Sarah McCraw Crow

FictionComing of Age

Marilou Is Everywhere

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In Sarah Elaine Smith’s debut novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, main character Cindy Stoat is almost 14, an observant and lonely teen in northern Appalachia whose mom has left home for a job without saying when she’s coming back. Parentless, Cindy and her two older brothers, Virgil and Clinton, cobble together a life, eating canned food and bathing once in a while in a nearby retaining pond. That might seem enough for a coming-of-age novel, but an outside event—the disappearance of Jude Vanderjohn, a more glamorous and privileged teen—sets the story in motion. Not long ago, Jude went out with Virgil, and now Virgil feels compelled to help out Jude’s unhinged mother, Bernadette, who can’t accept that her daughter is missing. Cindy tags along with Virgil, and before long she’s found a way out of her own sad house and into Bernadette’s. Because Bernadette’s memory is shot, she accepts Cindy’s growing presence in her house, at least some of the time.

It’s a compelling premise for a suspenseful novel, and short chapters keep the story moving, as Cindy makes a choice that harms others. But Smith isn’t solely interested in plot; she’s a poet as well as a fiction writer (she holds two MFAs, one fiction and another in poetry), and her interest in language shows. “Dark came on earlier,” Cindy remembers, midway through the novel. “The blue light had a glassy depth to it. Bernadette said it was the hours before the moon rose that made the color reverberate in its vaulted bowl over us. The first stars were scrawled in, and Virgil was late getting me.” Marilou Is Everywhere’s language mixes the inventive with the plain, which adds another dimension to the first-person narration, making Cindy’s lonely world more vivid.

Smith handles the darkness in the novel (rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect) with a light touch, offering plenty of humor in Cindy’s narration. The story comes to a lovely conclusion, allowing Cindy and the novel’s other characters some redemption.

Smith is a writer to watch.

Debut novelist Sarah Elaine Smith handles the darkness in the novel (rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect) with a light touch, offering plenty of humor.
FictionFamily Drama

The Gifted School

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Bruce Holsinger is an English professor at the University of Virginia, a medievalist whose first two novels were set in 14th-century London. With his new novel, Holsinger has moved forward seven centuries and across an ocean. The Gifted School is a contemporary story about high-stakes parenting, set in an affluent Colorado suburb.

The novel’s four moms—Rose, Azra, Samantha and Lauren—have been best friends for a decade. Together, they’ve weathered death, divorce, addiction and travel-team sports. When they learn that a charter school for gifted middle and high schoolers will open in Crystal (a fictionalized Boulder), they respond with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But before long, they’re caught up in the school’s competitive admissions process, each trying to find a hook for her kid.

Although the novel’s point of view shifts with each chapter, Holsinger has made an interesting and smart decision to offer the perspective of only one of the four moms. That’s Rose, an ambitious neurologist who’s exasperated with her husband, Gareth, an underachieving novelist. Other point-of-view characters include Beck, the soccer dad ex-husband of Azra, and Ch’ayña, an immigrant grandmother who cleans houses. We also get the perspectives of three kids: Emma Z., daughter of Samantha, the most affluent mom; Xander, an 11-year-old chess whiz on the autism spectrum; and Tessa, Xander’s troubled 16-year-old sister.

Yes, it’s a lot of characters to keep track of. But the novel’s frequent perspective shifting, interspersed with faux newspaper articles, texts, Facebook posts and video narration, keeps the story moving through the months leading up to the gifted school’s opening. As the story unfolds, we learn that most of the characters harbor secrets, not all of them having to do with parental ambition. These secrets, compounded by a devastating project undertaken by one of the kids, are revealed in the novel’s climactic final act at the school’s open house. An astute reader may predict part of the outcome, but the story still offers satisfying surprises.

Reminiscent of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, The Gifted School is a story of trouble in paradise with timely commentary on hyperparenting and the lengths to which parents will go to ensure that their kids remain “exceptional.”

