Poet, essayist and children’s book author Donald Hall looks back over his richly textured 89 years of life in his latest memoir, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. Most of his reflections here are blithely inconsequential, keen observations about nature, career and relationships. They expound no end-of-life wisdom, detail no significant literary trends or feuds and offer no general assessment of the state of poetry today. But it is this very lack of utility—the knowledge that we need not underline or take notes—that makes the book such a joy to read.

This is not to suggest that the book lacks weight. Whether Hall is describing the passage of the seasons or mulling over the comforts of friendship, he is always worth hearing out. He is especially moving when writing about his love affair and home life with his second wife, Jane Kenyon, a respected poet in her own right. Among his “carnival of losses”—his mobility, old friends, an ancient tree in his front yard—her death in 1995 at the age of 47 looms largest.

It is a shrinking pool, to be sure, but English majors who came of age academically in the 1960s and ’70s will especially relish Hall’s recollections of other big-name poets, among them Theodore Roethke (“exuberant, loud, and funny”), Stephen Spender (“talked well on any subject other than poetry”), James Dickey (“the best liar I ever knew”) and T.S. Eliot (“spoke like a member of Parliament”). He met them all.

Many contemporary poets make their living as teachers, but Hall has made his mostly as a freelance writer, packaging and selling his verbal wares wherever he could. This collection of well-crafted bric-a-brac demonstrates that he’s still not inclined to let any of his words go to waste.

Editor’s Note: Donald Hall died on June 23, 2018.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, July 2018

As director of the African American Studies program at Princeton University, Nell Painter seemed to be at the pinnacle of her distinguished career. The renowned historian had written numerous books, including the bestseller The History of White People. But at age 64, Painter surprised everyone by leaving Princeton to take up something completely different: art school. The road was anything but easy, as she explains in her bold, brave account, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over.

Not satisfied with being what she calls a “Sunday painter,” she was determined to study art on a professional level. First she got a BFA at Rutgers University, then she earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Amid the tattoos, piercings and bright yellow hair of her fellow students, Painter’s fashion statement consisted of a white T-shirt, black pants and “sturdy” New Balance walking shoes. She was “an exotic in art school . . . a creature from another planet.” Her confidence was hardly boosted when a RISD teacher informed her that she would never be an artist. Adding to her turmoil were anguish and grief over the fact that Painter’s mother was dying on the West Coast, leaving her father depressed and needy, necessitating cross-country trips and interventions.

Nonetheless, Painter persevered, enjoying moments of absolute euphoria at having the time and freedom to paint, while also experiencing interludes of extreme self-doubt and loneliness. In the end, she triumphed by relying on what she calls her “old standbys: education and hard work.”

Painter concludes that “the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it,” but she was able to find her own artistic voice by incorporating both history and text into her work which, in a way, brought her career full circle.

Old in Art School is a fascinating memoir about Painter’s daring choice to follow a passion with courage and intellect, even when the odds seemed firmly stacked against her.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Nell Painter about Old in Art School.

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

Picture a tree. Perhaps you visualize it at a distance, as though observing a photograph. James Aldred, a professional climber who has been on payroll for National Geographic and the BBC, would likely conjure something much more intimate: the texture of the bark, the give of the branches. Aldred’s new book, The Man Who Climbs Trees, lets us see the trees alongside him. If you’ve ever marveled at the ecosystems housed by these majestic, ascending towers of life, you will enjoy nestling into the pages of this book.

Each of the 10 chapters focuses on a particular tree from around the world. Aldred’s descriptions are breathtaking. When climbing the “Tree of Life” in Costa Rica, he happened upon a 6-foot iguana, which he refers to as an “arboreal dragon.” When in Borneo, he paused midway up a tree, closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the rainforest. When he opens his eyes, the view “rushed at me from every direction, as if a veil had been lifted. The jungle was so much greater than the sum of its parts, and I was nothing more than an atom adrift within this overwhelming tide of energy.”

As this passage suggests, Aldred’s devotion to these natural spaces verges on spiritual. Aldred gives the reader a real sense of his embodied experience. He describes all varieties of bugs—ants, bees, wasps, spiders—and how they crawl on his skin as he scales the trees, as well as the sheer exhaustion of tossing a rope over an ever-higher target. He recalls incredible primates—gibbons, gorillas, howler monkeys and so forth—and envies their climbing expertise. He spies lumbering elephants, stealthy cats, colorful birds, graceful butterflies and determined tree frogs. Truly, Aldred offers a feast for the imagination, one that will draw you back to the landscapes that you’ve loved and pull you forward toward new ones. This wide-ranging and beautiful book, brought to life with expertise, affection and respect, is not to be missed.

