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The Art Thief

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Most art thefts are simply for financial gain. The thieves, often opportunistic crooks and rarely art connoisseurs themselves, view their stolen masterworks as loot to be fenced. Stéphane Breitwieser is different. Growing up in the Alsace region of France, he fell in love with art and artifacts under his grandfather’s tutelage, and by the time he was in his 20s, he had begun to steal compulsively from museums, auction houses and even churches. In eight years, often aided by his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine, he filched more than 300 irreplaceable works—including small oil paintings, silver chalices, ivory sculptures, tapestries and a historic bugle—estimated to be worth billions. When he was ultimately caught, Breitwieser said his sole motivation for stealing was to surround himself with beauty. He never sold anything he procured but instead displayed it all in a cramped attic room he and Anne-Catherine occupied in his mother’s house.

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by journalist Michael Finkel is a fascinating account of Breitwieser’s crime spree that attempts to understand the mind of this criminal aesthete. This proves a herculean task, since Breitwieser’s singular condition has defied clear-cut diagnosis by a passel of mental health experts, but Finkel’s re-creation of the thief’s nefarious activities is nonetheless a riveting ride. As the only American journalist who was granted interviews with Breitwieser, Finkel spent some 40 hours with him, even accompanying the now ex-con on visits to some of the museums and churches from which he once stole. From this personally reported material, as well as other interviews and documentation, Finkel has fashioned an engrossing true crime narrative—mostly told in present-tense prose to heighten the drama—that takes readers along on Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine’s daring robberies, quite often carried out in plain sight. 

The Breitwieser whom Finkel deftly portrays is a social misfit, a virtuoso of stealth, an inveterate moocher and, most of all, a self-deluded hero. (He claims he is protecting and preserving the art by stealing it.) Anne-Catherine seems a complicit accomplice—a lovestruck Bonnie to her cultured Clyde—until Breitwieser is caught and the tables turn. Breitwieser’s enabling, much-in-denial mother, meanwhile, alters the course of events in a way that will shock and disturb art and history lovers. Obsessive crime, dangerous beauty, ill-fated love: The Art Thief is the stuff of noir fiction, made all the more compelling and audacious for its authenticity.

Stéphane Breitwieser stole more than 300 irreplaceable artworks. Journalist Michael Finkel now attempts to understand why this criminal aesthete hoarded those treasures in his attic.
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NonfictionBiography

The Woman Beyond the Attic

Sponsored by Gallery Books

“The woman who emerges from these pages is as riveting as her books” (The Wall Street Journal) in this Edgar Award–nominated celebration of the famously private V.C. Andrews—featuring family photos, personal letters, a partial manuscript for an unpublished novel, and more.

Best known for her internationally, multi-million-copy bestselling novel Flowers in the Attic, Cleo Virginia Andrews lived a fascinating life. Born to modest means, she came of age in the American South during the Great Depression and faced a series of increasingly challenging health issues. Yet, once she rose to international literary fame, she prided herself on her intense privacy.

Now, The Woman Beyond the Attic aims to connect her personal life with the public novels for which she was famous. Based on Virginia’s own letters, and interviews with her dearest family members, her long-term ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman tells Virginia’s full story for the first time.

Perfect for anyone hoping to learn more about the enigmatic woman behind one of the most important novels of the 20th century, The Woman Beyond the Attic will have you transfixed from the first page.

This Edgar Award–nominated celebration of the famously private V.C. Andrews features family photos, personal letters, a partial manuscript for an unpublished novel, and more.
NonfictionLiteratureBiographyArts & Culture

August Wilson

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Patti Hartigan’s August Wilson: A Life is the first comprehensive biography of the great American playwright, who died 18 years ago at the age of 60. Hartigan, a theater critic and arts reporter who knew Wilson professionally, has done her homework in parsing Wilson’s complicated story from many layers of half-truths and myths, some of which were propagated by the legendary raconteur himself during his lifetime. The result is an even-handed and absorbing exploration of a sui generis artist who followed his own rules both in the theater and in his personal life.

An autodidact who learned to read by age 4, Wilson was born Freddy Kittel and grew up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the largely Black neighborhood that he would immortalize in his plays. Wilson’s father was white—and for complex psychological reasons still left largely unexplored in this book, Wilson spent his life convinced he had a different white father than his siblings. However, Wilson identified exclusively as Black. His mother arranged the best education she could for her brilliant son, but he repeatedly faced skepticism and racism, and he never finished high school. Aspiring to be a poet, Wilson dove into the nascent Black arts scene in Pittsburgh, where his writing talents were put to use in local theater productions. Confident in his abilities and focused on his ambitions, he began sending unwieldy scripts to the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.

