Priscilla Kipp

NonfictionMusic

Listen

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The word “listen” can function both as a noun —“Give a listen”—and as a verb: “Are you listening?” In Michel Faber’s first work of nonfiction, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, he gives both uses a workout. Known for category-resistant fiction like 2002’s The Crimson Petal and the White and 2014’s The Book of Strange New Things, Faber promises that this book, which was decades in the making and exhaustively examines genres, their artists and their respective audiences, “will change the way you listen.” True enough. In doing so, it also broadens the act of listening in directions that are surprising, sometimes unsettling and ultimately endearing.

Faber has his opinions, and he doesn’t hold back. He thinks composing and playing classical music is often more a test of musical skill than true creative work. Rock is still too Anglocentric, its audiences unreceptive to listening to songs sung in languages other than English; the loss is ours, he notes. Today’s multimedia-infused performances are a “synergy of illusions.” He weighs in on the vinyl versus digital debate and the practice of lip-syncing. His thoughts on The Beatles and their albums are included, along with those on David Bowie, The Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. It would be easier to point out his omissions than the many artists he includes, but let’s give it a try: He opines about Beyoncé, Beethoven, Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Marvin Gaye, among others. It’s a sprawling survey that sometimes feels unwieldy, but Faber covers miles of ground with knowledgeable panache.

Music needs audiences, and Faber spotlights joyful children first introduced to rhythm and the elderly keeping their memories alive in the tunes embedded in their minds. Music is known for its healing properties as well, and Faber gives special attention to and heartfelt praise for caregivers who use it to benefit people with Parkinson’s disease, dementia and other conditions.

Exploring the act of listening through the prisms of history, culture and his own troubled childhood, Faber—who has chronic tinnitus—dances through chapters titled “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and “Let’s Hear It One More Time for Ludwig!” In “The Tracks of My Tears,” he arrives at what it is about music that makes some people cry. With that, he brings his listeners to common ground where music thrives: our humanity.

In his compelling nonfiction debut, award-winning novelist Michel Faber vows to change the way you listen to music.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistoryBlack History

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The written narratives of enslaved people offer a window into circumstances that are, to most of us, unimaginable. These vital documents immortalize the names of their authors: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup and Harriet Jacobs, among them. But one woman wrote anonymously, perhaps trusting history to keep her secret until it was safe for her identity to be revealed. In The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Harvard University professor Gregg Hecimovich sets out to find the woman who wrote The Bondwoman’s Narrative, an unpublished manuscript bought at auction by renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2001. Hecimovich relies on the scholarship of Gates and others to celebrate the life and work of the first Black female novelist, Hannah Bond—more than a century after her death.

Scholars have suggested other candidates to fit the bondwoman’s identity—women who walked similar paths from slavery to freedom in the antebellum South of North Carolina, Virginia and Washington. Yet Hecimovich successfully braids together the fictitious details of the novel’s protagonist with Bond’s autobiography, leaving little doubt about the truth. Thanks to his deep research—and despite remaining gaps in the historical record—the titular bondwoman comes vividly to life.

As a “domestic servant,” Bond was at the mercy of her enslavers, who sexually abused her and cruelly severed her family ties—a practice especially rampant after the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, when slave owners increasingly forced their captives to reproduce and then sold their children. Bond lost her mother and her child, but she held onto her hunger to learn and become literate. She especially leaned on Charles Dickens and Bleak House for help in creating her writing.

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts is a vivid introduction to America’s first Black female novelist.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

A Few Days Full of Trouble

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Sixty-seven years after the savage murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, his cousin still seeks some kind of justice. Haunted by the 1955 hate crime that ignited the civil rights movement, Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. brings everything and everyone back to life in A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till. The title comes from the Bible—“Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble” (Job 14:1, NIV)—and is aptly applied to the short life and violent death of 14-year-old Till, while also ironically relating to the decades of delayed and denied justice that followed.

