Kelly Blewett

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.
NonfictionFamily & Relationships

Discovering strength after a betrayal

Review by Kelly Blewett

Glennon Doyle Melton was a mother in crisis when she turned to Facebook. “I’m a recovering alcoholic and bulimic but I still find myself missing binging and booze,” she wrote. Readers instantly responded. Melton’s website, Momastery, has become a go-to for mothers seeking straight talk and compassion, and her first book, Carry On, Warrior, was a bestseller. Now, in Love Warrior, Melton turns her truth-telling gaze toward her husband and shares the story of their marriage: how they came together, how they fell apart, and how they reunited.

It sounds like a straightforward story, but it’s not. Parts are incredibly difficult to read. From the first days of the marriage, Melton felt alienated from her body during sex and struggled to establish emotional closeness with her husband. When he reveals a stunning betrayal, Melton is instantly scarred to the core. She is ready to throw the marriage away, to align herself firmly with her children and move on. But then things begin to happen. In the midst of the disintegration, Melton makes a new kind of connection with God. She finds answers on the beach and in hot yoga studios. She keeps taking one small, precise step at a time. Meanwhile, Melton’s estranged husband is doing some discovering on his own. The two circle each other cautiously while their three children watch. Their slow return to intimacy is a breathless story, beautifully told. They find out who they really are as individuals, an invaluable discovery as the couple finds the strength to stay together at the memoir’s close, though they announced their separation a month before the book’s publication. 

Love Warrior, which resides in the same realm as books by Brené Brown and Elizabeth Gilbert, presents an intense and absorbing narrative while reaching for something bigger and more quixotic, the mystery of intimacy itself.

 

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

Glennon Doyle Melton was a mother in crisis when she turned to Facebook. “I’m a recovering alcoholic and bulimic but I still find myself missing binging and booze,” she wrote. Readers instantly responded. Melton’s website, Momastery, has become a go-to for mothers seeking straight talk and compassion, and her first book, Carry On, Warrior, was a bestseller. Now, in Love Warrior, Melton turns her truth-telling gaze toward her husband and shares the story of their marriage: how they came together, how they fell apart, and how they reunited.
NonfictionMemoir

The shadow of grief

Review by Kelly Blewett

Decca Aitkenhead never meant to fall in love with Tony. A drug dealer who was already married, Tony seemed the least likely candidate for a serious love affair. But insuppressible attraction and deep emotional intimacy led the British couple to a partnership that lasted nearly 10 years—until Tony, a man in his prime, suddenly died inside the space of 10 minutes while on vacation with his wife and two children in Jamaica.

Aitkenhead’s new book chronicles the terrible details of Tony’s death by drowning and her mourning in the year that followed. “You always said I should write a book about you,” she writes in the dedication to Tony. “It wasn’t meant to be this one.” As this wrenching dedication suggests, Aitkenhead is an unsparing writer. Her understated prose makes the story surge forward with force.

It is not, though, an unusual story. Like many grief-stricken widows, Aitkenhead found herself, in the wake of tragedy, to be a person she did not know. This new Decca Aitkenhead had enormous and unpredictable needs. She felt split in half. Though it was her partner who drowned, it was Aitkenhead who was, as the title puts it, all at sea.

Aitkenhead is well known in England as a journalist, and she brings an intensity and objectivity to her story that is tremendously appealing. The consternation of how to remember Tony—and how to remember that heartbreaking day with her children—show up in ways both symbolic and mundane: how to plan the funeral, how to talk about Tony with her children, whether or not to bring new kittens into the household, whether or not to return to Jamaica. Though ostensibly a story of loss, this is also a story of survival by a woman who is strong, self-perceptive and a beautiful writer.

Decca Aitkenhead never meant to fall in love with Tony. A drug dealer who was already married, Tony seemed the least likely candidate for a serious love affair. But insuppressible attraction and deep emotional intimacy led the British couple to a partnership that lasted nearly 10 years—until Tony, a man in his prime, suddenly died inside the space of 10 minutes while on vacation with his wife and two children in Jamaica.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Love where you live

Review by Kelly Blewett

Melody Warnick was not loving where she lived. After moving to Blacksburg, Virginia, Warnick looked around with dismay. The trees were menacing. She knew no one. She had young children. She was tempted to stay in and binge-watch Netflix. But she decided to try to make herself fall in love with Blacksburg. This Is Where You Belong reveals the steps in her journey, which will be relevant to many of us. As Warnick points out, Americans are, and have been for some time, “geographically restless.”

