Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Nonfiction

When up is down

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

What will happen to the Earth when the North Pole and South Pole reverse their positions? How will human society be affected when such a reversal causes a weakening of the Earth’s electromagnetic field? Will mass extinctions occur in species that use the Earth’s magnetic fields to find food or to migrate to winter homes?

Acclaimed science journalist Alanna Mitchell (Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis) asks these and other questions in her mesmerizing The Spinning Magnet. Part detective story and part history of science, Mitchell’s galvanizing story chronicles the tales of the scientists who research the movement of the poles, the power of electromagnetism, the force of the Earth’s magnetic fields and the deleterious effects of solar radiation on Earth. She introduces us to Bernard Brunhes, the French physicist who first discovered that the planet’s two magnetic poles had once switched places. Scientists following up on his findings discovered that the poles had reversed their positions more than once and that a confluence of events—the Earth’s diminishing electromagnetic field and the increase in solar storms—over the past century indicate that the possibility of another such reversal continues to grow more likely.

Mitchell points out that the reversal of the poles will have dire consequences for the world. Electrical grids will be disrupted and millions will live in the dark for days; airplanes will lose the capability to navigate over the poles; satellite systems will cease to function, causing widespread havoc around the world.

In the same vein as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Mitchell’s captivating book shocks us into contemplating the physical forces that keep our world spinning that we take for granted every day.

What will happen to the earth when the North Pole and South Pole reverse their positions? How will human society be affected when such a reversal causes a weakening of the Earth’s electromagnetic field? Will mass extinctions occur in species that use the Earth’s magnetic fields to find food or to migrate to winter homes?

NonfictionBiography

A man vindicated by history

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken is a page-turning story of a how a now largely forgotten figure could have turned the tide of the Vietnam War if someone in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had just listened to him.

Drawing deeply on previously unavailable archival materials, Boot deftly chronicles the life and career of Edward Lansdale, the CIA operative and Air Force officer who allegedly was the model for Alden Pyle in The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Tracing Lansdale’s sheltered childhood and youth, Boot portrays a young man fascinated by the perceived romance of Southeast Asia. Later, in his short-lived career in advertising, Lansdale developed his trademark knack for honesty, insolence and an ability to see others as equals—qualities that would lay the foundation of his successful covert work in the Philippines and Vietnam.

During the United State’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Lansdale, working as a CIA operative, argued that the U.S. could operate most effectively not by increasing firepower but by making Saigon’s government more “accountable, legitimate, and popular to the people it aspired to serve.” Boot sums up Lansdale’s policy of friendly persuasion to win “hearts and minds” with three L’s—Look: understand how the foreign society works and don’t impose outside ideas that won’t translate to the society; Like: become a sympathetic friend to the leaders of the society; Listen: hear out the leaders’ ideas.

Boot’s mesmerizing, complex biography and cultural history not only recovers Lansdale and his foreign policy strategies but also illustrates the ways that those strategies might be effective in dealing with various military conflicts today.

Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken is a page-turning story of a how a now largely forgotten figure could have turned the tide of the Vietnam War if someone in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had just listened to him.

NonfictionMusic

Legends of rap

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Drawing on interviews with members of N.W.A.—which founding member Ice Cube once famously called the “World’s Most Dangerous Group—their friends, families and musical associates, journalist Gerrick Kennedy vividly tells the fast-paced, captivating story of the group’s rise, fall and enduring legacy in Parental Discretion Is Advised.

With the staccato, sure-fire delivery of a rap artist, Kennedy chronicles the early lives of each of N.W.A’s members—Eazy-E, who died of complications of AIDS in 1995, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella—and how they came together to form N.W.A. Dre and Eazy met up as members of the World Class Wrecking Crew, mixing and sampling music at crowded venues around Los Angeles; the two saw rap as way of achieving a better life for themselves. The two eventually meet up with MC Ren, DJ Yella and Ice Cube, who writes many of the lyrics for the group’s biggest hits, including “F*ck Tha Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta.” When the group releases Straight Outta Compton in 1988, the album launches their careers even as it marks the beginning of the end for the group. Kennedy chronicles the now well-known story of Ice Cube’s financial disputes with Eazy and Dre and his subsequent move to a successful solo career, as well as the predatory management practices of their first manager, Jerry Heller. As Kennedy points out, N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton was a “sonic Molotov cocktail that ignited a firestorm with acidic lyrics which shocked the world.”

