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NonfictionReligion & SpiritualityMemoirCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Cultivating a mindful new year

Feature by Heather Seggel

As we greet the new year, many of us are not where we’d like to be in life. Whether that means personal relationships that could be improved or bad habits that need to be broken, progress begins when we lace up our shoes and take the first step. A handful of new books each have a different subject in mind, but share a common endorsement of mindfulness as the key to a happier, healthier life.

FRIENDS FOR LIFE

Bette Midler’s signature song used to be “You’ve Gotta Have Friends,” back before she got all wind-beneath-my-wings-y. Carlin Flora’s Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are seconds that emotion, noting the enormous health benefits of friendship along with the idea that our friends shape our personality and choices even more than families do. Flora, formerly the features editor for Psychology Today, discovers that one unexpected benefit of friendship is that it allows us to be altruistic and care about others. This may be why the kids who make friends most easily are those who can quickly change gears and empathize with a wide variety of personality types. (It also helps if their names are easy to pronounce.) If you’ve been thinking of starting a book club with your BFFs, here’s your first assignment.

COMPASSION IN ACTION

A professional relationship with a religious leader led to a great friendship for Victor Chan. He traveled with the Dalai Lama for many years, recording talks and meetings with everyone from sick children to two men on either side of the long-standing “troubles” in Northern Ireland. In The Wisdom of Compassion, Chan recounts a variety of these encounters as they relate to “Overcoming Adversity,” “Educating the Heart” and “Compassion in Action.” We get a good sense of what Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader experiences on a typical day, and his personality, which can be fiery but is more often full of effusive giggling, comes through nicely. Chan inserts himself into the narrative more than is warranted, but the overall message of the book is uplifting and inspiring: If we generate compassion within ourselves, then extend it to all people (not just the ones we like most), we hold the potential to alleviate much of the world’s suffering.

BOOST YOUR BRAINPOWER

If you think attention and mindfulness are just for the spiritually inclined, you may be shortchanging your own intelligence. Sandra Bond Chapman’s Make Your Brain Smarter leads with the advice to stop multitasking and utilize what she calls the “brainpower of none,” emptying the mind to allow your thoughts to sort and settle. From there, focusing on just one thing intently or working only on your top two priorities lead to increased productivity and a healthier brain. While it’s disappointing to learn that crosswords and sudoku do less for brain health than previously thought, Chapman’s program encourages thinking broadly and creatively to stimulate the frontal lobe. Considering that she created a program designed to sharpen the minds of Navy SEALs in the same way their elite training hones their bodies, you may want to toss the crosswords and give this a try.

FOCUS ON SUCCESS

The new year is when we often resolve to take up better fitness habits and put down some of our vices; after all, if you can stick with it for three weeks it locks in, right? Actually, no, says PsyBlog creator Jeremy Dean. In Making Habits, Breaking Habits he argues that one of the keys to changing a habit is—don’t say you weren’t warned—mindfulness. Despite the slew of books raving about the power of intention as the key to personal success, research finds that intention creates false expectations and leads more often to disappointment than to thin thighs or an Aston Martin. Instead, the practice of mindfulness helps us act on our intentions consciously, which reinforces new habits and makes it easier to break old ones despite the social cues that can trigger them. Thinking both abstractly and analytically can also develop the mind’s capacity and flexibility. Begin with the mind, then get on the treadmill, and you’re well on your way to self-improvement.

A PATH THROUGH THE DARK

Sometimes the urge to care for ourselves is slow in coming. When Katrina Kenison’s second son left home, she was confronted with an overwhelming sense of loss. It wasn’t just the empty nest or uncertainties of middle age, but also the shifting terrain of her marriage and the long shadow cast by the death of a friend that weighted her days. Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment follows Kenison for a year in which she gently plumbs her intuition to find new purpose and resilience in the face of sorrow. When her life seems most empty, she realizes, “I do at least know this: . . . I can either run away from my loneliness, or I can practice tolerating myself as I am.” Yoga proves central to her healing, and its focus on mindfulness helps even the darkest places to reveal their beauty.

DOWN TO THE ROOTS

Garden blogger (and Kenison’s writing partner) Margaret Roach pulls together the scientific and spiritual in The Backyard Parables: A Meditation on Gardening, but it doesn’t feel like work when you’re out getting your hands dirty. A year spent in her garden includes a glimpse of her “new spiritual practice—a moving meditation aimed specifically at dandelions, a ritual that brings me into touch with my own powerlessness, and also my own power.” By turns wise and witty, the book is also jam-packed with practical tips for gardeners, from the basics of succession sowing to winning a showdown with chipmunks. Roach, former editorial director for Martha Stewart, followed a passion, cultivated it devoutly and turned it into a career. She doesn’t need to discuss the how-to of mindfulness; her life is the best example of the way love and attention will make things bloom.

As we greet the new year, many of us are not where we’d like to be in life. Whether that means personal relationships that could be improved or bad habits that need to be broken, progress begins when we lace up our shoes and take…

NonfictionWomen's HistoryMemoir

Forging new paths for women everywhere

Feature by Heather Seggel

A popular bumper sticker theorizes that well-behaved women rarely make history. While it’s true that sometimes swimming against the current is the only way to get where you’re headed, three new books show women making history in a variety of ways, from globetrotting, to taking on mysterious jobs, to smashing through political barriers—even if their behavior was sometimes less than ladylike.

ALL ABOARD

In 1889, Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days was hot stuff. So hot, in fact, that two New York publications sent female reporters on trips around the world to try and beat fictional character Phileas Fogg’s time. Matthew Goodman’s Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World recreates the race and shows how it shaped the women’s lives afterward. It’s also a dazzling tour of the world at a time when travel routes were just opening up; a look at sensationalist journalism and pop culture in pre-Kardashian America; and a testimony to how hard women had to fight to get work and achieve respect as journalists.

Bly perfected the art of traveling light for the sake of convenience, then went on a shopping spree in Singapore, after which she was saddled with a cantankerous monkey she named McGinty. Bisland, who agreed to race against Bly with less than one day’s notice, didn’t like the publicity that came with the challenge and squirmed at being hauled in rickshaws and sedan chairs, but she was otherwise a fearless competitor who continued to travel for the rest of her life. Their stories should inspire both writers and travelers today: If you finish this without laying out your own version of Nellie Bly’s one-bag, no-hassles travel case, don’t complain the next time you’re dinged $25 for an extra suitcase. She was vastly ahead of her time.

WOMEN’S WORK

The Girls of Atomic City details a story that seems impossible yet was true. Author Denise Kiernan brings a novelist’s voice to her thoroughly researched look at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a small city that housed 75,000 people, used as much power as New York City, yet didn’t exist on any map. During World War II, numerous women were recruited to work in Oak Ridge but were never told what their jobs were; each job was isolated from the others so a complete picture couldn’t be formed. All they knew was that they were working to help bring a swift end to the war. By the time anyone had figured it out, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been decimated and the war was over.

The story of the town is impressive and occasionally funny: Women disembarking from cars for the first time sank to their knees in mud, since there were no sidewalks built, and one resident persuaded a worker to make her contraband biscuit tins from scrap metal so as to avoid the cafeteria’s sub-par chow. There was camaraderie among the workers, yet everyone felt ambivalent about what they created and how it was ultimately used. Kiernan gives no easy answers, but the stories of the women will resonate with readers. If someone offered you double what you’re making now, would you jump on a train with no further information? That took guts.

HIGHEST CALLING

It’s great to look back and find undiscovered stories in our past, but the experiences of those who are still with us have much to offer as we go forward. Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice is Mary Robinson’s memoir. The first female president of Ireland and former U.N. high commissioner for human rights traces her political roots back to an early and radical questioning of her Catholic upbringing. Continually working and fighting for full inclusion on behalf of the poor and marginalized, she became a vocal opponent of U.S. President George W. Bush’s policies in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. When journalists questioned her outspoken stance and willingness to jeopardize her U.N. job, she writes, “I replied that this was the job; it was better to do the job than try to keep it.”

Robinson is unsparing about mistakes she’s made in her political career, and unfailingly gracious and grateful to her friends and family in these pages, which puts her tougher stances in perspective. A critical thinker and fine writer, her life story is a pleasure to read, and one that will certainly inspire generations of leaders to come.