When he was finally accepted with what was at the time a four-and-a-half-hour version of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wilson quickly took the theater world by storm. Just a few years later, he was on Broadway and had won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes. The playwright, known for his powerful and poetic monologues, soon embarked on a daunting project: a 10-play cycle that would hold a mirror up to the experiences of Black people in 20th century America, decade by decade. He finished the last play just months before his premature death.

In her five-year-long excavation of August Wilson’s family history, Patti Hartigan found spine-tingling similarities between the stories the celebrated playwright created and the actual past he never fully knew. 

The man Hartigan profiles is a fascinating bundle of contradictions: a generous, congenial companion who could at times seethe with rage; a lover of women who often gave them short shrift in his plays; a storytelling seer who made well-drawn specifics of the Black experience speak to audiences across racial barriers. August Wilson: A Life is a worthy and overdue first biography that will trigger new conversations about a magnificent playwright and the origins of his talent.

August Wilson: A Life is an even-handed and absorbing exploration of a sui generis artist who followed his own rules both in the theater and in his personal life.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

The Marriage Question

Review by Anna Christensen

“Marriage is so unlike anything else,” writes George Eliot in Middlemarch. “There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” By the time that novel was published in 1871, Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, was 17 years into her partnership with George Lewes, himself an author and member of the mid-19th-century intelligentsia. Lewes was already married when he met Eliot but had long been estranged from his wife, who by that time had given birth to multiple children with another man. Eliot and Lewes determined to form their own sort of marriage despite being unable to marry legally; they even set off on a honeymoon to Germany. That excursion led to a lifelong union that became the complicated scandal of Eliot’s life, making her “unfit” for drawing room visits and causing her family to shun her, even as she penned wildly successful novels.

It’s impressive how King’s College London professor Clare Carlisle (Philosopher of the Heart) finds her way inside this deeply intimate partnership in The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. Though Lewes was more exuberant and extroverted, Eliot guarded her private life closely. She had a deep desire for acceptance and love, which possibly led her to gloss over uncomfortable problems in her partnership with Lewes. On the one hand, Lewes was Eliot’s first cheerleader, encouraging her through her professional endeavors and proudly promoting her work in the literary sphere. On the other hand, Lewes could be difficult in ways that were typical for a Victorian husband. For example, the immense earnings from Eliot’s work were deposited into Lewes’ bank account, and he availed himself of them freely. He could also sometimes be controlling, according to Carlisle’s narrative, basking a little too much in Eliot’s reflected glory.

Wielding a combination of biography and thoughtful analysis of Eliot’s novels and verse, Carlisle examines what marriage has been historically and what it is today, noting that it is as sticky and complex as ever. In many ways, Eliot’s relationship was thoroughly modern: an unsanctified union with a female breadwinner who struggled to balance the demands of parenting with the time and space she needed to work. Carlisle demonstrates that Eliot’s thoughts on marriage were reflected in her work as she picked through romantic joys and frustrations, ruminating over the what-could-have-beens that haunt every long partnership.

There are no neat answers to Eliot’s marriage questions—“whether to marry, whom to marry, how to live in a marriage, whether to remain married,” as Carlisle summarizes it. Instead, The Marriage Question is a deep examination of long partnership—how it affects us, how it is negotiated—through Eliot’s deliciously thoughtful prose and reflective journal entries. Carlisle has written a book that seems to tell us a story about others but instead deeply informs us about ourselves.

Wielding a combination of biography and thoughtful analysis of George Eliot’s novels and verse, Clare Carlisle examines the sticky, complex concept of marriage.
NonfictionLiteratureBiographyArts & Culture

How a self-described ‘baby theater critic’ became the first biographer of playwright August Wilson

Interview by Robert Weibezahl

Patti Hartigan was a self-described “baby theater critic” when she met August Wilson in 1987. The two were chatting at the National Critics Institute at the famed O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and Wilson asked if Hartigan had seen his play Fences, which was then the talk of Broadway. “Being green and subsisting on a freelancer’s pitiful wages,” she recalls in her debut book, August Wilson: A Life, “I blurted out, ‘My mother saw it, but I can’t afford a ticket.’ The minute I said it, I wished I could take it back.” But the next day, Hartigan received a note that two tickets would be waiting for her at the box office.

