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The Icon and the Idealist

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
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Travel

Set your sights on Sydney

Review by bookpagedev

Geoffrey Moorhouse is the kind of writer who reminds you that "Travel Literature" not just "Travel Guides" used to be a prominent section in good bookstores.

Sydney: The Story of a City is beautifully written, casual, conversational, almost unobtrusively suffused with information, and wittily opinionated all at once. It adds to the picture-postcard view of Sydney an engrossing humanity and a sort of rude health that reminds us how young a city it is, founded notoriously as a penal colony only in 1770.

Moorhouse’s sentences have a rare and seductive rhythm, and his adjectives a particular aptness. Consider the polish, and the visual acuity, of a simple vignette of the harbor traffic: "Ships arrive with superstructures rising abruptly in umpteen storeys like an apartment block; ships with the bulbous bow that became fashionable again after being out of favor for the best part of a century; ships so top-heavy with containers that they resemble a railway marshaling yard, and you wonder why they haven’t turned turtle in the latest storms; ships that are nothing more than boxes on keels, so unspeakably ugly that whoever drew up the blueprints must have thought they were being asked to design a septic tank; ships that have become floating advertisements with their owner’s name flashed ostentatiously along the side an unthinkable vulgarity not so long ago." Not only that, but his masterful prose allows him to ramble from past to present, conveying astonishing amounts of fact and detail without ever seeming pedantic.

"It is still, but only just, possible to appreciate what terra australis looked like round here when the Aborigines had it all to themselves. To do so you need to go up the Parramatta River, where there are still small mangrove swamps in Home Bush Bay and near Rydalmere, where duck and pelican, cormorant and sandpiper flourish, just as they did when they were hunted to keep aboriginal hunger at bay; or you must go some distance north of the city, where the Hawkesbury River winds down to the sea at Broken Bay, through hundreds of square miles of national park and its blessedly unexploited bush. . . . [R]oots and fruits were abundant here, together with witchhetty grubs which could be found in rotting trees trunks and were regarded as a great delicacy when lightly grilled." Moorhouse is no respecter of church or state, unless either earns it; he takes shrewd and unshakable aim at the selfish, the aggrandizing and the prejudiced of town and gown and chalice. But he is also unstinting in his admiration of the generous and far-sighted, and unusually imaginative in his portraits of some of the complex and contradictory figures in Australian history. He peeks in at the Parliament, with its very English habit of exquisitely insulting circumlocutions.

He makes palpable the idiosyncratic pleasures (and shadows) of national holidays, from the we’re-all-green over-indulgences of St. Patrick’s Day to the solemnity of Anzac Day, a veterans’ day salute to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps forces slaughtered at Gallipoli in 1915.

And he conveys the sense of physical energy that pervades the city. The host city for the Olympic Games in September, Sydney is famously sports mad: cricket, horse racing (there are 11 tracks), greyhound racing, American and Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union, golf and bowling, basketball, soccer and, swimming, and surfing (despite the many hazards of freak tides, deadly sea snakes, sharks, and Portuguese man Ôo war jellyfish). Moorhouse manages to explain how the adherents of these often internecine sporting traditions squabble, coexist, battle for attention and scramble for media coverage. Altogether, this is a book of chewy pleasures, witty, sympathetic, finely descriptive and thoroughly accessible and it demands a suitable wine. The nearest wine region to Sydney is the Hunter Valley, and from that area Rosemount produces unpushy but broadly aromatic Semillons, with a softness to the texture often likened to lanolin but more like mango juice. Although the ordinary Semillons are good, and bargain-priced, the vintage wines, such as the 1996 Show Reserve (about $17) begin with a clearwater stoniness, turn a neat ankle of white peach and honey cream and ring down the curtain with a lingering, palate-cleansing almond. A showstopper.

 

P.S. If you are going to the Olympics, you might get a kick out of the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Deluxe Gift Edition: Sydney (Dorling Kindersley, $40, ISBN 0789456443). In addition to DK’s usual lush, full-color format and intriguing historical tidbits (and hotel and restaurant info, of course), the special version has a plastic case, wallet-sized info cards and a take-along map.


Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post. This column reflects her dual interests in travel and wine.

Geoffrey Moorhouse is the kind of writer who reminds you that "Travel Literature" not just "Travel Guides" used to be a prominent section in good bookstores.

