Kelly Blewett

NonfictionBiography

The original Renaissance man

Review by Kelly Blewett

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, November 2017

Walter Isaacson, who recently authored the door-stopping, New York Times bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, turns his attention to Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci in his latest book. Careful scouring of Leonardo’s notebooks, located variously in the United States, France, England and Italy, enabled Isaacson to write a work of breathtaking scope and intimacy. Leonardo, the bastard son of a notary, had what Isaacson calls “an instinct for keeping records.” He filled notebooks with observations, sketches, lists and questions about the world.

The many pleasures within Isaacson’s thick tome include gorgeous illustrations, beautiful and precise writing, surprising glimpses into Leonardo’s thinking and, perhaps most satisfyingly, a stunning survey of the artist’s best-known works. Isaacson closely observes the paintings, guiding readers to consider their complexity, implied movement and brilliant interplay of shadow and light. Isaacson also elaborates on Leonardo’s innovative approaches to painting, such as sfumato, the shading of edges through shadow rather than lines.

Leonardo’s life led him to the courts of Milan, Florence, various Italian cities and finally to France. Isaacson explores not only the artistic masterpieces that Leonardo left behind, but also the many remarkable treatises on anatomy, engineering and geography, and the projects that were left unfinished, including a gigantic bronze sculpture of a horse (his rival Michelangelo never let him forget that). Leonardo was a singular man, interested in a range of topics from flying machines and fetal development to the properties of water and the deadliest weapons on the battlefield. Rather than viewing Leonardo’s broad interests as distractions from his artistry, Isaacson helps readers see how the vigorous curiosity that animated these investigations enriched both Leonardo’s life and his art.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Walter Isaacson about Leonardo da Vinci. 

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

Walter Isaacson, who recently authored the door-stopping, New York Times bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, turns his attention to Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci in his latest book.

NonfictionMemoir

The ones you choose

Review by Kelly Blewett

Armistead Maupin is revered for his marvelous newspaper column Tales of the City, which ran in San Francisco papers during the 1970s and ’80s. Like a carnal version of a 19th-century novel, this column followed the fictional exploits of characters that lived on Barbary Lane. Some kept secrets about their gender and sexuality while others were gloriously, radically forthcoming. Nine novels following these characters have been published to date. The success of Tales of the City launched Maupin into the center of the gay rights movement in San Francisco. As he chummed around the city, making friends with movie stars, finding his voice and writing thinly veiled autobiographical vignettes in his column, Maupin became one of the most vocal advocates of gay rights during the 1970s and beyond.

In his new memoir, Maupin, now in his 70s, recalls the tightly closeted Southern childhood that preceded this active public life. He recounts a sheltered childhood (one of his favorite activities was antiquing) followed by years of military service and the dawning realization of his homosexuality. He describes his fractured relationships with his father and brother and his close ties with his grandmother, mother and sister. This story of his biological family gives way to a very different account of his logical family, the vibrant network of gay, male artists in and around the Bay Area who catalyzed Maupin from an insecure youth to a vocal artist and activist.

The pleasure of this book, beyond the funny anecdotes and poignant reflections, is getting a behind-the-scenes look at a treasured series of novels and reading a first-hand account of a significant human rights movements in our nation’s history. Maupin offers a vivid look at key moments—such as the murder of Harvey Milk—and the impact these had on the gay rights movement and his life. Unsurprisingly, Maupin is a sympathetic and soulful storyteller. His account of a past struggle for equality is especially important in our fraught present.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Armistead Maupin for Logical Family.

In his new memoir, Armistead Maupin, now in his 70s, recalls the tightly closeted Southern childhood that preceded this active public life. He recounts a sheltered childhood (one of his favorite activities was antiquing) followed by years of military service and the dawning realization of his homosexuality.

NonfictionMemoir

A life cut short

Review by Kelly Blewett

Like The Other Wes Moore and Between the World and Me, Danielle Allen’s Cuz presents a rich personal narrative in trenchant historical and political context. Allen tells the story of Michael, her irrepressible cousin with the dazzling smile.

Although Danielle was raised in relative comfort—she describes the casual security of being a professor’s kid in the college environments where she grew up and now makes a living (Allen is a political philosopher at Harvard University) —Michael’s family, the family of Allen’s father’s youngest sister, lived on the edge. When they moved to LA during Michael’s adolescence, Michael committed petty theft. And then, at age 15, he attempted carjacking at gunpoint. He didn’t shoot (in fact, he got shot in the neck), but the judge opted to try him as an adult. Suddenly, this adolescent faced 13 years in prison, a sentence nearly as long as his life had been so far.

