Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

NonfictionHumorAging

Lessons from Lucy

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In his characteristic free-flowing style, Dave Barry stares down aging by taking lessons from his 10-year-old dog, Lucy, in the delightful Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog. 

Barry reveals seven lessons that his beloved Lucy has taught him, and he measures how well he’s succeeded in embracing those lessons. For example, he learns from Lucy how to be present, especially to “Pay Attention to the People You Love (Not Later. Right Now.).” Lucy always lives in the present moment, Barry tells us. When the garbageman comes, she “objects vociferously—she cannot believe we allow this to happen—he is taking our garbage,” but as soon as he leaves, Lucy has forgotten him and gone on to the next moment in her life. Barry tries to apply this lesson to his life with friends and family, working to be present with them rather than looking at his phone. Barry admits that it’s a constant struggle to focus on the people around him rather than on Twitter, but he thinks he’s doing better than he used to.

Another lesson he learns from Lucy is “Don’t Lie Unless You Have a Really Good Reason, Which You Probably Don’t.” When Lucy does something she’s not supposed to do, such as knocking down the Christmas tree, she greets the family with whimpering and “flattening herself on the floor in the yoga position known as Pancake Dog.” Barry points out that dogs are incapable of lying but that it’s more complicated for humans. Barry admits that he’s doing OK with this lesson.

Even as we’re laughing out loud at Lucy’s and Barry’s behavior, his witty and wise stories about aging with his dog touch our hearts.

Dave Barry stares down aging by taking lessons from his 10-year-old dog, Lucy.
NonfictionMemoir

The Lost Prince

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Author Pat Conroy was larger than life, and his work vividly described the dark shadows and bright corners of family life in the South. Like William Faulkner and James Dickey, Conroy told sprawling tales about himself, his family and his friends. He was a lovable, irascible rapscallion and a raconteur who never met a story he couldn’t tell with humor, relish and gusto. Since Conroy’s death in 2016, several books have followed: A Lowcountry Life: Reflections on a Writing Life, a posthumous collection of his own writings; My Exaggerated Life, an oral biography by Katherine Clark; and Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy, a collection of fond memories. 

Michael Mewshaw’s The Lost Prince joins in this flood of memories, offering an intimate, affectionate and candid portrait of his friendship with Conroy. While Mewshaw was living in Rome in the 1980s, Conroy called him one day out of the blue, looking for the companionship of another American writer in Rome. When the two first met, they discovered their shared love of basketball, their similarly dysfunctional families and their fear of flying. Over the next decade, Mewshaw and Conroy and their families were almost inseparable, enjoying parties with well-known literary figures such as Gore Vidal and William Styron. However, after a seismic event in the mid-1990s, the lights went out in their relationship, and the two never reconciled.

In a letter to Mewshaw in 2003, Conroy asked him to write about “you and me and what happened.” In The Lost Prince, Mewshaw lovingly, colorfully and splendidly does just that.

Michael Mewshaw’s The Lost Prince offerings an intimate, affectionate and candid portrait of his friendship with Pat Conroy.

NonfictionEssays

Collected Schizophrenias

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Esmé Weijun Wang delivers stunning insights into the challenges of living with schizoaffective disorder in The Collected Schizophrenias. Wang provides glimpses of her journey toward understanding herself with deliberate, sparkling prose and exquisitely fine-tuned, honest descriptions filled with intimate details of her struggles.

Wang describes herself as an overachieving child; she wrote a 200-page novel in the fifth grade and assigned herself essays to write during school vacations. In high school, when she told her mother that she was considering suicide, her mother suggested they do it together. Later, after she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and accepted to Yale, Wang fled to the East Coast college, where her life began to fall apart at a rapid clip. 

Wang finally received her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder eight years after she experienced her first hallucination. She admits that she finds the diagnosis comforting, as it provides a “framework, a community, a lineage. . . . [A] diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way that has been experienced and recorded.” Once Wang receives her diagnosis, she probes every facet of her illness, sharing her insights with us along the way. Wang brilliantly explores the relationship between herself and her psychosis, writing, “[I]f I am psychotic 98 percent of the time, who am I?”

