Priscilla Kipp

NonfictionMemoir

Ingrained

Review by Priscilla Kipp

As Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman opens, Callum Robinson and his father are trekking deep into a Scottish forest on a quest for timber. As we follow them, we are newcomers in this unfamiliar territory of dappled sunlight, damp air and still silence, surrounded by “hulking Scots pines [that] lurk in their own long shadow.” Along with his woodworking tools, Robinson brings his skills as a wordsmith; his writing is startlingly sensual and as vibrant and lush as the terrain he walks. He evokes the smell and feel of the “dry, earthy, fungal miasma” among the “woodland behemoths” that surround him.

Ingrained is as much the story of these woodlands as it is Robinson’s own journey from wayward teen to impassioned master woodworker. But he didn’t fully understand how much his virtuosic father had taught him, and how much he had, albeit reluctantly, learned, until he left home to find his own way. With his indomitable wife and business partner, Marisa, Robinson opens a storefront in Linlithgow, and business grows quickly—too quickly. Robinson finds himself frustrated behind a desk, fretting over near calamities and financial cliffhangers, instead of a workbench. When he comes to realize he prefers a workshop in the woods over paperwork and corporate bosses, Robinson finds his purpose.

The details are everything here, and in his own devotion to craft, Robinson leaves few out. On that trek deep into the woods, he goes “treasure hunting” at a mill and sorts the sought-after boards by their grain, look and feel. Robinson invites the reader into his workshop to smell the sawdust and wince when learning how a lathe can wreak havoc.

Best of all, thanks to the self-deprecating sense of humor in Robinson’s impressive storytelling, readers come to understand that you don’t need a crafty bone in your body to appreciate and celebrate the work of a master craftsman, or, as Robinson’s father taught him, to respect the creative mind at work. Ingrained makes an excellent case for doing exactly that, whether working with wood, words or, as so beautifully exemplified here, both.

In his sensual, vibrant memoir, Ingrained, Callum Robinson shows off his skills as a woodworker and wordsmith.
NonfictionMemoir

Gather Me

Review by Priscilla Kipp

It all began with a T-shirt. On her 32nd birthday, Glory Edim was surprised by a gift from her ex-partner, a custom-made T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Well-Read Black Girl.” When she wore it on the streets of Brooklyn, she was again surprised: People stopped her to talk about books.

Thus began an evolving conversation, first with her fledgling book club, Well-Read Black Girl, which soon attracted acclaimed authors like Tayari Jones (An American Marriage) and Angela Flournoy (The Turner House); then with her premiere virtual literary festival, attended by more than 800 people. Her podcast, Well-Read With Glory Edim, followed. Now, in her plucky, intimate memoir, Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me, Edim offers her own story, tethering the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery. It’s reader catnip. 

Edim begins each chapter with a list of the authors and books that most influenced her as she came of age, from childhood (My Book of Bible Stories, The Berenstain Bears) through experiencing romantic love for the first time (Romeo and Juliet, Beloved) to her fraught relationship with her aging mother (Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River). She finds solace, wisdom, grace, humor and, especially, support in these tomes as she navigates hard times, and her own writing grows more poignant. 

Yet Gather Me is more than an ode to writers spun from a respectful distance: This is a hands-on guidebook to getting by in good (literary) company. Through reading, Edim found stable ground within her fracturing Nigerian immigrant family, and later as a single mom. Writers like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, bell hooks, James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston became her community. 

The title borrows a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. . . . It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” Edim writes, “I am never alone. The T-shirt, the books, the authors, the club, the community: Those things are now my bright and roaring fire, my blessed and beautiful universe.” Gather Me is a powerful invitation to join her there.

In her plucky, intimate memoir, Glory Edim, the creator of the Well-Read Black Girl book club, tethers the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery—it’s reader catnip.
NonfictionMemoir

The Slow Road North

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Rosie Schaap lost her husband to cancer at 42. Her mother died a year later, followed by her ancient, beloved cat. Awash in grief, Schaap needed a place to mourn. She would find it in Northern Ireland, a country still recovering from decades of sectarian strife known as the “troubles.” The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country is a magnificent love letter to a region that brought her back to life.