The devastating effect of prison on Michael is beautifully wrought in poetic, heartfelt and restrained prose by his cousin, who frequently visited him. When he was released, it was Allen who helped get him established. Despite her best efforts (which far outstripped anything I could imagine undertaking), within a few years he was found shot to death in a car.

Allen’s searing memoir seeks to understand what happened to Michael within the context of LA during the 1990s just after the “three strikes” rule came to pass, as fears of carjacking were running rampant and as gang affiliations pulsed in the street. Having read several books like Cuz in an attempt to understand what is happening in this country, I can say that Allen’s is one of the strongest. This book—part elegy, part history, part political philosophy—is wholly unforgettable.

Like The Other Wes Moore and Between the World and Me, Danielle Allen’s Cuz presents a rich personal narrative in trenchant historical and political context. Allen tells the story of Michael, her irrepressible cousin with the dazzling smile.

NonfictionLiterature

Looking back at children’s books

Review by Kelly Blewett

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, August 2017

In Wild Things, Bruce Handy offers a rousing and nostalgic romp through the classics of children’s literature from the latter half of the 20th century, from Goodnight Moon to Ramona to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Clearly passionate about his topic, Handy dives into the context of the publication of these books with enthusiasm and verve.

Handy makes unlikely comparisons (Beverly Cleary to Henry James; The Runaway Bunny to Portnoy’s Complaint). He vividly portrays Margaret Wise Brown, with her loads of golden hair, unconventional love interests and seemingly endless well of inspiration, and her mercurial editor Ursula Nordstrom, who hovers at the edge of many of the most beloved publications of this era (it was she who convinced Maurice Sendak that Where the Wild Things Are should feature monsters, not horses). Handy tangles with scholars from children’s literature, such as Philip Nel and his interpretation of The Cat in the Hat—Nel argues it’s informed by minstrelsy, while Handy suggests that the cat may be a representation of Dr. Seuss himself.

But this is no scholarly tome. Indeed, Handy makes the personal and idiosyncratic nature of many of his reflections apparent. He frames his chapter on Narnia in light of his own religious inclinations (which are not C.S. Lewis’) and describes how it felt to realize the book had such Christian themes (he was dismayed, but also enduringly drawn to the way the children relate to Aslan, which Handy believes was how Lewis experienced his faith). And Handy’s enthusiasm for Cleary’s character of Ramona is as genuine and sweet as an ice-cream cone on a hot summer’s day. This is a compulsively readable and entertaining collection of essays that will take readers back, in the best sense, to books they may have nearly forgotten but will delight in remembering.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Bruce Handy.

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

In Wild Things, Bruce Handy offers a rousing and nostalgic romp through the classics of children’s literature.

NonfictionMemoir

A beautiful mind

Review by Kelly Blewett

Naoki Higashida is a nonverbal, autistic young man whose first widely translated memoir, The Reason I Jump, written when he was 13, was received with acclaim and incredulity. Acclaim because it detailed the vivid inner life of someone who had, before his mother’s intervention with what they call an “alphabet grid” (a modified QWERTY keyboard), seemed unresponsive, and incredulity because it seemed impossible that someone who was genuinely autistic and working independently could compose such coherent and artful prose. Since writing The Reason I Jump, Higashida has become a celebrity in Japan and the second most widely translated Japanese author behind Haruki Murakami.

Higashida’s new collection—comprised of blog entries, poems, a short story and an interview—brings readers up to speed with the author, now in his early 20s. His thoughts on neurological diversity are riveting: “My brain has this habit of getting lost inside things. Finding the way in is easy, but—like being in a maze—finding your way out is a lot harder. I want to exit the maze right now, but I’m forced to stay inside it. This applies also to time and schedules. They constrain me.” Higashida’s accounts of thinking in images, feeling compelled to make repetitive movements and the difficulties and pleasures of communicating make this book totally captivating. Translator and bestselling author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) introduces the volume with an account of the dismay he felt when Higashida’s work was dismissed by critics as fraudulent. Mitchell points out that he has witnessed Higashida’s composing firsthand, and that, moreover, Higashida’s prose has changed the way he perceives—and interacts with—his own autistic son. Mitchell writes that bringing Higashida’s writing to a larger public has been the most important writing task of his life.

Readers will find this older Higashida not only eloquent and thoughtful, but also wise, measured and, most of all, kind.

