Pietro Bartolo runs the sole medical clinic in his homeland of Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia that has become the gateway—and graveyard—for an unending stream of refugees trying to escape the varied horrors confronting them in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Bartolo’s Tears of Salt, written with Italian journalist Lidia Tilotta, is equal parts memoir, celebration of his birthplace and report from the front. Above all, though, it is a plea for compassion.

Bartolo begins his narrative by describing how, at age 16, he nearly drowned in the icy Mediterranean after falling unnoticed from his father’s fishing boat. The sensation of going under, gasping for breath and feeling left behind, provided him with a template for understanding the terror of countless others who have suffered the same fate—but without the happy ending of survival. Now he treats the living and anatomizes the dead who reach Lampedusa’s shore. By his count, he and his medical team have treated nearly 300,000 refugees over the past 25 years.

But it’s not the massive numbers that give Bartolo’s account its emotional impact—it’s the attention he focuses on individual survivors, such as the teenage brothers Mohammed and Hassan. Because Mohammed, the eldest, is paralyzed, Hassan carries him on his back all the way from their native Somalia to Libya and then vigilantly guards him against further injury throughout the perilous ocean passage. Once ashore, he fiercely resumes his burden. Bartolo tells many such stories of courage and sacrifice.

“Whenever I see images of migrants being callously deported in their thousands, forced to return to the hell they have escaped, I am outraged,” Bartolo writes. “What kind of person has the nerve to seal the destiny of all these people with a mere signature on a piece of paper, then smile about it to the cameraman and pose for photographs?”

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

Clifton Fadiman had two paramount passions: savoring the best wines and obliterating his Jewishness. He wasn’t what is commonly called a “self-hating Jew.” It was more pragmatic than that. Like so many other first-generation American Jews, he saw his cultural heritage as an impediment—even a reproach—to the refined, upper-class WASP life he aspired to. Although clearly a doting daughter, Anne Fadiman is not an uncritical one as she examines her relationship with her father in The Wine Lover’s Daughter.

Born in Brooklyn in 1904 to Russian parents, Clifton Fadiman worked his way through Columbia University and achieved a sterling academic record. He might have joined the English department there had he not been told, “We have room for only one Jew, and we have chosen Mr. [Lionel] Trilling.” Thus rebuffed by academia, he used his formidable literary knowledge to become a public intellectual. By the time he was 28, he was editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster and a year later the book critic for The New Yorker. At 34, he began hosting the popular radio quiz show “Information Please.” From that point on, he was a bona-fide celebrity, one who would extend his genial wit and wisdom well into the burgeoning television age.

Anne Fadiman points out in great detail her father’s sexism and snobbery and marvels at the fact that—even when he was 80—he still asked her not to mention he was a Jew in the profile she wrote on him for Life magazine. Much of her chronicle is given over to her father’s informed obsession with wines and her attempts—ultimately unsuccessful—to become a wine enthusiast herself. Clifton Fadiman died at 95 in 1999, no doubt comforted in the fact that his children had gone to Harvard—which had been off limits to him—and that his daughter married a WASP.

If you’ve read any of A.J. Jacobs’ bestselling books, you have an idea of what to expect from It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree. But if you haven’t, then, you’re in for a treat. Jacobs has established a brand by immersing himself in his subjects. There was the time he read the encyclopedia (The Know-It-All) and the time he took every command in the Bible literally (The Year of Living Biblically). He’s also applied that sort of immersive reporting as a writer for Esquire and as the host of the podcast Twice Removed. Jacobs doesn’t do things halfway.

That’s again the case in It’s All Relative, as he turns his attention to genealogy. It started with an email: “You don’t know me, but you are an eighth cousin of my wife, who, in my opinion, is a fine lady.” This email from Jules Feldman introduces Jacobs to the concept of a worldwide family tree—and, in typical Jacobs fashion, he goes all in.