This act of generosity toward a fledgling critic was emblematic of Wilson, Hartigan would discover. After landing at the Boston Globe as theater critic and arts reporter, she built a rapport with Wilson over the years, talking with him whenever he opened a play at the city’s Huntington Theatre. Then in January 2005, with Wilson poised to complete his monumental 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle—one play about Black life in America set in every decade in the 20th century—Hartigan flew to Seattle to interview him for a celebratory piece. Neither she nor Wilson yet knew that a fast-spreading cancer would lead to his death just a few months later. He managed to complete the final play, Radio Golf, under great physical and mental strain, and when he died in October 2005, the world mourned the loss of a voice that had changed the landscape of the American theater.

“He didn’t want to be the first. But certainly, in carving out room in American theater for Black playwrights . . . he paved the way.”

But “time passed and there was no biography,” Hartigan says in a video call. “I decided someone has to do this, and because I knew him, I decided to jump in.” The first-time biographer spent five years researching and writing August Wilson: A Life, an accomplished work that not only takes full measure of the playwright’s career but also delves into his childhood and ancestry to unearth a family history that Wilson himself did not fully know. Hartigan would even climb a mountain in Spear, North Carolina, where generations of Wilson’s strong-willed antecedents were born. Wilson himself never undertook that journey, saying that he wrote from “the blood’s memory” rather than doing research. Yet again and again, Hartigan found spine-tingling similarities between the stories he created and his family’s actual past.

Patti Hartigan

Wilson is largely associated with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, specifically its Hill District, where he set all but one play in his monumental cycle. The Hill is where his mother, Daisy, and others in the family settled during the Great Migration, and it’s where Wilson was born in 1945 and grew up. His singular intelligence was apparent from an early age, and Daisy made sure he was educated in the best parochial and public schools. But his intelligence could not shelter him from endemic racism, and after being belittled and undervalued at school, he dropped out at just 15. (Years later, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh awarded the autodidact a high school diploma, an honor he cherished alongside his two Pulitzer Prizes and other awards.)

Read our starred review of ‘August Wilson: A Life.’

Wilson’s earliest literary aspiration was as a poet, which Hartigan says is hardly surprising given the soaring poetry of his monologue-driven plays. His move into theater was both accidental and serendipitous, coinciding with the politically fueled Black literary movement of the 1970s, which played out in neighborhood theaters in Pittsburgh. Wilson was driven, and when he learned about the O’Neill Conference—arguably the preeminent play development opportunity available at the time—he began submitting a play each year. He was met with rejection after rejection until 1982, when he received the coveted telegram from artistic director Lloyd Richards. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom had been selected.

Richards was perhaps the most influential Black theater maker of the age—he was the first African American to direct a play on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun—and “a presence like no other,” says Hartigan. He took Wilson under his wing and played a major role in the playwright’s progress. When asked if she thought there would have been an August Wilson without a Lloyd Richards, Hartigan admits there is no way of knowing, but probably not. “The two of them fed each other. August would come with a play that was four and a half hours long, and Lloyd could cut it down and streamline it and ask the right questions,” she says. “But the relationship was key for both men. Lloyd’s career had a resurgence when he began working with August.” The professional falling-out that came later, which Hartigan thoughtfully chronicles, was painful. “Both were right and both were wrong, and it’s a tragedy. Yet you can praise the relationship that was.”

Hartigan, clearly a great admirer of Wilson and his work, is nonetheless forthright in her appraisal of both. She does not shy away from portraying the playwright’s flaws as a man, a husband, a father. More than once she addresses the frequent observation that, with a few notable exceptions, Wilson’s female characters are weak. “I think the criticism is warranted,” she says. “Yet I’ve seen later productions where the women are painted in by just the direction [of the play]. So I think there might be a little more to the women [in Wilson’s plays] than we initially thought.”

The August Wilson Estate declined to grant permission to Hartigan to quote from his intimate letters or from some of his early writings, a decision she regrets because “paraphrasing just can’t do him justice.” Yet she manages to capture Wilson’s voice well. “He didn’t want to be exceptionalized,” she says. “He didn’t want to be the first. But certainly, in carving out room in American theater for Black playwrights—and the subject matter that he was able to bring to the stage—he paved the way.”