Reminiscent of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, The Gifted School is a story of trouble in paradise with timely commentary on hyperparenting and the lengths to which parents will go to ensure that their kids remain “exceptional.”
FictionPopular Fiction

Mrs. Everything

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

At the outset, Jennifer Weiner’s new novel, Mrs. Everything, pays homage to Little Women: Older sister Jo, a tomboy and athlete, wants to be a writer, while younger sister Bethie just wants to be a sweet, pretty daughter. But in Alcott terms, these two sisters are more like Jo and Amy: They scrap, they fail to understand each other, and sometimes they just don’t get along.

Told by turns in Jo’s voice and then Bethie’s, Mrs. Everything follows the two sisters from their Jewish girlhood in post-World War II Detroit right on through the present and into the near future, 71 years in all. The cultural changes of the 1960s and ’70s—civil rights, the antiwar movement, gay rights, the women’s movement and more—roll over Jo and Bethie, changing them as each struggles to find her way, and as they sometimes rescue or betray each other.

Jo and Bethie reverse their roles multiple times, so that what the reader expects from the novel’s opening chapters is not what follows. The novel is especially strong during Jo’s observations on race relations and the way even well-intentioned white people can thoughtlessly enforce institutionalized racism.

With its long timespan and its focus on cultural change, Mrs. Everything is a departure for Weiner, a founding godmother of fun, fluffy, women-centric popular fiction. In its period details, Mrs. Everything is a little reminiscent of Judy Blume’s In the Unlikely Event, and in themes reminiscent of Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion. Some of Weiner’s previous novels have taken on difficult social issues like prescription drug abuse, and Mrs. Everything’s flawed but approachable female characters, well-examined friendships and romantic relationships and often-joyful sex scenes make this vintage Weiner.

Because the novel covers so much time and ground, some details and secondary characters are skated over, and some sections feel rushed. Still, this is a warm, readable novel about figuring out what it means for a woman to be true to herself, and then figuring out how to act on that knowledge.

At the outset, Jennifer Weiner’s new novel, Mrs. Everything, pays homage to Little Women: Older sister Jo, a tomboy and athlete, wants to be a writer, while younger sister Bethie just wants to be a sweet, pretty daughter. But in Alcott terms, these two sisters are more like Jo and Amy: They scrap, they fail to understand each other, and sometimes they just don’t get along.

FictionComing of Age

Light From Other Stars

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Erika Swyler’s first novel, The Book of Speculation, mixed historical fiction and fantasy in an appealingly offbeat way, featuring a lonely librarian, circus mermaids and an old family curse. Like her debut, Swyler’s new novel, Light From Other Stars, bends genres as it explores how the past intrudes on the present. But that’s where the similarities end. 

On a cold January morning in 1986, everything changes for Nedda Papas, an 11-year-old science geek and astronaut fangirl. Ten miles from Easter, their small Florida town, the space shuttle Challenger lifts off and explodes. Soon, strange things happen: Electricity surges and fails, ponds freeze and boil, the sky takes on a green glow. At first, Easter’s residents chalk up the weirdness to the Challenger explosion, but Nedda and her dad, Theo—a physicist who’s been laid off from NASA—begin to suspect otherwise. Theo and his wife, Betheen, both grieving a loss, have begun to live separate lives. Theo works obsessively on a project he calls his entropy machine, while Betheen, a frustrated scientist, has devoted herself to her baking business, cutting herself off emotionally from her husband and daughter.

The novel alternates the 11-year-old Nedda’s story with that of the grown Nedda, who’s narrating from aboard the spaceship Chawla. The adult Nedda is part of a crew of four on a long-term mission to an unnamed planet, and the crew has learned that power spikes have affected the ship’s generator. As Nedda and her crewmates work to head off disaster, so does the 11-year-old Nedda, along with Theo and Betheen. 

Although Light From Other Stars includes plenty of science fiction elements, it’s also a coming-of-age story, as the young Nedda gains a new understanding of her parents and then works to rescue them and the rest of her town. Juggling dual timelines, wonderful mid-1980s period details and a large cast of secondary characters, Swyler has set herself an ambitious task. But the novel is well-paced, with a satisfying twist near the end that readers are subtly prepared for but that still feels surprising.

On a cold January morning in 1986, everything changes for Nedda Papas, an 11-year-old science geek and astronaut fangirl. Ten miles from Easter, their small Florida town, the space shuttle Challenger lifts off and explodes. Soon, strange things happen: Electricity surges and fails, ponds freeze and boil, the sky takes on a green glow.