The Collected Schizophrenias easily takes its place among the best memoirs about illness and the transformative power of embracing it.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Esmé Weijun Wang delivers stunning insights into the challenges of living with schizoaffective disorder in The Collected Schizophrenias. Wang provides glimpses of her journey toward understanding herself with deliberate, sparkling prose and exquisitely fine-tuned, honest descriptions filled with intimate details of her struggles.

Nonfiction

Never Home Alone

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Cockroaches repel us, we run from spiders in our bathrooms, we kill crickets in our basements and moths in our closets, while our dogs and cats track in dirt full of bacteria. Much to our dismay, our homes are filled with uninvited guests. In Never Home Alone, ecologist Rob Dunn examines the biodiversity we live with every day in our basements, bedrooms and kitchens.

In this intriguing and captivating scientific detective story, Dunn examines our mania for keeping our houses clean and sparkling in a futile effort to keep out bacteria, fungi and insects. The problem with these efforts, he points out, is that we too often inadvertently kill off the benign—or even helpful—with the harmful. Dunn eloquently observes that many species we find in our homes have value to us—for example, spiders keep pests such as mosquitoes and flies under control, and certain species of wasps live on the larvae of German cockroaches. If we study these species closely, we may be able to harness these “good” bacteria for commercial or medical purposes, such as making antibiotics.

Dunn peers closely at many of the aspects of our daily lives, like showering, which introduce us to both good and bad bacteria. As he points out, “the showerhead is one the of the simplest ecosystems in your house.” It contains in its biofilm—the gunk we find in the showerhead whenever we clean it (if we clean it!)—mycobacterial strains, some of which can make us sick and some of which are harmless. Scientists continue to work to identify the hundreds of mycobacteria in such biofilms and how they affect us.

Never Home Alone posits that if we look around us as Dunn does, we can begin to see the glorious biodiversity of our indoor worlds and wonder at its complexity and capacity.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Rob Dunn. 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Cockroaches repel us, we run from spiders in our bathrooms, we kill crickets in our basements and moths in our closets, while our dogs and cats track in dirt full of bacteria. Much to our dismay, our homes are filled with uninvited guests. In Never Home Alone, ecologist Rob Dunn examines the biodiversity we live with every day in our basements, bedrooms and kitchens.

NonfictionMemoir

There Will Be No Miracles Here

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, 12-year-old Casey Gerald gathers with family and friends as they wait for the world to end and for God to usher in a new world with Jesus’ return. As midnight passes and the world remains unchanged, Gerald slowly recognizes the yawning gap between the illusory “truths” he’s been told and the facts of this world. In his compulsively readable memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here, Gerald writes about coming into the light of reality in a world filled with deceit and loss, love and hope.

Growing up just outside Dallas, Texas, Gerald moves from one disappointment to another, struggling to make sense of his world and his family. His father, once a great football player, is an “inconvenience” of a father. After his mother disappears from his life with no explanation, Gerald and his sister live off their mother’s disability checks in a small apartment. A gifted athlete, Gerald achieves stardom as a high school football player and then wins a football scholarship to Yale, where he excels not only on the field but also in the classroom. During his years at Yale, he continues to struggle with the complexities of his identity as a gay black man, and he has difficulty envisioning a future for himself. Before the financial collapse of 2008, Gerald works on Wall Street, where he sees the fraud underlying the financial institutions’ operations. In the final and most compelling chapter of the book, Gerald riffs on the major moments of his life, sharing his current vision of working for free with local citizens on behalf of the common good.

Gerald’s staccato prose and peripatetic storytelling combine the cadences of the Bible with an urgency reminiscent of James Baldwin in this powerfully emotional memoir.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, 12-year-old Casey Gerald gathers with family and friends as they wait for the world to end and for God to usher in a new world with Jesus’ return. As midnight passes and the world remains unchanged, Gerald slowly recognizes the yawning gap between the illusory “truths” he’s been told and the facts of this world. In his compulsively readable memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here, Gerald writes about coming into the light of reality in a world filled with deceit and loss, love and hope.

NonfictionLiterature

When poems are psalms

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Quite simply, Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light is a beautiful book, floating as it does on elegant, lyrical prose. Wiman seeks to glimpse the ways that art and faith reflect and tangle with each other, and in doing so he offers graceful meditations on the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Philip Larkin and Donald Hall, among others.