A popular bumper sticker theorizes that well-behaved women rarely make history. While it’s true that sometimes swimming against the current is the only way to get where you’re headed, three new books show women making history in a variety of ways, from globetrotting, to taking…

NonfictionReligion & SpiritualityMemoir

Transformative accounts of faith and redemption

Feature by Kelly Blewett

For five writers from varied points on the Christian spectrum, God transforms dramatic circumstances into spiritual gain. From moving across the country to facing death itself, these authors amply illustrate that resurrection stories—far from being a thing of the past—are happening all around us.

LIFE-CHANGING SURGERY

For Steve Sjogren, author of Heaven’s Lessons: Ten Things I Learned About God When I Died, a near-death experience in 2000 led to an unexpected destination in his faith. Sjogren’s story is a humbling one. While pastoring a megachurch in Cincinnati, he went in for a standard hospital surgery that went horribly wrong. On the operating table, God told him that from now on he would “walk with a limp.” Following the surgery, Sjogren lost his position at the church, faced severely diminished health and was forced to re-examine some of the fundamental things he believed about God. He’s divided this book into 10 resulting lessons. “Though my experience with God in my near death experience was life changing, what followed it was depressing to me,” he writes. “If there is an option for a fast route, it seems I still always end up being placed on the l-o-n-g way forward.” This book offers readers the opportunity to benefit from Sjogren’s journey and to see how God turned a tragedy into a transformation. Sjogren, ever the pastor, is quick to provide applications of the book’s lessons to the reader’s life.

A PARENT’S STRUGGLE

In Beautiful Nate, Dennis Mansfield explores how his son’s drug addiction forced him to confront unwelcome truths about evangelicalism. Even though Mansfield tried to raise his son “by the book,” relying on experts like James Dobson, his boy still repeatedly rebelled and ultimately—in his 20s—died after an adverse drug reaction. Mansfield, a former Focus on the Family employee and lobbyist, loves Reagan, rhetoric and his family. His passions come through clearly, as does his pain. As Nate faced prison and life beyond, his father describes a softer side of their relationship: impromptu visits, staying up all night to watch movies and (most movingly) writing a novel the pair jointly penned during Nate’s incarceration. To his father, Nate was a follower of Jesus Christ forever torn by competing desires. While Beautiful Nate is certainly a sad story, Mansfield is consistently grateful for his son and the lessons learned about faith, parenting and life. He writes, “My hope is that you found [this] to be a poignant account of the realization that . . . things often turn out very wrong—and yet can turn out eternally right.” This is a good book for parents of faith who want to heal imperfect circumstances through the mercy of a perfect God.

NEW DIRECTIONS

In Landmarks: Turning Points on Your Journey Toward God, author Bill Delvaux describes a series of unexplainable choices that yielded satisfying results. He left a ministry position for teaching, and left his teaching position to write and speak about faith. A thoughtful writer, Delvaux was asked by a colleague to explain how his spiritual journey developed through these counterintuitive decisions. Delvaux responds that though he never knew he was going in the right direction, his Heavenly Father provided certain “landmarks” along the way. For frequent readers of evangelical nonfiction, the landmarks may seem unsurprising—giving up idols, addressing old wounds, seeking sexual purity. Yet Delvaux’s way of addressing these topics gives this slim book both gravity and purpose. When discussing idols, for instance, Delvaux shares his own former insistence that the details of his life be in order, right down to his junk mail. He realized that grasping toward perfection was ultimately idolatrous. As he reveals his own story, readers are gently guided to consider their own. A movie fan, Delvaux situates many of his lessons within the context of popular films. A small book that leaves a big impression, Landmarks tells how one man was transformed by embracing the principles he’d been teaching his whole life.

HEALING JOURNEY

For spiritual seeker and standout writer Beverly Donofrio (author of the memoir Riding in Cars With Boys) the pursuit of faith led to life in a small Mexican town replete with margaritas at sunset, yoga and plenty of time for writing. Yet Donofrio, a Catholic, felt herself drifting from God. Committed to rededicating herself, she planned an ambitious tour of monasteries around the country. Then a man broke into her apartment and raped her at knifepoint. In her new book, Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace, Donofrio ponders the significance of the timing. What does the rape reveal about God? How do trials figure into God’s plan for our lives? What does it mean to heal and grow? Donofrio spends much of the next year completing her monastery tour and offering tentative answers to these questions and more. A nontraditional thinker who accepts parts of the “Jesus myth” and rejects other parts, Donofrio’s journey around the country and into her inner life is compelling material beautifully written. Perpetually humble, searching, honest and wry, Donofrio is a fine companion for a spiritual journey.

THINGS UNSEEN

Jack Perkins, best known as a longtime reporter for NBC News, left a successful journalism career to move to a remote island in Maine. In Finding Moosewood, Finding God, Perkins traces the spiritual lessons he learned, recounts favorite stories from his journalism days and offers a wholly appealing personal glimpse into his family life. In the wilds of Maine—reading the journals of Thoreau and following his spiritual impulses—Perkins’ personal journey with God truly begins. By rejecting the consumerist culture of Los Angeles, Perkins and his wife Mary Jo find what seems to be an incomparable happiness in island living and creative pursuits. Both read voraciously and explore their new home with enthusiasm. By embracing the blessings of God—in a sunset, in the view of the water at night, in spotting a passing lobster boat—the couple begins to appreciate His divine character. This fresh and invigorating story will help the reader appreciate her own life and, better yet, feel that anything is possible.

While these books vary in points of view, trials faced and solutions suggested, they share a common belief that God is in the midst of our circumstances. This divine God who resurrects new life from death is, they agree, more real than the world before our eyes. As Perkins writes in one of his poems: “Henceforth this is my plan: / Believe much more in what I can’t see, / Much less in what I can.”

For five writers from varied points on the Christian spectrum, God transforms dramatic circumstances into spiritual gain. From moving across the country to facing death itself, these authors amply illustrate that resurrection stories—far from being a thing of the past—are happening all around us.

LIFE-CHANGING SURGERY

For…

NonfictionParentingMemoir

A mother’s gifts last a lifetime

Feature by Alice Cary

How do you approach Mother’s Day? With reverence and joy, or sorrow and trepidation? Are you fulfilled, exhausted or both from being a dutiful child or caretaking parent? No matter what your emotions, these engrossing books about mothers, children and parenting are bound to speak to you.

Particularly wonderful is a collection gathered by Elizabeth Benedict, What My Mother Gave Me. Benedict, who had a trying, distant relationship with her mother, found herself surprised by the intense feelings she had about a long woolen scarf her mother gave her in the last years of her life. She began to wonder: “If this one gift meant so much to me, if it unlocked the door to so much history and such complicated feelings, might other women have such a gift themselves?”

Indeed they do, and their answers come to life in stories from such writers as Ann Hood, Mary Gordon, Elinor Lipman and Mameve Medwed. Lisa See’s mother taught her to pen “a thousand words a day and one charming note,” a work ethic that involves writing steadily and aiming high. Joyce Carol Oates describes the first days of her widow­hood, when she wrapped herself in a rainbow-colored quilt made by her late mother. The quilt became “a sign of how love endures in the most elemental and comforting ways.” And Emma Straub ponders gifts less tangible, such as tickets for a rainy, rather miserable but memorable cruise around a Wisconsin lake. Straub writes: “My own happiness during every terrible minute of the Betty Lou Cruise came from knowing that when it ended, I would get to tell [my mother] about it.”

BIG FAT GREEK LOVE

For some, the road to motherhood can be fraught with formidable roadblocks, as was the case for actress Nia Vardalos, the famed actress and writer of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. She tells her story in Instant Mom, which is as compelling, witty and wonderful as her now-classic movie about Greek family life. While Vardalos filmed the movie, went on press tours and was eventually nominated for an Oscar, she was desperately enduring a series of fertility treatments and heartbreaking miscarriages. Her dream of becoming a mother was finally fulfilled in 2008 when she and her husband became the unimaginably proud parents of a 3-year-old daughter that they adopted via the foster-care system. “After years of praying to be parents,” Vardalos says, “this little miracle simply appeared.”