Kennedy’s compulsively readable book shines a glowing light on a brilliant group once accused of destroying America’s moral fabric but now occupies a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for their astonishing contributions to music.

Drawing on interviews with members of N.W.A.—which founding member Ice Cube once famously called the “World’s Most Dangerous Group—their friends, families and musical associates, journalist Gerrick Kennedy vividly tells the fast-paced, captivating story of the group’s rise, fall and enduring legacy in Parental Discretion Is Advised.

NonfictionEssays

The final words of a beloved genius

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When Oliver Sacks died in 2015, the world lost a writer whose insatiable curiosity about the connections between every facet of life permeated his elegant, joyous and illuminating essays and books. His memoirs, such as Uncle Tungsten, reveal a man peering into the corners of life and discovering sparkling rays connecting family life, human nature and the life of the mind. His books, from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat to Musicophilia, lead us gently and warmly into the labyrinths of psychology and the quirkiness of science without losing us along the way.

Two weeks before he died, Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness and directed the book’s three editors to arrange its publication. Although a number of the essays in this collection appeared previously in The New York Review of Books (the book is dedicated to the late Robert Silvers, its longtime editor), they read as if they’ve been written just for us. In the essays, Sacks moves over and through topics ranging from speed and time, creativity, memory and its failings, disorder, consciousness, evolution and botany. In a fascinating essay on Charles Darwin, Sacks reminds us that Darwin was deeply interested in botany and spent much of his time following the publication of The Origin of Species exploring the evolution of plants. Sacks points out that Darwin illuminated for the first time the coevolution of plants and insects. Creativity, according to Sacks, is “physiologically distinctive. . . . If we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring.”

Sacks’ golden voice and his brilliant insights live on in the essays collected in The River of Consciousness, and for that we’re fortunate.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sacks’ golden voice and his brilliant insights live on in the essays collected in The River of Consciousness.

Nonfiction

Where stories and science meet

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Almost 20 years ago, in his book Consilience, the prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson argued for the unity of all human knowledge. In between writing about ants and island biogeography, Wilson has turned out eloquent and forceful works that compel us to reconsider the origins of human nature, the place of humans in the biosphere and the role of humans in preserving biodiversity in our world.

E.O. Wilson’s rich and provocative The Origins of Creativity singles out creativity—expressed in the stories we tell, the movies we watch, the books we write—as humanity’s defining trait. He locates the origins of creativity in hunter-gatherer societies 1,000 millennia ago when individuals would gather around the campfire to tell stories to entertain themselves or to forge bonds with others in the circle. Focusing on innovation, language, metaphors and irony, Wilson traces the ways that creativity serves as common ground for science and the humanities. The two modes of inquiry still have work to do, for the humanities must still strive to understand the deep genetic origins of consciousness, and science must continue its quest to understand the ancient values and feelings that make us human. He urges a “third enlightenment” in which we recognize that science and the humanities permeate each other. “The act of discovery,” he writes, “is completely a human story and scientific knowledge is the absolutely humanistic product of the human brain.”

Regaling us with stories of his meetings with Nabokov, his encounters with movies that illustrate deep human archetypes (the hero, the quest), and his preferences for the beauty of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby over the social gossip of Jonathan Franzen’s novels, Wilson movingly illustrates the dynamic character and the depths of the creative process.

E.O. Wilson’s rich and provocative The Origins of Creativity singles out creativity—expressed in the stories we tell, the movies we watch, the books we write—as humanity’s defining trait; its “ultimate goal,” he points out, is “self-understanding.”

NonfictionLiterature

Of man’s first disobedience

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, September 2017

The story of Adam and Eve occupies two short chapters early in the biblical Book of Genesis and is never mentioned again in the Bible. But the story, as Stephen Greenblatt so vividly and beautifully points out in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, lies at the foundation of Western culture’s enduring questions about the origins of human nature and our moral shortcomings.