After a meeting with Seamus Heaney that is marked as much by silence as words, Wiman recalls that the poet’s work “could . . . take that inchoate edge of existence and give it actual edges. He could bring the cosmic into the commonplace. . . . He could make matter, inside the space of a poem, immortal, or make the concept of eternity, in more than one sense, matter.” After a frustrating week of trying to write poetry, Wiman grabs a copy of Don Quixote from his bookshelf, losing himself for three days in its prose and story; he then emerges to discover that the “existential key to his soul had been unlocked.” Reflecting on this moment, he shares his insights into faith and art: “It has been my experience that faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that knows its object.” Wiman reveals that faith and art give form to feelings that are incipient, and they offer us a means “whereby we can inhabit our fear and pains rather than they us, to help us live with our losses rather than being permanently and helplessly haunted by them.”

Luminous and moving, He Held Radical Light brilliantly reveals the inextricable bonds of poetry and faith, and it serves as an evocative companion to Wiman’s 2013 memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.

Quite simply, Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light is a beautiful book, floating as it does on elegant, lyrical prose. Wiman seeks to glimpse the ways that art and faith reflect and tangle with each other, and in doing so he offers graceful meditations on the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Philip Larkin and Donald Hall, among others.

NonfictionMilitary History

Dispatches from the front

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The physical and psychological tolls of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on military personnel too often remains hidden from view. In The Fighters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers narrates the stories of six combatants, peeling back the curtain on these individuals’ sacrifices, their commitment despite their nagging uncertainty about the morality of the war, and their lives after service.

Inspired by watching the jets from a nearby air base buzz the cotton farm where he grew up in Texas, Navy Lieutenant Layne McDowell decided early in life that he wanted to fly fighter jets. After enlisting, he gets his chance to fly missions over Afghanistan following September 11, and he confidently settles in to achieve his mission. On his earliest bombing missions, though, he feels a lingering chill and wonders whether he has killed children or a family with his bombs.

Navy hospital corpsman Dustin Kirby returns home from the base in Jacksonville, North Carolina, not yet having faced action in Iraq, to learn that his cousin with whom he had enlisted, Joe Dan Worley, has lost a leg in Iraq; upon hearing the news Kirby thinks that the same will happen to him when he sees action.

Drawing on his reporting from these two wars, Chivers vividly brings to life these combatants, caught in a web of circumstances beyond their immediate control, who are determined to serve America and the country in which they find themselves assigned to duty. The Fighters offers an absorbing and indelible account of war and its costs.

The physical and psychological tolls of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on military personnel too often remains hidden from view. In The Fighters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers narrates the stories of six combatants, peeling back the curtain on these individuals’ sacrifices, their commitment despite their nagging uncertainty about the morality of the war, and their lives after service.

NonfictionMemoir

A heartbreaking memoir of grief

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

One late morning in August, Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, in their living room, gasping for breath. In a surreal flurry, Santlofer frantically dials 911 while urging his wife to hold on. Soon he’s standing against the living room wall watching his wife die, even as paramedics try to save her.

Joy’s death leaves her husband bereft, and Santlofer struggles to live with his grief, a process he details in his heart-rending, poignant memoir, The Widower’s Notebook.

Following Joy’s death, Santlofer spends many sleepless nights not only reliving her death but also recalling the many tender, angry, sad and joyous moments of more than 40 years of married life. On one of those sleepless nights, he writes with fits and starts in a notebook, trying to bring some peace to his restless mind. He also starts to draw pictures of Joy and their daughter, Dorie. “Drawing,” he writes, “has made it possible for me to stay close to Joy when she is no longer here . . . grief is chaotic; art is order.” In the pages of his notebook, Santlofer reflects on the importance of paying attention to the pain of grief: “Better to have painful memories than no memories at all.” He meditates on the many things he misses about Joy, as well as the stupid things that smart people say to grieving friends. Even after he releases Joy’s ashes, Santlofer shares the raggedness of his still-raw emotions, admitting that he’ll never stop crying.