Jacobs decides to organize the world’s largest family reunion. At some point we’re all related, right? And perhaps seeing one another as family could improve the way we treat strangers. You wouldn’t cuss at your fourteenth cousin twice removed in the carpool line, would you?

It’s an ambitious goal, and one that results in a romp through genealogical history and insight. Readers will meet y-Chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve, who weren’t the Earth’s original inhabitants but are those from whom we can trace our origins. They likely didn’t know each other, but their DNA has separately survived the centuries. They’re our eight-thousandth-great grandparents, so to speak.

Readers will delight in Jacobs’ other discoveries, such as his relationship to George H.W. Bush, and his uncertain approach to organizing the world’s largest family reunion. It’s All Relative is another installment in Jacobs’ brand of learning, with a lot of laughter along the way.

In 2011, 29-year-old American Ballet Theatre dancer David Hallberg made international headlines—and history—when he announced that he was joining the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, one of the world’s most prestigious ballet troupes, by the invitation of the Bolshoi’s director.

The first American to join the Russian company as a principal dancer, Hallberg began splitting his time between the Bolshoi and the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York City. He led a stress-filled life of training and travel (his days off were often spent on airplanes, commuting between countries), and the pressure caught up with him in 2015, when foot issues led to his exit from the stage. After two problematic surgeries, Hallberg—devastated—thought he’d never dance again.

In his brisk, beautifully executed new memoir, A Body of Work, Hallberg documents his rise to the top of the ballet world and coping with a career-threatening injury. Born with the perfect ballet physique—tall and long limbed with flexible feet—he began studying ballet seriously at age 13 in Phoenix, Arizona. He was teased at school but supported by his parents, who encouraged his desire to dance.

By the age of 20, Hallberg was living in New York and dancing with ABT. He provides an enthralling inside look at life in the studio—the physical pain, the hard-to-please partners, the struggle to transcend technique and achieve artistry. “Dancing virtuoso steps,” Hallberg says, “can feel like traversing a darkened room trying to avoid a trip wire.”

At the time of his injury in 2015, Hallberg had performance engagements around the world. The road to recovery took two-and-a-half years, including 10 months with the Australian Ballet’s reputable rehabilitation team. In scenes that are emotionally raw and moving, he recounts the painful comeback process.

Performing as effortlessly on the page as he does on the stage, Hallberg, who returned to ABT in top form this year, writes about the technicalities of his craft with clarity and precision. Readers of every taste will find much to relish in his inspiring book (balletomanes will consume it in a couple of sittings). Should Hallberg choose to take it on when he retires, a new role may await him: writer.

Few would disagree that the climax of the 2016 Democratic National Convention was when Khizr Khan, a Gold Star Father, held up his copy of the U.S. Constitution and challenged Donald Trump to read it. It was an audacious gesture that was grounded in firmly held conviction. Regardless of one’s politics, there was something profoundly admirable about this man.

In his eloquent memoir, An American Family, Khan retraces the steps that brought him from his grandfather’s house in Pakistan to the stage of the Democratic National Convention. His grandfather instilled in Khan a compassionate morality that is firmly rooted in Islam. Throughout his life, his grandfather’s wisdom guided Khan. It sustained him through his struggle for an education; his lyrical romance with his wife, Ghazala; his single-minded determination to succeed in America; and, ultimately, his grief at the death of his beloved son, Captain Humayun Khan, who sacrificed his life while protecting others from a suicide bomber.

Khan opens his book by describing his first encounter with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution while he was a law student in Lahore, Pakistan. The documents’ assertion of inalienable rights and equality resonated with Khan, who lived in a society that promised neither. He never doubted the promise of the words he read in Lahore.

Khan’s story is both unique and archetypal. Like generations of immigrants before them, the Khans sacrificed in order to achieve the American Dream. They became citizens and raised their three sons to be good men. When Humayun joined the Army, the Khans, although fearful, respected his commitment to his country.