With his typical eloquence, Greenblatt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Swerve, explores the life of a biblical story that artists, philosophers, theologians and poets have struggled for hundreds of years to understand and interpret. Augustine of Hippo laid out the most famous interpretation of the story by using the tale of Adam and Eve’s transgressions as the centerpiece for his own concept of original sin: We’re born sinners, since the act of sin is transmitted through sexual intercourse. For Augustine, as Greenblatt so felicitously puts it, “human sinfulness is a sexually transmitted disease.” The fourth-­century monk Jerome laid the blame for the couple’s wrongdoings at Eve’s feet, an interpretation that continues to foster mistreatment of women in churches and in society. Greenblatt paints an exquisite portrait of artists such as Albrecht Dürer, who imagined the beauty of the original couple in his engraving “The Fall of Man,” which illustrates, for Greenblatt, a “vision of those perfect bodies that existed before time and labor and mortality began.” In John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” according to Greenblatt, Adam and Eve finally become real, depicting their struggle with freedom and innocence and the tension between the forces of good and evil.

In the end, Greenblatt elegantly concludes that the story of Adam and Eve is a powerful myth that deeply informs our understandings of temptation, innocence, freedom and betrayal, the choice between good and evil.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The story of Adam and Eve occupies two short chapters early in the biblical Book of Genesis and is never mentioned again in the Bible. But the story, as Stephen Greenblatt so vividly and beautifully points out in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, lies at the foundation of Western culture’s enduring questions about the origins of human nature and our moral shortcomings.

NonfictionBiography

A marriage of lyrics and melodies

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

They’re the greatest songwriters you've probably never heard of, but the songs that Boudleaux and Felice Bryant wrote might be part of the soundtrack of your life: “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Bye, Bye, Love,” “Wake Up, Little Susie” and “Devoted to You,” all made famous by the Everly Brothers in the late 1950s. Fans of the University of Tennessee also sing one of the Bryants’ songs—“Rocky Top”—many times every game day, and the rousing tune is now the Tennessee state song. Just a glimpse at the list of singers who have recorded the Bryants’ songs reveals a gathering of the royalty of country, pop and rock music: Kitty Wells, Eddy Arnold, George Jones, Ricky Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Nazareth, Simon and Garfunkel, and Donnie Osmond, among many others.

In the lovingly crafted All I Have to Do Is Dream: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story, Lee Wilson (daughter-in-law of her subjects) offers a tender and passionate portrait of the Bryants, who were among Nashville’s first professional songwriters. Drawing on interviews, anecdotes and archives, Wilson provides both a fan’s appreciation and what appears to be the first biography of the couple. She traces the lives of Boudleaux and Felice from childhood and youth to their first meeting in a hotel in Milwaukee, their elopement, their early struggles as songwriters and their eventual success and rise to the top as two of Nashville’s most respected and sought-after songwriters.

Born in Georgia to a musical family, Boudleaux (named for a French soldier who saved his father's life in World War I) got a violin for his fifth birthday and by the time he graduated from high school he was playing with the string band Uncle Ned and His Texas Wranglers, and then with Hank Penny and His Radio Cowboys, and on the WSB Barn Dance. Felice was a native of Milwaukee and a natural actor; as a young child she “single-handedly re-enacted for neighborhood kids the musicals she saw, taking all the parts and singing them herself.” She loved music and words—she read and re-read The Best Loved Poems of the American People—and Wilson points out that Felice’s love of poetry gave her a familiarity with melody and rhythm that she brought to her writing. After eloping, the couple moved to Moultrie, Georgia, where they parked their trailer on Boudleaux’s parents’ farm and eventually started writing songs together. As Wilson points out: “Felice could compose lyrics and could come up with melodies, but she couldn’t write them down. Boudleaux could preserve Felice’s melodies on paper as well as compose his own, and he found that her ideas sparked his own creativity.”

