality medical care for women and a place where women could study medicine in order to practice it.

Attracted to healing as a teenager, Elizabeth saw medicine as a noble vocation, but as she sought to embrace her calling she encountered resistance at almost every turn. Eventually she was able to graduate from Geneva Medical College in New York, becoming the first woman in the U.S. to earn a medical degree, after which she set up a practice in New York City. Emily followed in her older sister’s footsteps, attending Rush Medical College in Chicago and the Medical College of Cleveland, where she became the third woman in the U.S. to receive a medical degree. In 1857, the two sisters founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, and in 1868 they opened the Women’s Medical College in New York City, where Elizabeth taught courses on sanitation and hygiene and Emily taught obstetrics and gynecology. By 1900, the college had trained more than 364 women, and the sisters’ work led to thousands of women becoming educated in the medical field. 

Nimura’s compelling biography not only recovers the lives and work of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell but also provides a colorful social history of medicine in America and Europe during the mid- to late-19th century.

Janice P. Nimura’s compelling biography The Doctors Blackwell reclaims two sisters’ enduring contributions to medicine and to women’s history.

NonfictionBiographyArts & Culture

Mike Nichols

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

With his peripatetic creativity, knack for comic improvisation and canny ability to draw out an actor’s best performances, Mike Nichols became one of the most acclaimed theater and film directors of our time. In the sprawling yet intimate Mike Nichols: A Life, Mark Harris (Pictures at a Revolution) captures the ups and downs, the enthralling highs and ragged despair, of the man whom Harris calls “the last of a certain kind of cultural celebrity—someone who could travel between film and theater, who understood art and politics and fashion and history and money, a man of the world and of his century.”

Drawing on 250 interviews with Nichols' friends and family, Harris traces Nichols’ rag-to-riches story, beginning with the immigration of 7-year-old Igor Michael Peschkowsky (Nichols' birth name) to New York from Berlin. From there the tale follows his father’s death when Nichols was 12, an allergic reaction that resulted in his hairlessness and his eventual move to Chicago, where he took the first steps toward his eventual success. Although he had enrolled as a student at the University of Chicago—where he met and developed lifelong friendships with Susan Sontag and Ed Asner, among others—he ultimately fell in with Paul Sills, who directed Nichols in the improvisation group the Compass Players, the forerunner of Second City. In Chicago, Nichols worked as a DJ at the famed program "The Midnight Special" on WFMT, and he also met Elaine May, with whom he developed a popular comedic partnership.

Eventually Nichols left Chicago for New York City, where he would direct in quick succession the plays Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple and Little Foxes to great acclaim. He then moved into film as the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Harris artfully tracks Nichols' deep desire to work and to inspire others to embrace the power of theater and film. “Movies give us a chance to live other lives," Nichols said, "and we walk on the set every morning thinking, Anything can happen.”

Candid, colorful and chock-full of detail, Mike Nichols: A Life is the biography that Nichols well deserves.

Candid, colorful and chock-full of detail, Mike Nichols: A Life is the biography that Nichols well deserves.

NonfictionMusic

Dolly Parton, Songteller

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

’Tis the season to be Dolly! In Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, the lovable, candid, tell-it-like-it-is singer shares her own story through the lyrics of her songs. While fans love Parton for her crystal-clear vocals and her charming, witty stage presence, she’s always thought of herself as a songwriter first, and this book illustrates her deep devotion to music that captures a moment or tells a heart-rending tale. As she reveals, “I write a lot from my own heart. But I also just have a big imagination. When I was young, we didn’t go to the movies, so I just created my own stories. It’s kind of embedded in me to make up songs and stories.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Don't miss Sarah Smarsh's incisive investigation into Dolly Parton's influence on the women who grew up with her music, She Come by It Natural.

Chock-full of never-before-seen photographs and memorabilia from Parton’s archives, every chapter tells a portion of her biography. Using lyrics from 175 of her songs—including “Coat of Many Colors,” “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene”—she traces the journey from her Tennessee mountain childhood to her role on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” her 9 to 5 days and her bluegrass albums. As she provides a glimpse into the origins of each song, Parton notes that she has “never shied away from any topic, whether it was suicide or prostitution or women’s rights or whatever. . . . Whatever it is, I can say it in a song, in my own way.”