Till’s murder became international news when his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open casket at the boy’s funeral, inviting the world to see her mutilated son. People fainted, the press raged—and yet the two white men accused of his murder were soon acquitted by an all-white jury. Not that the men worried about their fate; during their trial, they were allowed to leave their jail cells for supper with their families, carrying guns. Four months later, Look magazine published “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi” by William Bradford Huie, which featured an exclusive interview with Till’s acquitted killers, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam. Milam admitted that they shot Till, tied a gin fan around his neck and rolled him into the river. Their confession earned them $4,000 and had no significant consequences.

Several investigations by the FBI and Department of Justice ensued, hindered by possibly racist politics and questionable sources. In 2017, Timothy Tyson published a bestselling book that contained a quotation from Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who claimed that Till had accosted her at the grocery store, motivating her husband and brother-in-law to pursue and eventually murder Till. In the quote, Donham recanted part of her original story. Or did she? As the Mississippi district attorney worked to confirm the quote in Tyson’s book, evidence of the author’s conversation with Donham vanished—if it ever existed.

Parker, with the help of his co-author, Christopher Benson, takes a hard look at everything that has transpired since 1955, including Parker’s own feelings of guilt. He was there the night Bryant and Milam came for Till, but he survived and went on to become a barber, minister and major force behind the family’s effort to achieve justice and right the record. His is a vivid chronicle of racism in America, an intense read that may make some readers uncomfortable. Perhaps that is the point. 

Anti-lynching bills struggled through Congress for years after Till’s murder. Finally, in March of 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime. As Benson writes in an afterword, “the work to achieve justice has just begun.”

The story of Emmett Till’s violent death in 1955 is retold by his cousin Wheeler Parker Jr., the force behind decades of attempts to achieve justice and right the record.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryBiography

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In 1767, Phillis Wheatley arrived in Boston via a slave ship at the age of 7. In the years leading up to the start of the American Revolution in 1775, she became famous across New England and in London for her poetry. For all her talent and influence on the issues of her day, such as abolition, emancipation and revolution, the details of Wheatley’s life are still unknown to many. Award-winning historian David Waldstreicher sets out to change that with his in-depth, engrossing biography, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence.

At a time when enslaved—and free—Black people were regarded by many colonists as barely literate “barbarians” and possible threats to Massachusetts’ rebellion against England, Wheatley earned her fame with words. Recognizing her unique ability, Wheatley’s wealthy, white enslavers gave her the time and privacy to write. Her poems, such as “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” were metered, not free verse, and spoke to the intellectual and impassioned Christian beliefs of her times. Wheatley’s elegies for the dead were distributed as broadsides at funerals, and her poems—which managed to praise British soldiers as well as American patriots and abolitionists—were published in newspapers on both sides of the churning political divide. Waldstreicher includes the text of many of Wheatley’s poems, explaining them well for those less familiar with the classical forms she used.

When an enslaved man fled his captors while they were visiting England, the ensuing public and legal controversy revealed the hypocrisy of a group of colonies seeking freedom while allowing slavery to persist. Within this context, Wheatley’s own position was precarious. She often had to prove that a young enslaved Black girl could indeed be a brilliant poet. In 1773, she achieved her emancipation with the help of her many patrons in Boston and England after the publication of her first book—at a time when very few women could get published.

Waldstreicher documents the long, tortuous journeys toward independence for both the poet and the American colonies in The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. Along the way, the likes of Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Abigail Adams cross Wheatley’s path, and events like the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre feature prominently. This account of Wheatley’s life adds much to the tumultuous Revolutionary chapter of America’s political and racial history.