Warnick establishes that she has “low place-attachment” through an inventory, which she includes for readers. To raise her depressingly low score, she devises and attempts various “Love Where You Live” experiments. What follows are 12 chapters about ways to dial up place affection: walking, eating local, buying local, getting to know neighbors. She traces the research that indicates why these activities are meaningful and often supplements her research by interviewing a place-making expert. Warnick knows how to make her interview subjects sparkle and brings together the various elements of the book with finesse. Back in Blacksburg, her experiments have her doing all manner of tasks, from delivering muffins to organizing a sidewalk chalk festival. 

The biggest pleasure of the book, though, is the way Warnick’s search will help readers reflect on their own locales. As someone who was already “deeply attached” to my place (according to the quiz), one might think I found little to take away. On the contrary, I gained fresh insight about why my hometown favorites—from food to friends to public places—make me more measurably connected to my city. I also found a handful of bright ideas to get to know it better. As far as experiments go, that’s a satisfying result.

 

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

Melody Warnick was not loving where she lived. After moving to Blacksburg, Virginia, Warnick looked around with dismay. The trees were menacing. She knew no one. She had young children. She was tempted to stay in and binge-watch Netflix. But she decided to try to make herself fall in love with Blacksburg. This Is Where You Belong reveals the steps in her journey, which will be relevant to many of us. As Warnick points out, Americans are, and have been for some time, “geographically restless.”
NonfictionNature

A poetic exploration of our National Parks

Review by Kelly Blewett

In this gorgeous collection of 12 essays, published to mark the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams provides a poetic and searing portrait of the land and, by extension, of America itself.

Philanthropists loom large in the history of our national parks and Williams draws them in compelling detail: Teddy Roosevelt riding out to North Dakota wearing spurs he bought at Tiffany’s, Laurance Rockefeller donating his family’s ranch to Grand Teton National Park and having every object meticulously cataloged (including the positions of ashtrays) so the ranch could be recreated later. She describes the difficult test that would-be tour guides in Gettysburg must take (since 2012, only two have passed). There’s the pleasure of journalism, the unexpected detail that never disappoints, the feeling of seeing something from an inside angle. But there’s poetry, too.

The intimate moments Williams experiences in these parks, often accompanied by beautiful photography, speak to the reader—what it’s like to witness the body of a bison eaten by other animals on the plain; what kind of lichen grows on the chilly tundra; what oil-soaked sand feels like between the toes. “To bear witness is not a passive act,” she writes. 

Williams’ reverent eyes catalog how humans have impacted the wilderness, but The Hour of Land is a hopeful book. “We are slowly returning to the hour of land,” she writes, “where our human presence can take a side step and respect the integrity of the place itself.”

 

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

In this gorgeous collection of 12 essays, published to mark the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams provides a poetic and searing portrait of the land and, by extension, of America itself.
Nonfiction

A bohemian’s lost notebooks

Review by Kelly Blewett

Joe Gould—mysterious madman, darling of the modern poets and, perhaps, a genius—began writing a book in the late 1920s. Or rather, several books. His writing, he believed, would turn the field of history on its head. Rather than stories of great men, Gould had a vision of capturing the everyday speech of people on the streets of New York. And so, pencil in hand, he went out to listen. He scrawled overheard bits in composition notebooks, and the notebooks came to dominate his small apartment, or so it was said. But the towers of notebooks are missing. Jill Lepore, at once detective and historian, decides to find them.

What readers will find in Joe Gould’s Teeth is a story of archival research of epic proportions. Lepore puts farflung snippets of the past together to tell a story about Gould and his writings that no one has yet heard—a story that takes readers into the heart of Harlem, into the classrooms of Harvard and down the long corridors of mental hospitals. What is at stake, though, is more than “What happened to Gould?” There’s also the question of history itself. What should history—and biography—be? Can a historian see anything accurately, or in the end, will her portraits of the past only reveal her own reflection? 

At once researching Gould and thinking alongside him about questions that hang behind every historian’s work, Lepore offers a book that is exciting and unsettling. Unlike her past work—think The Secret History of Wonder Woman—Lepore herself is very much a character in this book, and the hunt for the truth about Gould takes on a sort of Edgar Allan Poe-like atmosphere of dread and anticipation. At times haunting and even hallucinatory, this book is Lepore’s most vulnerable and thought-provoking work yet.