Kelly Sundberg’s memoir of domestic violence brilliantly records the shock, physical and emotional pain and, perhaps most poignantly, the confusion of abuse. The same man who could proclaim his love for Sundberg and their young child was also capable of verbally and physically assaulting her.

As a young woman, Sundberg longed for safety, and she found it with her warm, funny husband, Caleb. But eventually, he became the man most likely to kill her as cycles of abuse, regret and reconciliation became shorter and more intense. This confusing experience (sometimes called “gaslighting”) is one reason why women stay with their abusers, especially if they have become isolated from friends and family.

Because of its subject matter, Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival might seem difficult to read, but Sundberg’s crystalline prose and insightful narration lighten the reading experience. Sundberg captures the slow, terrifying evolution of her relationship: how a few red flags and a frightening episode of rage snowballed into brutal physical violence. She is careful (maybe too careful?) to balance her portrait of Caleb’s abuse with his good qualities, and she does not engage in self-pity. She provides an important record of how anyone could find themselves in an abusive relationship and lends understanding to the reasons they stay—and how and why she eventually left.

Sundberg’s story is haunting, propulsive and, perhaps for some readers, familiar. Her wrenching memoir deserves to be read by a wide audience so that we can all learn to recognize the signs of domestic abuse.

But Sundberg is also a talented writer with many more stories to tell: about her childhood in Salmon, Idaho, her experiences as a forest ranger and her difficult relationship with her mother. These narratives, hinted at throughout Goodbye, Sweet Girl, suggest a rich terrain of material for Sundberg to mine in future stories. I, for one, look forward to hearing more from her.

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

Love is a complicated matter. That’s true for anyone, and it’s a concept Darnell L. Moore has wrestled with throughout his life.

Moore was born into tough circumstances as the child of two black teenagers in Camden, New Jersey. What his large and close family lacked financially, they made up for in love. But Moore struggled to love himself. He recognized his attraction to other men at a young age, and he found it abhorrent. Homosexuality didn’t fit with his idea of acceptable black masculinity. Moore pushed down his feelings with a tough attitude and attempted to hide from the world with a series of girlfriends and sexual encounters with women.

It didn’t work. When he was 14, neighborhood boys suspected him of being gay and attempted to set him on fire. The fire didn’t light, but the bullying left emotional scars.

In No Ashes in the Fire, writer and Black Lives Matter leader Moore recounts decades of running from his true self. His lyrical reflection reveals a teenage boy in search of his family story—and a young man who ran from it.

“As long as I wasn’t a clone of my dad, I thought, there was no need for her to complain,” he writes of his emotionally manipulative relationships with women. “I hadn’t yet realized I was his son, his likeness, an ellipsis extending his presence into the world.”

Moore describes years of self-loathing and the drugs, then religiosity, he used to mask his desires. He faces his biases against certain people, such as black femme men, and in doing so he realizes—and invites the reader to recognize—that justice means freedom and equality for all.

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

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

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

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

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

The threat of mortality has a peculiar way of amplifying a person’s regrets. The Electric Woman, an honest and emotionally vulnerable memoir by Tessa Fontaine, chronicles the author’s relationship with her mother, who suffered a massive stroke that left her a shadow of her former self.

Inspired by her mother’s lust for life, Fontaine decides to challenge herself and conquer her fears. She says of her mother, “She’s a yes person, a woman of adventure. When I begin to doubt that I can pull this off, I stop and think of her.” On a whim, the author accepts an invitation to join a traveling circus. Although she essentially bluffs her way into a job, Fontaine quickly finds herself fully immersed in the rag-tag carnival lifestyle. She is drawn to this world of illusions and the carnival workers’ ability to seamlessly transform onstage. Fontaine takes up the acts of escape artist, snake charmer and “Electric Woman,” an act during which she lights bulbs with her tongue.

Fontaine partially frames her memoir as an anthropological investigation. She is a stranger in a strange land, observing the various characters that comprise the circus. Yet despite her misgivings, she finds a genuine camaraderie with her carnival co-workers. Throughout the circus narrative, Fontaine soberly recounts hospital visits with her mother in the Bay Area, her obvious love for her mother permeating each interaction like perfume.

In this memoir that seamlessly balances grief, loss and wild-eyed determination, Fontaine makes a compelling case for using fear as an unexpected gift.