Little Jimmy Dickens took the Bryants’ song, “Country Boy,” and turned into a hit, and the Bryants never looked back. They worked very early with Nashville’s premier A&R man, Fred Rose (who wrote songs for Hank Williams, among others), who was at MGM at the time and who became their publisher. They eventually moved to Nashville and parked their trailer in Hillbilly Heaven—the Rainbow Trailer Court—whose previous residents included country singers Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold and Cowboy Copas, among others. They lived just down the road from Chet Atkins, who said that the “Bryants changed the direction of music all over the world through their songs for the Everly Brothers.” In those early days, Boudleaux kept songs written on scraps of paper in his pockets; when he lost a coat whose pockets were filed with such scraps, Atkins suggested that the couple use accounting ledgers in which to write songs, and that became their method.

Among the best features of the book are the anecdotes from the couple that Wilson shares in sidebars. For example, Boudleaux on what makes a successful song: “I don’t know what makes a successful song. To carry that further, I would also say that nobody else knows. . . . The answer is somewhere beyond our ken, residing in that which is just outside reach of our normal senses, reposing in a benevolent providence, a bubble of luck, a good karma, or—well, your guess is as good as mine or anybody else’s.”

Boudleaux also reflected on making songwriting a career (and the hundreds of aspiring songwriters flocking to Nashville daily would do well to pay attention): “Unless you feel driven to compose and have all the instincts of a riverboat gambler, you should never seek songwriting as a profession. Unless you know in your heart that you’re great, feel in your bones that you’re lucky, and think in your soul that God just might let you get away with it, pick something more certain than composing, like chasing the white whale or eradicating the common housefly. We didn’t have the benefit of such sage advice. Now it’s too late to back up. We made it. Sometimes it pays to be ignorant.”

Wilson’s lavishly illustrated and fondly admiring biography provides a much-needed look at the lives and craft of two songwriters whose work should be even better known. 

 

In the lovingly crafted All I Have to Do Is Dream: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story, Lee Wilson offers a tender and passionate portrait of the influential Nashville songwriters.
Nonfiction

New discoveries in the origin of species

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Every now and then a brilliant book comes along that helps us rethink what we know about a subject. Jonathan B. Losos’ fascinating, compulsively readable Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution is just such a book; it offers an opportunity for us to ponder the process of evolution, the questions that have fueled recent debates and the extent to which evolutionary biology can be confirmed through experimentation.

Harvard biologist Losos raises two key questions that lie at the heart of conversations about evolution: Is it predictable? Or is it contingent? These questions spiral into more queries: If the process of natural selection and adaptation takes place slowly over time—as scientists traditionally believed—can we really observe it and reach provable conclusions? Can we conduct large field experiments that would give us insights into evolution?

Drawing on his own experiments with lizards, as well as on the research of others in the Galapagos, Losos illustrates that the pace of evolutionary change is not glacial, and that evolutionary change can be observed over a relatively short time. He also concludes that convergence—in which species living in similar environments will adapt similar features—has emerged as a challenge to those scientists who argue that evolution is unpredictable, random and nonrepeatable. Losos demonstrates that “the contingencies of history play a minor role, their effects erased by the predictable push of natural selection.”

With vivacious writing and thoughtful, provocative insights, Losos’ captivating study of evolution deserves to be read alongside the books of E.O. Wilson (The Social Conquest of Earth) and Stephen Jay Gould (Wonderful Life).

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Every now and then a brilliant book comes along that helps us rethink what we know about a subject. Jonathan B. Losos’ fascinating, compulsively readable Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution is just such a book.

NonfictionMemoir

The personal and the political

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

We all recall one momentous event in our lives that dramatically altered our direction and violently shook our sense of self, shaping us in myriad ways. In his absorbing and lovely The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered, Benjamin Taylor recalls such an event, using it as the tantalizing entry point to his memories of growing up gay and Jewish in Texas.