David Waldstreicher’s engrossing biography of the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley adds much to the tumultuous Revolutionary chapter of America’s political and racial history.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistoryBiography

Untold Power

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the controversial first lady of 28th president Woodrow Wilson, had some impressive predecessors. There was women’s rights advocate Abigail Adams, wife of second president John Adams and mother of sixth president John Quincy Adams. During the War of 1812, Dolley Madison, wife of fourth president James Madison, rescued the nation’s treasured artwork from a burning White House. Edith was also followed by trailblazers, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, whose looming legacies have sometimes left Edith in history’s shadow. With Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson, historian Rebecca Boggs Roberts gives Edith her due, demonstrating that, as the first unelected woman to govern the country, Edith has no match.

Like several other first ladies, Edith had little formal education. She came from a Virginia family who had been dispossessed after the Civil War and grew up in a crowded apartment above a general store, which she eventually left for Washington, D.C., where a tall, striking beauty like herself could better shine. When she married Norman Galt, a jewelry business owner, she became his helpmate; when he died, she became a working widow. 

Woodrow lost his first wife, Ellen, soon after taking office in 1913. When he was introduced to Edith, he promptly fell in love. He shared with her every aspect of his work, soon darkened by the looming threat of a world war that many Americans wanted no part of. During those early years of her marriage, Edith knew her place—and how to get around it. When women were not allowed at important White House meetings, she hid in drapes to watch. When a stroke left Woodrow incapacitated shortly into his second term, Edith quietly took over, deciding which pieces of news wouldn’t be too stressful for him, who could visit and how to keep everyone, especially his political enemies and the press, from seeing the truth of the president’s condition.

Untold Power brims with details, from the colors of the signature orchids Edith wore to the troubled corners of Woodrow’s mind after his stroke. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge is there, bent on destroying the president’s obsessive quest for a League of Nations, and sheep populate the White House lawn (one of Edith’s successful—and profitable—wartime ideas). This well-told history, based on sources that are often at odds with Edith’s own memoir, also begs the question: How could so much in the White House have gone unseen and unknown for so long? And, chillingly, could it happen again?

With Untold Power, Rebecca Boggs Roberts gives first lady Edith Wilson her due, demonstrating that, as the first unelected woman to govern the country, Wilson has no match.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

A Living Remedy

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The epigraph at the beginning of Nicole Chung’s vivid memoir A Living Remedy includes a line from Marie Howe’s poem “For Three Days”: “ . . . because even grief provides a living remedy.” As Chung immerses readers in her experience of grief, her powerful words compel us to follow her on a beautiful but difficult journey of loss.

Chung was born prematurely to Korean parents who felt they could not care for such a fragile baby. She wrote about her adoption by a white couple, and her subsequent search for her birth family as she became a mother herself, in her bestselling 2018 memoir, All You Can Ever Know. Now Chung continues her story, returning to the Oregon mountains of her childhood at the moment her beloved adoptive parents’ health began to fail.

Chung’s struggle to be present for her parents as a daughter, while also being a wife and a mother in another city three thousand miles away, will be familiar to many readers. When her father’s health began its slow downward spiral, he was still young enough to seek a better job with better health resources but was stymied by his limited education—and proud enough to resist the government assistance Chung begged him to request. When he finally did, he was denied, falling through the cracks of a broken health care system. By that time, his illness had taken an irreversible toll. Chung’s grief and frustration over his death were fanned by the costly miles between them, but she resolved to do better by her widowed mother. However, Chung’s time with her mother eventually ran out as well, as the gathering storm of the COVID-19 pandemic spread its own brand of pain and panic.

A Living Remedy makes this era of collective grief more personal, as Chung honestly explores her childhood and the lives and deaths of her parents. She gives these hard times a purpose, absorbing them with both fury and compassion, making them part of her own legacy to pass along to her daughters. For her, this is indeed a living remedy.

In Nicole Chung’s memoir about the deaths of her parents, she absorbs hard times with fury and compassion, making the universal experience of grief vividly personal.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

The First Lady of World War II

Review by Priscilla Kipp

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do,” Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote. In journalist Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s detail-rich and revealing account, The First Lady of World War II: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Daring Journey to the Frontlines and Back, it is abundantly clear that the four-term first lady lived her words. Beginning as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I, and later as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife and widow, she was a powerful voice for pacifism and economic and racial equality. She was derided during her lifetime for her forays into men’s worlds of work and war, but that didn’t stop her from embarking on a perilous journey to visit American troops in the South Pacific during World War II.

