How can a dictator hide in plain sight, telegraphing evil intentions years or even decades after their demise? Daniel Kalder posits that it’s simple: Many of them left behind a body of literature. Kalder, a journalist who lived in Moscow for 10 years, immersed himself in “dictator literature” and has collected his analyses of their often terrible writing and its consequences in The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy. As it turns out, in addition to being despots and practitioners of genocide, dictators are typically megalomaniacs who like to put their thoughts on paper for posterity.

Kalder started reading the works of dictators around 2011 and somehow managed to finish the requisite reading and complete his own book within the decade. To say this was a tall task would be an understatement—there has been no lack of dictators in the course of human history—but Kalder delivers with this entertaining and highly informative book. It helps that he keeps his sense of humor. “Dictators usually live lives that are rich in experience,” he deadpans early on, and the quips are sprinkled throughout (including a shot at everyman author Bill Bryson). Given the subject matter, they are never unwelcome.

As for the dictator-authors, it’s safe to say there are no Brysons among them. Mussolini comes off best in terms of writing skill (“borders on the readable”), while Hitler (“staggeringly incompetent”) takes a pounding. Kalder then dutifully leads us through the writings of Mao Tse-tung, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini and a few lesser-known despots. There’s a handy summary at the end in which Kalder also considers the impact of social media and warns—perhaps more aptly than he realized when writing this book—about the ability to “wage war . . . through the medium of text.”

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

When we think of the writing lives of iconic female authors Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, we imagine them going it alone, Austen at her tiny table, her sister and mother bustling around her, and Brontë stuck in her father’s spare parsonage, with siblings for company. But those images tell only part of the story, write Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, who detail the writerly friendships that sustained Austen and Brontë, as well as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, in A Secret Sisterhood.

Drawing on a wealth of letters, Midorikawa and Sweeney reveal long friendships that were glossed over or even suppressed by descendants and biographers. For Austen, that friend was Anne Sharp, governess to Austen’s niece and an amateur playwright. Brontë first encountered lifelong friends Mary Taylor (who later wrote a feminist novel) and Ellen Nussey in boarding school, creating a middle school friendship triangle. Later, Brontë and Taylor studied French in Belgium, a transformative experience. Eliot grew an epistolary friendship with blockbuster author Harriet Beecher Stowe; the two never met, but they corresponded intermittently for decades after Stowe wrote an admiring letter to Eliot. And as for Woolf, a friendship with short-story writer Katherine Mansfield was fraught, but lasted until Mansfield’s untimely death.

In their approachable style, Midorikawa and Sweeney illuminate these novelists as each struggles to write and publish in an era hostile to women and cope with both anonymity and fame. We also get a sense of the relationships among these four: Brontë complained about Austen to Eliot’s partner, while Eliot herself was a great admirer of Austen. Woolf, in turn, revered Eliot. A Secret Sisterhood is bookended by a lovely foreword from Margaret Atwood and an epilogue noting other female literary friendships.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, September 2017

The story of Adam and Eve occupies two short chapters early in the biblical Book of Genesis and is never mentioned again in the Bible. But the story, as Stephen Greenblatt so vividly and beautifully points out in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, lies at the foundation of Western culture’s enduring questions about the origins of human nature and our moral shortcomings.

With his typical eloquence, Greenblatt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Swerve, explores the life of a biblical story that artists, philosophers, theologians and poets have struggled for hundreds of years to understand and interpret. Augustine of Hippo laid out the most famous interpretation of the story by using the tale of Adam and Eve’s transgressions as the centerpiece for his own concept of original sin: We’re born sinners, since the act of sin is transmitted through sexual intercourse. For Augustine, as Greenblatt so felicitously puts it, “human sinfulness is a sexually transmitted disease.” The fourth-­century monk Jerome laid the blame for the couple’s wrongdoings at Eve’s feet, an interpretation that continues to foster mistreatment of women in churches and in society. Greenblatt paints an exquisite portrait of artists such as Albrecht Dürer, who imagined the beauty of the original couple in his engraving “The Fall of Man,” which illustrates, for Greenblatt, a “vision of those perfect bodies that existed before time and labor and mortality began.” In John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” according to Greenblatt, Adam and Eve finally become real, depicting their struggle with freedom and innocence and the tension between the forces of good and evil.

In the end, Greenblatt elegantly concludes that the story of Adam and Eve is a powerful myth that deeply informs our understandings of temptation, innocence, freedom and betrayal, the choice between good and evil.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, August 2017

In Wild Things, Bruce Handy offers a rousing and nostalgic romp through the classics of children’s literature from the latter half of the 20th century, from Goodnight Moon to Ramona to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Clearly passionate about his topic, Handy dives into the context of the publication of these books with enthusiasm and verve.