Glenarm is a small village in County Antrim, along Northern Ireland’s northeastern coast. On a travel writing assignment in 2016, Schaap stayed at the Barbican, “the fairy-tale castle folly at the entrance of Glenarm Castle.” A forest and a seashore, a few small shops, two pubs and a grocery store: She fell in love. “It had a feeling, a spirit, a strong sense of place to which I succumbed. I knew I would be back. And I had a feeling that someday I would stay much longer.”

After her various griefs at age 47, the Drinking With Men author enrolled in a creative writing program at a Belfast college. Her studies soon expanded beyond the classroom as she took in the history of her village and the people there, and the stories of those still being mourned from the troubles. The Irish are excellent at death, she learned. Strangers became friends and empathetic listeners. She could pour her grief out to them and they understood everything.

As idyllic as it all seemed, Schaap was not so much entranced as curious—and cautious. To be asked “What are you?” still meant “Protestant or Catholic?” Her being Jewish confounded them, just as they sometimes did her. A “reticence” she often encountered on the subject of the troubles, was, she believed, “a reflection of the trauma those years inflicted upon the people here . . . too sensitive and painful to discuss, too unhappy to recollect at will.”

Schaap nicely balances lush descriptions of the Irish countryside with sharp observations and wit, as she sheds her old city life and finds a home to tend to her grief. The Slow Road North is a winning memoir about loss and life.

 

The Slow Road North is Rosie Schaap's magnificent love letter to Northern Ireland, the region that offered her solace and community while she was reeling from grief.
NonfictionTrue CrimeHistory

The Incorruptibles

Review by Priscilla Kipp

New York City’s East Side at the turn of the 20th century comes vibrantly alive in The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld. In the late 1800s, Eastern European Jews began fleeing Germany’s pogroms and Russia’s Pale of Settlement, the largest ghetto in history. The East Side became their American ghetto, soon in the grip of an underworld of gamblers, grifters and pimps, and an upper world of titans of manufacturing and politics. Then along came Abe Shoenfeld and his vice squad, the Incorruptibles.

Dan Slater (Love in the Time of Algorithms) stumbled upon Shoenfield’s “reams of reportage and intelligence about the Jewish underworld of pre-World-War-I New York.” Combined with reporting from newspapers of the day, as well court cases, sales receipts, government findings and memoirs of those involved, Slater provides rich context for the setting the Incorruptibles hoped to reform. In a city plagued by abominable labor conditions in factories, the political machine of Tammany Hall and corruption blocking the path to justice, Shoenfeld’s homegrown vice squad was determined, against all odds, to be incorruptible.

Slater recreates the notorious stars of this underworld—the likes of dapper Arnold Rothstein, ruthless Big Jack Zelig and comically clueless gangster Louie Rosenberg—and the women in their shadows, some of whom, like Louie’s widow, Lily Rosenberg, kept their own notes. He also weaves in the critical impact of fomenting antisemitism throughout the country. The vices plaguing the East Side were being attributed to Jewish immigrants at large, rather than the small cabal of wealthy schemers and corrupt politicians. Slater shows how this metastasizing hatred of Jews foreshadowed Nazi Germany.

While the need for reform was an easy message to sell to the public, actually prohibiting popular illegal activities like gambling and prostitution proved hard. Working with a scrupulous lawyer named Harry Newburger and detective Joseph Faurot, whose technical acumen, like bridging telephone wires to listen in to private conversations, revolutionized criminal investigations, the Incorruptibles prompted The World to print on the front page: “BIGGEST GAMBLERS QUIT; BROADWAY SECTION CLEAN.”