The first few months involved exhausting efforts by all to acclimate and build trust, and Vardalos never sugarcoats the details, though she always buffers them with her and her husband’s complete joy and adoration of their headstrong, vivacious little girl. Vardalos brings readers along for a delightful ride as she navigates the toddler and preschool years, ending the story with a helpful question-and-answer section about the adoptive process. Her goal is to educate her readers about adoption, and she achieves it in an endlessly entertaining fashion.

SHARED LAUGHTER

Comedian Carol Burnett also has a powerful mothering story to share. Like many, I grew up watching “The Carol Burnett Show” and still grin at the thought of her Tarzan yell and the unflappable Mrs. Wiggins. Now Burnett bares her soul in her touching memoir, Carrie and Me.

Carrie Hamilton was the oldest of Burnett’s three daughters, a young woman who shared both her mother’s looks and her wide-ranging talent as an actress and singer. Burnett highlights the great triumphs and tragedies of her beloved daughter’s life, filling in details with stories, diary entries and letters. The pair went public in 1979 about Carrie’s adolescent struggle with drugs and alcohol—a multi-year battle from which she ultimately emerged victorious. Mother and daughter later collaborated on a play about Carol’s early life, and the adult Carrie lived in a Colorado cabin while writing a story called “Sunrise in Memphis,” which is included in the book.

Sadly, Carrie’s bold spirit and artistic talent were cut short by lung cancer in 2002. Carol and Carrie were lucky to have each other, and their ironclad bond shines through in this short but sweet memoir.

A LIFE RENEWED

Like Nia Vardalos, Glennon Doyle Melton became something of an instant mom, but in a very different way. On Mother’s Day 2002, this unwed 26-year-old was shocked to discover she was pregnant. What’s more, she was battling bulimia, alcohol and drug addiction. Happily, her life of struggle has become one of triumph, which she describes in Carry On, Warrior.

Becoming a wife and mother was a turning point for Melton, who is now the mother of three and the successful creator of the blog Momastery.com, some essays from which are collected here. She calls herself a “reckless truth teller,” and like Anne Lamott (one of her favorite writers), Melton has dedicated her life not only to her family but to religious faith and humor. She explains that once her husband and first child entered her life, she realized, “If two such good, kind, full people needed and wanted and loved me, could I really be so worthless? Suddenly, it seemed that there might be parts of life that were beautiful and good and meant for ME.”

All four of these books will make readers laugh and cry in recognition, and think more deeply about their own roots and relationships.

How do you approach Mother’s Day? With reverence and joy, or sorrow and trepidation? Are you fulfilled, exhausted or both from being a dutiful child or caretaking parent? No matter what your emotions, these engrossing books about mothers, children and parenting are bound to speak…

ParentingMemoirFilmBiography

Special treats for special dads

Feature by Martin Brady

Father’s Day 2013 brings with it memoirs, nostalgia pieces, books on child-rearing (specifically from Dad’s POV) and also interesting volumes related to golf’s singular, imaginative hold on the father-son bond. We can’t review every item that made it over the transom, but here’s a sampler of our favorites.

SEEKING TO UNDERSTAND

In an epic mix of sprawling journalism and personal memoir, veteran magazine writer Stephen Rodrick presents The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey into His Father’s Life, in which he searches for clues to the mystery of his dad, a U.S. Navy pilot who crashed into the Indian Ocean in 1979 during maneuvers that were part of America’s response to the Iranian hostage crisis of that year. Rodrick, only 13 at the time, here acknowledges the resulting emotional gaps and confusion in his family’s life, and sets out to grapple with his own dysfunction while also investigating his father’s past to gain perspective on the man and on the military lifestyle in general, especially as it affects spouses and children. Rodrick’s approach is nothing if not frank, and at the risk of alienating those he loves, he emerges triumphant, purging some personal demons and seeming to gain a better understanding of what family means.

There are some interesting thematic similarities to Rodrick’s work in The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA, in which former Newsweek foreign correspondent Scott C. Johnson recounts his curiously peripatetic upbringing and makes an effort to understand his father and his unlikely profession. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that Johnson learned his dad was a CIA agent. Looking back, Johnson recounts the veil of deception that always seemed to shroud his father’s attitudes, demeanor and social activities. Questions remain unanswered for years, yet some clarity emerges right before 9/11, when son elicits from father an understanding of his notions of patriotism and morality. Later, while working as an international reporter in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, Johnson begins to find parallels in his own work, mainly in its secretive nature and its reliance on a certain kind of trust. With a scope spanning the Cold War and the war on terror, Johnson’s father-son memoir offers a rare glimpse of family, from separation to hard-won reconciliation.

LIFE ON THE LINKS

In Loopers: A Caddie’s Twenty-Year Golf Odyssey, professional golf caddy turned journalist John Dunn offers an engaging and surprisingly gritty approach to the sport’s literature. Against his father’s wishes, Dunn takes up the life of an itinerant caddy, and this volume essentially covers his episodic, two-decade journey across the U.S. working at golf courses great and small. Dunn makes it inside Augusta National Golf Club, manages to cross paths with celebrities and titans of industry, even travels across the pond to St. Andrews. It’s a gypsy existence that sometimes demands a scrappy persistence and a lot of compromises, yet Dunn’s account makes clear that his “a breed apart” personality is a good match for the vagabond lifestyle, which includes its fair share of fun and adventure. The book comes full circle when Dunn must confront his father’s imminent death from cancer. Closure occurs as the book reaches its poignant end, and golf’s linkage to the relationship between fathers and sons resonates once again.

TWO BIG DADDIES

Actor Steve Schirripa has had some great roles. Formerly the entertainment director of the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, he then parlayed his connections there into both TV and big-screen roles, mainly on “The Sopranos” as Bobby Bacala. Fact is, Schirripa is bigger than life. And while his new book, Big Daddy’s Rules: Raising Daughters Is Tougher Than I Look, written with Philip Lerman, definitely has a tongue-in-cheek feel to it, the tough-guy approach he espouses to child-rearing is heartfelt and refreshingly commonsensical. For Schirripa, it’s about protection—plus it’s his conviction that when parents assert an authoritative stance, kids will push boundaries more reasonably (and hence maybe end up with fewer tattoos!). This is parenting the old-school way, laced with tales from the trenches and committed advice on how to bring kids through the tough years, including discussion of topics like dating and sex, drinking and drugs, the value of money and hard work, and more.

“Today, big families are like waterbed stores; they used to be everywhere, and now they are just weird.” So says popular comedian and actor Jim Gaffigan, the author of Dad Is Fat but more tellingly the father of five young children, who, as of this writing, live with him and his “very fertile wife, Jeannie” in a two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Unsurprisingly, Gaffigan’s new book reads like one big extended stand-up routine about family life in general and the challenges of parenting a large brood in particular. Fans of the author’s sharp, dry wit will definitely be amused. The book is peppered with warm, candid photos of Gaffigans young and old.

AN AMERICAN ICON

Finally, there’s John Wayne: The Genuine Article, a coffee-table book suitable for the movie legend’s fans. Wayne was a dad, of course—son Ethan provides the preface here—and certainly was an authoritative film figure who epitomized the rugged American male. Michael Goldman’s text offers a welcome rundown of Duke’s life, from his almost accidental entry into the movies to his iconic rise in celluloid and later status as patriotic figure, with concluding chapters sharing a glimpse into Wayne’s personal moments and memories as a father. The plentiful graphic material includes reproductions of rare personal documents, family photos, letters to and from Hollywood stars and politicians, shooting-script excerpts from various Wayne flicks and other memorabilia.

Father’s Day 2013 brings with it memoirs, nostalgia pieces, books on child-rearing (specifically from Dad’s POV) and also interesting volumes related to golf’s singular, imaginative hold on the father-son bond. We can’t review every item that made it over the transom, but here’s a sampler…

PhotographyMusicMemoirBiography

The song remains the same

Feature by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Hitting the shelves this fall are several new biographies and autobiographies of rock, country and jazz stars that reveal never-before-heard refrains of personal anguish, as well as triumph.