NonfictionMemoir

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

What happens when a psychotherapist’s life falls apart? She finds her own therapist. But it turns out that beginning therapy, and then muddling through it, is just as hard for professionals as it is for the rest of us. 

In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, Los Angeles-based therapist Lori Gottlieb details her search for a therapist she doesn’t know but might begin to trust and the way her own defenses and blind spots trip her up as she tries to get over an unexpected breakup. As Gottlieb undertakes her own therapy journey, she continues to see her usual roster of patients, and she introduces us to four of them (identities disguised), each with their own array of quirks, longings and suffering. As Gottlieb’s patients proceed (often painfully) through their sessions, so does Gottlieb with her new therapist, Wendell. And we get to listen in through this unusual combination of memoir, self-help guide and therapy primer. 

Before Gottlieb trained as a therapist, she worked as a writer for TV shows like “E.R.” She’s also a columnist for The Atlantic and the author of Marry Him, and her varied background shows in her writing, which is warm, approachable and funny—a pleasure to read.

“I’ve always been drawn to stories—not just what happens, but how the story is told,” Gottlieb writes. In showing us how patients tell themselves what turns out to be just a part of their stories, she also gives us a satisfying set of narratives. As we watch Gottlieb and her patients learn to tell the rest of their own stories and move beyond their pain, we find some surprising insights and even a bit of wisdom. 

What happens when a psychotherapist’s life falls apart? She finds her own therapist. But it turns out that beginning therapy, and then muddling through it, is just as hard for professionals as it is for the rest of us. 

NonfictionMemoir

Savage Feast

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Boris Fishman’s memoir Savage Feast opens in the middle of the night, on a train at the border of Czechoslovakia, as Fishman, then 9 years old, and his parents and grandparents attempt to make their way from Soviet Belarus to a new life in the United States. The story then drops back to the lives of Fishman’s Jewish grandparents, detailing how they survived in Stalin-era Belarus in Eastern Europe.

The author of two novels, Fishman lets his narrative move novelistically back and forth in time through key moments like his family’s emigration, their early days in Brooklyn and the recent past, when Fishman is uneasily tethered to his family’s foreignness. Fishman’s writing is brisk and vivid, and despite generations’ worth of trauma the family suffered, from pervasive anti-Semitism to the brutalities of World War II, his memoir is often funny.

Savage Feast is mostly a coming-of-age story, as the young adult Fishman tries to find his place—and love—in his adopted country. Throughout, we see him visiting his grandfather’s Brooklyn apartment, where he’s fed an array of traditional Russian dishes prepared by his grandfather’s home-health aide, Oksana. As his grandfather grows sicker, and as Fishman suffers through a protracted depression and failed relationships, these traditional dishes—borsch, cabbage dumplings, latkes, rabbit braised in sour cream, ukha (salmon soup)—remain a comforting constant, and Fishman learns from Oksana how to cook them. That’s where this book departs from other memoirs: Most chapters end with detailed recipes, adding a lovely, homey dimension.

Boris Fishman’s memoir Savage Feast opens in the middle of the night, on a train at the border of Czechoslovakia, as Fishman, then 9 years old, and his parents and grandparents attempt to make their way from Soviet Belarus to a new life in the United States. The story then drops back to the lives of Fishman’s Jewish grandparents, detailing how they survived in Stalin-era Belarus in Eastern Europe.

Nonfiction

Why We Dream

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

The science of sleep and its importance to our health seem to be in the news almost every day. But the science of dreams? Not so much. However, though it may lag behind the research on sleep, dream research is catching up; it turns out that our dreams affect our well-being, too, as Alice Robb writes in her lively, immersive Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey. She writes, “Dreams play a crucial role in some of our most important emotional and cognitive systems, helping us form memories, solve problems and maintain our psychological health.”

“Paying closer attention to our dreams can allow us to understand what we may be ignoring in the daytime.”