Handy makes unlikely comparisons (Beverly Cleary to Henry James; The Runaway Bunny to Portnoy’s Complaint). He vividly portrays Margaret Wise Brown, with her loads of golden hair, unconventional love interests and seemingly endless well of inspiration, and her mercurial editor Ursula Nordstrom, who hovers at the edge of many of the most beloved publications of this era (it was she who convinced Maurice Sendak that Where the Wild Things Are should feature monsters, not horses). Handy tangles with scholars from children’s literature, such as Philip Nel and his interpretation of The Cat in the Hat—Nel argues it’s informed by minstrelsy, while Handy suggests that the cat may be a representation of Dr. Seuss himself.

But this is no scholarly tome. Indeed, Handy makes the personal and idiosyncratic nature of many of his reflections apparent. He frames his chapter on Narnia in light of his own religious inclinations (which are not C.S. Lewis’) and describes how it felt to realize the book had such Christian themes (he was dismayed, but also enduringly drawn to the way the children relate to Aslan, which Handy believes was how Lewis experienced his faith). And Handy’s enthusiasm for Cleary’s character of Ramona is as genuine and sweet as an ice-cream cone on a hot summer’s day. This is a compulsively readable and entertaining collection of essays that will take readers back, in the best sense, to books they may have nearly forgotten but will delight in remembering.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Bruce Handy.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a mediocre medical doctor with an adventurous streak that could not be suppressed. “Several times in my life I have done utterly reckless things with so little motive that I have found it difficult to explain them to myself afterwards,” he wrote in his memoir. In Arthur and Sherlock, literary historian Michael Sims traces some of Doyle’s grand adventures, including expeditions to the polar icecap and Africa, and shows how they became fodder for his early prose. But travel wasn’t the only source of inspiration for Doyle’s iconic fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

Dr. Joseph Bell, who was one of Doyle’s teachers in medical school in Scotland, was so recognizable in the character of Holmes that Robert Louis Stevenson, who also studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, wrote to Doyle to inquire, “can this be my old friend Joe Bell?” Bell, a lively, intelligent man who could startle classes with uncanny observational deduction, proved a wonderful model for Holmes, who both builds on and deviates from the literary tradition of detective fiction that goes all the way back to the Bible itself. (King David, Sims suggests, is an early prototype of the detective figure.) This tradition is luminously carried on by Edgar Allan Poe, whom Sims explores in absorbing detail.

There is something in this marvelous book for every Holmes fan, and short, vivid chapters keep the pages turning. From early reviewers who couldn’t spell Doyle’s name to grand lunches with famous magazine editors alongside Oscar Wilde, Sims knows how to paint a picture that fascinates and delights. Arthur and Sherlock will take its place on the growing shelf of literary histories presented by this talented and eloquent writer.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As the old saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. And the two often intertwine, as we learn in Lesley M.M. Blume’s mesmerizing account of the young Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s as he prepares to write his breakout debut novel, The Sun Also Rises. 

While many readers are familiar with Hemingway among the expats and his post-World War I modernist classic, Blume opens up the story in surprising new ways. She was inspired to dig into this project after seeing a photograph of Hemingway with the main cast of characters who would later appear in the novel—what some called a barely fictionalized account of a trip by a group of friends to Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls. In Everybody Behaves Badly we meet femme fatale Lady Duff Twysden, inspiration for Lady Brett Ashley, Harold Loeb (Robert Cohn), Donald Ogden Stewart (Bill Gorton) and Patrick Guthrie (Mike Campbell). She describes not only their real-life intrigues but also the impact that the novel had on their later lives. 

Blume’s account also probes Hemingway’s first marriage and its dissolution and his larger-than-life literary ambitions. Among the most fascinating aspects of Everybody Behaves Badly are the insights into the editing, publishing and marketing of The Sun Also Rises. Here, we see the friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway in action and their mutual dedication to craft. 

Blume’s book is nonfiction, impeccably documented. Yet, like Hemingway’s fictional masterpiece, it reminds us that real life can inspire great stories and writing.

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

Nine male convicted felons, serving long sentences for violent crimes, meet regularly with a sensitive, witty female professor inside a maximum security prison to read and discuss works by literary giants like Conrad, Kafka, Nabokov, Poe and Shakespeare. What could go wrong? The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison is Mikita Brottman’s refreshingly straightforward account about all that did go right, as together they explored Heart of Darkness, The Black Cat, Lolita and other rather unlikely candidates for prison reading. 