 

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

Naoki Higashida is a nonverbal, autistic young man whose first widely translated memoir, The Reason I Jump, written when he was 13, was received with acclaim and incredulity. Acclaim because it detailed the vivid inner life of someone who had, before his mother’s intervention with what they call an “alphabet grid” (a modified QWERTY keyboard), seemed unresponsive, and incredulity because it seemed impossible that someone who was genuinely autistic and working independently could compose such coherent and artful prose. Since writing The Reason I Jump, Higashida has become a celebrity in Japan and the second most widely translated Japanese author behind Haruki Murakami.

NonfictionMemoir

Journaling to the heart of it all

Review by Kelly Blewett

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, June 2017

In Theft by Finding, David Sedaris, best known for his eight bestselling books as well as his contributions to “This American Life,” The New Yorker and Esquire, offers a glimpse into the most unruly of writing: his diaries from the years 1977-2002. Sedaris notes in the introduction that he does not expect readers to plow through this 528-page tome in linear fashion, but instead to dip in at random. I suspect he would approve of my own manner of reading the book, which was to see what Sedaris was up to on my birthday each year.

However, his (edited) diaries are too interesting to limit oneself only to birthday entries—I wound up reading the whole thing, laughing frequently and earmarking many memorable passages. These diaries reveal the development of Sedaris’ aesthetic, filled with rich and unfailingly sharp observations—portraits of people he saw on the street, overheard snippets of dialogue, accounts of interactions with everyone from cabdrivers to his irrepressible siblings.

For Sedaris fans, the diaries offer a backstage tour of books like Me Talk Pretty One Day (his initial observations of his French teacher, essays he wrote in response to homework prompts) and Holidays on Ice (accounts of locker-room exchanges between men working as Macy’s holiday elves). There are moments of sadness, such as the unexpected death of his mother and the slow decline of his sister Tiffany, who would later commit suicide. But this is not a sad book; instead, it’s a gloriously weird one. Sedaris lists Christmas presents received every year, shares recipes and constantly suggests to the reader to keep going, just for one more page.

“If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in,” Sedaris writes. This is a diary that shows us how Sedaris’ powers of observation and his intense investment in his own perspective have enriched his life and, by extension, ours.

 

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

In Theft by Finding, David Sedaris, best known for his eight bestselling books as well as his contributions to “This American Life,” The New Yorker and Esquire, offers a glimpse into the most unruly of writing: his diaries from the years 1977-2002. Sedaris notes in the introduction that he does not expect readers to plow through this 528-page tome in linear fashion, but instead to dip in at random. I suspect he would approve of my own manner of reading the book, which was to see what Sedaris was up to on my birthday each year.

NonfictionMemoir

In the name of the father

Review by Kelly Blewett

Some people are born to write, and one of those people is Patricia Lockwood, who knew at age 6 that she would be a poet. In the final chapter of Priestdaddy, her debut memoir, Lockwood—whose poem “Rape Joke” won her a Pushcart Prize in 2015—marvels at her own forcefulness: “On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength.” In this brilliant and heartbreakingly funny book, the poet returns to her childhood home and offers the story of her unconventional Catholic upbringing and her larger-than-life parents.

Lockwood’s father, believe it or not, is a Catholic priest who converted to the faith after he was married. In such circumstances, there is a celibacy loophole, and Lockwood and her four siblings grew up on rectory grounds in St. Louis and Cincinnati, which Lockwood loyally refers to as “the worst cities in the Midwest.” When she became a teenager, she fell in love on the internet and ran away to marry Jason, which, miraculously, turned out to be a great decision. In adulthood, however, the couple fell on hard times and found themselves moving back in with Lockwood’s parents—her guitar-strumming, boxer-shorts-wearing, holy and emotionally aloof father and her paranoid, accommodating and lyrical mother. Surrounded by the vestiges of her childhood, Lockwood begins thinking anew about identity, place, religion, girlhood and poetry—always poetry.

This is a book that will transport the reader deep into Lockwood’s zany and appealing point of view. The sheer authority of the prose will occasionally take the reader’s breath away. To say I could not put the book down does not do it justice, nor would quotations from the dozens of pages that struck me as beautiful and unforgettable and weird. Do yourself a favor and read this memoir.

 

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

Some people are born to write, and one of those people is Patricia Lockwood, who knew at age 6 that she would be a poet. In the final chapter of Priestdaddy, her debut memoir, Lockwood—whose poem “Rape Joke” won her a Pushcart Prize in 2015—marvels at her own forcefulness: “On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength.” In this brilliant and heartbreakingly funny book, the poet returns to her childhood home and offers the story of her unconventional Catholic upbringing and her larger-than-life parents.