In Why We Dream, Robb reminds readers that for most of history, dreams were viewed through a spiritual lens. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that scientists tried to study dreams. Some of the first dream-research discoveries were made by nontraditional outsiders; the scientist who first documented REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and who connected REM cycles to dreaming, is largely forgotten. Other early dream researchers tried without much success to study dream telepathy and whether dreams could predict natural disasters.

Robb neatly uses her own and others’ dream experiences to introduce current research, including how dreams help us learn and remember, recover from trauma and stay mentally healthy. Poor dream recall or lack of dreams can be a risk factor for depression, and middle-aged people who act out their dreams may be at higher risk for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. The book also offers a brief guide to lucid dreaming (in which dreamers know they are dreaming), with an entertaining portrait of a lucid-dreaming conference in Hawaii.

Paying closer attention to our dreams can allow us to understand what our brains are processing—and what we may be ignoring in the daytime. Robb offers a range of suggestions for better attention to dreams, from keeping a dream journal to starting a dream group.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Alice Robb.

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The science of sleep and its importance to our health seems to be in the news almost every day. But the science of dreams? Not so much. However, though it may lag behind the research on sleep, dream research is catching up; it turns out that our dreams affect our well-being, too, as Alice Robb writes in her lively, immersive Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey.

NonfictionAmerican History

The Poison Squad

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

The phrase “celebrity chemist” sounds like an oxymoron, but at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was just that, a crusading chemist who fought for safe food and accurate food labeling. In The Poison Squad, Deborah Blum, director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program, tells Wiley’s story, as well as the larger story of what happened to our food supply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Indiana-born Wiley first tested foods at Purdue University, and then moved to the newly formed U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1883. As Americans flocked to cities and the demand for milk, meat and canned food grew, industrial producers added often-poisonous chemicals like formaldehyde, borax and salicylic acid to prevent or hide spoilage. Producers also had little compunction about false labels and ads, or about selling rotten meat and eggs. Wiley and his staff tested foods, drinks, spices and condiments, hoping to influence Congress to pass food-safety laws. Wiley also studied the effect of those chemical additives, recruiting men for what one reporter called the Poison Squad. The Poison Squad recruits ate food laced with borax, and only half the men made it through the five rounds of testing; the others dropped out because of illness, presumably brought on by the borax.

Wiley could be rigid, coming into conflict with his boss and with Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, who worried about government overreach. But he was beloved by the Agriculture Department’s clerks and secretaries for his decades’ worth of efforts to protect the nation’s food. In his 60s, Wiley married ardent suffragist Anna Kelton, a late-life love story. The Poison Squad offers a well-researched portrait of Wiley, rather unappealing food facts and an era of rapid American growth, with a government scrambling to catch up.

The phrase “celebrity chemist” sounds like an oxymoron, but at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was just that, a crusading chemist who fought for safe food and accurate food labeling.
NonfictionMemoir

A Jewish girl’s journey through WWII

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

“I had always known that my grandparents sheltered Jewish children during the German occupation of the Netherlands,” Bart van Es writes in The Cut Out Girl. Growing up, van Es remembers hearing of a girl named Lien, who was taken in by his grandparents and hidden from the Nazis. She eventually became a member of the family, until a never-discussed rift severed the connection. In 2014, the senior member of van Es’ family died, setting him on a quest to find out what happened to Lien.

To tell this story, the Dutch-born van Es, who teaches Renaissance literature at the University of Oxford, alternates between the present and World War II. The narration of the war years has a novelistic feel and takes on the viewpoint of Lien as a child. This method works well to convey the trauma Lien felt after losing her parents. She was shuttled from town to town and family to family without explanation, and she endured deprivation and abuse. The present-day sections of the book describe van Es’ meetings with the 80-year-old Lien, his retracing of her hiding places and his research, which fills the gaps in her memory. The book also makes wonderful use of Lien’s childhood poesy book (a kind of autograph book) and family photos and mementos.