In 1969, Crosby, Stills & Nash emerged as a supergroup, showcasing sweet harmonies and tight arrangements. One year later, Neil Young joined the band, and the quartet rocketed to superstardom on the strength of Graham Nash’s song “Teach Your Children.” Behind the scenes, though, life wasn’t so harmonious. In his honest and well-crafted memoir, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, Nash reveals the fierce struggles between Stills’ and Young’s titanic egos that eventually destroyed the group (although they have never officially broken up). With the lyrical flights of his best songs (“Carrie Anne,” “Our House,” “Chicago”), Nash carries readers on a journey from his often difficult childhood in the industrial north of England and the formation with Allan Clarke of the band that eventually became the Hollies, to his encounters with Mama Cass Elliot (who introduced him to David Crosby), Joni Mitchell, the Everly Brothers and Bob Dylan. While Nash holds back little, unveiling his disappointments with his own work and that of others, his love of songwriting and harmony remains: “I am a complete slave to the muse of music.”

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

While Nash tells his own story in his own words, Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant told journalist Paul Rees that he had no intention of writing a memoir because it was “too early in his career to do so.” Instead, Plant allowed Rees to have unparalleled access to his closest friends and associates to tell the story in Robert Plant: A Life. Rees chronicles Plant’s childhood as the son of an engineer in England’s industrial Midlands, where he would often hide behind the sofa and pretend to be Elvis. Deeply influenced by the blues (in particular the music of Robert Johnson), Plant began singing with local bands around Birmingham and left home at 17 to pursue a music career. But it was not until he teamed with Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page in 1968 that his ascension to rock-god status truly began. A few months later, after the band’s name was changed to Led Zeppelin, their rapid rise to fame exceeded even Plant’s wildest expectations. Rees traces the successes and excesses of Led Zeppelin, from limos, groupies and sudden wealth to plagiarism charges and “poisonous” reviews. He also explores Plant’s recent work, including his acclaimed collaboration with bluegrass fiddler Alison Krauss. Plant comes across as a confident but agreeable superstar, a “preening peacock” whose long locks and powerful voice secured his place in the rock pantheon.

HELLO, I’M JOHNNY CASH

Although Johnny Cash told his own story on at least two occasions—in Man in Black (1975) and, with Patrick Carr, Cash: The Autobiography (1997)—he nevertheless remains an enigmatic figure whose life story is surrounded by as much legend as truth. Until now. Drawing on previously unpublished interviews with Cash as well as previously unseen materials from the singer’s inner circle, former L.A. Times music critic Robert Hilburn gives us the definitive biography of the Man in Black in Johnny Cash: The Life. In intimate detail, Hilburn—the only music journalist at Cash’s legendary Folsom Prison concert in 1968—elegantly traces the contours of Cash’s life and career. After a hardscrabble childhood in Dyess, Arkansas, Cash built on his early love of music and made insistent attempts to get Sam Phillips’ attention at Sun Records. Hilburn chronicles Cash’s early hits such as “Folsom Prison Blues,” his foray into television in the late 1960s with “The Johnny Cash Show,” his failed first marriage and his deep love for June Carter, as well as his drug addictions. Most importantly, Hilburn compiles an exhaustive record of Cash’s enduring contributions as a songwriter and singer to both rock and country music.

TAKE THE “A” TRAIN

In the almost 40 years since his death, Duke Ellington has remained an enigmatic figure, even as his reputation as one our greatest and most culturally prominent orchestra leaders and jazz composers continues to grow. Following his acclaimed biography of Louis Armstrong, Pops, culture critic Terry Teachout draws on candid unpublished interviews with Ellington, oral histories of the orchestra leader and his times, and other little-known primary sources to tell a mesmerizing story in Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. Teachout follows Ellington from his childhood in Washington—where he gained his name “Duke” because of his stylish dress—and the first band he formed at 20, to his move to Harlem at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance and his emotional distance from family and friends for the sake of composing his music. Teachout traces Ellington’s deep influence on various cultural movements, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Duke’s own renaissance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. Teachout brings Ellington to life in this richly detailed and engrossing biography.

OLD FRIENDS

We often remember our favorite album covers and photos of our favorite musicians as much as their music. For more than four decades, Columbia Records staff photographer Don Hunstein snapped memorable shots of figures as diverse as Aretha Franklin, Sly Stone, Miles Davis, Leonard Bernstein, Mitch Miller, Tony Bennett and Bob Dylan, catching rare private moments of public lives. A collection of gorgeous, never-before-seen photos from the Columbia Records archive, Keeping Time: The Photographs of Don Hunstein illustrates Hunstein’s ability to capture artists relaxing and being themselves. Photos of Johnny Cash on his family’s farm in 1959, a weary Duke Ellington talking to Langston Hughes at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, and Cassius Clay and Sam Cooke teaming up in the recording studio in 1964 are just a few of the gems included here. In the words of New York Times music writer Jon Pareles, who contributes the book’s brief text, Keeping Time is “a quietly revealing close-up of artists who graced and transfigured the twentieth century.”

Hitting the shelves this fall are several new biographies and autobiographies of rock, country and jazz stars that reveal never-before-heard refrains of personal anguish, as well as triumph.

In 1969, Crosby, Stills & Nash emerged as a supergroup, showcasing sweet harmonies and tight arrangements. One year…

NonfictionMemoir

Theme and Variations: Two ballerinas reflect on the dancing life in new memoirs

Feature by Julie Hale

Early in her new memoir, Dancing Through It, when Jenifer Ringer writes, “It would take a while for us to realize that the world we were entering might well prove impossible to survive in,” she sounds as though she’s crossing into a combat zone or embarking on an expedition to Everest. But it’s the ballet world and the unseen hazards it holds for her younger self and fellow students that she characterizes so grimly. As the book progresses, Ringer—recently retired from her position as an acclaimed principal dancer with the New York City Ballet—becomes so fixated on her art form that she loses the ability to enjoy it. The ballet realm itself, so orderly and pristine, where she experiences both spectacular success and crippling pressure, morphs into a kind of “monster.” It “warped and twisted my spirit until I was almost destroyed,” Ringer recalls.

Ballet is, of course, an uncommon vocation—an extreme career that often inspires extreme behavior. Performers who push themselves (sometimes right over the edge) with unusual intensity are standard in the dance world, and Ringer, as Dancing Through It makes clear, was no exception. In her case, “the ballet-centric lens” through which she perceived her life led to problems that forced her to step back, take stock and grow outside of the studio. The core of her story lies in her personal metamorphosis—a slow, often difficult transformation from an eager-to-please, up-and-coming dancer into a secure and confident artist.

It’s a quality her narrative shares with another upcoming ballet-related memoir, Life in Motion by Misty Copeland (on sale March 4). As the only black woman at American Ballet Theatre, an 80-member troupe that’s one of the nation’s best, Copeland has spent her professional years defying the status quo. Her background and upbringing differ dramatically from Ringer’s, but the two have much in common. As adolescents, they devoted their lives to dance (neither started dating until she reached her early 20s) and were sidelined by injuries. Both have grappled with eating disorders and refer to themselves as perfectionists. Both have struggled to find ways to practice their craft without being undone by it. And both make it clear that the physical demands of their career are severe but not impossible to manage. The dancing is indeed doable. It’s the psychological stuff that’s the real killer.


Ballerinas Misty Copeland (left) and Jenifer Ringer

A LATECOMER TAKES HER PLACE AT THE BARRE

 “Ballet has long been the province of the white and wealthy,” Copeland writes in Life in Motion. Indeed, women of color are rare in America’s most prominent ballet companies. When American Ballet Theater (ABT) promoted Copeland from corps member to soloist in 2007, she was the first African-American woman in two decades to achieve that rank in the company. Prior to her promotion, in its 76 years of existence, ABT had only two black female soloists.

In her engaging autobiography, Copeland, now 31, traces the complex chronology of her unusual personal life and her remarkable rise as a performer. She’s a poised, intelligent writer whose temperament—disciplined, determined, driven—gives the book a special spark.

Along with her five siblings, Copeland grows up poor and—for the most part—fatherless in San Pedro, California. Her childhood is rocky thanks to her half-Italian, half-black mother, an exotic beauty whose succession of husbands results in frequent upheaval for the family. At one point, they relocate to a grubby motel where the kids are forced to bed down on the floor.

Despite the instability at home, Copeland develops into an overachiever, channeling her anxiety and energy into excelling at school. She applies the same drive to ballet. At the age of 13, she takes her first class at the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and proves to be a prodigiously gifted mover with the ability to mimic any step or gesture she sees. Although she’s a latecomer to ballet, she quickly blossoms.