Parton tells her stories with a grin and a twinkle in her eye. Her book invites us to sit a spell as she weaves her enchanting storytelling web around us, wrapping us in the warm, silky threads of her voice and comforting us with her presence.

In Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, the lovable, candid, tell-it-like- it-is singer shares her own story through the lyrics of her songs.

Nonfiction

The Mutant Project

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Advances in medicine often outrun advances in ethics. Scientists are constantly discovering new techniques, procedures and treatments that can alter certain conditions or, in some case, eradicate disease—yet, does the potential of the discovery outweigh its inherent risks? Asked another way, just because we can prolong human life, should we? What, for example, are the long-term risks of the way chemotherapy changes human cellular structure? What are the consequences of genetic editing (cloning, genome mapping) to create and shape human life? With scalpel-like precision, anthropologist Eben Kirksey carves away at these questions in The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans.

The book opens in Hong Kong in November 2018 at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Mapping, where Chinese researcher Jiankui He breaks the news that he has manipulated the genes of freshly fertilized eggs, creating the world’s first “edited” babies. At the conference, Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer in the use of a new genetic engineering tool called CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), comments that she knew this day would come but imagined it to be far into the future. Drawing on conversations with Doudna and other scientists, as well as with medical doctors, corporate lobbyists and biotechnology entrepreneurs, Kirksey follows CRISPR around the world, seeking to discover the ways that genetic engineering will transform humanity.

Various questions fuel his search. Who is gaining access to cutting-edge genetic medicine? Are there creative ways to democratize the field? Should parents be allowed to choose the genetic makeup of their children? How much can we actually change about the human condition by tinkering with DNA? In the end, Kirksey concedes that human bodies are ongoing mutant projects, evolving over time in response to various diseases and treatments. We can control our biological destiny to some extent, but he urges caution, prudence and care as we make “new personal and political choices about the future of human biology.”

The Mutant Project might provoke and disturb as it raises unsettling questions about the nature of human life, technology and corporate and personal greed, but Kirksey’s entertaining and fascinating combination of detective story, medical history and ethics is a must-read.

Scientists are constantly discovering new techniques, procedures and treatments that can alter certain conditions or, in some case, eradicate disease—yet, does the potential of the discovery outweigh its inherent risks? Asked another way, just because we can prolong human life, should we?
NonfictionBlack HistoryBiography

The Dead Are Arising

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The Autobiography of Malcom X remains one of the most captivating and essential books of the 20th century. In it, the iconic activist offered glimpses of his probing self-awareness and his piercing and astute examinations of racial issues in the United States. It provided the outlines of his childhood, his life in prison, his religious conversion and his commitment to and eventual disaffection from the Nation of Islam. Now Pulitzer Prize winner Les Payne’s monumental and absorbing The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X peers into the gaps left by Malcolm X’s autobiography, taking us more deeply into the intimate details of his life, work and death.

In 1990, investigative reporter Payne began conducting hundreds of interviews with Malcolm X’s family members, childhood friends, classmates and bodyguards, as well as with FBI agents, photographers, U.N. representatives, African revolutionaries and presidents and the two men falsely imprisoned for killing him. Drawing on these conversations, Payne traces Malcom X’s story from his childhood in Omaha, Nebraska, through his teenage years in Lansing, Michigan, where Malcolm learned to resist the racial provocations of his white classmates. Payne chronicles Malcolm X’s time in prison, where fellow inmate John E. Bembry challenged Malcolm X by telling the young prisoner, “If I had some brains, I’d use them.” This encouraged Malcolm X to read all he could and to not only engage others with words but also support those words with facts from experts. Payne documents Malcolm X’s meeting with the KKK in 1961 and shows how that meeting sowed the seeds of his disenchantment with the Nation of Islam. In vivid detail, Payne retells the events leading up to Malcolm X’s assassination, offering fresh information about those involved.