If this was the sole substance of Slater’s book, it would be a singularly worthy read. Yet it is so much more. The Incorruptibles is a compelling crime story, colorful history and an ominous warning about antisemitism.

Dan Slater’s vibrant The Incorruptibles chronicles the homegrown vice squad that took down New York City’s most notorious turn-of-the-century gangsters.
NonfictionMemoir

Wonderland

Review by Priscilla Kipp

T.S. Eliot wrote, “There’s no vocabulary / For love within a family . . . the love within which / All other love finds speech. / This love is silent.” Not so for Nicole Treska, as she introduces her rogues’ gallery of a family in her debut memoir, Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard and Breaking Even. Treska knows her family’s vocabulary by heart and speaks it with equal parts love, loyalty, chagrin and ambivalence. She paints her hometown of Boston with the same vibrant detail, offering both cityscape and cultural backdrop. Legendary attractions like the Hilltop, Kowloon and the Golden Banana strip club come alive, along with cherished and not-so-cherished memories of her family, some of them long gone but living on in their own notoriety.

Treska begins by envisioning the eponymous Wonderland, a short-lived, early-1900s amusement park on Boston’s Revere Beach. “Of course,” Treska writes, “we revered some kind of permanence—something to point to and say, ‘I came from right here.’ . . . There was yearning in what remained.” In this spirit, Treska dives into her family history. Her grandfather was a bookie for the infamous Whitey Bulger. His diner was host to the Winter Hill Gang, an Irish mob syndicate that dominated the city in the ’60s and ’70s: “They ran books and armed the IRA and engaged in your typical mob-type behavior: racketeering, robbery, drugs, murder.” When her father, Phil, worked at the diner, he took bets from “all the gamblers and wiseguys around town” and later did a stint in prison for federal drug trafficking. “My family met the devil regularly,” Treska notes dryly.

Meanwhile, Treska was the first to graduate from college, and she became an adjunct professor at City College of New York. But she notes, too, her skill at swapping price tags on artwork and stealing accessories for her Harlem apartment. She also became smart at tricking her landlord and profiting from the Airbnb rental of one of her bedrooms. “Begging, borrowing, and stealing were the only way I knew how to build a life, but I did build.”

Treska’s reckoning of her two lives—rising success in New York and her family’s heavy legacy of poverty and crime in Boston—continues. Phil gambles. “He breathed, he lied, he gambled, and then all the rest that makes up a life,” Treska writes. “I loved my father. And how do you love a thief?” For those who, like Treska, may have some skeletons in their family closet, Wonderland holds both good and bad news: We can honor them with our fonder memories, but the damage they caused may yet linger. But still, family is something to point to, to say, “I came from right here.”

Nicole Treska explores memory and legacy as she introduces her rogues’ gallery of a family in her debut memoir, Wonderland.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Great River

Review by Priscilla Kipp

It should come as no surprise that a book about the legendary Mississippi River covers centuries of history, tons of mud, hundreds of levees and a rogues’ gallery of characters. Boyce Upholt turns it all into an absorbing tale in The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi.

When Upholt took on a writing assignment about a paddler and tourist guide in 2015, he had no experience with the Mississippi. In the following years, he would go on to catch rides in oyster boats, tour the delta with a parish councilman and absorb the worries of the president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association.

Of course, many before Upholt were also drawn to the river. Spanish explorers are credited with “discovering” the river on a mission to plunder the riches of Indigenous people—a historical narrative Upholt calls “that tired idea that a white man can discover something that has already been used as a watery highway for thousands of years.” Enslaved and free Black people and generations of restless migrating white settlers found their way to the territory alongside the river. Mark Twain and his iconic character, Huck Finn, lured cramped, disillusioned city dwellers to the wild river’s endless spaces. Flatboats gave way to steamboats, and railroads hauled people to the river’s banks in droves. Property battles, poverty, greed, murders and graft ensued.