Copeland is able to prepare for a professional ballet career through scholarships and the aid of sympathetic patrons. She trains with typical tenacity and focus—until she’s blindsided by family friction. The custody conflict that arises between her mother and her dance teacher, Cindy Bradley, is one of the most extraordinary occurrences in her very eventful life. The incident results in a media circus, landing Copeland on national TV at the age of 16.

When she’s in her late teens, Copeland’s hard work pays off, and she’s invited to dance with ABT. She’s thrilled to become a corps member but disappointed to discover the prejudice that lurks in the big-time ballet world—a place where conformity counts. Copeland learns the hard way about those “who believed there was no place in ballet for a black swan.” She writes openly about her outsider status at ABT and the ways in which it eroded her confidence and made her question the future. Would certain coveted classical roles always be off-limits because of her skin color? And would she ever have the chance to dance principal parts like Juliet and Odette?

These are questions that remain unanswered. After 13 years at ABT, Copeland is a celebrated ballerina who’s still climbing the ranks, hoping to be promoted to principal dancer. Yet she’s arrived at a place of acceptance. In Life in Motion, she looks back on the past without bitterness or anger, only gratitude. Hers is an out-of-the-ordinary story about defying stereotypes, and she shares it in an inspiring narrative that’s enlivened by her own grace and generous spirit.

FINDING BALANCE IN THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION

Compared to Copeland’s against-all-odds autobiography, Jenifer Ringer’s Dancing Through It reads like a fairy tale at times. As she recalls in this smoothly recounted chronicle of her rise from the small studios of the South to the hallowed ranks of New York City Ballet (NYCB), Ringer was blessed with advantages Copeland lacked, including a secure family life and money to pay for training, which she started at the age of five.

Yet Ringer encountered obstacles of a different kind, and because they were, for the most part, deeply personal and interior, hers is a darker story.

A North Carolina native, Ringer is raised by supportive parents who encourage her to dance. She joins NYCB, one of the country’s top companies, at the age of 16 and a mere three years later is being cast in plum roles and praised in the press. The quintessential ballerina, she spends her days in the studio and her nights on the stage of the New York State Theatre. Her very first kiss occurs during a performance of Romeo and Juliet.

Despite her early and overwhelming success, though, Ringer is miserable. She’s plagued by self-doubt and frequently exhausted by the pressures that come with life as a performer. But—despite the stress—she’s determined to maintain a “perfect” exterior.

Ringer’s façade cracks when, after a few years at NYCB, she develops an eating disorder. She writes with unsparing honesty about the loneliness and shame that accompany her condition.  “I could make myself feel better with food,” she says. “Or I could just somehow not feel with food.” When Ringer gains weight and loses her job at NYCB, she’s despondent. But out in the “nondancing world,” she grows in new ways, finishing her college degree and achieving a sense of normalcy that allows her to overcome her disorder. She also finds comfort in the Christian faith.

After a year’s absence, Ringer returns to NYCB in full force and as a new person—an adult comfortable in her own skin. In 2010, when her curvy physique is criticized in the New York Times, she bravely faces the media blitz that follows and appears on "Oprah" to discuss body-image issues.

Ringer is a more reserved and measured narrator than Copeland. But the survey of her 23-year-career that she presents in Dancing Through It has immediacy and an emotional rawness, and in its focus on the dangers that often attend the pursuit of perfection, it’s just as compelling as Life in Motion. Despite her past difficulties, Ringer isn’t a whiner. She’s a modest, likeable figure with the ability to laugh at herself, and her book contains many funny moments (she doesn’t shy from sharing memories of mid-performance falls and other unglamorous, on-stage occurrences). Now married to NYCB alumnus James Fayette and a mother of two, Ringer danced her final ballet with the NYCB on February 9. She has clearly found her balance. 

Her memoir, like Copeland’s, illuminates the ballet world in a distinctive way, providing fascinating access to an environment that can seem mysterious to outsiders. Both books demonstrate that a ballerina’s achievement of radical grace is a battle of the mind as well as the body—one that involves more grit than glamour. There’s a strange kind of necessity in the struggle. Ringer isn’t exaggerating when she says of Serenade, one of her favorite ballets, “If I were not allowed to dance these steps to this music, something would always be missing from my life.” On the page, as on the stage, both ballerinas earn ovations.

As adolescents, they devoted their lives to dance . . . Both have grappled with eating disorders and refer to themselves as perfectionists. Both have struggled to find ways to practice their craft without being undone by it. And both make it clear that the physical demands of their career are severe but not impossible to manage. The dancing is indeed doable. It’s the psychological stuff that’s the real killer.
NonfictionMemoirBiography

A grand slam for baseball books

Feature by John C. Williams

There are certain years that trigger immediate associations in any baseball fan’s mind. 1903: the first World Series. 1927: Murderer’s Row. 1961: Mantle and Maris. 1994: the players’ strike. Whether 2014 will produce such a season is yet to be written, but a tremendous crop of baseball books guarantees this year to be one for the publishing annals.

Is there any more complicated figure in the modern baseball era than Pete Rose? Consider the brief of Kostya Kennedy, author of the magnificent new biography Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. Those with even casual baseball knowledge are familiar with the outline: “Charlie Hustle,” Cincinnati Reds stalwart, the man who always slid headfirst and who attained the Major League record for base hits, is evicted from the game—as well as from eligibility for the Hall of Fame—for betting on those Reds while serving as their manager. Kennedy takes that familiar story and delves deeper, presenting an artful portrait of the blue-collar world Rose came from, the dream world he ascended to and the bizarre world he slipped into after his banishment.

In doing so, Kennedy touches on a theme well beyond baseball: the inherent contradictions of human nature. How could someone who willed himself to the top of his profession with such clarity of purpose throw away his legacy with such singular dissipation? The tragic element of Rose’s life—his ability to bend circumstances to his will in one context yet to lose all sense of rationality in another—is stuff worthy of Shakespeare. Kennedy handles it just fine, though. For the market, the book is pitched as a re-evaluation of Rose’s fate now that baseball has suffered though steroids, arguably a graver sin than gambling. Kennedy doesn’t break new factual ground or suggest “answers” so much as refocus the question. And he presents a compelling case that whether Rose deserves his lifetime suspension should be evaluated separately from whether he should be eligible for the Hall. It’s interesting enough material for the baseball reader, but the appeal of this book goes further. With writing of such quality and a subject of such complexity, it deserves to be read by anyone who appreciates good biography.

HARD-BOILED BASEBALL
No baseball book in recent memory has been as uproarious as They Called Me God, written by legendary umpire Doug Harvey with an assist from longtime sportswriter Peter Golenbock. Harvey, one of only nine umpires in the Hall of Fame and considered by many—including himself—to be one of the best of all time, worked the National League from 1962 to 1992. Stylistically, the book is a marvel, particularly while recounting Harvey’s origins. Its staccato style and fatalistic tone are on par with classic noir. Take, for example, this setup: “The regulars had been drinking, I’d had a few myself, and I was sitting there wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life.” Or this meditation on his professional plight: “There was just one perfect umpire, and they put him on the cross.” I won’t spoil any more gems.

The book is billed as a tell-all. No kidding. Man, does Harvey settle some scores. His first wife, coaches who disrespected him, cheating pitchers and the league officials who enabled them—no one, it seems, is safe. But the book is written with such good humor and honest feeling that you can hardly begrudge Harvey these takedowns. Harvey only blows one call, so to speak, by including a painfully awkward story about the late umpire Eric Gregg that should not have seen the printed page. That aside, the book offers refreshing insight into an umpire’s world, and with considerable panache.

FROM THE FRIENDLY CONFINES
About 20 years ago, the band the Mountain Goats produced a tune called “Cubs in Five.” The title was a joke—the song is about stuff that is unlikely to happen—but it encapsulates nicely the futility of rooting for Chicago’s National League squad. Even if renowned columnist and Bunts author George F. Will hasn’t heard the song, he gets the sentiment, as is apparent from his latest baseball foray, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred.

