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American Scary

The rigorous yet still enticing American Scary invites readers to peer into the horror show of American history through the lens of literature and film.

Cookbooks, Lifestyles, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Lifestyles Cookbooks

Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.

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YE OLDE CURIOSITY SHOPPE Lenin grads Lenin’s Embalmers, by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, is the story of the eccentric crew who were handed the scientifically and politically volatile assignment of mummifying Lenin’s body a task somewhere between deifying a pharaoh and preserving the bones of a saint. Naturally the book is illustrated with fascinating photos of characters living and dead.

Ilya Zbarsky, the son of one of Lenin’s embalmers, tells the outrageous story of his father, the era, and the secret goings-on behind the mausoleum walls. Zbarsky’s Kafkaesque portrait of the insanely secretive Soviet regime is both terrifying and bitterly amusing. It fortifies his account of the scientific challenge the embalmers faced, and of his father’s and his own surprising survival through such a dangerous time. For all of his arcane expertise and high social position, however, Zbarsky’s father was Jewish, and in time Stalin’s fanatical anti-Semitism brought him down. Worth the price of admission here is the information about embalming and mummification, the methods invented by Zbarsky’s father and his colleagues. As grisly as the tale of Tutankhamen, it is yet still timely. The methods used to preserve Lenin are now being exported to preserve leaders in places as far away as Vietnam. Back home in Russia the techniques are applied to the embalming of rich gangsters.

Surprisingly, Lenin’s Embalmers is also a fascinating memoir of one man’s relationship with an exploitative father. And there is a nice thread of celebrity literary gossip thrown in, too. The Zbarskys were friends with a young writer named Boris Pasternak. It seems that the talented Boris had an affair with the author’s mother. In fiction they call that a subplot.

Set your sights on Sydney

by bookpagedev

Sports

Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by James Grinnell

During its 50-year history, NASCAR has metamorphosed from dirt track, Saturday night, fairgrounds racing into a national spectator sport. It has become a very big business, but it has not lost its rural, southern roots. A panel of NASCAR stalwarts assembled a list of stock car racing’s 50 best (and often most colorful) drivers, representing each of the five decades of NASCAR’s history. With NASCAR 50 Greatest Drivers, writers Bill Center and Bob Moore provide a thumbnail history of each driver and his era, along with a sidebar of vital statistics and a collage of photographs from sepia-toned black and whites from the early years to bold color shots of today. Yesteryear’s heroes such as Junior Johnson and Fireball Roberts, current superstars like Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, and the timeless King, Richard Petty they’re all here, and they’re all legends. This is a book that any NASCAR fan would be happy to own.

Review

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Behind the Book: Why I formed the Council of Dads

Behind the Book by Bruce Feiler

by Bruce Feiler

It was the most desperate week of my life. It gave birth to the most hopeful idea I’ve ever had. In July 2008, I learned that I had a seven-inch cancerous tumor in my left femur. I instantly worried about my three-year-old twin daughters and what life might be like for them.

Would they wonder who I was? Would they wonder what I thought? Would they yearn for my approval, my love, my voice?

“I asked each of them to teach a different lesson to my girls—how to live, how to travel, how to think, how to dream.”

Three days later, I awoke with an idea of how I might give them my voice. I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to form a “Council of Dads.”

My initial instinct was not to tell my wife, Linda. We should focus on the positive. We should live in the moment.

But I quickly lost my resolve. Linda cried at first, but as soon as we began discussing who should be in my Council, she started rejecting my nominees. “I love him,” she would say, “but he doesn’t represent you.” She added, of another, “I would never ask him for advice.” Starting a Council was a very efficient way of finding out what my wife really thought of my friends!

We needed a set of guidelines.

First, no family members. We figured my family would already have relationships with the girls. Plus, as Linda said, your friends know you differently from your family.

Second, men only. Many of my close friends are women, but with their mom still around, we sought to fill the Dad space in our girls’ lives.

Third, intimacy over longevity. We thought some more recent friendships might better capture the father I wanted to be.

Finally, a dad for every side. We looked for men who might capture different aspects of my personality.

We ultimately settled on six men: my oldest friend, my camp counselor, my college roommate, my business partner, my closest confidant and a tortured romantic poet friend. I asked each of them to teach a different lesson to my girls—how to live, how to travel, how to think, how to dream.

I then asked each one for a single piece of advice to convey to my daughters. Their answers ranged from the best way to take a trip—“Be a traveler, not a tourist”—to the best way to make your dreams come true— “Don’t see the wall.” One advised them not merely to seek the answers but to “Live the questions.” Another counseled that even when they experience pain they should still “Harvest the miracles” around them.

Their answers surprised, at times confused, but ultimately moved me. They also changed our lives. I remember after my first conversation with one of the dads, I said to Linda: “Their wisdom is not just going to change how our girls live. It’s going to change how you live.” (The advice had to do with the proper way to jump in puddles.) These answers were intended for my girls, but they’ve already made me a better dad and friend.
And therein has proven the magic of the Council of Dads. We did it for our girls. But it has transformed us. The experience helped build a bridge between our friends and our kids. It created an entirely new community in our lives. It reminded us of the power of friendship.