NonfictionMemoirCookbooks

Confessions of a chef

Review by Kelly Blewett

Out of Line details Barbara Lynch’s extremely unlikely journey from a “project rat” (her term) to a three-time James Beard award-winning chef living la belle vie. Along the way she falls in and out of infatuations, describes glorious meals and keeps readers on the edge of their seats.

Lynch’s teenage escapades—boosting a bus, driving without a license from Boston to Florida, flying to the Bahamas using stolen credit cards—are almost as jaw-dropping as her memories of growing up in the South Boston neighborhood under the eye of mobster Whitey Bulger. Lynch’s vivid memories, her straightforward and direct manner of telling stories and her obvious passion for food make these pages fly. The child of a single mother, Lynch remembers how her mom made everyday food special—pickle juice in the tuna salad, crushed saltines in the meatballs, a particular brand of tomato sauce. Here, Lynch acknowledges that care in the preparation of food happens at all levels, that lingering over flavor is part of what it means to be fully human.

The gutsiness that led her to steal that bus later enables her to accept a series of seemingly impossible professional tasks—single-handedly cooking a wedding feast in Italy, making dishes in Hawaii for hundreds, launching a variety of restaurants with the slenderest advance preparation. She admits to saying yes and figuring out the details later, a report that I find fully believable after traveling through several chapters at her side. This is a candid telling of how a devil-may-care attitude gave rise to one of the most powerful female restaurateurs in the country today.

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

Out of Line details Barbara Lynch’s extremely unlikely journey from a “project rat” (her term) to a three-time James Beard award-winning chef living la belle vie. Along the way she falls in and out of infatuations, describes glorious meals and keeps readers on the edge of their seats.

NonfictionMemoirArts & Culture

Making something out of nothing

Review by Kelly Blewett

Writing is hard. Just ask Nell Stevens, a 27-year-old British graduate student working toward her MFA in fiction at Boston University. As part of the program, she receives a three-month fellowship to travel anywhere in the world to practice her craft, and to the surprise of her advisor, she chooses the sparsely populated Falkland Islands. Located in the South Atlantic Ocean near Antarctica, the frigid islands offer Stevens the isolation she needs to concentrate on her Dickensian novel—which, like her life, features a young English academic who travels to the Falklands. Stevens arrives at Bleaker Island, a small world of rock, sea and sky, and promptly puts on an extra pair of socks.

In Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World, Stevens offers a quirky and engaging account of what happens next. Surrounded by a colony of penguins, a beached whale carcass, caracara birds and a herd of sheep, she spends hours writing in a sunroom so thoroughly transparent she feels part of the weather. She plans her day down to the number of almonds she can eat each morning and the number of words she’ll produce each afternoon.

Despite her rigid plan, the act of writing proves as unpredictable and brutal as the weather. Her isolation compels her to ponder the process of composing. How does one make something beautiful from a string of words and longings, from memories and imaginings and, more practically, from computers and books and piles of almonds? Eventually departing the island with a book—though one very different from her original plan—Nell offers a captivating portrait of the creative life.

 

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

Writing is hard. Just ask Nell Stevens, a 27-year-old British graduate student working toward her MFA in fiction at Boston University.
NonfictionLiterature

The adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Review by Kelly Blewett

Arthur Conan Doyle was a mediocre medical doctor with an adventurous streak that could not be suppressed. “Several times in my life I have done utterly reckless things with so little motive that I have found it difficult to explain them to myself afterwards,” he wrote in his memoir. In Arthur and Sherlock, literary historian Michael Sims traces some of Doyle’s grand adventures, including expeditions to the polar icecap and Africa, and shows how they became fodder for his early prose. But travel wasn’t the only source of inspiration for Doyle’s iconic fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

Dr. Joseph Bell, who was one of Doyle’s teachers in medical school in Scotland, was so recognizable in the character of Holmes that Robert Louis Stevenson, who also studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, wrote to Doyle to inquire, “can this be my old friend Joe Bell?” Bell, a lively, intelligent man who could startle classes with uncanny observational deduction, proved a wonderful model for Holmes, who both builds on and deviates from the literary tradition of detective fiction that goes all the way back to the Bible itself. (King David, Sims suggests, is an early prototype of the detective figure.) This tradition is luminously carried on by Edgar Allan Poe, whom Sims explores in absorbing detail.

There is something in this marvelous book for every Holmes fan, and short, vivid chapters keep the pages turning. From early reviewers who couldn’t spell Doyle’s name to grand lunches with famous magazine editors alongside Oscar Wilde, Sims knows how to paint a picture that fascinates and delights. Arthur and Sherlock will take its place on the growing shelf of literary histories presented by this talented and eloquent writer.