The Dead Are Arising is essential reading. Completed after the author’s death by Tamara Payne, Les’ daughter and the book’s primary researcher, it illustrates the forces that shaped Malcolm X and captures the vibrant voice of a revolutionary whose words resonate powerfully in our own times.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Love audiobooks? Check out The Dead Are Arising and other nonfiction audiobook picks.

The Autobiography of Malcom X remains one of the most captivating and essential books of the 20th century. In it, the iconic activist offered glimpses of his probing self-awareness and his piercing and astute examinations of racial issues in the United States. It provided the…

NonfictionBiography

Mad at the World

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

John Steinbeck just might be the novelist for our time. In his sprawling epic The Grapes of Wrath, he captured Americans’ peculiar yearning for a life not their own, the promise of wealth beyond the veil of desolation and the wretched impossibility of such a promise. Steinbeck’s other epic, East of Eden, illustrates the ragged desperation of human nature, wreaking destruction rather than carrying hope. William Souder’s bracing Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck vividly portrays the brooding and moody writer who could never stop writing and who never fit comfortably in the society in which he lived.

Souder, whose biography of John James Audobon was a Pulitzer finalist, traces Steinbeck’s love of story and storytelling to his childhood. As a teenager, Steinbeck immersed himself in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which he translated later in life, and in adventure tales and classics such as Treasure Island, Madame Bovary and Crime and Punishment. This early reading gave him glimpses into the shadowy corners of the human heart and provided him with models for telling tales of people engaged in heroic struggles against the injustices of their eras.

Steinbeck was a born storyteller, a writer who was not happy unless he was working, a novelist a bit out of step with his times (many of his social realist novels appeared during the innovations of modernism) and a reticent man who would rather write than talk publicly about his writing. Steinbeck’s greatest virtue, according to Souder, was his “ability to live inside other cultures, other races; he brought people to life who were otherwise invisible and voiceless.” The first Steinbeck biography since Jay Parini’s more psychological John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995), Mad at the World vibrantly illuminates the life and work of a writer who is still widely read and relevant today.

John Steinbeck just might be the novelist for our time. In his sprawling epic The Grapes of Wrath, he captured Americans’ peculiar yearning for a life not their own, the promise of wealth beyond the veil of desolation and the wretched impossibility of such a…

NonfictionAnimals

Tales from the Ant World

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Whether he’s writing about island biogeography, sociobiology, human nature or biodiversity, naturalist Edward O. Wilson tells a cracking good story. He’s a raconteur who compels us to stop for a moment and listen in rapt wonder to his captivating tales of forays into forests, where he uncovers rotted logs or overturns mounds in search of the great variety of species in the ant world. With characteristic passion and humor, Wilson regales us with Tales From the Ant World, combining memoir and scientific discovery into a spellbinding narrative of his lifelong devotion to myrmecology, the study of ants.

Most of us are familiar with the ants that track across our kitchen counters on warm spring days, but few of us take the time to consider those creatures’ lives. Wilson unveils the ant fauna, revealing the astonishing number of ants in the world (more than 15,000 species, and some have estimated that the number is closer to 25,000 or 30,000), their social quirks (pouring out of their “hidden bivouac,” uncoiling like a rope and moving “hard and fast” from “one stronghold to the next”) and their ways of communicating (of all the social insects that communicate by pheromones, ants are the virtuosos of chemical communication). 

Wilson’s absorbing and delightful book shows how extraordinary (and populous!) this common creature really is. As he puts it, “If Homo sapiens had not arisen as an accidental primate species on the grasslands of Africa, and spread worldwide, visitors from other star systems, when they come (and mark my word, they will eventually come), should be inclined to call Earth ‘planet of the ants.’ ” In his enchanting Tales From the Ant World, Wilson encourages readers to feed those ants in your kitchen and observe them. In doing so, you’ll discover a great deal about the social world of insects and, perhaps, about yourselves.

Whether he’s writing about island biogeography, sociobiology, human nature or biodiversity, naturalist Edward O. Wilson tells a cracking good story. He’s a raconteur who compels us to stop for a moment and listen in rapt wonder to his captivating tales of forays into forests, where…

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