Sydney: The Story of a City is beautifully written, casual, conversational, almost unobtrusively suffused with…

NonfictionAudioMemoir

A Carnival of Snackery

Review by Anna Zeitlin

A Carnival of Snackery (17 hours) collects highlights from David Sedaris’ diaries from 2003–2020, read by the author and British-born actor Tracey Ullman. Sedaris’ diary entries reflect much of what we love most about his short stories and essays—observations about the unusual people he meets on his travels, anecdotes about awkward situations and tales about his family—all filtered through the lens of the last two decades, with backdrops that range from Brexit to protests against the Iraq War and George Floyd’s murder.

In the introduction, Sedaris explains that Ullman will narrate the portions of the audiobook set in England, to capture the local charm in a way he cannot. She does a wonderful job portraying Sedaris and the broad range of accents he encounters while across the pond, from a haughty horseback rider to a teenage troublemaker. Sedaris hardly needs help: He doesn’t perform as many voices in his sections, but his emphasis and timing get right to the humor at the heart of his diaries.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of the print edition of ‘A Carnival of Snackery.’

David Sedaris and actor Tracey Ullman get right to the humor at the heart of his diaries in the audio edition of A Carnival of Snackery.

The Verge

Podcaster Patrick Wyman skillfully narrates his engaging economic history of Europe.
LiteratureArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

When he was 10 or 11 years old, Harold Bloom read the poetry of William Blake and Hart Crane and was profoundly moved. This led to a lifelong passion for literature and a career as one of our most distinguished and prolific literary critics. Much of that time, his influential and often controversial criticism was addressed primarily to an academic readership. More recently, his best-selling titles are mindful of what Dr. Samuel Johnson and later Virginia Woolf called “the common reader.” Bloom notes, “If there is a function for criticism at the present time, it must be to address itself to the solitary reader, who reads for himself, and not for the interests that supposedly transcend the self.” We common readers continue to be in Bloom’s debt. His new book, How to Read and Why, offers not only helpful suggestions indicated by the title but also sophisticated and stimulating analyses of noteworthy short stories, poetry, novels, and plays. Drawing on the writing of Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf, Francis Bacon, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bloom formulates his principles of reading. In summary, they are: “Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.” Bloom is careful to state that the selections he has chosen to write about and quote from are “a sampling of works that best illustrate why to read.” In the short story section, for example, the samplings include works by Turgenev and Chekhov as well as Flannery O’Connor and Italo Calvino. A surprise is the story “Gogol’s Wife” by the modern Italian writer Tommaso Landolfi.

There are two chapters on novels, the first one with discussions of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, “the first and best of all novels, which nevertheless is more than a novel,” and Jane Austen’s Emma, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, among others. The second chapter on novels includes William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West. All of the books in this chapter Bloom includes in the “school of Melville” and his consideration of them follows an introductory section on Moby Dick. He writes there of Ahab being “American through and through, fierce in his desire to avenge himself, but always strangely free, probably because no American truly feels free unless he or she is inwardly alone.” The longest discussion of an individual work is of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. It is a highlight of the book. Bloom says that “after four centuries, Hamlet remains the most experimental drama ever staged, even in the Age of Beckett, Pirandello, and all the Absurdists.” He also comments, “Hamlet, like Shakespeare’s disciples Milton and the Romantics, wishes to assert the power of mind over a universe of death or sea of trouble, but cannot do so, because he thinks too lucidly.” The other two, quite different plays, discussed are Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Bloom’s passion for great literature is evident on every page. This book should be of special interest both to solitary readers and reading groups.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

When he was 10 or 11 years old, Harold Bloom read the poetry of William Blake and Hart Crane and was profoundly moved. This led to a lifelong passion for literature and a career as one of our most distinguished and prolific literary critics. Much…

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

You just had a sack lunch yesterday. This ain’t Outward Bound, you know. one hungry smokejumper to another. A smokejumper’s job description might read: Squelch forest fires by parachuting into them wearing 40 pounds of gear. Operations require days of primitive camping in hot, smoky areas. Rewards include near-death experiences, extreme sleep deprivation, broken bones and more interesting injuries, and knowing you’re the world’s best defense against forest fires.

In the late 1930s, someone in the Forest Service suggested parachuting firefighters into small blazes to stop them. After U.S. Army officials watched the first fire jumps in 1940, they quickly created the first airborne units for World War II. The Bureau of Land Management launched a jumping program in 1959, the same year Murry Taylor became a firefighter. Taylor became a smokejumper in 1965, and today he is the oldest active jumper, having dropped into more than 200 fires.