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

In Maker of Patterns, Freeman Dyson weaves a quilt sewn from the colorful memories of the early years of his life. The Princeton physicist emeritus stitches together the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and the professional and personal triumphs and failures of his early life in this collection of letters, written mostly to his family from 1941-1978. He interweaves his later reflections between the letters, commenting on various events or figures he’s described in the letters.

In most of the letters, Dyson describes his day-to-day life, but he also reflects on his love of languages, literature and history and his evolving work in physics as he moves from Trinity College in Cambridge, England, to Cornell and eventually to Princeton. Zelig-like, Dyson witnesses many of the most momentous events of the 20th century, from the end of World War II and the hydrogen bomb to the civil rights movement and the Apollo moon landing. The most interesting aspects of his letters are his observations about figures such as Robert Oppenheimer—“unreceptive to new ideas in general”—theologian and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr—who had a “reputation for being gloomy”—and physicist Edward Teller—“he seems to do physics for fun rather than for glory”—among others. Dyson also chronicles his two marriages, admitting that he thinks he’s a better father than a husband, as well as his growing work in atomic physics as he tries to apply his theories to nuclear problems. His final reflection looks to the future, and he warns that pure science is best “driven by intellectual curiosity, but applied science needs also to be driven by ethics.” Dyson is hopeful that his granddaughter and her generation will have a chance to make this happen.

Maker of Patterns reveals a glimpse into the keenly curious mind and the passionate life of one of our greatest scientists and public figures.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been without Pat Conroy’s lovable, gruff voice for three years now. When he died on March 4, 2016, we lost one of the last of a generation of Southern writers whose humorous, riveting, sad, terrifying and redemptive stories captured the ragged ways families fall in and out of love and hope. From his first novel, The Water Is Wide (which catapulted Conroy to a fame he never quite knew how to navigate), to Beach Music, his novels, like Thomas Wolfe’s glorious pageants, portray the struggle of finding home again and living in families whose steel-edged sentimentality prevents them from ever acknowledging the hard truths of abuse, failed love and violence.

The 2016 release of A Lowcountry Heart gave readers a chance to hear his entertaining voice as he regaled them with his reflections of the writing life. Now, in My Exaggerated Life, we get to hear Conroy’s voice again, unadorned and speaking plainly and cantankerously about his struggles and his triumphs in life. Between 2014 and 2016, Conroy spoke on the phone to biographer Katherine Clark—who co-wrote Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet with another Southern raconteur, Eugene Walter—every day for an hour or more; no topic was off limits. Clark weaves these conversations into a revealing biography structured by the places Conroy called home over the years: Beaufort, Atlanta, Rome, San Francisco and Fripp Island. Conroy admits his mistake in marrying Lenore Fleischer, his second wife, even as he rages over her taking away their daughter, Susannah, from him in the divorce. Conroy mourns the loss of Susannah—they never reconciled—deeply. He learns through therapy that he gets involved with people because he feels he needs to rescue them. He tells delightful stories about his years with his publisher, Nan Talese, and their work together.

Every page of My Exaggerated Life contains a gem from Conroy, despite the pain and vulnerability he shares through the book. His love of reading and writing fills the air that he breathes: “My deepest living is in the imagination of others, when I take that magic carpet ride of being a reader. . . . I think that’s why I want to write, to make others feel that way.” Welcome to Conroy’s magic carpet, and enjoy the ride.

How are families shaped by race, economics, genetics, love, jealousy and rifts? These are the questions Gregory Pardlo ponders in his highly anticipated memoir, Air Traffic. “In studying my family’s destruction, I am studying my own,” he writes in a raw, telling statement.

Pardlo enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in 2015, when his second book of poetry, Digest, won the Pulitzer Prize. Air Traffic is a narrative digest of his life and those of his family members, several of whom also experienced dramatic rises and falls. The poet delves deeply into a mosaic of memories, chronicling growing up black in Willingboro, New Jersey, in the 1970s and the battles he, his brother, father and other relatives have fought with depression, alcoholism and mental illness.

The Pardlos seemed firmly entrenched in middle-class security until August 5, 1981, when President Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, including Pardlo’s father. Gregory Sr. never quite recovered from the blow.

Meanwhile, during his teen years, the author’s “self-image was caught in a bitter custody battle between Alex. P. Keaton and Jimi Hendrix,” yet his adult years morph into a yo-yoing stream of failure and success.

The book’s powerful final chapter, “On Intervention,” offers a fascinating account of how Pardlo’s younger brother, Robbie, became the subject of the A&E reality show “Intervention” in 2010. Robbie shot to fame as a musician, once singing backup for Whitney Houston and forming the R&B trio City High, known for its Grammy-nominated hit, “What Would You Do?” Robbie’s drinking, however, caused his life to implode.