The Army Corps of Engineers built the longest levee in the world along the lower Mississippi—the second largest human-made structure on Earth, only after the Great Wall of China. Local and federal commissions, boards and agencies would attend to the political wants and economic needs of those invested in the river (especially the powerful and wealthy) ever since. Climate change heightens the river’s many challenges. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina “woke the world,” Upholt writes, as it “ripped through the marshland and put much of New Orleans underwater.” But the life of the river goes on. Mud is dredged here and moved there. Industrial pollutants irrevocably change ecosystems. Engineers continue to construct, deconstruct, rearrange, recreate, divert and revert the waterway. Our attempts to control the wild Mississippi are an endless pursuit.

Upholt manages to wrestle a staggering amount of details into a narrative that is at times a challenge to read. But thanks to his concise yet lively writing style, The Great River is worth the effort. It compellingly pays homage to a waterway worthy of its moniker.

Boyce Upholt wrangles the geological, political and cultural history of the wild Mississippi River in a compelling, lively narrative.
NonfictionPop CultureArts & Culture

American Diva

Review by Priscilla Kipp

When Deborah Paredez describes the women she awards diva status as “extraordinary, unruly, fabulous,” she is just getting started. In tributes as impassioned and exuberant as any of her subjects, the college professor and poet offers a diverse collection of women to be celebrated and emulated. American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous is the grand platform Paredez creates for her stars as she tells their stories, bedecked with her own scintillating flourishes. 

Paredez memorializes divas at a propulsive pace. Here is the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz; the effervescent and doomed Selena; Tina Turner performing “Proud Mary” with “inimitable ferocity”; Rita Moreno, on-fire dancer and vengeful victim in the movie West Side Story; Venus and Serena Williams, “defying the naysayers” and dominating the courts; Aretha Franklin, “a queen bee dripping with so much nectar” at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. These iconic women, both here and gone, have earned their diva status and, Paredez insists, stand as beacons of feminism for future generations.

Divas, by Paredez’s definition, are “strong, complicated, imperfect, virtuosic women who last and last and last.” But competing definitions of divas have made their way into the culture. Newsweek cautioned parents against “Generation Diva” in 2009, and divas, “once synonymous with virtuosity, became symbols of vitriol.” Meanwhile, tween icons like Miley Cyrus—whose exploits as Hannah Montana came “adorned with sparkly merchandise”—were on the rise. Young girls have learned to dress, dance and perform as the stars they yearn to be. Paredez wonders, has a diva instead become “a means of convincing girls that singing along to a power ballad in a sequined T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Li’l Diva’ equals actual power”? The downside to such youthful appropriation becomes clear by contrast: The women whose careers Paredez showcases in American Diva are real and powerful in their sheer fearless embrace of their own best selves—rendering moot any worshipful imitation.

Paredez doesn’t hold back, and is especially startling in her candor about her own impetuous coming of age. Bookending this star-studded lineup is the author’s own beloved Lucia, the aunt who introduced her to all things diva: Dress up, dance, sing or ace your serve—and always accessorize. The rest—success, money, fame, love—will happen only if you are strong enough to make it so.

The exuberant American Diva celebrates “extraordinary, unruly, fabulous” women who earned their diva status and stood the test of time.
NonfictionBiography

The Swans of Harlem

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In 2014, Misty Copeland became the first Black dancer to ever take the stage as Swan Queen in Swan Lake. The next year, she was promoted to principal dancer in the American Ballet Theatre, making her the first Black dancer to ever secure the role. She has been heralded as a prodigy and celebrated as a trailblazer. Yet in the first decade of her career, she was made to paint her face to look less like herself, less Black. White choreographers had long tried to steer her toward modern dance, where her skin color was more acceptable, and where she would not “break the line” of pale flesh. 

Today, large dance organizations boast diversity, equity and inclusion programming, and all dancers can finally find ballet tights and shoes that match their skin tone. Thanks to Copeland, other Black girls may not feel so alone in their unquenchable desire to dance classical ballet. 