Sometimes it takes a newcomer to point out the beauty that old-timers take for granted. America, more than any other country, was founded upon ideals: individual freedoms, equal protection and due process of law. Khan reminds us that these ideals are worth fighting—and even dying—for. The Khans truly are the most American of families.

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

Armistead Maupin is revered for his marvelous newspaper column Tales of the City, which ran in San Francisco papers during the 1970s and ’80s. Like a carnal version of a 19th-century novel, this column followed the fictional exploits of characters that lived on Barbary Lane. Some kept secrets about their gender and sexuality while others were gloriously, radically forthcoming. Nine novels following these characters have been published to date. The success of Tales of the City launched Maupin into the center of the gay rights movement in San Francisco. As he chummed around the city, making friends with movie stars, finding his voice and writing thinly veiled autobiographical vignettes in his column, Maupin became one of the most vocal advocates of gay rights during the 1970s and beyond.

In his new memoir, Maupin, now in his 70s, recalls the tightly closeted Southern childhood that preceded this active public life. He recounts a sheltered childhood (one of his favorite activities was antiquing) followed by years of military service and the dawning realization of his homosexuality. He describes his fractured relationships with his father and brother and his close ties with his grandmother, mother and sister. This story of his biological family gives way to a very different account of his logical family, the vibrant network of gay, male artists in and around the Bay Area who catalyzed Maupin from an insecure youth to a vocal artist and activist.

The pleasure of this book, beyond the funny anecdotes and poignant reflections, is getting a behind-the-scenes look at a treasured series of novels and reading a first-hand account of a significant human rights movements in our nation’s history. Maupin offers a vivid look at key moments—such as the murder of Harvey Milk—and the impact these had on the gay rights movement and his life. Unsurprisingly, Maupin is a sympathetic and soulful storyteller. His account of a past struggle for equality is especially important in our fraught present.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Armistead Maupin for Logical Family.

Sarah Perry woke up in the middle of one 1994 night, startled by her mother’s screams. What could be a child’s worst nightmare becomes Sarah’s reality: As the 12-year-old listens, helpless in her room, Crystal Perry is being stabbed to death on the other side of the wall.

The murder cleaves Sarah’s childhood into before and after. Before, she and her mother shared the sort of close relationship single mothers and their only children sometimes find. Sarah knew her father, but her parents split when she was young. Sarah was a self-described weird kid, the sort of girl who would lose herself in a book and her own writing.

After her mother’s murder, Sarah finds herself in a near constant battle with rage. The person she loves most gone, and now she is left to wonder whether any of the men in her life is the murderer. Sarah feels lost; she can no longer write, and she can no longer trust the people around her. As police investigate Crystal’s murder, Sarah wonders if she can even trust her own memory of that night.

In After the Eclipse, Sarah recounts her journey to understand her own experience and who her mother was. The book, like her childhood, is split into two parts: her memories, and her efforts to move forward.

After the Eclipse is a thoroughly researched account of Crystal Perry’s death and the efforts to bring her murderer to justice, yet this is so much more than a typical true crime tale. Sarah Perry has created a captivating and emotionally raw account of the event that changed her life and how it shaped her.

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

Like The Other Wes Moore and Between the World and Me, Danielle Allen’s Cuz presents a rich personal narrative in trenchant historical and political context. Allen tells the story of Michael, her irrepressible cousin with the dazzling smile.

Although Danielle was raised in relative comfort—she describes the casual security of being a professor’s kid in the college environments where she grew up and now makes a living (Allen is a political philosopher at Harvard University) —Michael’s family, the family of Allen’s father’s youngest sister, lived on the edge. When they moved to LA during Michael’s adolescence, Michael committed petty theft. And then, at age 15, he attempted carjacking at gunpoint. He didn’t shoot (in fact, he got shot in the neck), but the judge opted to try him as an adult. Suddenly, this adolescent faced 13 years in prison, a sentence nearly as long as his life had been so far.