Van Es sets scenes well, contrasting the Netherlands of the 21st century—with its liberal outlook and high-tech industries—with the far more rural and traditional Netherlands of the 1940s. He also notes the country’s complicated role in the Holocaust: While the Dutch were often heroic in their efforts to hide or transport Jews, they were also frighteningly efficient in turning Jews in to Nazi authorities. And though Lien isn’t named as a co-author, her own voice and the story of her survival, not just of the war but also of the decades afterward, come through clearly.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“I had always known that my grandparents sheltered Jewish children during the German occupation of the Netherlands,” Bart van Es writes in The Cut Out Girl. Growing up, van Es remembers hearing of a girl named Lien, who was taken in by his grandparents and hidden from the Nazis. She eventually became a member of the family, until a never-discussed rift severed the connection. In 2014, the senior member of van Es’ family died, setting him on a quest to find out what happened to Lien.

NonfictionMemoir

Hope in the ashes

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Poet Karen Auvinen’s memoir, Rough Beauty, opens on a beautiful March morning, when Auvinen, out delivering the mail on her rural Colorado route, notices the deep blue of the sky, the signs of early spring and smoke from a fire—a fire that turns out to be her own house burning. She’d recently settled outside the Rocky Mountain town of Jamestown, but now, Auvinen can only watch as firefighters work to contain the fire, which destroys everything she owns.

Auvinen then drops back to detail her difficult adolescence: an abusive dad, an impassive mom, a peripatetic childhood. But she dispatches with her youth quickly, focusing instead on the years that followed the devastating fire and describing life at the edge of the wilderness. “Up on the mountain, summer was easy,” she writes. “The world was green and glorious. Aspens clacked in the breeze and hummingbirds whirred across meadows gone crazy with wildflowers. Mornings dawned open and wide blue, but by noon, the sky blackened and thunder rumbled.”

As she describes her patchwork of jobs, her friends and a relationship gone bad, Auvinen paints a picture of quirky Jamestown, home to 300. She works part-time as a cook at Jamestown’s Mercantile Café and tries to help her aging mother, who has begun a slow decline. Auvinen isn’t afraid to show her own prickly character or her loneliness. But the heart of this memoir is her relationship with her rescue dog, Elvis, a Husky mix with a penchant for wandering. As Elvis nears the end of his life, Auvinen finds a new (human) relationship and her own happy ending.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Poet Karen Auvinen’s memoir, Rough Beauty, opens on a beautiful March morning, when Auvinen, out delivering the mail on her rural Colorado route, notices the deep blue of the sky, the signs of early spring and smoke from a fire—a fire that turns out to be her own house burning. She’d recently settled outside the Rocky Mountain town of Jamestown, but now, Auvinen can only watch as firefighters work to contain the fire, which destroys everything she owns.

Nonfiction

A fascinating survey of modern marvels

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Prolific and bestselling writer Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World) returns with The Perfectionists, turning his focus to precision engineering—in a nutshell, the story of machines that make other machines. Without precision engineering, we’d have had no Industrial Revolution, no steam engines, no cars, jet airplanes, GPS or the ever-more-miniscule silicon chips inside our phones, laptops and countless other devices.

As with some of Winchester’s previous books, The Perfectionists combines social history and science. Each chapter opens with a short bit of memoir, such as an incident from Winchester’s 20s when he was a geologist on a North Sea oil rig, or a compelling anecdote, like a horrifying engine failure on a super-jumbo jet, to illustrate a larger point. Along the way, Winchester incorporates profiles of innovators both familiar and unknown, among them Thomas Jefferson, Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and Gordon Moore, the Intel founder who in 1965 predicted that computer components would shrink by half every year, a prediction now known as Moore’s Law. The book’s complicated scientific explanations have the potential to be tedious (at least to nonengineers like me), but Winchester’s prose is engaging, describing concepts like the role of precision time-keeping in the development of GPS, and the mind-boggling set of factors that allow a jet engine to power an enormous airplane without the engine overheating and melting.

A late chapter gets a little philosophical, weighing the gains and losses that precision has brought us as Winchester delves into the history of the Seiko Watch Company in Japan, where craft and precision work side by side. But what remains with me are the stories from Winchester’s life, as well as those of the men (yes, almost all men) who measured, tinkered and persevered to build, for better or worse, our ultraprecision-driven world.

Prolific and bestselling writer Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World) returns with The Perfectionists, turning his focus to precision engineering—in a nutshell, the story of machines that make other machines. Without precision engineering, we’d have had no Industrial Revolution, no steam engines, no cars, jet airplanes, GPS or the ever-more-miniscule silicon chips inside our phones, laptops and countless other devices.