 

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

Joe Gould—mysterious madman, darling of the modern poets and, perhaps, a genius—began writing a book in the late 1920s. Or rather, several books. His writing, he believed, would turn the field of history on its head. Rather than stories of great men, Gould had a vision of capturing the everyday speech of people on the streets of New York. And so, pencil in hand, he went out to listen. He scrawled overheard bits in composition notebooks, and the notebooks came to dominate his small apartment, or so it was said. But the towers of notebooks are missing. Jill Lepore, at once detective and historian, decides to find them.
NonfictionMedicine

Discovering a new depth of feeling

Review by Kelly Blewett

John Elder Robison is already well known for his 2007 memoir, Look Me in the Eye, which detailed his life as a successful adult with Asperger’s syndrome. A key feature of this bestseller, and of Robison’s stance toward Asperger’s in general, is that being on the autism spectrum is a gift rather than a disease. And so, when given the opportunity, why did he submit to a series of experimental brain treatments? This is one of the questions Robison struggles to answer in Switched On, his eloquent, vivid and utterly compelling new memoir.

Robison undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) because it might increase his emotional awareness, or so researchers predict. But his reaction to the treatments far exceeds their expectations. His experiences are hallucinogenic, highly charged and deeply meaningful. They change him forever. Readers see Robison in the throes of the treatments and their dramatic aftermath—staying up all night listening to music, reconsidering relationships, reveling in his ability to finally look people in the eye. These stories are so moving and unpredictable that I found myself reading them aloud. 

It’s been seven years since Robison initially underwent TMS, and the long-term implications are still unfolding. Ultimately, though, this book provides an intellectual and emotional initiation into a different way of perceiving the world. Like books by Andrew Solomon and Oliver Sacks, Switched On offers an opportunity to consider mental processes through a combination of powerful narrative and informative medical context. Readers can put their hands, for a moment, on the mystery that is the brain.

 

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

John Elder Robison is already well known for his 2007 memoir, Look Me in the Eye, which detailed his life as a successful adult with Asperger’s syndrome. A key feature of this bestseller, and of Robison’s stance toward Asperger’s in general, is that being on the autism spectrum is a gift rather than a disease. And so, when given the opportunity, why did he submit to a series of experimental brain treatments? This is one of the questions Robison struggles to answer in Switched On, his eloquent, vivid and utterly compelling new memoir.
NonfictionBiography

How literary greats cope with life’s end

Review by Kelly Blewett

Katie Roiphe’s latest offering details the deaths of five major writers: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas and Maurice Sendak. Roiphe took the book’s title, The Violet Hour, from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” because “the phrase evokes the mood of the elusive period I am describing: melancholy, expectant, laden. It captures the beauty and intensity I was finding in these scenes, the rich excitement of dusk.”

Each section of this elegiac book begins with the image of an empty room. “I very conspicuously do not belong in these rooms,” Roiphe writes, yet she recreates them in piercing detail: the hospital room in Sloan-Kettering where Sontag lay dying of cancer; the empty office where Sendak, in happier moments, drew pictures and whistled operas; Updike’s spare and efficient desk. These writers have something in common with all of humanity—they died. And in their crackling, vivid work, Roiphe finds keys that enable her to approach the mystery of death, although not to unlock it.

The chapters are organized around a moment-by-moment narrative of each writer’s final days. We find out, for instance, that Sontag was grateful for a last haircut and that Sendak ate homemade apple crisp. And that Updike’s first wife, Mary, grabbed his feet through the sheets and held them when she saw him the final time. So while a medical story is being laid out, there is also what Barthes calls the punctum, the evocative detail that elevates the reportage to something more like poetry. As these moments accumulate toward their final, inevitable endpoint, Roiphe takes many tangents to explore the writer’s attitude toward death as communicated through his or her work, which, for all these writers, was the central and most transcendent aspect of their lives.

“It’s all on the page,” Updike said. That may be true, and yet by combining the writer’s final moments of life with what they left on the page, Roiphe ultimately offers us something beyond the work: a glimpse of death that is startling and new, intimate and uncomfortable, and deeply, deeply human.