Recently, on my girls’ fifth birthday, the Council of Dads convened for the first time ever. They argued about politics, parenting and height. They complained about the weather, one another, me. In short, they were men! (My wife said she had wondered for two years what they would talk about. The answer: sports cars!)

But our girls didn’t care. They were delighted as they moved from dad to dad, reveling in the private bond they share with each one. Our girls don’t understand the shadow that hangs over the idea. All they know is that these men are not just Daddy’s friends.

They are their friends.

That night, after the girls were sleeping, we went around the room and each man spoke of how the experience had changed him. One felt the Council helped replace the voice of his own father. Another took the advice he gave our girls and changed how he parents his own children. The last person to speak was my confidant. I call him my ThinkDad. He calls himself The Contrarian.

“When I first heard the idea of the Council, I rejected it,” he said. “You would triumph over your illness. We wouldn’t need to exist. Today I realized I was wrong. Whether we’re healthy or sick, male or female, we all need to be reminded of what’s most valuable in our lives. We all need to be surrounded by the people we love. And seeing the looks on the girls’ faces today, I now know we all need our own Council.”

Bruce Feiler is the best-selling author of Walking the Bible and America’s Prophet. His new book is The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me. Feiler has been cancer-free since completing chemotherapy last year.

Titanic book’s not a sinking ship

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Diane Stresing

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.

Review

by bookpagedev

Nature

Nature

Behind the Book: Entering the deadly kingdom

Behind the Book by Gordon Grice

by Gordon Grice

“But why can’t we go look at it?” I asked my mother.

“Because it’s dangerous,” she said.

“We could watch from the car.”

“We’ll go back into town and let Granddad handle it.”

“We never get to do anything fun,” I said, but the argument was already lost, the red cedar fence posts clicking by faster and faster outside the car window. I picked at the threads in the green upholstery of the back seat. Mom was putting miles of safety between us and the cougar treed in front of our farmhouse. My grandfather had waved us down as we drove home from errands and told us to proceed no further. I was six; it didn’t occur to me to worry about my grandfather. I only knew I was missing out on something.

The next time I saw him, Granddad was the same as always, tossing his silver head as he told his jokes, smiling in his broad but mysterious way, like the man on the Quaker oats box. He had little to say about the fate of the cougar.

The real cougar passed from my life permanently. I never even glimpsed him. But the memory of him was written in fire. It seemed a special cruelty for my elders to deny me his company, for I was already obsessed with wild animals and wanted to see him more than I can perhaps make clear. I had heard the voice of the bobcat and followed the delicate and sinuous track of the rattlesnake; soon I would begin to keep insects and spiders in jars; within a few years I would fill notebooks with my observations and drawings of wildlife. Our home in the Oklahoma Panhandle offered daily lessons in biology: a two-headed Hereford calf at the local museum, plagues of grasshoppers and jackrabbits, mastodons dug out of the fields, the tracks of Allosaurs found in stone. One summer when I was 10, prodigious congregations of black crickets rose from the soil. They seethed beneath the outdoor lights. Once they came pouring over the edge of our front porch, where a friend and I had just squashed a grasshopper. It seemed, for a panicky moment, like retribution.

Of course those crickets were really harmless, like most of the animals I watched. But the dangerous ones kept a special fascination for me. As an adult, I wrote magazine stories about obviously dangerous animals like cougars and surprisingly dangerous ones like armadillos, which can give you leprosy if you eat them. They can also scratch you, but that was my own fault for picking the thing up. In my first book, The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, I wrote about my own encounters with rattlesnakes and coyotes.

It was a happy coincidence when one day a dusty bookshop yielded two classic surveys of my favorite subject. Roger Caras’s Dangerous to Man (1964) was full of quotes from scientists; James Clarke’s Man Is the Prey (1969) was a spicier volume of anecdotes. They were both well-researched and interesting books, and they both had it all wrong.

That’s not a knock on Clarke and Caras. They’d done their homework. It was the world that had changed. It was no longer true, for example, that cougars didn’t consider people prey. A few famous fatalities made that clear. There were more people spread over larger areas, and relations between the species had changed. Science had made progress, too: now we knew about the surprisingly dangerous venoms of komodo dragons and hobo spiders. And then there were the changes in people. It’s become surprisingly common for suburban Americans to own monkeys and chimpanzees, despite the tendency of these primates to bite off human fingers.

What I wanted was a new bestiary for the 21st century. And I wanted to be the one to write it. It took me seven years to finish Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals. There was some unusual research. I stuck my arm into the flensed skull of an alligator to see how it felt. I searched for the black bear my neighbor spotted on her morning jog. I read things in medical reports I’d rather forget, and I learned all over again how gorgeous even the humblest animals can be. And in the end, I saw animal attacks in a new light, not just as interesting and disturbing events in their own right, but also as products of poverty, war and environmental carnage. It’s always been this way for me: looking at other animals is my way of looking at us.

Photo credit: Parker Grice

“But why can’t we go look at it?” I asked my mother. “Because it’s dangerous,” she said. “We could watch from the car.” “We’ll go back into town and let Granddad handle it.” “We never get to do anything fun,” I said, but the argument was already lost, the red cedar […]

Review

by bookpagedev

Medicine

Medicine

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Michael Sims

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).

Creative knitters spin a great yarn

by bookpagedev

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