Patti Hartigan spent five years researching and writing August Wilson: A Life, an accomplished work that takes full measure of the playwright’s career and life.
NonfictionBiography

Daughter of the Dragon

Review by Alden Mudge

Anna May Wong (1905-1961) was Hollywood’s first great Chinese American actress. At 15, she had her first starring role in a silent film. Shortly thereafter, she played opposite film legend Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad (at 5 feet, 7 inches, she was taller than him). She was a friend, and perhaps a lover, of Marlene Dietrich. A brilliant student of accents and languages, she successfully made the fraught transition from silent film to “talkies” and, later, to television.

As Yunte Huang’s fascinating biography Daughter of the Dragon clearly shows, however, Wong’s career was consistently hampered by racist, sexist and ageist strictures. She embodied the problematic archetypes of submissive Asian women in relationships with powerful white men as well as the devious, sexually powerful Asian women often called dragon ladies. One Hollywood rule, for example, prevented women of color from kissing a white man on screen. This kept Wong from romantic leading roles, for which her talents and beauty seemed so well suited. Stalled by such barriers, Wong went to Germany, learned the language and starred in smash hits like Song. Later, after being passed over for a role in the film version of Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth, despite the writer’s desire for the film to star Chinese actors, Wong went to China just to study Chinese drama, with the hopes of bringing this classical form home.

Huang, a professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, offers a rich and complex view of Wong’s life and times. His book is less an intimate, psychological biography than a revealing look at Wong’s experience within the history of the era and its flow of cultural biases. Many chapters, like one on the ghettoized origins of Chinese laundries and Hollywood’s strangely enduring fascination with Los Angeles’ Chinatown, are as illuminating as they are unexpected. Huang offers penetrating descriptions of the making of some of Wong’s most famous movies, bringing to light Wong’s abilities and the prejudices and challenges she faced in trying to succeed. During her stay in China, for example, Wong was feted as a breakthrough star and also berated as an actor who presented shameful Chinese stereotypes. When questioned by local reporters, she noted that as an actor she rarely had the power to choose her parts but could only take what she was offered.

A reader is left thinking that what Anna May Wong was offered was never quite what she was worth. Wong died at 52, perhaps of alcoholism and definitely in financial distress. Of the rules that constrained her career, Huang writes, “these puritanical and overly racist guidelines became a virtual form of foot-binding for Anna May, shackling her career ambitions for the rest of her life.”

This major biography of Anna May Wong, Hollywood's first great Chinese American actress, is a revealing look at her startling talent and the limitations she faced due to racism and cultural biases.
NonfictionBiography

Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons

Review by Anne Bartlett

If Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had an idle moment when they met in 1941 to hammer out the Atlantic Charter, they might have talked about Roosevelt’s stamp-collecting or Churchill’s painting. It is perhaps less likely they chatted about one big thing they actually had in common: Strong, intelligent American mothers, widowed young, who provided them with plenty of runway for political takeoff.

Not that Jennie Jerome Churchill or Sara Delano Roosevelt would have liked each other much. Although both were daughters of rich upper-class New Yorkers, their personalities were starkly different. Jennie had a reckless streak (like her father and Winston) and was prone to problematic romances, while Sara waited to marry until she found a wealthy, serious older man in her own social circle. Nevertheless, as well-known Canadian author Charlotte Gray shows in her dual biography Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons, 19th-century culture shaped both into women who believed influence was only attainable through men. 

Jennie’s life was sufficiently flamboyant that she has attracted a number of biographers; Sara was more conventional, and she tends to be dismissed by historians as possessive and overbearing. She was indeed formidable, but her real story is more complex. Through detailed historical research and scenic retellings, Gray makes a persuasive case that Franklin and Winston depended on their mothers’ devotion, influence and money.

FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt had to battle out of what they saw as Sara’s smothering embrace, but Sara effectively raised their five children while the couple built public careers. After Sara’s death, Eleanor consistently denigrated her mother-in-law, but the children spoke of Sara with affection and gratitude. In contrast, Jennie was no grandmotherly nurturer. Aside from the important political help she provided her first husband and eldest son, her accomplishments included chartering wartime hospital ships and learning piano from a friend of Chopin.

Had they been born a century later, one can imagine Jennie as a supermodel-turned-Hollywood producer and Sara as a Fortune 500 CEO. Instead, Gray tells us, they funneled their prodigious energies into their statesmen sons, both of whom were profoundly impacted by their fascinating and formidable mothers.