Appropriately for a topic as inherently funny as the Cubs, Will takes a droll approach. In about the amount of time it takes to soak in a ballgame, the reader is treated to a romp through Cubs history, from the origins of Wrigley Field up to the Steve Bartman debacle. As this is George Will, there’s a dollop of evolutionary psychology and economics on the side, though nothing much heavier than an Old Style. 

About that field. The title evokes it, and it is the focus of the book’s thesis: that the beauty of the ballpark is in large part responsible for the consistently poor quality of the product on the diamond. Will has discovered, through the work of some authors he cites, that ticket sales at Wrigley bear a smaller-than-normal correlation to the team’s record and actually are more sensitive to the price of a beer in the stadium than the cost of admission. By providing a good place to watch baseball, Will hypothesizes, management has relieved itself of the need to provide a good baseball team. At least the theory has the virtue of explaining the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon that is the Cubs.

BACK TO THE MINORS
Every kid dreams of hitting a game-winning homer in the World Series. No kid dreams of hitting anything at all for the Montgomery Biscuits. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, a thorough and enjoyable profile of the players, coaches, umpires, radio announcers and pretty much everyone else besides the peanut vendors who are associated with minor league baseball. By focusing on eight different people over the course of the 2012 season, Feinstein ably shows how the tantalizing promise of working in the bigs—not to mention the attendant compensation and creature comforts—shapes the lives of those who are still down on the farm. The book has a nice pace: casual and a little rambling, though a bit repetitive at times and with lags here and there. Not so different, come to think of it, than a midsummer Double-A tilt.

There are certain years that trigger immediate associations in any baseball fan’s mind. 1903: the first World Series. 1927: Murderer’s Row. 1961: Mantle and Maris. 1994: the players’ strike. Whether 2014 will produce such a season is yet to be written, but a tremendous crop of baseball books guarantees this year to be one for the publishing annals.

NonfictionParentingMemoir

What does it mean to be a mom?

Feature by Alice Cary

These four books add unique insights to this essential question, with subjects including an irrepressible immigrant mother, birth mothers and adoptive mothers, and a crusading mom who wants to liberate others from their guilt.

One can only imagine what Elaine Lui’s mother wants for Mother’s Day.

Lui, creator of the popular blog LaineyGossip.com, details her relationship with her uniquely irrepressible mother in a sparkling new memoir, Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What’s a Daughter To Do?

Lui explains that her mother loves to be honored on any occasion, even when it’s her daughter’s birthday: “There is no better way to demonstrate gratitude for Ma giving birth to me than to give her money. If it’s not the first thing she says when she sees me, it’s definitely the second thing out of my ma’s mouth when she sees me: ‘Where’s my money?’”

In this hilarious account, readers learn that Lui’s mother grew up in Hong Kong, loves rhinestone-studded clothes that her daughter describes as “China Woman Elvis,” and, most notably, has a grating voice that has earned her the nickname “the Squawking Chicken.” Despite a trauma-filled, poverty-stricken childhood, her mom persevered, remaining strong, even in later life when faced with a rare blood disorder. And she is certainly a woman who continues to be heard.

The Squawking Chicken has always been an in-your-face, controlling mom, and Lui describes numerous incidents when her and her mother’s wills have clashed. The details are fascinating, and the many cultural differences between China and the West are particularly intriguing.

Her mom usually ends up being right, Lui says. She’s also gotten used to the texts her mom sends after Lui appears on TV, such as “STOP MAKE UGLY FACE WHEN YOU TALKS.” Lui has made her peace with her mother’s intrusions; in fact, she would almost certainly be lost without them.

As she explains: “I am the Squawking Chicken’s only daughter and her only true friend. It can be a burden, sure. But mostly, it is my life’s honor.”

ADOPTIONS AND REUNIONS
When Caroline Clarke, an award-winning journalist, faced some health issues, she contacted the agency that had handled her adoption in 1964. She ended up discovering that her birth mother was Caroline “Cookie” Cole, the adopted daughter of Nat King Cole.

Clarke writes beautifully about this unexpected discovery in Postcards from Cookie: A Memoir of Motherhood, Miracles, and a Whole Lot of Mail.

Cookie had led a life of privilege, but when she became pregnant, she was sent away to a home in New York for unwed mothers. She wanted to keep her baby and, after her birth, delayed signing adoption papers. However, when she heard on the radio that her beloved father was hospitalized with end-stage lung cancer, she felt that she had no choice but to obey her domineering mother, sign the papers and head back to California to his deathbed.

When Clarke contacts her newly discovered birth mother decades later, their lives are forever changed. “This means everything to me,” Cookie says.

As a psychotherapist tells Clarke, “In every way, you got the fantasy.” Not only does she suddenly belong to a well-known, highly accomplished birth family, she has a wonderful, supportive adoptive family who nurtured her every step of the way. Still, the connection becomes at times overwhelming for both mother and daughter, and there are problems as everyone gets used to this new reality.

In a parallel but very different story, at age 18, Diane Burke got pregnant during a summer fling with a co-worker, a Muslim on a work visa from Jordan. Burke writes about how this event transformed her life in One Perfect Day: A Mother and Son’s Story of Adoption and Reunion. The young lovers quickly decided not to marry, and Burke’s horrified parents sent her off to secretly give birth in a home for unwed mothers. Burke wanted to keep her baby, but with no immediate way to support herself and the child, she gave him up for adoption.

Burke continued to mourn the loss of her son as she later married, had two more sons, divorced, remarried and became a writer of romantic mysteries. During turbulent times, she turned to religion for strength.

Years later, a stranger on the telephone asks, “Mrs. Burke, did you give up a child for adoption in 1971?” It was a question that would lead to Burke’s reunion with her son, Steve Orlandi. This riveting account describes the multitude of conflicting emotions that both mother and son share as they meet and get to know each other. (Steve also wrote parts of the book, explaining the emotional impact of reuniting with his birth family).

As Burke explains: “All reunions are intense, emotional, and complicated. It is the past colliding with the present and being faced with an uncertain future. It is joy and pain and hope and disappointment. But it can become a relationship founded on love and blessed with commitment and happiness.”

GUILT BE GONE
Daisy Waugh is a busy, accomplished mother of three. She’s also a British novelist and journalist, and the granddaughter of literary lion Evelyn Waugh. In The Kids Will Be Fine: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Women, Waugh makes it clear that she loves being a mother, but adds that “there have been many moments when I felt bewildered and alienated by society’s inflexible expectations of me as a mother.” As a result, she offers “some potentially liberating observations for mothers” who’ve been led to believe they should focus solely on their child’s every need.

Her blunt and amusing advice is divided into sections on Pregnancy and Birth, Baby Care, Child Care, School, and Charm School. After three kids, Waugh has learned which battles aren’t worth fighting, such as the harangues parents make about kids wearing coats in cold weather. She advises a live-and-learn policy: “As often as not, the children are only taking eight short but breezy steps from hallway to the back of a heated car. . . . It shouldn’t matter much, even in a snowstorm, if they made the journey in their underpants.”

Waugh’s views on parenting without guilt are bound to be controversial, such as her thoughts on organic food, which she describes as “a waste of money.” I myself disagree with a number of her notions, such as her dislike of having children write thank-you notes.

Whatever your thoughts on motherhood, Waugh’s eye-opening approach offers a new perspective on what makes a “good” mother.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

These four books add unique insights to this essential question, with subjects including an irrepressible immigrant mother, birth mothers and adoptive mothers, and a crusading mom who wants to liberate others from their guilt.

NonfictionMemoirEducation

Better teachers, better schools

Feature by Angela Leeper

As a new school year begins, four new titles reveal that teachers can but do change lives in classrooms every day. Chronicling how teachers adapt to change, improve their methods and even learn from their own students, these books will appeal to all those interested in the impact of education. 

LEARNING TO TEACH
Do some teachers have natural  qualities that make them more effective educators? Elizabeth Green, editor-in-chief of website Chalkbeat New York, explores that question in Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (And How to Teach It to Everyone). Expanding on an essay she wrote for the New York Times Magazine, Green gives a historical overview of studies on teaching, from the perspectives of such experts as behavioral and cognitive psychologists, educational specialists, economists and entrepreneurs. Among those cited are noted individuals in the field of education, including Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, and mathematics teaching specialists Magdalene Lampert and Deborah Loewenberg Ball. Green also reflects on whether such recent developments as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Common Core have influenced teacher performance. Using numerous examples of instructional methods and students’ reactions to math problems, Green shows how teaching is anything but natural work. In this era of high-stakes standards, with an emphasis on accountability but little guidance, the author makes the case through thoughtful details that great teachers are made, not born. As Green advocates for practice-based teacher education, she brings hope and renewal to the field.