 

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

Arthur Conan Doyle was a mediocre medical doctor with an adventurous streak that could not be suppressed. “Several times in my life I have done utterly reckless things with so little motive that I have found it difficult to explain them to myself afterwards,” he wrote in his memoir. In Arthur and Sherlock, literary historian Michael Sims traces some of Doyle’s grand adventures, including expeditions to the polar icecap and Africa, and shows how they became fodder for his early prose. But travel wasn’t the only source of inspiration for Doyle’s iconic fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

NonfictionSocial Science

A look at modern sex culture at college

Review by Kelly Blewett

College students aren’t having as much sex as everyone thinks, professor Lisa Wade writes in American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. Instead, most students are just talking about hooking up—and participating in a set of rituals that goes along with it.

Wade describes the cycle: pregaming in dorm rooms, dirty dancing at parties and then pairing off in bedrooms where actual sex may or may not occur. The next day, the events are discussed obsessively with friends. The pair who hooked up follow rigid rules, avoiding each other to prove the hookup was meaningless. The next weekend, the whole thing starts again. 

To compile specifics about sexual behavior, Wade relied on journals prepared by three classes of freshmen. These journals are predictably scintillating. It’s important to remember, though, that they were prepared for a professor and may therefore be regarded with some skepticism. Wade complements the journals with data from national surveys, dissertation studies and journalistic accounts. 

As a teacher at a residential college, I was not totally persuaded by Wade’s representation of sex culture on campuses—there are many students who opt into social circles with other kinds of rituals, and there’s more nuance and complexity in campus culture. Still, American Hookup could be a helpful conversation starter—and Wade’s takeaways about how to make the culture of hooking up kinder and more compassionate are well supported and important.

 

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

College students aren’t having as much sex as everyone thinks, professor Lisa Wade writes in American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. Instead, most students are just talking about hooking up—and participating in a set of rituals that goes along with it.
NonfictionBiography

The filmmaker behind Star Wars

Review by Kelly Blewett

Just in time for the release of the latest Star Wars movie, Brian Jay Jones (author of Jim Henson) offers a cinematic and engrossing look at the life of filmmaker George Lucas.  

From the start, Lucas wouldn’t bend to anyone else’s creative vision, whether it belonged to film school professors or the studios backing his movies. Early relationships with Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg shaped Lucas’ work and place in Hollywood—and foreshadowed what was to come.

When the book turns to the first Star Wars film, readers observe Lucas’ tortured creative process. He wrote treatments of the screenplay longhand in pencil and painstakingly edited snippets from other movies to show how he wanted Star Wars to look and feel. The result forever changed how Americans experience film.

For movie fans or anyone fascinated by the creative process, this is a well-researched and illuminating biography.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Just in time for the release of the latest Star Wars movie, Brian Jay Jones (author of Jim Henson) offers a cinematic and engrossing look at the life of filmmaker George Lucas.
Nonfiction

The countdown to a successful book

Review by Kelly Blewett

In The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers make a provocative claim: A book’s fate in the marketplace can be determined in advance, and not by the opinions of smart literary critics, book publishers or savvy writers. Instead, they argue that bestseller status can be predicted, with more than 80 percent accuracy, by a computer.

To an avid reader, attuned to the seeming incongruity and unpredictability of the weekly New York Times bestseller list, such a claim may seem akin to heresy. But the book’s co-authors, armed with a secret algorithm, unpack precisely how a book like Fifty Shades of Grey can reasonably, accurately and persuasively be compared to something else entirely, like, say, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch.

There’s an argument here about mass reading that is undeniably pleasing: The highbrow and the lowbrow are not, in fact, so far apart as most would believe. The book proceeds with more seemingly impossible facts, such as this: Algorithms can predict, with surprising levels of accuracy, whether a book was written by a male or female author only by looking at the writer’s use of pronouns. Seemingly insignificant details add up. And computers excel at this kind of granular counting.

Using a corpus of just over 5,000 books (500 of which are NYT bestsellers), the researchers have trained the computer to track more than 20,000 discrete characteristics. These items reveal patterns about all sorts of things—from topic to plot, from character to style. And along the way, the researchers unpack how various titles and authors you already know—from Danielle Steele to John Grisham—exemplify the patterns they are tracing, even as they move toward solving a particular and engrossing mystery: what working writer today best exemplifies popular approaches to novel writing. For readers interested in books about books, this is a title not to be missed.

In The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers make a provocative claim: A book’s fate in the marketplace can be determined in advance, and not by the opinions of smart literary critics, book publishers or savvy writers.

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