The first lady’s 1943 tour started in secret, as an attempt to evade misogynistic criticisms from press and politicians. When the news broke that she was amid the fierce, ongoing war with Japan, she was pilloried. Disdain and skepticism awaited her when she met the military men in command. Admiral “Bull” Halsey said he didn’t have time to entertain a “do-gooder.” General Douglas MacArthur refused to allow her to visit his post in Papua New Guinea. Yet, flying in freezing military planes, often under cover of darkness to avoid detection, Roosevelt visited Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and 17 islands, including Bora Bora, Christmas Island and Guadalcanal, over the course of five weeks. She went from bed to bed in hospitals, offering to bring messages home to the families of wounded soldiers and letting the troops know she was there because their president wanted to know how they were doing.

What was first viewed as a political stunt soon earned Roosevelt the admiration of Halsey and others, many of whom couldn’t keep up with her. She ate with the enlisted men, slept in huts, took cold showers and wrote it all down in her syndicated news column, “My Day.” In New Zealand and Australia, she visited factories and farms where women did the work that men were no longer available for. She wore a Red Cross uniform she paid for herself, just as she funded her entire trip. While some people back in America groused that Roosevelt should “stay at home, where a wife belongs,” the troops she met with gushed, “She’s just like your mother, isn’t she?”

After witnessing firsthand the horrific combat conditions for servicemen in the South Pacific theater, Roosevelt became a force for improving their lives as veterans. The GI Bill of Rights would help prevent the shameful treatment and broken promises that World War I veterans had endured. Roosevelt’s role as a delegate in the nascent United Nations also had its roots in this journey, which continued to haunt her throughout her life. As Schmidt powerfully conveys, it was a trip that changed many lives, especially Roosevelt’s.

Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s detail-rich and revealing The First Lady of World War II follows Eleanor Roosevelt on her perilous journey to visit American troops in the South Pacific.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

Built From the Fire

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The appalling history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma is becoming better known, albeit a century later. But journalist Victor Luckerson understands that what happened following those horrific events, as the survivors persevered and rebuilt, is also an important part of this history. In his debut book, Built From the Fire, Luckerson tells the story of the massacre, the people who restored the Greenwood district of Tulsa after that violent night in 1921, and their descendants who continue to fuel and inspire change.

The book is divided into three parts as Luckerson chronicles the last century of Greenwood’s history. Part 1 recounts the district’s beginnings circa 1901, when a segregated slice of oil-rich Tulsa became a destination for Black Americans looking for a future that the Jim Crow South would not deliver. But hope dimmed after the widespread race riots of 1919’s “Red Summer.” Black soldiers returning from World War I, where racism in the military meant menial assignments and segregated units, found that their service also failed to earn them equality at home. Yet Greenwood prospered, with movie theaters, dance halls, restaurants, hotels and a newspaper with a distinctly Black voice.

Luckerson fills every page with humanity distilled from his prodigious research. For example, there’s Dick Rowland, a young Black worker who got caught in a malfunctioning elevator with a white girl on May 30, 1921, the day before the massacre. She screamed, and he was almost lynched. Loula Williams, a successful Black entrepreneur, escaped the mob the night of May 31 but lost almost everything she had built—and later lost her mind. Prominent community member J.H. Goodwin diverted white terrorists from his home possibly because he passed for white.

During the night, Greenwood’s thriving businesses were reduced to smoking rubble. White rioters, including many citizens who were spontaneously deputized as policemen, stormed into the area and dragged people from their homes, shot them in the street and burned everything in their path. Planes even dropped explosives as they flew low over fleeing families. Luckerson holds nothing back in this description of hell, so terrifying that for years, survivors kept silent and such lurid history went untaught. But this, as Luckerson makes clear, was only the beginning.