Brottman is an Oxford-educated scholar volunteering within the grim walls of Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institute, bringing her deep love of literature to men who, she hopes, will find something meaningful for themselves in the books she cherishes. Her own troubled childhood led her to seek escape in such works; complex characters like Conrad’s Marlow and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, she reasons, may help these convicts reach a deeper understanding of themselves and each other. They seem willing to try. But the crushing weight of prison life—unrelenting boredom, punitive corrections officers, random lockdowns, solitary confinements, illnesses and violent gang fights—takes its toll. 

They all make mistakes here: Brottman misspeaks to a reporter and worries the club will be cancelled altogether. The men nod off when high or ill. She wonders why she ever thought reading about the pedophile and nymphet in Lolita was a good idea. Then again, they make her see Gregor’s transformation into a bug in Metamorphosis in an entirely new way.

Later, when two of the men are released and Brottman meets them “outside,” she discovers they have no more interest in reading literature. “On the inside,” she concludes, “I’d loved those men. But on the outside, I’d lost them. Because literature was all I had.” Not quite all: She tells her own good story here, too.

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

Wait, we need a Brooklyn-based writer to guide us through the swamps, thickets and kudzu of Southern literary haunts? Not to worry—Margaret Eby may live in the borough, but she grew up in Alabama and is on familiar turf in South Toward Home, a highly readable literary tour of the region that gave us Faulkner, O’Connor and Lee (Harper, not Robert E.).

The title is a nod to Eby’s Southern roots but also an homage to North Toward Home, Willie Morris’ 1967 memoir of growing up in Mississippi and moving as an adult to New York. Eby reverses his course, with a simple conceit: Pick a writer and visit the city, town or site associated with him or her, mixing literary primer with historical background and some good old-fashioned reporting. It’s not a new formula, but it requires an expert’s touch, and Eby displays that as she makes the obligatory pilgrimages to places like Oxford, Mississippi, and Monroeville, Alabama, and the not-so-expected detours to a Memphis library or Florida backwoods.

The itinerary is by no means comprehensive: Eby doesn’t go looking for Robert Penn Warren on the Tennessee-Kentucky border or Alice Walker in rural Georgia. Still, readers will feel fortunate that, while not overlooking the obvious choices, Eby includes Harry Crews—not exactly on every high school reading list. 

Feel free to skip around—especially if you’re eager to get to the chapter on Harper Lee and Truman Capote, or the fascinating account of John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces) and his native New Orleans. But if you read even one of the chapters, you’ll want to make sure you take the entire tour.
 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Margaret Eby about South Toward Home.
 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Once a staple on the bookshelves of middle-class American homes, The Great Books of the Western World originally comprised 54 volumes of readings selected as essential to a liberal education. The series, with its notable exclusion of women and writers of color, fell out of favor with the advent of political correctness and a more inclusive cultural view. Yet, as Matt Burriesci suggests in Dead White Guys, there is still much that can be learned from these white European males. “The Great Books of the Western World are not interested in promoting our illusions, and they do not care about authority,” he writes. “They are neither gentle nor polite. They teach you how to see through illusions, and they demand that you question both yourself and your masters.”

Dead White Guys is at heart a series of letters to Burriesci’s daughter, Violet, written for her to open when she turns 18 in 2028. It began as he cleared his own set of Great Books, acquired years before at a flea market for $50, to make way for the nursery for baby Violet. Taking a break, he picked up volume one and started reading. What he discovered in its pages was timeless, sometimes challenging wisdom that he knew would one day serve his daughter well. The result is 26 lessons about values—from Plato on doing right and wrong to Plutarch on leadership to Marx and Engels on whether capitalism works—that he hopes will allow the future Violet to find her own place in the world.

Each letter begins with Burriesci sharing some personal history or truth with Violet—tales of his own misguided ambitions, career failures and youthful indiscretions, as well as happy memories of his own childhood in a gentler, vanishing time. These thoughts then spur a visit to one of the seminal Great Books texts, distilling key points to their fundamentals. Far from stuffy or academic, Burriesci’s brief essays are often witty, iconoclastic and disarmingly frank (he does not shy away from calling Aristotle a racist, for instance, or from musing about the Founding Fathers, “What idiot would pick a fight with the British Empire?”).