OUR CHANGING SCHOOLS
Just as he reflected on the state of dying bookstores in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Lewis Buzbee turns to the plight of declining public schools in the slim yet moving Blackboard: A Personal History of the Classroom. Admittedly an average student, Buzbee attended California public schools when they were ranked first in the nation. Now these same schools scrape the bottom at 48th or 49th. To try to understand this fall, the author returns to the same schools he attended as a child and teenager. As he recalls visceral moments during his education, from learning to read with Ginn and Co. textbooks to the terror of locker room nakedness in P.E., Buzbee offers short, appealing histories of such staples as kindergartens, blackboards and school buses, and explains how they transformed the American school environment. He never forgets the most important asset in any school—the teachers—and recalls how they changed his own life after his father died. But in this era of budget cuts, metal detectors and teachers forced to take second jobs to make ends meet, Buzbee also draws attention to the social, political and economic changes needed to create better schools. Part personal recollection, part history lesson, part call to action, Blackboard is all eloquence.

BACK IN THE CLASSROOM
When his wife changed jobs and his family needed health insurance, Garret Keizer returned, after a 14-year hiatus, to teaching at the same high school where he started his career 30 years earlier. A contributing editor of Harper’s magazine, author (Privacy) and a former Guggenheim Fellow, Keizer documents a one-year stint as an English teacher in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, one of the state’s poorest regions, in Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher. This candid month-by-month account describes his time with his working-class students, as he wonders what they will do for employment and how to prepare them properly. Trying to make connections with his students and peers and keep his “ancient” teaching techniques alive—despite his students’ reluctance to consult books and a decimated library replaced with computers for reading—he finds education vastly transformed since he last set foot in a classroom. Much of Keizer’s memoir is dedicated to the biggest changes: uniform instruction (i.e., state and Common Core standards) and computerized productivity tools. Ironically, the latter make him devote more time to data and less time to educational substance. Readers will empathize with Keizer’s bittersweet feelings in June, when school is out and another year is not an option.

CONTINUING EDUCATION
When Kim Bearden began her career as an educator, she assumed she would be the one doing all the teaching in her classroom. Instead, she recognizes the insight and wisdom she’s gleaned from her students in Crash Course: The Life Lessons My Students Taught Me. Drawing on 27 years of experience as a teacher, curriculum director, middle school principal and cofounder of the Ron Clark Academy (an innovative, internationally renowned middle school in Atlanta), Bearden offers anecdotes, analogies and examples of creative problem-solving. Related in Bearden’s down-to-earth voice, these honest and uplifting lessons show the importance of relationship building, tenacity, gratitude and even magic and play. Bearden explains how she and her students “do see color,” embracing and celebrating differences in culture. She shows that we sometimes have to identify the greatness in others before they see it for themselves, and that our individual talents, which may seem like misshapen puzzle pieces, can fit together to make a beautiful picture. While the author gives a teacher’s perspective, the recommendations here are applicable to anyone who works with youth or the public.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As a new school year begins, four new titles reveal that teachers can but do change lives in classrooms every day. Chronicling how teachers adapt to change, improve their methods and even learn from their own students, these books will appeal to all those interested in the impact of education.
NonfictionMusicMemoirBiography

That’s what makes the jukebox spin

Feature by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

This fall, music keeps playing around in our heads thanks to a crop of books by and about some of rock's most elusive artists, as well as its most treasured songs. 

WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN’
Over a two-year period, maverick Southern author Rick Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin’) sat down with Jerry Lee Lewis and let the Killer walk “day after day through the past and come back, sometimes bloody, with the stories in this book.” Not simply an “as-told-to” memoir, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story is a harmonious blend, with Lewis providing the details of his life and Bragg weaving a narrative around them to add historical and cultural context. “He did not want to do a first-person book,” Bragg writes, “and I had no interest in trying to pretend to be him. Instead, this is one man talking of a remarkable life and another man writing it down and shaping it into a life story so rich that, if I had not been there, I would have wondered if it was real.”

And Lewis’ story is definitely remarkable: Full of life from birth—“I come out jumpin’, an’ I been jumpin’ ever since”—Lewis discovered his “reason for being born” when he saw a piano in his aunt’s house as a child. He knew he wanted to be a star, so he pursued his dream relentlessly, appearing in clubs when he was 14 and lying about his age. Lewis burned down many roadhouses with his raucous style, rising to fame with songs such as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” and leaving in his wake broken marriages and mangled friendships. The book candidly catalogs his problems with drugs, alcohol, taxes and women (his seven marriages included a union with his 13-year-old second cousin that caused an international scandal). Lewis also acknowledges his fear that he may have led people astray with his music, but confesses that music was the purest part of his life. Lewis tells his story here for the first time, and it’s every bit as frantic, ugly, joyful and searing as you’d expect from the Killer.

A NATURAL WOMAN
While Lewis hypnotized audiences with manic energy, Aretha Franklin grew up in the Detroit church where her father preached, playing soulful gospel piano and developing her unmistakable voice. Franklin collaborated with music writer David Ritz in 1999 on a less-than-revealing memoir, Aretha: From These Roots. As Ritz explains in his new book, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, Franklin asked him to work with her on a second volume, but he declined, citing her insistence on steering clear of certain topics. Instead, Ritz chose to write an independent biography, drawing on his earlier conversations with the singer, her friends and family to provide a full and frank account of the Queen of Soul’s career. Moving album by album, the book recounts her rise to the top of the soul charts in the late 1960s and her fall from the throne in the early 1970s. She struggled to find her style in the disco era, and reinvented herself in 1985 with the hit “Freeway of Love.” Franklin isolated herself for almost 20 years after the deaths of her father, sisters and brother, only to come out of the shadows once again in 2008 to sing at President Obama’s first inauguration. Franklin’s life is rarely pretty, however, and Respect is ultimately a poignant and disappointing tale of a singer who never reached the pinnacle for which she aimed.

SOUL SACRIFICE
In 1966, a young guitar player named Carlos Santana filled in one night at Bill Graham’s famous Fillmore West with an impromptu group of musicians; the rest, as they say, is history. Three years later, Santana and his band mesmerized the crowd at Woodstock, and soon after, the band’s first album climbed to #4 on the Billboard charts. Reaching this level of success wasn’t easy, as Santana reveals in his new memoir, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light, which he co-wrote with Ashley Kahn and Hal Miller. Although the book’s prose is sometimes flat and repetitive, the details of Santana’s story are nevertheless compelling. He traces his path from his childhood in the Mexican town of Autlán to his earliest gigs at El Convoy in Tijuana. Santana recounts his sometimes ragged family life and reveals for the first time the sexual abuse he suffered at age 11 at the hands of a man who took him to San Diego and molested him, leaving the boy with “an intense feeling of pleasure mixed with confusion, shame, and guilt for letting it happen.” Above all, however, Santana’s memoir recounts his spiritual quest to find the “story behind the stories, the music behind the music. . . . I call it the Universal Tone, and with it you realize you are not alone; you are connected to everyone.”

 

Paul McCartney added psychedelic illustrations to his handwritten lyrics for “The Word,” a song on 1965’s Rubber Soul album. 
From The Beatles Lyrics, reprinted with permission. Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

 

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Although the life stories of musicians continue to fascinate us, we’re just as intrigued and perplexed by the lyrics of popular songs. Few songs have been as scrutinized as those by the Beatles, and in his new book, The Beatles Lyrics, Beatles biographer Hunter Davies not only probes the meanings of the Fab Four’s songs but also gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at their writing process. For John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting could happen anywhere—songs might begin as a scribble on the back of an envelope or on hotel stationery. “Strawberry Fields,” for example, was written by Lennon when he was in Spain, far from home and thinking back on his childhood in Liverpool. This stunning collection explores the stories behind all the Beatles’ classics and includes more than 100 original handwritten manuscripts.