Charlotte Gray paints a new, insightful portrait of two mothers who gave their statesmen sons the irreplaceable gift of total self-confidence.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Wifedom

Review by Catherine Hollis

George Orwell, born Eric Blair, is celebrated for novels like Animal Farm and 1984, as well as for his political commitments, including fighting fascism on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. Like many men, he relied on the invisible labor of women to provide him with food, shelter, typing and comfort while he focused on writing. While much is known about Orwell’s personal life, no one person has vanished more definitively from his biographies than his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

Anna Funder sets out to correct this absence in her compelling hybrid biography Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life. Mixing historical detail with the immediacy of personal memoir, Wifedom brings readers into the personal life of O’Shaughnessy both with and without Orwell, while also detailing Funder’s own domestic discontent. By focusing on O’Shaughnessy’s diminished status in Orwell’s biographies, Funder reveals how the invisible and unpaid labor of domestic work erases women from history. Patriarchy’s narrative about literary genius tends to leave out the typist.

Did Eileen’s 1934 poem “End of the Century, 1984” play a role in Orwell’s own 1984? As Orwell’s typist, did Eileen shape Animal Farm? Funder convinces the reader that the answers are yes, maybe. Funder’s most impressive achievement is her revision of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a text documenting his time at the Spanish front that fails to mention O’Shaughnessy by name. In fact, as Funder demonstrates via archival evidence and imaginative reconstruction, O’Shaughnessy committed multiple acts of heroism in Spain, including extracting Orwell from potential imprisonment. But Orwell never acknowledged her or gave her due credit, as if admitting he needed help would have detracted from his own heroic narrative.

The memoir portions of Wifedom aren’t quite as captivating, but it’s clear why Funder wanted to embed her biographical scholarship within her own experiences. Making visible the extent of Eileen’s influence on Orwell’s life and work matters because the condition of “wifedom,” understood as daily unpaid care work, continues to be distributed unfairly, falling mainly on women’s shoulders. Yet this undervalued work is as necessary as what Funder does so well in Wifedom: retelling history to be more considerate and accurate.

Mixing history and memoir, Anna Funder brings readers into the personal life of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, both with and without her husband, George Orwell.
NonfictionTrue CrimeTravelNatureMusicMemoirHistoryEnvironmentBlack HistoryBiographyAmerican History

Fall 2023 preview: Most anticipated nonfiction

Feature by the editors of BookPage

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

Simon & Schuster | October 3

Throughout poet Safiya Sinclair’s childhood in Jamaica, her father was a strict Rastafarian who imposed harsh constraints on his daughters’ lives and appearances. As Sinclair read the books her mother gave her and began to find her voice as a poet, she likewise found her voice as a daughter struggling to get out from underneath her father’s thumb. In her debut memoir, Sinclair reckons with colonialism, patriarchy and obedience in expressive, melodic prose.

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Riverhead | September 12

The celebrated novelist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer turns to memoir for the first time in A Man of Two Faces. Viet Thanh Nguyen left Vietnam at age 4 and came to the U.S. as a refugee, but even after escaping danger in their home country, his family was separated, targeted and harmed in America. This book recounts the events of Nguyen’s life, of course, but it becomes much more than a straightforward memoir as Nguyen conjures stirring insights into memory, migration and identity.

The Sisterhood by Liza Mundy

Crown | October 17

The author of the 2017 bestseller Code Girls returns with The Sisterhood, a history of the women who have played key roles in the CIA since World War II. As spies, archivists, analysts and operatives, women have been underestimated and overlooked through the years. Liza Mundy now spins a gripping tale of how those women used those slights to their advantage as they captured state secrets and spotted threats that the men working alongside them had missed.

Being Henry by Henry Winkler

Celadon | October 31

Famously kindhearted actor Henry Winkler opens up about his life and work in Being Henry. From overcoming a difficult childhood and getting typecast as the Fonz early in his career to finding his second wind decades later in shows such as “Arrested Development” and “Barry,” Winkler peers beneath the sparkling veneer of Hollywood to tell the tender personal story behind his lifelong fame.

My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand

Viking | November 7

If there is one book that truly captures the spirit of “most anticipated,” it has to be screen and stage legend Barbra Streisand’s memoir. Fans have been looking forward to reading the full saga of Streisand’s life and unparalleled career for years—and this fall, they will finally get the chance. At 1,024 pages long, this book is unlikely to skip over any of the juicy details.