Early on the morning of November 22, 1963, 11-year-old Taylor gets to shake President John F. Kennedy’s hand in Fort Worth, Texas. Later that day, he hears the news that Kennedy has been assassinated. In achingly gorgeous prose, Taylor reflects on the incongruity of these two moments, which leads to childhood remembrances of making and losing friends, his discovery of a love of politics and playwriting, and his halting lessons in the ways that families sometimes fall apart. He writes about his family with a clear-eyed vision: “The hue and cry at our house was against disorder, bedevilment, despair.”

In this memoir, Taylor pulls his family and his young life from the shores of forgetting, and he tells us he’s heaped up this “monument because my family—Annette, Sol, Tommy, Robby too—have vanished and I cannot allow oblivion to own them altogether.” Although his memoir sometimes moves confusingly between 1963 and 1964 and the present, Taylor nevertheless captivates with his vibrant recollections of immense moments and the life that grew out of them.

We all recall one momentous event in our lives that dramatically altered our direction and violently shook our sense of self, shaping us in myriad ways. In his absorbing and lovely The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered, Benjamin Taylor recalls such an event, using it as the tantalizing entry point to his memories of growing up gay and Jewish in Texas.

NonfictionHistoryCookbooks

Settle in for a factual feast

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Southerners love a good meal as much as they love a good story, and sitting down with food historian John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South is like sitting down to a bountiful Sunday Southern dinner.

Edge uncovers the rich narratives that lie beneath Southern food, illustrating the tangled and compelling webs of politics and social history that are often served up alongside our biscuits and gravy. For example, Georgia Gilmore, a cook and waitress who worked for the railroad, literally fueled the Montgomery Bus Boycott by opening her house and cooking for and feeding protestors. Rather than condemning fast food restaurants such as Popeye’s and Bojangles’, Edge sees them as emblems of the South and its food. As he points out in his introduction, in the 1930s even Southern politicians argued about food—in a series of letters to the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, they debated over whether to dunk or crumble cornbread into potlikker. Edge uses potlikker—the rich broth that’s left after a pot of greens or peas boil down—to illustrate the diverse and rich ingredients that coalesce in the South. Edge introduces us to great Southern writers like Eugene Walter who also wrote passionately about food, as well as cooks like Matt Lee and Ted Lee who understand that “cooking and eating and sharing food is a passkey to a newer South.”

Edge’s delightful and charming book invites us to pull up a chair for a satisfying repast of tales that illustrate that the food history of the modern South reveals the dynamic character of Southern history itself.

Southerners love a good meal as much as they love a good story, and sitting down with food historian John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South is like sitting down to a bountiful Sunday Southern dinner.

NonfictionMedicine

An infected family tree

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Imagine watching your father die slowly from a degenerative neurological disease so rare that there is no cure. Imagine, then, coming to grips when you learn the disease is genetic and there is a good chance that you carry those genes, and will not only die from the disease but pass it along to your children. If you could take a simple blood test to reveal whether or not you have the genes, would you take it?

Part medical mystery, part family history and part medical history, Gina Kolata’s gripping Mercies in Disguise: A Story of Hope, a Family’s Genetic Destiny, and the Science That Rescued Them tells the story of one small-town Southern family ravaged by a mysterious illness. The Baxley family of Hartsville, South Carolina, always felt they were special. They were even named the South Carolina Family of the Year in 1985 by former governor Richard Riley. Following family patriarch Bill Baxley’s death, they discovered their specialness arose not only from hard work and community respect but from carrying a rare disease that started to afflict almost every member of the family.

After watching her father die slowly from Gerstmann-­Sträussler-Scheinker (GSS) disease, Amanda Baxley, Bill Baxley’s granddaughter, tests positive for this degenerative illness that is plaguing her family. In poignant detail, Kolata tells of Amanda’s fear, hope, strength and courage as she chooses to undergo preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a procedure in which embryos with the disease are discarded while a healthy one is implanted. As a result of this procedure, Amanda delivers twins not long after her father breathes his last breath, and she sees her children as a gift of life from her father.

Kolata’s book tells a riveting tale of fear and fierce determination in the face of an overwhelming medical situation that at first seems hopeless.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Imagine watching your father die slowly from a degenerative neurological disease so rare that there is no cure. Imagine, then, coming to grips when you learn the disease is genetic and there is a good chance that you carry those genes, and will not only die from the disease but pass it along to your children. If you could take a simple blood test to reveal whether or not you have the genes, would you take it?