Part II follows Greenwood’s survivors as they began the daunting task of salvaging, rebuilding and fighting back. Their descendants reclaimed the city’s entrepreneurial spirit while becoming civil rights activists and adamant reformers. Part III brings Greenwood into the still-turbulent present, as Goodwin’s great-granddaughter Regina, a Democratic state representative, pursues a relentless legislative quest for justice. As the search for the massacre’s mass graves continues, recovery from the gentrifying urban-renewal wrecking ball of the 1970s makes progress and demands for reparations intensify, Luckerson’s point is clear: Greenwood is alive again.

Victor Luckerson’s Built From the Fire documents what happened following the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, centering the survivors who persevered and rebuilt.
NonfictionTravelMemoir

Women We Buried, Women We Burned

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Investigative journalist and award-winning author Rachel Louise Snyder has reported on natural disasters, genocides, wars and social justice issues around the globe. Acclaimed for her seminal 2019 study of domestic violence in America, No Visible Bruises, she turns her focus to her own troubled family history in Women We Buried, Women We Burned, a memoir that is compelling, propulsive, gripping and disturbing in equal measure.

Snyder was 8 when her mother died of breast cancer at age 35. Growing up with her older brother near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Snyder had basked in her Jewish mother’s beauty and love; the loss left her feeling haunted and forever incomplete. Their father soon remarried, moving them near Chicago and immersing the newly blended family into the fervid world of evangelical Christianity. Church, Bible readings, forced hugs and bruising spankings were the remedies for all broken rules, and Snyder eventually rebelled in every way she could. 

Snyder was kicked out of her house at age 16, and her path from a homeless teenager to a college professor—one who, in her work as a journalist, has borne witness to women’s victimization across the world—is a journey worth following. It began when Snyder spent a semester of college traveling internationally by boat, funded in part by her mother’s brother. Though she had never left America before, she ended up visiting Japan, China, South Africa, India and Kenya with other college students. Along the way, she discovered that several of her fellow students had also lost a parent, and she wondered if that made them all more curious about simply being alive. 

Later, Snyder’s years living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge’s legacy of genocide still silently throbbed between generations, provided another education altogether. She describes the pulsing monsoon rains, the never-ending search for soldiers gone missing during the Vietnam War and the geckos climbing her apartment walls with a precision that makes even her most everyday observations vividly alive.

With the birth of her daughter, Snyder was able to reach a deeper understanding—and a sharper judgment—of her father and stepmother. The life she builds from this new wisdom is another kind of journey, one equally worth following.

The award-winning author of No Visible Bruises turns her focus to her troubled family history in a memoir that is compelling, propulsive, gripping and disturbing.
NonfictionEnvironmentAnimals

Eight Bears

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Gloria Dickie, an award-winning journalist and climate correspondent for Reuters, begins her intensive study of the eight remaining species of bears by recalling the familiar children’s story of Goldilocks. “We have entered the bears’ home without permission and selfishly laid claim to what we found there,” Dickie writes in Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future, alluding to everything humans have done to endanger these creatures.

Dickie brings readers along for the global trek she took while reporting and writing this book. Eight Bears is divided into three geographic parts, according to her subjects’ habitats: South America is home to the elusive spectacled bear in Ecuador and Peru; sloth, sun, moon and panda bears live in Asia, including India, Vietnam and China; and in North America, readers meet the American black and brown bears (United States) and the polar bear (Canada).