The devastating effect of prison on Michael is beautifully wrought in poetic, heartfelt and restrained prose by his cousin, who frequently visited him. When he was released, it was Allen who helped get him established. Despite her best efforts (which far outstripped anything I could imagine undertaking), within a few years he was found shot to death in a car.

Allen’s searing memoir seeks to understand what happened to Michael within the context of LA during the 1990s just after the “three strikes” rule came to pass, as fears of carjacking were running rampant and as gang affiliations pulsed in the street. Having read several books like Cuz in an attempt to understand what is happening in this country, I can say that Allen’s is one of the strongest. This book—part elegy, part history, part political philosophy—is wholly unforgettable.

People often associate Julia Child, who made French food accessible to the home cook, with Alice Waters, whose restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, was one of the epicenters for the movement toward simple, locavore dining. And the two culinary queens do have much in common, especially as crusaders for what might be called “real food” in a time when most Americans’ dining experiences ran the culinary gamut from A to B, as Dorothy Parker would say.

But while Child and Waters are both legendary free spirits, there are striking differences between the two. Child was a classicist who mastered technique and fine detail, a quirky sophisticate who believed “all things in moderation,” while Waters, a card-carrying advocate of 1960s-style exuberance, is a hedonist, punch-drunk with flavor and scent and texture.

Waters’ new memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, is a reminiscence of an extended adolescence spent not only navigating the enticements of postwar liberation—drinking, sex, art and anti-establishment politics—but also foreign countries, including France, Turkey, Georgia and Greece, to name a few, places that embrace community and kindness as much as food and cooking.

Waters’ memoir, as touching as it sometimes is, can be a little helter-skelter: There are italicized inserts that shoulder into the narrative, supplying details of a person’s biography or offering foreshadowing or philosophical asides. And there are plenty of famous names dropped, unavoidably, as Waters’ friends are connected to an impressive array of filmmakers, more experienced chefs, artists and writers.

These diary-like passages, and Waters’ almost stream-of-consciousness remarks on the importance of mood, music, visual arts and flowers on the dining experience, come to a head with the hilariously chaotic opening of Chez Panisse in 1971. If the way to counterculture’s heart is through its stomach, Chez Panisse is the start.

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

Throughout her stunningly powerful memoir, We Are All Shipwrecks, Kelly Grey Carlisle runs a finger over everything, from the tide-pool sea creatures she inspected as a child to photographs of the mother she never met. That thoughtful touch reveals dark complexities and provokes her curiosity, which becomes her lifeboat as she searches for truth.

Raised by Richard, her eccentric, self-absorbed grandfather, and his much younger wife, Marilyn, on a yacht that “looked something like a three-tiered wedding cake” in a run-down California marina, Carlisle knew little about her mother, a 23-year-old prostitute brutally murdered by a killer who was never caught, and even less about her father. Left behind in a motel drawer at 3 weeks of age, Carlisle grew up asking many questions and receiving ever-changing answers. Life with her grandfather was anything but stable, and even succeeding as a competitive swimmer in high school meant little at home: Richard simply missed having her there in time for dinner.

It was the good company of her equally unconventional, often down-and-out neighbors living on the pier that sustained Carlisle and fed her desire to move on from her life on the harbor. Finally, after college, marriage and the birth of her daughter, Carlisle seems to have found the balance she was looking for. Richard once told her, “Blood is important. Where you come from is important. It’s who you are.” Yet clearly, Carlisle’s pursuit of her past is also about whom she chose to become, and what it took to get her there.

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

Adam Gopnik is a flâneur, a voyeur of streetscapes, crowds and singular personalities. He’s a romantic—his wife, Martha, to whom his memoir At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York is dedicated, is described with a disarming mixture of wryness and adoration—and he is frequently a cynic and a sentimentalist within the span of a few paragraphs. A sensualist, he often uses food as a metaphor as he reflects on both personal and cultural ambition. He infers, he observes—and then he composes. Because above all else, Gopnik is a writer.