Nonfiction

The future is (almost) now

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

What is the next step in human evolution? Will human beings become cyborgs, implanted with chips that enable us to control our environment? Or will humans, in their never-ending quest for perfection, become gods, erasing the human altogether?

In his provocative and lively new study, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the 2015 bestseller Sapiens, asks challenging questions about the future of humanity and the longstanding belief that places humans at the center of the universe (humanism). In the first section of the book, Harari examines the relationships between humans and animals, contending that if we want to understand how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat humans, we should examine how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. He then proceeds to explore how humans elevated themselves to the center of the universe, developing a humanist creed that continues to have both liberating and oppressive consequences (economic prosperity, democratic institutions, wars, poverty).

In a final section, Harari looks at the next stage of human development, or demise, by asking how humanity’s search for “immortality, bliss, and divinity shake the foundations of our belief in humanity.” Harari refuses the role of prophet, but he does contend that Homo sapiens will disappear once technology gives us the ability to re-engineer human minds.

Thought-provoking and enlightening, Harari’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of our species.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his provocative and lively new study, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the 2015 bestseller Sapiens, asks challenging questions about the future of humanity and the longstanding belief that places humans at the center of the universe (humanism). In the first section of the book, Harari examines the relationships between humans and animals, contending that if we want to understand how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat humans, we should examine how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. He then proceeds to explore how humans elevated themselves to the center of the universe, developing a humanist creed that continues to have both liberating and oppressive consequences (economic prosperity, democratic institutions, wars, poverty).

NonfictionBiography

A luminous portrait of a literary life

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When Shirley Jackson's now-classic story "The Lottery" appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, readers wrote in to the magazine decrying the story as "outrageous," "shocking," "gruesome" and "utterly pointless." In spite of such responses, within a year the story was included in Prize Stories of 1949 and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, acknowledging the power of Jackson's storytelling craft and introducing very widely a writer whose first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), had disappointing sales but cannily and hauntingly depicted the humorous, horrific and sometimes macabre irony of suburban life.

Ruth Franklin's elegant Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life now provides what has long been missing: a sensitive, incisive, thoroughly detailed reading of Jackson's stories and novels as they issue from the writer’s never-very-happy life. In an almost year-by-year examination, Franklin draws on letters, journals and Jackson's writings to narrate the days of a young woman whose own conventional mother was disappointed, and even horrified, that her daughter was not very conventional: "Geraldine wanted a pretty little girl, and what she got was a lumpish redhead."

Franklin nimbly guides us through Jackson's childhood in California, where she was always writing, and her family's move to Rochester, New York, in her senior year of high school. While attending Syracuse University, she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and published her first story, "Janice," in the school's literary magazine. The book also chronicles her difficult, tumultuous marriage to Hyman, a professor and prominent literary critic, and her devotion to her four children.

Franklin provides sparkling readings of Jackson's writing, including the challenges she faced with each novel or story, ranging from her less well-known novel, Hangsaman, to her more familiar tales of urban chill, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as autobiographical collections such as Life Among the Savages. All of her writings dwell on the tension of inhabiting the roles of housewife and mother and bestselling author.

This luminous critical biography reveals a writer who thought her task—much like Hawthorne and Poe—was to pull back the curtain on the darkness of the human heart. Franklin smartly succeeds in drawing so colorful a portrait of the author that we’re encouraged to pick up one of her stories or novels and read Jackson all over again.

When Shirley Jackson's now-classic story "The Lottery" appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, readers wrote in to the magazine decrying the story as "outrageous," "shocking," "gruesome" and "utterly pointless." In spite of such responses, within a year the story was included in Prize Stories of 1949 and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, acknowledging the power of Jackson's storytelling craft and introducing very widely a writer whose first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), had disappointing sales but cannily and hauntingly depicted the humorous, horrific and sometimes macabre irony of suburban life.

Sign Up

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

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features