Santlofer’s honesty, his focus on the moments that remind him of Joy and their life together, and his beautifully crafted, tender prose make for heartbreaking yet page-turning reading.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One late morning in August, Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, in their living room, gasping for breath. In a surreal flurry, Santlofer frantically dials 911 while urging his wife to hold on. Soon he’s standing against the living room wall watching his wife die, even as paramedics try to save her.

NonfictionHistory

A history of power

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance. In a fast-paced narrative, he conducts readers on a journey from humanity’s dependence on wood as the primary fuel source to the use of coal and up to the development of nuclear energy and solar energy.

Along the way, Rhodes introduces readers to inventors and scientists whose discoveries fueled work on various methods of extracting and harnessing different sources of energy. Readers will be familiar with stories about Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity and James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, but Rhodes also introduces lesser-known innovators like Denis Papin, the 18th-century scientist who invented a double-acting steam engine that Watt used as a model, but whose inventions were never supported by others, and Richard Trevithick, the 19th-century inventor of a portable steam engine, among many others.

Rhodes judiciously points out that the overdependence on various sources of energy leads to their depletion and to dangerous threats to health such as air and water pollution. Rhodes concludes that the greatest challenge for the 21st century will be limiting global warming while providing energy for a population that will grow by 25 percent by 2100. This exceptional book is required reading for anyone concerned about the human impact on the future of the world. Rhodes optimistically predicts that by using all sources of energy—nuclear, solar and renewable resources—the world can meet the needs of its growing population.

Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance. In a fast-paced narrative, he conducts readers on a journey from humanity’s dependence on wood as the primary fuel source to the use of coal and up to the development of nuclear energy and solar energy.

Nonfiction

When the levee breaks

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When it comes to natural disasters, the question is not so much “if” but “when.” In certain areas of the world, rivers will continue to flood, earthquakes will continue to shake the earth, and volcanoes will continue to erupt. Anyone living in these areas exists in an uneasy truce with nature, always wondering when the next disaster will strike. In her fascinating study, The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do about Them), seismologist Lucy Jones examines 11 of history’s most destructive natural events, from the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and the floods in Sacramento in 1861-1862 to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 and the great 1927 flood in Mississippi, to reveal what we can learn from them.

As Jones points out so astutely, humans label earthquakes and other natural activities “disasters” because of their effects on human lives, yet such events are simply a fluctuation in the natural environment necessary for the support of life. While many cultures have found ways to be resilient—even returning to the scene of a disaster to rebuild—she offers advice about living in areas prone to natural disasters (though any area, she counsels, could experience them): “Don’t assume government has you covered,” “work with your community,” “remember that disasters are more than the moment at which they happen.”

Jones’ fascinating book takes a long view at natural events in order to help us understand our environment and to prepare for and survive natural disasters.

When it comes to natural disasters, the question is not so much “if” but “when.”
NonfictionMemoir

An erudite look back at a life devoted to science

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In Maker of Patterns, Freeman Dyson weaves a quilt sewn from the colorful memories of the early years of his life. The Princeton physicist emeritus stitches together the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and the professional and personal triumphs and failures of his early life in this collection of letters, written mostly to his family from 1941-1978. He interweaves his later reflections between the letters, commenting on various events or figures he’s described in the letters.

In most of the letters, Dyson describes his day-to-day life, but he also reflects on his love of languages, literature and history and his evolving work in physics as he moves from Trinity College in Cambridge, England, to Cornell and eventually to Princeton. Zelig-like, Dyson witnesses many of the most momentous events of the 20th century, from the end of World War II and the hydrogen bomb to the civil rights movement and the Apollo moon landing. The most interesting aspects of his letters are his observations about figures such as Robert Oppenheimer—“unreceptive to new ideas in general”—theologian and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr—who had a “reputation for being gloomy”—and physicist Edward Teller—“he seems to do physics for fun rather than for glory”—among others. Dyson also chronicles his two marriages, admitting that he thinks he’s a better father than a husband, as well as his growing work in atomic physics as he tries to apply his theories to nuclear problems. His final reflection looks to the future, and he warns that pure science is best “driven by intellectual curiosity, but applied science needs also to be driven by ethics.” Dyson is hopeful that his granddaughter and her generation will have a chance to make this happen.