Taylor’s clean construction takes us straight to the jumpers’ camp, close enough to scoff at the tourist who suggests the jumpers take a flying vacation over Alaska because “it’s the best way to see the country,” and close enough to grind off tooth enamel waiting out a day on call when, alas, no fires need fighting. In plain and simple terms, Taylor describes the vastness of the fires, the land on which they feed, and the immense challenge faced by those who dare interfere with nature’s burning desires. He also refrains from embellishing the injuries so many jumpers experience; a good thing, since a description of bones popping as they land badly on hot Alaskan rocks needs no amplification. Taylor’s remembered, recalled, or recreated events are so neatly recounted that they sound like a friend’s “day at the office” stories; his dialogue and description of place are as accurate as a jumper’s safe landing. The book moves fast; read the short glossary of jumper terms in the back of the book first so as not to get lost in jumper-lingo. Then dive into the intense pleasure of Jumping Fire.

Diane Stresing is a freelance writer in Kent, Ohio.

You just had a sack lunch yesterday. This ain't Outward Bound, you know. one hungry smokejumper to another. A smokejumper's job description might read: Squelch forest fires by parachuting into them wearing 40 pounds of gear. Operations require days of primitive camping in hot, smoky…
Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

There have been authors before Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor who have written admirable books about the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Mike Royko’s Boss and Daley: Power and Presidential Politics by F. Richard Ciccone are two titles that come to mind. So the challenge for Cohen and Taylor to come up with something unique was accomplished by publishing the most comprehensive biography on Daley to date. American Pharaoh may not have the verve or panache of those previous Daley books, but it makes up for that with thoroughness and attention to detail.

American Pharaoh carefully chronicles how Daley, a South Side Irish-Catholic, slowly built his political power base through shrewdness, hard work, and patronage. Establishing one of history’s most efficient big city political machines, Daley began in the 1960s to wield his power on the national level. Unfortunately, much of the national attention Daley received was negative. He was accused of stuffing the ballot box to secure the presidency for John F. Kennedy. He issued “shoot to kill” orders to police trying to control looters following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King. And in defending the police brutality surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Daley uttered the infamous malaprop: “The policeman is not there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.” While Daley obviously won the battle for Chicago, remaining in office for 21 years until his death in 1976, American Pharaoh convincingly argues that he lost the battle to control the nation. As people were crying out for desegregation and an end to the Vietnam War, Daley insisted on clinging to old values and old practices, making him an icon of an outdated era. Daley was, as the book title suggests, the pharaoh of a crumbling empire.

John T. Slania is a journalism professor and freelance writer in Chicago.

There have been authors before Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor who have written admirable books about the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Mike Royko's Boss and Daley: Power and Presidential Politics by F. Richard Ciccone are two titles that come to mind. So the…

Medicine

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Pain as God’s Megaphone, C. S. Lewis wrote, “is a terrible instrument.” Frank T. Vertosick quotes this line as epigraph to his new book, Why We Hurt. Lewis’s comparison points out why pain is essential: It gets our attention, alerting us that something is terribly wrong and, if possible, must be dealt with.

Throughout history, pain has been an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. It still is, but over the last century we have made great inroads not only against illnesses but against the pain they cause. We would do well to remember the agonies of past generations, for which there was simply no relief but the grave. Vertosick’s beautifully written book, The Natural History of Pain explores this essential but terrifying adaptation with intelligence, sympathy, and an encyclopedic store of references from across the cultural and scientific spectrum. A literate scholar and an experienced neurosurgeon, Vertosick is the author of a celebrated account of his training as a neurosurgeon, When the Air Hits Your Brain. He combines his own case histories (suitably disguised), fascinating tidbits from the history of medicine, and an endless curiosity about the nature of pain as a physical sensation. The surprises never stop. Vertosick explains the horrific etymology of the word “cancer,” which, as in the sign of the zodiac, refers to a crab in this case, a crab’s unshakable grip. He explains sciatica, and how Shakespeare came to coin the term. Carpal tunnel syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, migraine headaches, phantom limb syndrome it’s all here, in lucid, witty prose.

Nor does Vertosick overlook the pains of everyday life that are not considered disorders but are nonetheless what the Koran calls “a hurt”: menstrual cramps, the pain of childbirth, office-induced back pain.

Vertosick has examined and operated upon countless patients. He admits that he likes to play Sherlock Holmes and make a tentative diagnosis at first glance. He tells of the patient who awoke on the operating table and began screaming when he saw his opened chest and exposed heart, and of the woman who had to lift her leg with a towel because it wouldn’t move of its own volition. From these anecdotes, with sympathy and wit, he builds insightful chapters about the curse and blessing that is pain.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Pain as God's Megaphone, C. S. Lewis wrote, "is a terrible instrument." Frank T. Vertosick quotes this line as epigraph to his new book, Why We Hurt. Lewis's comparison points out why pain is essential: It gets our attention, alerting us that something is terribly…

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