There is a lot to learn here about the mythic panda, the shy spectacled bear, the aggressive sloth bear, the controversial grizzly, the potentially doomed polar bear and others, and Dickie shows just how vulnerable they all are. Climate change is everywhere, threatening animals and humans with droughts, deforestation, warming seas and withering food sources. Human greed, corruption and exploitation make things worse; the captors of sloth “dancing bears” in India and the extractors of bear bile in Vietnam, for example, have earned their infamy. In the U.S., the pros and cons of continuing to protect grizzlies while ranchers and farmers deal with the dire consequences of their predation are up for debate. In other parts of the world, different species are being forced to share dwindling food sources, such as the spectacled bear and the puma as lowlands warm in the Andes. Six of these eight bear species are on the verge of extinction, and in addition to outlining their peril, Dickie also speaks with several of the activists and scientists who are working to secure a better future for them.

Our relationship with bears has been complicated but tender, Dickie notes. Remember the whimsical Paddington Bear, the beloved Berenstain Bears, the cute stuffed teddy bear in a baby’s crib? And the panda bear, so idolized that it is given as a political gift to China’s favored friends? Perhaps it is just such a history that can inspire more work to save them from extinction.

Gloria Dickie’s study of the eight remaining species of bears is laced with climate change warnings as she explores all the ways humans both love and endanger these creatures.
NonfictionScienceNature

The Underworld

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean zips as enthrallingly along as the state-of-the-art submersibles in which journalist Susan Casey deep-sea dives. The 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 over the Indian Ocean ignited Casey’s curiosity about what lay deeper within the marine worlds she had previously covered in her bestselling The Wave, The Devil’s Teeth and Voices in the Ocean. As Casey writes, the ensuing high-tech search for the plane using robots and sonar revealed a “symphony of extremes, a playlist of geology’s greatest hits,” including mountainous volcanoes, deep crevasses, towering cliffs and “a riot of unique species” never seen before. The Underworld is her dazzling answer to the age-old, tantalizing question about the ocean’s abyss: “What’s down there?”

Casey provides a thorough historical run-up of how the deep ocean has intrigued cartographers and explorers for centuries. From Olaus Magnus’ 1539 illustrated map, the Carta Marina, which inspired the popular belief that monsters filled the deep, to today’s OceanX, a nonprofit initiative whose mission is “to explore the ocean and bring it back to the world,” Casey colorfully explains how far our understanding of the ocean has come. Yet as humans we tend to look up, not down. Space continues to hold our attention. This, Casey argues, shortchanges the great lifesaving potential of the ocean, where even tiny microbes have the power to transform and save our planet.

The Underworld begins in January 2021, with Casey equally thrilled and terrified as she prepares to take her first dive in a submersible. Starting from the epipelagic (or sunlight) zone, she will drop through several regions to reach the hadal zone—fittingly named after Hades, Greek god of the underworld—which starts at 20,000 feet and extends beneath the seafloor into trenches and troughs. It is a wild ride as she describes the sea’s inhabitants flitting past the viewport: supergiant squids and transparent creatures with glass skeletons, three hearts, eight legs or “eyes that could swivel in any direction.” In the hadal zone, a submersible faces 16,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, and any mechanical flaw is likely to be fatal.

But that is not the danger Casey worries about. Rather, she worries about the imminent threat of deep-sea mining, poised to wreak havoc on the ocean’s floor, destroy sea life and alter the ocean’s ecosystem forever. Casey warns that the global efforts of environmental activists to stop the cataclysmic mining could ultimately fall short, and The Underworld compels readers to pay attention and learn more about this mysterious but vital world.

The Underworld is Susan Casey’s dazzling answer to the age-old, tantalizing question about the ocean’s abyss: “What’s down there?”
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Six

Review by Priscilla Kipp

As the first American female astronaut to fly into space on June 18, 1983, Sally Ride made history. Her name became synonymous with courage, excellence and the breakthrough of women, at last, into the storied all-male, all-white culture of NASA. In this eye-opening, untold chapter of history, The Six, acclaimed space reporter Loren Grush ensures that Ride’s five female colleagues in NASA’s astronaut group 8 also get their due. Each left their mark in a field often hostile to their gender. One, Judy Resnik, lost her life on January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded minutes after launching. She held a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and was the first Jewish American astronaut.