“Alcoholism was the Muzak of our familial dysfunction,” Pardlo explains. “Most of the time we didn’t even notice it.” Ironically, the intervention helped the author, not his brother, find his way to sobriety. However, Pardlo writes, “There can be no happily ever after for a recovering drunk like me.” That being said, Pardlo seems to be defying the odds, turning his pain into mesmerizing poetry and prose.

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

Life was an adventure for young Tyler Kane. By age 9, her family had lived in nine homes. By age 12, she began to understand why.

Her name wasn’t Kane after all, she learned, but Wetherall. Her family’s frequent moves to different continents weren’t adventures—they were hiding from authorities.

Wetherall and her siblings were the children of a fugitive. Their parents began to reveal the truth as it became inevitable. Wetherall would notice a black car following her outside of her mother’s house, and every visit to her father was shrouded in mystery.

On Wetherall’s 12th birthday, Scotland Yard finally caught up to her father. But even as her dad served prison time for his crimes, she remained unsure about what he had done that landed him there. Wetherall and her sister dreamed up potential scenarios. Surely it was more than tax evasion. But could their father have done something as serious as kill a person? And if he had, how would they react? Their father had shared literature that seemed designed to increase their empathy for people on the run—Les Misérables, for example. But The Fugitive was off limits. Had he done something they would be able to forgive?

Wetherall’s captivating No Way Home is a reminder that our actions affect not only our own paths but also the lives of everyone close to us. Our stories are intertwined with our loved ones’ lives, no matter what distances—or steel bars—come between us.

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

The mind is a precious thing to lose. Dr. Barbara K. Lipska, the director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health, learned this terrifying truth firsthand. In January of 2015, a melanoma diagnosis turned her once nimble mind into a war zone. With alarming quickness, the metastatic melanoma in Lipska’s brain attacked her frontal lobe, the area of the brain responsible for behavior, personality, learning and voluntary movement. She began to transform into a distant stranger, experiencing symptoms that mimicked dementia and schizophrenia. Friends and family members wondered if this new version of their beloved mother, wife, friend and colleague would permanently replace the woman they once knew. Lipska waged a tough battle against her faulty brain, and remarkably, through radiation and immunotherapy, she recovered.

As a medical professional whose career revolves around analyzing the molecular and genetic structure of the brain, it seems a cruel trick of fate that Lipska was struck by a disease that affected her own brain function. In The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind, Lipska recounts her ordeal with equal parts raw honesty and clear-eyed conviction. Her brush with death changed her physically, mentally and emotionally, and lead to a realization that the tragedy of an unlived life should be feared more than death itself. Lipska writes, “I’ve become more aware of living. I try harder than ever to find meaning in ordinary things every day.” While this sentiment could seem trite in other memoirs, Lipska avoids sentimentality and doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that her descent into “madness” resulted in collateral damage among her loved ones; she was somewhat safe in the eye of the storm.

Lipska’s memoir makes clear that, in many ways, our brains are still a mystery.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, April 2018

In 1985, Jefferson County, Alabama, suffered a string of armed robberies. The robber would attack restaurant managers, take their cash, force them into the cooler and then shoot them in cold blood. Two managers died; the third survived and gave a description of the attacker to the police. Based on this identification, the sheriff’s department arrested Anthony Ray Hinton, an African-American man out on parole for auto theft.

But Hinton had an ironclad alibi: At the time of the third robbery, he was at work 15 miles away, with a security guard who noted Hinton’s whereabouts throughout his shift. Furthermore, Hinton took and passed a polygraph test. He was innocent. Yet the district attorney pursued Hinton’s conviction with the grim determination of the furies, aided in his dogged efforts by an incompetent defense attorney, a racist jury and a judge who ruled in the State’s favor at every turn. Hinton was eventually tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the two murders. He spent 30 years on death row before being released in 2015. Hinton tells his story in his harrowing, powerful memoir, The Sun Does Shine.

This book is filled with questions that infuriate. Why did the DA ignore the evidence of Hinton’s innocence? Why would the State ignore prosecutorial misconduct and refuse to consider new exonerating evidence? Why spend so much time, effort and money to execute a man for a murder he demonstrably did not commit?

Yet The Sun Does Shine is also filled with grace. Through his faith in God, the love of his friends and mother, his commitment to the other inmates on death row and the unstinting support of his appellate attorney (Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative), Hinton maintained his soul in a soulless world. His experience gives him a peerless moral authority on the death penalty, and he raises powerful questions about the practice. Hinton’s voice demands to be heard.

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