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith

Knopf | November 7

Tracy K. Smith digs into historical archives to craft a new terminology for American life in this centuries-spanning portrait. Using the personal, documentary and spiritual, Smith considers the memory and possibilities of race, family and intimacy throughout history and into the future. By the end of this meditation, readers will have a new vocabulary and insight into the powers of their own soul.

Gator Country by Rebecca Renner

Flatiron | November 14

Gonzo journalism meets nature documentary in this fast-paced Floridian crime story. Officer Jeff Babauta goes undercover into the world of gator poaching in an attempt to bring down the intricate crime ring. As he becomes embedded in the network, meeting a zany, desperate cast of characters, Babauta’s sense of justice is challenged and he soon has to choose between sacrificing his new community and the safety of the natural world. 

The Lost Tomb by Douglas Preston

Grand Central | December 5

True crime meets a crash course in archaeological history in this extravaganza of a book. When he isn’t co-writing bestselling thrillers featuring FBI Agent Pendergast, Douglas Preston has been traveling the world, visiting some of history’s most storied and remote locations. From the largest tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings to a mass grave left by an asteroid impact, Preston will take readers on a fun, insightful journey into history.

Discover all of BookPage’s most anticipated books of fall 2023.

From CIA spies to Barbra Streisand, alligator tales and more, there’s something for everyone in fall’s most anticipated nonfiction releases.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMedicineBiography

Rough Sleepers

Review by Priscilla Kipp

“Rough sleepers” are homeless people who mostly choose to sleep on the streets rather than in indoor shelters. Their death rates are staggering, their health needs endless, their fates often in the hands of people who struggle to know what to do with them. However, there are some people whose mission is to care for rough sleepers, doing work that is both lifesaving and extremely frustrating. With a straightforward scrutiny that somehow sees, describes and reveals without flinching or judging, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder offers a long, hard look at the lives of people without housing in Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.

As a writer, Kidder is intensely immersive. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, he traveled with Dr. Paul Farmer to observe groundbreaking health care work around the world. In Rough Sleepers, Kidder documents the three years he spent with the team that cares for Boston’s homeless population, making rounds with Dr. Jim O’Connell in his van late into the night. They treated people on the street or got them into hospitals and clinics to receive care. They offered blankets and food. They listened. Kidder was given deep access to their world—to the shelters, clinics, emergency rooms, hidden hangouts—and to the life of the man leading these efforts, fondly known by his many patients as Dr. Jim.

Audiobook jacket image for Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder
Read our starred review of the audiobook, narrated by author Tracy Kidder.

Readers also meet some of the people who live without homes in Boston in Rough Sleepers. There’s Tony Colombo, who spends his days at a respite house helping residents and staff and his nights on the street getting into trouble. Tony’s friend BJ, having lost both legs, needs constant help keeping upright in his wheelchair. Joanne Guarino is maintaining her sobriety after 30 years on the street and remains a regular guest speaker at Harvard Medical School, where she compels students to treat homeless people with compassion.

Dr. Jim and his team are the inspiring center of Kidder’s book. Now in his 70s, the Harvard-trained physician is still the city’s “street doctor,” sustaining and nurturing relationships with society’s most marginalized and vulnerable people. He realizes his work has come at the cost of his own family life and wryly compares himself to Sisyphus. His colleagues also grapple with the personal toll such vigilant care takes. Still, they see themselves as merely necessary, not heroic. In Rough Sleepers, Kidder begs to differ.

With a straightforward scrutiny that reveals without judging, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder offers a long, hard look at the lives of homeless people.
NonfictionSciencePhotographyHistoryBiographyArt

Giftable glimpses of history

Feature by Alice Cary

Documentary filmmaker and historian Ken Burns believes that photographs are portals “not just to a different time and space but also to dimensions and possibilities within myself.” Through photographs and illustrations, these books are guaranteed to transport you.

★ Apollo Remastered

Book jacket image for Apollo Remastered by Andy Saunders

Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record is a weighty, large-format coffee table book that beams readers right into its cosmic world. The original NASA film from the Apollo missions (which includes some 35,000 images) has been safely secured inside a frozen vault at the Johnson Space Center, but new technology has allowed digital restoration expert Andy Saunders to painstakingly remaster this treasure trove of photographs, many of which have never been published. The results are pure magic, full of clarity, sharpness and color that make readers feel like part of the team—a far cry from those grainy images that were broadcast on TV at the time. 