CRYING, WAITING, HOPING
The hallways of rock ’n’ roll history are littered with volumes that move mechanically through a year-by-year chronicle of important events. Noted cultural critic Greil Marcus wasn’t interested in writing a typical history of the genre, however. His provocative The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs chronicles the music through an exploration of 10 songs recorded between 1956 and 2008. In his typical gnostic style, Marcus examines the ways in which each song transcends its era, gathering meaning as it is recorded by artists in completely new times and places. For example, he observes that the Teddy Bears’ 1958 hit, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” took 48 years to find its voice. “When Amy Winehouse sang it in 2006, her music curled around Phil Spector’s [who wrote the song], his curled around her, until she found her way back to the beginning of his career, and redeemed it.”

Marcus’ unconventional history captures the unruly, unpredictable nature of rock ’n’ roll.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

This fall, music keeps playing around in our heads thanks to a crop of books by and about some of rock's most elusive artists, as well as its most treasured songs.
Memoir

Pearls of hard-won wisdom

Feature by Arlene McKanic

How much of an understatement is it to say that we need inspiration in this day and age? When the world is riven with war, pestilence and those other horsemen of the Apocalypse, a bit of hopefulness is just the thing.

AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND LEGEND
The late Louis Zamperini—the Olympic athlete and war hero who died in July at age 97—was indeed an inspiration. He wrote about his POW nightmare in Devil at My Heels, and Laura Hillenbrand chronicled his experiences in the bestseller Unbroken. In the last book from Zamperini, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life, co-written with David Rensin, he mines his experiences for advice that will encourage others. Even as a young man, he had the gumption to turn his excess energy into something positive and became a champion athlete. His ebullience led him to set up camps for delinquent boys. In his twilight years, Zamperini carried the Olympic torch and went skateboarding. He also fully appreciated getting hugs from Angelina Jolie, whose film of Unbroken opens on Christmas Day.

THE POWER TO FORGIVE
Thank goodness for Anne Lamott. Her writing style, both unfussy and diaphanous, her congeniality, loopy humor and dogged optimism are balms. Her latest book, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace is a gem. In addition to hope, she also brings anger, even rage, and uses it like a finely honed weapon. Because of her rage—at ridiculous men found on match.com, at politicians both heartless and gormless, at perfect, stay-at-home moms who wear size 0 and run around in biker shorts, at her rather grotesque mother, long-dead father and the state of the world in general—much of the book also focuses on forgiveness. Forgiveness may be a useful thing, she says, but people often need to be dragged to it kicking and screaming. According to Lamott, forgiveness probably needs one of those improbable moments of grace to happen at all. Surely, when it comes to questions of faith, Lamott is to essay writing what Marilynne Robinson is to fiction. Awesome.

ABOVE & BEYOND
Eric Metaxas, author of Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life, certainly believes in miracles, those eruptions of the ineffable into the mundane. He has no patience with those who think what the human being can discern with five senses is all there is. The miracles Metaxas writes of here range from the spectacular to what can be called “miracle light.” One of his acquaintances, a very British, High Church Anglican type, sees 50-foot angels in full battle rattle. Others see an incandescent Jesus or are healed at the last minute from deathly illnesses. Metaxas has no use for subtlety; these miracles only happen through the intercession of Jesus. But his writing, and the miracles he describes, encourage all of us to ponder the possible.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How much of an understatement is it to say that we need inspiration in this day and age? When the world is riven with war, pestilence and those other horsemen of the Apocalypse, a bit of hopefulness is just the thing.
NonfictionMemoirLiteratureBiographyArt

The season’s best picks for serious readers

Feature by Julie Hale

If you’re shopping for a book-obsessed guy or gal who geeks out over all things literary, then you’ve turned to the right page. The holiday selections featured below offer the sort of author anecdotes, book-related trivia and top-notch storytelling that bibliophiles are wild about. 

LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE
Countless young readers have warmed to the novel form thanks to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Images from Ingalls-family lore—silent Indians, swarming locusts, interminable wagon journeys with Jack the bulldog trotting behind—are now part of America’s collective literary consciousness. Followers of Wilder’s prairie adventures have something new to look forward to with the release of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Wilder wrote this factual account of her life in 1929-30, and when publisher after publisher passed on it, she repurposed it for the Little House books, using it as the foundation for her fiction. The newly released manuscript displays the forthright style and easy grace associated with the Wilder name and delivers an unsentimental look at the reality behind her novelized life. In a compelling introduction to the book, editor Pamela Smith Hill examines the evolution of the manuscript and offers insights into Wilder’s development as a writer. Maps, photos and other memorabilia make this a must-have for the beloved author’s many fans.
RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Pamela Smith Hill on Pioneer Girl. 

WRITERS ON THE ROAD
The armchair escapist on your gift list will love An Innocent Abroad: Life-Changing Trips from 35 Great Writers. A wide-ranging anthology that pays tribute to the transformative power of travel, the volume features contributions from an impressive lineup of literary celebs. Far from being savvy explorers, the authors in this globe-trotting collection confess their incompetence when it comes to crossing borders and cracking maps. Ann Patchett’s Paris sojourn contains a quintessential coming-of-age escapade: As a teenager made giddy by the City of Light, she toys with the idea of getting a cow (yes, cow) tattoo. Mary Karr’s Belize eco-tour results in personal growth, as she sheds her civilized self and becomes one with the jungle. Alas for Richard Ford—his hair-raising run-in with kief sellers on a remote road in Morocco demonstrates that danger is all too often the traveler’s companion. Yes, vicarious voyages are sometimes the best kind, and this travel-writing treasury offers an instant—and expedient—adventure fix.

AUSTEN IS AWESOME
Fans of Emma and Persuasion may OD on the eye candy contained in Margaret C. Sullivan’s Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Covers. A fascinating survey of the visual treatments Austen’s work has received over the centuries, this charming anthology opens with marble-boarded first editions of Sense and Sensibility from London publisher Thomas Egerton and ends with a roundup of foreign translations that range from old-fashioned to funky (a 1970 Spanish edition of Pride and Prejudice has a disembodied eye on its jacket). Sullivan, author of The Jane Austen Handbook, tracks how the presentations of the novels changed along with the publishing industry to reflect graphic design trends and technological advances. Austen’s many disciples will swoon over traditional covers from Penguin, Signet and the Modern Library but may cast a skeptical eye at graphic-novel and zombie editions of Austen’s work. It seems every company under the sun has done Austen, and this irresistible album provides an intriguing overview of their efforts.

THE MAN FROM HANNIBAL
Imagine it: Mark Twain on Twitter. With his carefully cultivated persona and gift for succinct verbal expression—it seems his every utterance was a perfect epigram—the author’s following would’ve been off the charts. Viewing the humorist through just such a contemporary lens, Mark Twain’s America: A Celebration in Words and Images proves that his voice and his work are as resonant today as they were in the 1800s. Harry L. Katz, a former Library of Congress curator, teamed with that institution to produce the book, which features a treasure trove of archival materials, including maps, photos, cartoons and correspondence that depict the rough-and-tumble America of Twain’s era. Documenting the many manifestations of Twain—gold prospector, riverboat pilot, newspaperman, novelist—this lavish volume provides a fascinating portrait of a multifaceted figure who was ahead of his time and whose influence, today, is everywhere. With a foreword by Lewis H. Lapham, former editor of Harper’s Magazine, this is a stunning appreciation of a true American original.

20 QUESTIONS
The arrival of the popular “By the Book” column in The New York Times Book Review is the peak of the week for many literature lovers. A writer-in-the-spotlight feature overseen by editor Pamela Paul, “By the Book” made its Review debut in 2012 (the first subject: David Sedaris). A new collection of Paul’s insightful interviews, By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review, contains Q&As with 65 writers, including Donna Tartt, Junot Díaz, Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman. In their candid conversations with Paul, the great writers come clean about their reading tastes, work habits and inspirations, the books that moved them and the ones that left them cold. Jillian Tamaki’s pencil portraits of the authors are a plus. (Test your writer-recognition skills using the grid of famous faces that graces the cover.) With a foreword by Scott Turow, this is a book that will give bibliophiles a buzz.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you’re shopping for a book-obsessed guy or gal who geeks out over all things literary, then you’ve turned to the right page. The holiday selections featured below offer the sort of author anecdotes, book-related trivia and top-notch storytelling that bibliophiles are wild about.

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