NonfictionScience

The power of flexible thinking

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

We live in a time of great change, driven by the exponentially increasing power of computers. In order to thrive in this whirlwind of change, we need to rely on what Leonard Mlodinow calls elastic thinking. But there’s a problem. In his new book, Elastic, Mlodinow writes, “The technological advancement that makes elastic thinking ever more essential also makes it less likely that we’ll engage in it.”

Mlodinow shows us the components of elastic thinking, like embracing eccentricity and novelty, letting go of cognitive filters, practicing mindfulness and even mindlessness. Along the way, Mlodinow provides a primer on the brain’s structures and brain research, showing us how we think and what, exactly, thought even is.

Does this book sound heavy? It’s not. Mlodinow is a lively guide, and his writing on this complicated subject is clear and easy to follow. (He’s also a theoretical physicist who’s written several bestselling science books, collaborated with Stephen Hawking and written for “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”) To illustrate his points, Mlodinow offers a wide range of anecdotes made possible by elastic thinking, such as the illuminating moment that led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein and the reasons behind the Allies’ success in the World War II Battle of Midway. He also interviews an array of people—not just scientists but also those who, in his view, exemplify some aspect of elastic thinking, people like Judy Blume and Seth MacFarlane.

Elastic thinking is what makes humans human, Mlodinow asserts, and it’s something we’re far better at than computers and artificial intelligence, which is reassuring for us. While Elastic isn’t exactly a self-help book, it does offer quizzes to help readers determine their levels of elastic thought, and each chapter offers exercises and suggestions for building elastic thinking skills.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

We live in a time of great change, driven by the exponentially increasing power of computers. In order to thrive in this whirlwind of change, we need to rely on what Leonard Mlodinow calls elastic thinking. But there’s a problem. In his new book, Elastic, Mlodinow writes, “The technological advancement that makes elastic thinking ever more essential also makes it less likely that we’ll engage in it.”

NonfictionHistoryFood & Drink

The man responsible for avocado toast

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

A century ago, the American diet was bland and boring, limited to basics like wheat and potatoes. But around the turn of the 20th century, a young botanist named David Fairchild began to change all that. “Fairchild’s life is the story of America’s blooming relationship with the world,” writes Daniel Stone, a contributor to National Geographic and author of The Food Explorer, a new biography of Fairchild.

Acting almost as a food spy, Fairchild traveled to every (farmable) continent in search of new crops to introduce to American farmers and eaters. In his early 20s, Fairchild, a Kansan who’d gone to Washington, D.C., to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, lucked into a friendship with the eccentric millionaire Barbour Lathrop. Funded by Lathrop’s fortune, the two traveled to far corners of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America and Europe, braving rough conditions and life-threatening illnesses in their search for edible plants. We can thank Fairchild’s curiosity and persistence for our easy access to avocados, nectarines, kale, mangos, cashews, citruses, dates and other produce, as well as improved industrial crops like soybeans and cotton. Fairchild’s efforts also extended into agricultural diplomacy—he was responsible for Washington, D.C.’s flowering cherry trees, which beautified the city and helped smooth strained Japanese-American relations.

The book retraces Fairchild’s journeys and includes enough cultural and political history to situate the reader in early 20th-century America, though Stone does not looking too closely at the ethics of Fairchild’s work, which sometimes involved stealing plants and seeds. Fairchild’s life and work intersected with some of the era’s biggest leaders and inventors: Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson; the Wright brothers; and Alexander Graham Bell (the story of Fairchild’s courtship and marriage to Bell’s daughter Marian, an energetic sculptor, is charming). Despite occasionally awkward phrasing, The Food Explorer does a wonderful job bringing Fairchild’s story to life and giving this American original some overdue recognition.

A century ago, the American diet was bland and boring, limited to basics like wheat and potatoes. But around the turn of the 20th century, a young botanist named David Fairchild began to change all that. “Fairchild’s life is the story of America’s blooming relationship with the world,” writes Daniel Stone, a contributor to National Geographic and author of The Food Explorer, a new biography of Fairchild.

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