During their spaceflights, many astronauts were shocked by how moved they felt looking back at Earth, and readers will see why. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell notes, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.” Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweickart recommends reading this book at night, surrounded by darkness and silence, to allow the gleaming spacecraft and spacesuits to shimmer and shine.

★ Our America

Book jacket image for Our America by Ken Burns

In the tradition of Walker Evans’ groundbreaking 1938 book, American Photographs, Ken Burns has assembled a collection of his favorite images in Our America: A Photographic History. “I’ve needed forty-five years of telling stories in American history, of diving deep into lives and moments, places and huge events, to accrue the visual vocabulary to embark on this book,” he writes in his introduction. 

These black-and-white photographs are arranged chronologically from 1839 to 2019, with only one on each page for full visual impact. They’re labeled by date and place (at least one for each state), with fuller explanations at the back of the book, and they are mesmerizing, drawing on a multitude of personalities, emotions and events. The images depict the brutally scarred back of an enslaved man, decomposing bodies at Gettysburg, frozen Niagara Falls, a 1909 game of alley baseball in Boston, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Elvis onstage and, finally, a stunning portrait of Congressman John Lewis from 2019.

Illustrated Black History

Book jacket image for Illustrated Black History by George McCalman

For Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen, artist, designer and creative director George McCalman created 145 original portraits spotlighting Black pioneers in many fields, each accompanied by a short biographical essay. Moving alphabetically from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to cinematographer Bradford Young, McCalman uses a bold array of acrylics, watercolors, pen and ink and colored pencils, to capture each personality in an individualized way. “I document body language, I document exuberance, I document pain,” he writes. “I draw like a reporter because I am a reporter.” 

McCalman began this project by challenging himself to paint one such portrait every day for a month, and the result overflows with energy and color. His choices are inspiring and well-rounded, running the gamut from Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin to activist Alicia Garza and food journalist Toni Tipton-Martin.

My Travels With Mrs. Kennedy

Book jacket image for My Travels With Mrs. Kennedy by Clint Hill

Despite the mountains of books already written about the Kennedys, I couldn’t put down My Travels With Mrs. Kennedy, a conversational memoir and very personal photo album by Clint Hill. A former Secret Service agent who served under five U.S. presidents, Hill was present during John F. Kennedy’s assassination and later assigned to the first lady and her children. He’s written other books about those experiences, including several with his wife and co-author, Lisa McCubbin Hill. 

This book was sparked by the process of cleaning out the garage of Hill’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, going through boxes of memorabilia, including a forgotten steamer trunk. Dialogue between the co-authors makes the book immensely readable as they discuss their discoveries and Hill’s memories. Numerous photos bring each scene to life, capturing intimate moments that reveal the first family’s personalities, especially that of Jackie. Of their relationship, Hill writes, “It wasn’t romantic. But it was beyond friendship. We could communicate with a look or a nod.”

The Only Woman

Book jacket image for The Only Woman by Immy Humes

The Only Woman is a unique gallery of group portraits that contain a lone female figure surrounded by men. There’s Marie Curie, for instance, with her head in her hand, looking downright bored among a group of suited scientists at a 1911 conference in Belgium. There’s 9-year-old Ab Hoffman, who earned a spot on a Canadian hockey team for one season in 1956 because her coaches hadn’t noticed her gender. In a 1982 photo, a white male U.S. Army Diver candidate sneers at Andrea Motley Crabtree, a Black woman who made the training cut when he didn’t. “Most of the men hated me being there,” Crabtree recalls. “He couldn’t understand how I was better than him.” 

Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Immy Humes provides concise commentary throughout her collection, which spans from 1862 to 2020. She speaks to “the pleasure of spotting them, and then, most of all, the mystery of them: What was she doing there?”

Affinities

Affinities book cover

In need of some creative downtime? Curl up with the hefty Affinities: A Journey Through Images From the Public Domain Review and lose yourself in a delightfully imaginative, visionary game. The book’s 350-plus pages contain a miscellany of images arranged to showcase unexpected similarities. For example, one section features the shapes of outstretched arms as seen in a 16th-century drawing of a mechanical arm, an image of the Borghese Gladiator sculpture, a John Singleton Copley painting and—of all things—a photo of damage sustained to the bow of the HMS Broke during a World War I battle. 