But decades before Copeland took to the stage, as she frequently acknowledges, Black girls and women were performing to accolades all over the globe and in U.S. cities generally hostile to anyone of color. The change began in Harlem, when the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. inspired a Black dancer, Arthur Mitchell, to found his own ballet company. The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History is journalist Karen Valby’s spirited account of Mitchell’s Dance Theater of Harlem, and of five principal dancers who, half a century after their time in the spotlight, formed the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council to tell their story. 

In 1968, Lydia Abarca was working as a bank secretary and about to enter Fordham University  on a partial scholarship. She had given up on ballet at 15, “tired of giving her whole self over to something that never seemed to love her back.” But a Black principal dancer teaching ballet in a neighborhood church basement lured her back in. Abarca’s mother, a part-time telephone operator, was skeptical, but her father, a janitor from Puerto Rico, did not object. So began Abarca’s rise to international fame. 

With respectful attention to their occasionally troubled lives, Valby introduces Abarca’s peers: Sheila Rohan, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells. Their “lighthouse,” Arthur Mitchell, is portrayed in his all-too-human complexity, fighting to keep his company funded and recognized, and his ballerinas under his thumb. Mitchell cast a long shadow over the dancers; he was their champion, teacher and employer—and their most unrelenting critic. 

Valby’s extensive interviews with the dancers lend an intimacy to the narrative, the details of their lives elevated and their perspectives clearly observed. The women of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council are determined to bring their story out of obscurity. In The Swans of Harlem, they become unforgettable.

Karen Valby’s spirited The Swans of Harlem brings the remarkable story of trailblazing Black ballerinas to center stage.
NonfictionMemoir

The House of Hidden Meanings

Review by Priscilla Kipp

RuPaul, drag superstar and pop culture icon, has been busy on his lifelong way to stardom—a destiny, he reveals, foretold by a psychic before he was born. He has been an actor, producer, author, model, dancer, singer, songwriter, media host, business mogul and creator of the multi-Emmy-winning reality TV series, “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” He has worked his way from unhoused nomad to celebrity star, including an actual one on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now 63, RuPaul turns his penetrating gaze inward, looking for deeper meanings within his journey. In The House of Hidden Meanings, he shares all with a tender clarity that renders him unforgettably human. 

Ernestine Charles chose her only son’s name because, she said, there was no one else “alive with a name like that.” Raising four children in San Diego after her abusive husband left, she was “always in a bad mood.” RuPaul entertained her with “imitations, bits, sketches, little scraps of makeshift theater. . . . I put her powder on and whipped a towel around my head as if it were a lustrous head of hair,” he recalls. As a teenager, he escaped to Atlanta and eventually worked his way to New York City. Club scenes kept him performing and partying. He always acted like a star, he says, because he knew he was one.

RuPaul paints wildly vivid city scenes: gritty New York, Atlanta alive with punk and drag, and San Diego, where his complicated childhood haunts him still. Relationships were often sidetracked by too many drugs and risky sex, but he somehow survived, always believing in his destiny—and in drag. His 1993 breakthrough video, “Supermodel (You Better Work),” turned gay stereotypes on their heads and showcased an exuberance that appealed to both the mainstream and the LGBTQ+ community.

Here, we don’t find his rise to fame, the lead-up to “Drag Race” or even his activism and philanthropic work. That information about the often-profiled star is readily available elsewhere.  The House of Hidden Meanings is about beginnings. RuPaul reveals the inner work of healing from past wounds and repairing his relationship with himself, and his memoir celebrates the potential for reinvention. “In a system where things insisted on being one or the other, drag was everything,” he writes. “That made it magic.”

In his refreshing memoir, drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul tells his life story with a tender clarity that renders a larger-than-life figure unforgettably human.
NonfictionMemoirMedicine

Facing the Unseen

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Conventional wisdom has long held that mental illness is disconnected from physical health, requiring two separate courses of treatment. In Facing the Unseen: The Struggle to Center Mental Health in Medicine, psychiatrist Damon Tweedy aims to debunk this long-standing theory. The acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Black Man in a White Coat, Tweedy offers what feels like a personal invitation into his office, his expertise and, most of all, his hard-earned wisdom. 