At the Strangers’ Gate is part memoir, part meditation on his (and Martha’s) journey from Montreal to New York, and ultimately to The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer for some 30 years. They came to New York in the 1980s, a decade of upheaval and reinvention, and wondered at it, indulged in it and alternately looked up to and down at its creators. When they move from their tiny uptown basement apartment to another lucky strike, a loft in SoHo, he discovers a village of artists, writers, Bohemians, cobblestones—all of which seems of a piece to his expanding worldview.

Occasionally, Gopnik’s love for the epigram trips the reader up: “Art traps time, but food traps manners. The art lasts, the food rots.” This is his introduction into a recollection of not only his life in SoHo but also his fledgling professional art criticism and gradual breakthrough into the literary universe. At the Strangers’ Gate is a book studded with nuggets of fine prose, best tasted in smaller sections.

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

The Choice is more than an eloquent memoir by Holocaust survivor and psychologist Edith Eva Eger. It is an exploration of the healing potential of choice. When someone chooses to harm us, our sense of self can later be overwhelmed by the memory of that pain. But Eger, who has helped countless trauma patients, believes that we can regain our autonomy by choosing to confront the past—a lesson she learned from her own experience.

When Eger was 16, Josef Mengele, the abhorrent Auschwitz physician, made horrific choices for her. He chose for Eger to live and sent her parents to die. That same day, he chose Eger to dance “The Blue Danube” for his entertainment. Although a prisoner, Eger infused that dance with all the joy that dancing always brought her. Mengele gave her a loaf of bread as a reward for her bravura performance. Eger shared the loaf with the other prisoners, and later, a girl who had eaten that bread chose to help Eger, saving her life as a result. The ability to choose, even though those choices were circumscribed by an electrified fence, gave Eger the strength to survive.

After the war, she repressed these memories to spare others the pain of her experience. Wracked with guilt for having survived when so many perished, Eger watched her marriage crumble. Another choice confronted her: Stay mired in the past, or face it and learn to live in the present. Her journey took her back to Auschwitz, where she unlocked the last and darkest memory of that first day, and forgave not only her tormentors but also, and most importantly, herself.

Eger is not suggesting that she is unscarred by her experience, but that she lives a life filled with grace. The Choice is not a how-to book; it is, however, an invitation to choose to live life fully.

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

From obscure author to literary legend—that’s the transition Karl Ove Knausgaard has made in recent years thanks to his acclaimed autobiographical work, My Struggle. In that six-volume series, he delivers a meticulously detailed chronicle of his upbringing in Norway and his life as a writer, husband and father.

Knausgaard has a gift for making the quotidian seem compelling. His inclusivity and exactitude of detail, along with his tendency to follow narrative tangents to their exhausted ends, allows him to replicate on the page the nature of his own experience in a way that feels both expansive and microscopic. This effect enlivens his new book, Autumn, the first of four essay compilations, each of which will be named for a season.

Autumn was written as Knausgaard awaited the arrival of his fourth child, Anne, and it serves as a sort of introduction to the material world. Knausgaard offers musings on items encountered during the routine business of living—from plastic bags, bottles and rubber boots to the drum kit he keeps in his office. He also focuses on nature and its power to astonish and on the mysteries of the human body. Whether he’s writing about a rainstorm (“the sound of thunder always heightens the sense of being alive”) or teeth (“miniature white towers in the mouth”), the scrutiny Knausgaard applies to everyday objects renews them for the reader.

The essays in this perceptive collection are no more than a few pages in length, and Knausgaard’s prose style throughout is unembellished and precise. But the book also has an underpinning of tenderness. Of his children, Knausgaard writes, “I want them to relish life and have a sense of its abundance.” In Autumn, he captures that sense—and much more.

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