With images old and new from around the world, all selected from the archive of the Public Domain Review, this is a book designed for random perusal. Some images come with suggested paths to different pages, creating a sort of chutes-and-ladders effect. As explained in the introduction, the result is “a maze of rootlike cut-throughs that allow you to move through the book in different ways, to disrupt the sequence and carve through your own serpentine trajectory.”

The armchair historian’s wish list isn’t a tough nut to crack. Just give them a great book.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean HistoryBiography

One Hundred Saturdays

Review by Deborah Mason

Reading One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank is like watching an artist piece together a mosaic. A splash of blue sea here. A mother’s song over there. The smell of Purim pastries. The flash of first love. But the mosaic is never completed. Instead, a terrible wind descends, leaving the artist to pick up the pieces as best she can and begin a new image.

Here, the artist is Stella Levi, a 99-year-old Jewish woman living in New York City. The mosaic is the Juderia, the main Jewish quarter on the island of Rhodes, where Levi was born in 1923. And the wind is the Holocaust, which reached the Juderia in the last months of World War II and scattered Levi’s parents, family, friends and community. One Hundred Saturdays is the story of that time and place, but it is also much more: a story of friendship, survival, reinvention and courage.

Frank, author of The Mighty Franks and What Is Missing and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, met Levi by chance—or perhaps serendipity—when he rushed in late to attend a lecture, and the elegant older woman in the chair next to him struck up a conversation. The following Saturday, he found himself in Levi’s Greenwich Village apartment, the first of 100 Saturdays that he would spend with her over the following six years. Over the course of those visits, Levi became both a friend and muse as she recounted the minutest details of her life, from its rich beginning to its remarkable present.

Maira Kalman’s illustrations, heavily influenced by Matisse with their deceptive simplicity, rich colors and delicate textures, are perfect complements to Levi’s story, portraying vanished scenes from life on Rhodes before the Holocaust. Together with the text of Frank’s beautiful book, they create a sensitive portrait of an extraordinary woman. Fiercely independent, keenly intelligent and remorselessly honest, Levi refuses to be defined solely by the tragedy of her youth. Her life has been a constant evolution, and her final years are being lived with the same vitality as her earliest ones.

One Hundred Saturdays is the story of a Jewish community before the Holocaust, but it is also much more: a story of friendship, survival, reinvention and courage.
NonfictionHistoryBiographyAmerican History

American Rascal

Review by Roger Bishop

Mark Twain wrote that “Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.” Gould’s fellow Gilded Age robber barons were more positive. Cornelius Vanderbilt called him “the smartest man in America,” and John D. Rockefeller said Gould had the “best head for business” of anyone. In American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune, Greg Steinmetz briskly tells financier and railroad leader Gould’s rags-to-riches story and gives a nuanced view of this man of contradictions and why he matters.

Gould originally made his money through various ventures in New York. However, when the Civil War ended, railroads became the most important and powerful industry in the country, and thus the focus of Gould’s business dealings. By investing in various railroads, Gould did as much as anyone at the time to generate economic growth and steer the country toward becoming a world power. As the owner and manager of multiple railroads, Gould was one of the largest employers in the country and made rail travel faster, safer and more comfortable. At the same time, he bribed politicians and used deception to ruthlessly manipulate competitors.

The qualities Gould demonstrated in taking control of the Erie Railroad illustrate his strengths throughout his career: “his brilliance as a financial strategist, his deep understanding of law, a surprising grasp of human nature, and a mastery of political reality,” as Steinmetz writes. Above all, Gould was a pragmatist. He could be a visionary, but only when it didn’t clash with his primary objective, which was to make as much money as he could for himself.

Outside of work, Gould seemed to be less ruthless. Most evenings, he left his office to have dinner with his wife and six children and to read in his library. He did not drink alcohol. He loved flowers, owned the largest greenhouse in the country and cultivated a new breed of orchids. Despite their wealth, he and his family were not part of the city’s social aristocracy. “I have the disadvantage of not being sociable,” he once said.

Steinmetz’s fast-moving and eminently readable biography shows how Gould thrived within the context of his times but also that his greed led to necessary reforms for the health of the country’s economy.

In American Rascal, Greg Steinmetz tells robber baron Jay Gould’s rags-to-riches story and gives a nuanced view of why he matters to American history.

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