Tweedy straightforwardly describes his training through Duke University School of Medicine, including his growing frustrations with an unsatisfactory system of care. He is critical of his colleagues for overlooking, stereotyping or dismissing the “unseen” signs of mental illness, bringing issues of class, race and gender into focus. He also questions his own biases, first as an aspiring cardiologist, and then as a psychiatrist struggling to understand how mind and body work together. 

Mostly, though, Facing the Unseen is about his patients. Tweedy is an excellent storyteller, making the people whom he treats unforgettably visible in all their complexities. Their stories embody why recognizing the mind-body connection is critical. There’s Natalie (all patients’ names are pseudonyms), an Iraq war veteran with PTSD, who came to the ER desperate for help. But treating her drug withdrawal was not considered a medical priority, and she was left to seek outpatient psychiatric care elsewhere. A passionate advocate for integrated medical and psychiatric care, Tweedy cites statistics that tally addiction and opioid abuse, PTSD, depression and anxiety, and the prevalent use of prescription pills. Throughout, he uses powerful descriptions that yield keen insights, showing us how the health care system sets doctors up to fail their patients, and offering solutions that will help. 

Improving access to effective treatments by coordinated caregivers is improving, but the need for better care is also growing. Facing the Unseen sounds both an alarm and a rallying cry. 

In Facing the Unseen, Black Man in a White Coat author Damon Tweedy makes an impassioned call for better mental health care.
NonfictionSocial ScienceEssays

You Get What You Pay For

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Morgan Parker, acclaimed poet and winner of a 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection Magical Negro, marries memoir with cultural critique in an unsparing, intimate and provocative book of essays, You Get What You Pay For, which infuses the titular idiom with the perspective of her wronged race. “Becoming a person,” she writes in the first essay, “forming an identity, had been a sham assignment from the start—for an African American person, there is a multistep process of backtracking and reinterpreting hundreds of years of American history, peeling apart film from adhesive to hold under the light and make out a cloudy reflection.”

Parker was named after a minor character in “The Cosby Show,” who, in her single appearance, comically eats olives despite knowing she’s allergic to them. Parker writes: “I come from . . . self-destructive impulses, swallowing what I shouldn’t, becoming a punchline.” Later, writing for the feminist platform Lenny Letter, she attended Cosby’s trial for sexual assault. “I’m one of maybe three Black women in the room . . . wrestling with that familiar triple-consciousness chicken or egg. Am I Black today or a woman? Where do I pledge allegiance? Which injustices should I fight first?”

Parker tells of her depression, anxiety and self-hatred, which she describes as “something palpable, something ugly and inadequate and all wrong.” She interrogates the relationships between Black people and treatment for mental illness, citing her father’s assertion that “Black people don’t go to therapy.” Eventually, she did. When a white therapist admitted she knew nothing about the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown’s death, Parker moved on. With time, she began to link her mental illness to that of her ancestors’ experience as slaves and the century-and-a-half of racism that has followed, “finally com[ing] to understand [self-hatred] as extension of the white supremacist ideologies permeating and governing the nation of which I am a citizen.”

The 22 essays in You Get What You Pay For cycle through Parker’s urgent concerns about white supremacy, police brutality, her often tenuous mental health and her ongoing search for love. She handles these heavy issues with incisive humor and a poet’s eye for detail. The “you” in that titular idiom becomes “we.”