Maker of Patterns reveals a glimpse into the keenly curious mind and the passionate life of one of our greatest scientists and public figures.

In Maker of Patterns, Freeman Dyson weaves a quilt sewn from the colorful memories of the early years of his life. The Princeton physicist emeritus stitches together the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and the professional and personal triumphs and failures of his early life in this collection of letters, written mostly to his family from 1941-1978. He interweaves his later reflections between the letters, commenting on various events or figures he’s described in the letters.

NonfictionMemoir

One final farewell from Pat Conroy

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been without Pat Conroy’s lovable, gruff voice for three years now. When he died on March 4, 2016, we lost one of the last of a generation of Southern writers whose humorous, riveting, sad, terrifying and redemptive stories captured the ragged ways families fall in and out of love and hope. From his first novel, The Water Is Wide (which catapulted Conroy to a fame he never quite knew how to navigate), to Beach Music, his novels, like Thomas Wolfe’s glorious pageants, portray the struggle of finding home again and living in families whose steel-edged sentimentality prevents them from ever acknowledging the hard truths of abuse, failed love and violence.

The 2016 release of A Lowcountry Heart gave readers a chance to hear his entertaining voice as he regaled them with his reflections of the writing life. Now, in My Exaggerated Life, we get to hear Conroy’s voice again, unadorned and speaking plainly and cantankerously about his struggles and his triumphs in life. Between 2014 and 2016, Conroy spoke on the phone to biographer Katherine Clark—who co-wrote Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet with another Southern raconteur, Eugene Walter—every day for an hour or more; no topic was off limits. Clark weaves these conversations into a revealing biography structured by the places Conroy called home over the years: Beaufort, Atlanta, Rome, San Francisco and Fripp Island. Conroy admits his mistake in marrying Lenore Fleischer, his second wife, even as he rages over her taking away their daughter, Susannah, from him in the divorce. Conroy mourns the loss of Susannah—they never reconciled—deeply. He learns through therapy that he gets involved with people because he feels he needs to rescue them. He tells delightful stories about his years with his publisher, Nan Talese, and their work together.

Every page of My Exaggerated Life contains a gem from Conroy, despite the pain and vulnerability he shares through the book. His love of reading and writing fills the air that he breathes: “My deepest living is in the imagination of others, when I take that magic carpet ride of being a reader. . . . I think that’s why I want to write, to make others feel that way.” Welcome to Conroy’s magic carpet, and enjoy the ride.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been without Pat Conroy’s lovable, gruff voice for three years now. When he died on March 4, 2016, we lost one of the last of a generation of Southern writers whose humorous, riveting, sad, terrifying and redemptive stories captured the ragged ways families fall in and out of love and hope.

NonfictionHistory

How things are made

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Factories conjure up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” and the claustrophobic, dangerous and soul-killing multistory buildings of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Joshua B. Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World weaves these grim visions of factories into a broad and compulsively readable cultural history of the birth and development of factories and their impact on society.

In 18th-century England, John and Thomas Lombe erected the first modern factory, their Derby Silk Mill—a “five-story, rectangular brick building, its façade punctured by a grid of large windows”—and filled it with a large workforce engaging in coordinated production using machinery, which was powered by a waterwheel. Freeman deftly chronicles the coming-of-age of factories and the changes, both positive and negative, they brought to the world. The advent of steel mills in mid-19th-century western Pennsylvania, for example, increased the production of steel but also resulted in bloody battles between workers and owners over working conditions. When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in his factories, productivity increased; however, workers were engaged in repetitious, mind-numbing tasks. By the mid-1980s, large factories in the U.S. were shutting down, causing a decline in manufacturing jobs. In the present, big factories continue to turn out products in China, and electronic firms such as Pegatron have more than 100,000 people working in their factory near Shanghai, with over 80,000 of them living in crowded factory dormitories.

Freeman’s fascinating history of factories, even with its darker chapters of labor unrest, illustrates that humans have persistently searched for ways to reinvent the world, striving to find ways to make their lives and work easier.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Factories conjure up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” and the claustrophobic, dangerous and soul-killing multistory buildings of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Joshua B. Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World weaves these grim visions of factories into a broad and compulsively readable cultural history of the birth and development of factories and their impact on society.

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