Burriesci’s reading tour skews toward the ancients (the book is nearly half done before he gets to St. Augustine), with Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch and Montaigne getting the lion’s share of consideration. Shakespeare is represented singly by Hamlet, and, by necessity, there are many other omissions: Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Dante, Cervantes, Kant and Freud, among them. Indeed, with the exception of Hamlet, the book steers away from fiction and drama entirely, focusing instead on philosophical and political works.

Still, these are Burriesci’s letters to his own daughter, so he gets to choose whatever dead white guys he finds most germane to the lessons he hopes to impart. The point, after all, is for Violet, and each of us, to find our own way through the great books and through life.

J.C. Hallman had only a passing awareness of writer Nicholson Baker when he quite impulsively became obsessed with the man and his work. He not only had erroneously thought that Baker was British, but considered him a “nonessential” writer. That indifference changed into fixation nearly overnight. Hallman plunged into all of Baker’s fiction and nonfiction, a project that morphed into the deeper contemplation of literature and life that he chronicles with candor, humor and insight in B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal.

Baker, of course, wrote his own such book: U and I, published early in his career, which grew out of a similar reader-for-writer mania, in this case Baker’s for John Updike. Logically, that volume provides a jumping off point for Hallman, but he quickly moves to Baker’s other early work, which, both fiction and nonfiction, is notable for its scrutiny of the minutia of daily life. In this unapologetically personal account, Hallman introduces us to his girlfriend, Catherine, a photographer who becomes a secondary pilgrim and often seemingly indifferent sounding board for his Baker enthusiasms. Their alternately passionate and thorny relationship plays out in the Midwest, Paris and Maine (where Baker lives), providing particular fodder as Hallman delves into Baker’s “sex trilogy.” The arms-length discourse that Hallman carries on with Baker through his books does eventually bring the two writers together when Hallman musters the nerve to arrange a meeting. Their two encounters are intriguing, if less than illuminating (full disclosure: I went to college with Baker, and these two clumsy scenes were sharply reminiscent of the single time, equally awkward, I was introduced by a mutual friend to the then-aspiring writer in the dining hall).

B & Me, fundamentally, is book about reading and the relationships we develop (usually from afar) with our favorite writers through their work. These relationships, Hallman suggests (and suggests that Baker is suggesting, too), are almost sexual in nature. “Nicholson Baker is not, and has never been, the true subject of this book,” Hallman writes near the end. “If I’ve been correct in suggesting that there’s something wrong with the state of modern literature, that the state of modern literature is like an aberrant state of mind, a state on the brink of breakdown and despair, then the problem is not that Nicholson Baker’s work has gone overlooked, however celebrated it may be. It’s that the whole world is slowly going mad and forgetting writers like Nicholson Baker, writers whose books truly need to be books.” [Hallman’s italics]

Hallman is an intelligent, passionate critic, and his fecund mind leads readers in many directions worth following. If his writing occasionally becomes slightly (but only slightly) insufferable as its struts across the page overly impressed with its own cleverness, and his decidedly clinical and off-putting (and not very erotic) descriptions of his own sex life do little more than distract from the larger issues at hand, those are minor quibbles. B & Me is an original, at once quirky and thought-provoking—a book in love with books and the power they can and should hold.

After establishing that he’s not any of the Andy or Andrew Millers you might have heard of, this English Andy Miller introduces his ambitious vow to read 50 great books within a year—and, better still, to chronicle the struggles and discoveries involved along the way. This he does with candor and good humor

His list ranges from the predictable (Moby Dick and Don Quixote) to the surprising (The Code of the Woosters and The Communist Manifesto) to the truly head-scratching (The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1 and Krautrocksampler). His criteria for inclusion, as best one can determine, are books he has already read, loved and wants to read again, books he feels he should have read and books he’s told people he’s read but hasn’t. He doesn’t actually describe his encounter with each book, but he does linger on those he found especially endearing or hard to deal with. In the process he muses on the future of physical books and libraries in an age of electronic ones and on the ideal roles of bookstore clerks. He almost gives up on Middlemarch and Of Human Bondage but ultimately soldiers through both.

In Anna Karenina he finds “the perfect balance of art and entertainment—no, not a balance, a union of the two.” Miller and his wife are even more moved by the cosmic sweep of War and Peace. “It is as though, having found a book with all the other books within it, we looked around and asked ourselves: what do we need with all these other books?” His appendices include a list of the 100 books that have influenced him most and a roll call of 34 others he still intends to read. Then there’s his droll sidebar on the similarities between The Da Vinci Code and Moby Dick.

“Better to speak volumes,” he observes sagely, “than to read them.”