Morgan Parker examines how racism and intergenerational trauma can affect mental health in her provocative, incisively humorous debut essay collection.
NonfictionMiddle Eastern HistoryHistory

The Gardener of Lashkar Gah

Review by Priscilla Kipp

After 20 years of trying and failing to rebuild Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, NATO allies pulled out of the country, promising sanctuary in the United Kingdom to the hundreds of Afghan interpreters, base workers and their families. In The Gardener of Lashkar Gah: The Afghans Who Risked Everything to Fight the Taliban, award-winning British journalist Larisa Brown uses her considerable reporting skills, astute insights and conflict zone experience to uncover the stories of those left behind.

Shaista Gul’s beautiful garden at the British base in the southwestern Afghanistan city of Lashkar Gah served as a place of comfort and respite for Afghan base workers and military personnel, for whom “life outside was an incongruous contrast to the patch of garden paradise inside.” Gul’s earnest teenage son Jamal became an interpreter for the British soldiers there and soon found himself on the front lines. His translating skills often made the difference between life and death for the troops as they moved across roads embedded with bombs, and into villages where he had to discern if people were farmers or insurgents ready to kill. Because interpreters were usually beside commanders, they were frequently targeted. Jamal barely made it out alive, only to return home to death threats from people intent on killing those who cooperated with the allies.

As NATO forces began their 2021 pullout, Afghan workers were hopeful that they’d be resettled in the U.K., instead of being left behind at the mercy of the Taliban as they reclaimed the country with brutal force. NATO broke its promise, and the final days at the Kabul Airport were a living nightmare marked by chaos and despair. Thousands were left behind and still wait to be rescued.

Brown relies on specificity and detail in her storytelling: the terrifying knock on the door when the Taliban came looking for a man accused of working for British troops; the rocky mountain paths where the very old and very young slept while attempting to escape to Pakistan; an entitled British commander who prioritized the escape of his pets over hundreds of Afghans desperate to be rescued. This forthright, unsparing account lays bare the failures of British and American leaders to keep their many promises, and succeeds in honoring the tenacity and courage of Afghans like Shaista Gul and Jamal.

Larisa Brown’s The Gardener of Lashkar Gah tells the harrowing story of the Afghan aid workers that NATO left to their fates when the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan.
NonfictionMemoir

Soundtrack of Silence

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In his intimate, inspiring memoir, Soundtrack of Silence: Love, Loss, and a Playlist for Life, Matt Hay celebrates the power of music, technology, the brain and how the human spirit can be made invincible by love.

When Hay was in elementary school, he copied his classmates’ annual audio tests to hide the fact that he couldn’t hear the tone. He continued to cover up symptoms of hearing loss until he was a college sophomore, when a free checkup at the school’s medical center led to an MRI, which led to a diagnosis of a rare disorder. Hay had neurofibromatosis type 2, which meant that tumors were growing on the hearing nerves of his brain and eventually, he would be deaf. Hearing aids worked for a while, but surgeries were necessary to remove the tumors, one of which was growing at the base of his brain. Hay practiced lip reading and learned sign language with his future wife, Nora, preparing for the day his world would go silent, and still hoping it would never come.

Hay wanted to preserve the sounds that mattered most, the music that conjured up memories of his youth, coming of age and falling in love. He listened to his favorites: The Beatles’ “Blackbird,” Beck’s “Beautiful Way,” Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” over and over again, embedding them in his brain, training it to preserve and be stimulated by vibrational information that corresponded with memorable times. Together, Matt and Nora created a playlist that would become the soundtrack of his life.

And then it happened: At work one day, Hay’s hearing left him. He was 25. Research led him to try a new device, an auditory brainstem implant (ABI) then in use by only 200 people.

Hays tells his story in an endearingly plain, straightforward style. His fearless approach to an insidious disease is inspirational; his attention to the science of hearing and technical remedies is educational; and his ability to showcase his personal plight in order to raise awareness and thus further benefit research is true generosity. Soundtrack of Silence is a testament to the human spirit and the forces of love and science, all wrapped up in the universal power of music.

Matt Hay’s memoir, Soundtrack of Silence, is a testament to the human spirit, the forces of love and science, and the universal power of music.

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