Grush roots the women’s stories in the context of their times, explaining the political and cultural pressures NASA was under when they chose to admit the six women in 1978. But she also maintains a detailed focus on each astronaut, imbuing her portraits of each with an intimacy that makes them utterly memorable. Geologist and oceanographer Kathy Sullivan would become the first American woman to walk in space. Judy Resnik specialized in the shuttle’s robotic arm, which served as “the world’s most sophisticated arcade claw game.” Emergency physician Anna Fisher became the first mother to fly into space. Surgeon Rhea Seddon, married to a fellow astronaut, gave birth to the first “astrotot.” Biochemist Ph.D. Shannon Lucid, a married mother of three, once held the record for the longest continuous stay in space, aboard the International Space Station. Sally Ride was a former junior tennis champion and held degrees in physics and English. After working on the Rogers Commission to discover why Challenger exploded, Ride left NASA and helped to create the nonprofit Sally Ride Science, inspiring children, especially girls, to pursue science and math careers. Upon her death from pancreatic cancer in 2012, it was revealed that she was the first LGBTQ+ astronaut.

NASA also needed these first female astronauts to be their ambassadors. The women had to deal with the male-dominated media of their day, fielding questions from Tom Brokaw like, “Did you ever wish you were a boy?” and jokes from Johnny Carson: “Imagine a woman astronaut…out in space. She says, ‘My God, I forgot to leave a note for the milkman.’” Grush makes it thrillingly clear: These six women rose far above such misogyny, smashing our planet’s highest ceilings as they soared.

In The Six, Loren Grush paints intimate, inspiring portraits of the U.S.’s first female astronauts, detailing the trials they overcame to eventually soar into space.
NonfictionMemoir

A Man of Two Faces

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Vietnamese refugee, American professor and acclaimed writer Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, The Sympathizer, in 2016. In both his fiction and nonfiction, he has represented the searing, often seething, always sensitive voice of the displaced, the decolonized, the erased and the marginalized: those whom he calls “The Other” in U.S. history and culture. In his memoir, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial, Nguyen blazes a nonlinear, literary way through the histories of Vietnam and the US, his parents’ arduous lives in each and his own struggles to find his voice as citizen, son and writer.

Although the memoir neatly organizes Nguyen’s life’s trajectory, starting with his arrival at the age of four at a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, his memories are fragmented on the page. That is, until the artistry behind them becomes apparent, and then it is a sheer thrill to follow. Nguyen pushes his parents’ past traumas against the ever-bruising present. They must leave an adopted daughter behind in Vietnam; they are shot on Christmas Eve while working in their grocery store. While Nguyen shares their fate as disrespected, underestimated “Other,” he is the only one who rails against it. For his Ba and M&aacute fleeing their ruined homeland, America is a dream; for their son, America did the ruining during the Vietnam War, leaving his family forever torn apart.

Always divided between his Vietnamese and American “faces,” Nguyen even narrates in a double voice, interjecting an introspective “you” into more straightforward threads of history, questioning everything as he lurches from childhood to his own parenthood, and on to his parents’ old age. “Be quiet,” he advises himself. “Be polite . . . But you have a character flaw. You are an ingrate.” It works as a kind of time-traveling history lesson that startles and fusses, but also endears. He “re members” and “dis remembers,” excavating and reassembling memories as if working on his family’s portrait, a pentimento of words.

Yet there is no self-serving artifice here. Nguyen even includes a blistering list of The Sympathizer’s bad reviews, and advice from another writer that he seek therapy. His regrets run as deep as his anger and disgust. He cannot remember enough about his mother and the onset of her mental illness that would eventually destroy her. Her “war story” becomes his. He is compelled to write about her “because writing is the only way I know how to fight. And writing is the only way I know how to grieve.”

In his memoir, award-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen “re members” and “dis remembers,” excavating and reassembling memories as if working on his family’s portrait.

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