 

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

Katie Roiphe’s latest offering details the deaths of five major writers: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas and Maurice Sendak. Roiphe took the book’s title, The Violet Hour, from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” because “the phrase evokes the mood of the elusive period I am describing: melancholy, expectant, laden. It captures the beauty and intensity I was finding in these scenes, the rich excitement of dusk.”
NonfictionEducation

The power of preschool

Review by Kelly Blewett

Written for anyone who cares about preschool education in this country, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups offers terrific insights into the world of children—the delight of imaginative play, the allure of nature, the power of emotion. I read this book in the company of my own children, ages 5 and 2. Often, I found myself observing them more closely, appreciating their richness of expression more fully and identifying more sympathetically with their frustrations. At the same time, early childhood education expert Erika Christakis is undeniably grumpy when assessing what preschoolers are getting from most grownups these days.

She sneers at the handprint turkey craft many children make at Thanksgiving (a version of which was displayed framed on my own wall as I read the manuscript). She sighs with exasperation at the ineffective design of preschool classes. Overstimulating colors, bins filled with “educational” toys and insipid curriculum are among her many targets. Yet she redeems these critiques by moving beyond them. In chapters after chapter, Christakis poses compelling questions and imaginative solutions. She wonders why, for instance, the slow food movement hasn’t gained more traction in preschools, where children could prepare food together and then clean it up. She describes engaging classroom environments she’s seen in beguiling detail, and recounts evocative conversations she’s had and overheard among small people. Her respect and love for them is undeniable.

Until late last year, Christakis was a lecturer in early childhood education at Yale. She and her husband, Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor, drew the wrath of some students when they voiced concern over Yale’s limitations on “offensive” Halloween costumes. Christakis quit her teaching post in December, citing a climate at Yale that was “not conducive to . . . civil dialogue and open inquiry.”

The Yale controversy played no role in the book, however, and The Importance of Being Little doesn’t delve into the nuts and bolts of preschool education at the policy level. What Christakis does offer is a compelling vision of what preschool could become, with many examples that provide useful context. Her experiences at Yale—surrounded by bright and curious people, resource-rich schools and extensive libraries—enrich what she offers to the reader: a somewhat academic, more than a little cantankerous and ultimately earnestly hopeful discussion about how to best serve our youngest charges.

Written for anyone who cares about preschool education in this country, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups offers terrific insights into the world of children—the delight of imaginative play, the allure of nature, the power of emotion.
NonfictionHistory

The settings that spawn brilliance

Review by Kelly Blewett

Journalist and globe-trotter Eric Weiner, perhaps best-known for his bestselling book The Geography of Bliss, continues his pursuit of big questions in The Geography of Genius. Why, he wonders, do some conditions give rise to networks of innovators who transform the world? As such a question suggests, Weiner is thinking about genius in a fresh way. He adroitly sidesteps our cultural myth of the solitary prodigy slaving away in isolation and instead thinks about genius as (always) socially situated, clusters of diamonds shining brightly in their original settings. “Certain places, at certain times, produced a bumper crop of brilliant minds and good ideas,” he explains.

Weiner generates a list of such places and times, and that list becomes his (and the reader’s) travel itinerary. From ancient Athens to contemporary Silicon Valley, with stops in China, India and Austria along the way, it’s a pleasurable ride. Like Socrates, Weiner enjoys coming to insights through dialogue, and so readers are introduced to a number of characters with whom he discusses his theories about genius. These interlocutors—whether Tony, who owns Tony’s Hotel in Greece, or Friederike, a “friend of a friend” who hosts a classical music show at a radio station in Vienna—add an immediacy the book. The reader has the sense that the ideas and insights arrived at through this talk are spontaneous. The progression feels natural, which is a pretty neat trick.

The fun, relaxed mode is also maintained when outside scholarship is brought in to help situate and consider a particular genius at hand, for instance, whether or not Beethoven’s messy habits contributed to his musical genius. Turning to research at the University of Minnesota that studied whether research participants came up with more creative ideas in messy environments or clean ones, Weiner manages to illuminate Beethoven through an unlikely blend of scholarship, musings about the popular photograph of Einstein’s chaotic desk and on-the-ground observation in Vienna. Well read, thoughtful and above all curious, Weiner invites the reader to explore a satisfying take on a meaningful topic while also enjoying daily pleasures in cities around the world.

Journalist and globe-trotter Eric Weiner, perhaps best-known for his bestselling book The Geography of Bliss, continues his pursuit of big questions in The Geography of Genius. Why, he wonders, do some conditions give rise to networks of innovators who transform the world? As such a question suggests, Weiner is thinking about genius in a fresh way.

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