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Golden Years

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
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The Hold List: Books that inspire big moves

Feature by the editors of BookPage

A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters by Cheena Marie Lo

If you were pressed to categorize a book of poetry on your bookshelf as fiction or nonfiction, would you choose fiction? Most people probably would. Poetry has a reputation for being airy and fantastical, for dwelling in the realm of emotions and dreams, not in the “real world.” Yet there is a strain of poetry that is explicitly concerned with informing readers about real events: documentary poetry. Cheena Marie Lo’s A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters (Commune Editions, $16, 9781934639191) is an excellent contemporary example, using statistics and phrases pulled from the news to trace human responsibility for the outcomes of devastating “natural” events like Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. Lo compares ecological processes like seasonal migration with the movement of evacuees in response both to the destruction caused by a storm and the failure of systems expected to provide help. At the same time, Lo points to the recovery of nature as a model for community recuperation through mutual aid. This is a great collection to read alongside Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler—another powerful documentary book of poems that chronicles state failure and human resilience during and after Katrina.

—Phoebe, Associate Editor

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

I was introduced to The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, $19.99, 9781419718786) in a college English class, which admittedly isn’t the most exciting way to find a book. But as a 20-something with lots of emotions about parenting and intergenerational trauma, I found author-illustrator Thi Bui’s story at exactly the right time. This graphic memoir flows between present and past. In the frame story, Bui is anxious that her flawed relationships with her parents will define how she interacts with her newborn son. In an effort to alleviate her anxiety, she sits down with her parents and attempts to figure out how they became who they are, journeying with them through their childhoods in war-torn Vietnam, their harrowing migration as refugees and their imperfect restart in America. Told through beautiful watercolor illustrations and sparse, emotionally-wrought text, Bui’s memoir does not offer easy answers to questions about trauma, immigration and family. However, The Best We Could Do is a tremendous lesson in empathy and a testament to healing through human connection.

—Jessica Peng, Editorial Intern

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

Casey McQuiston’s sophomore novel, One Last Stop (Griffin, $16.99, 9781250244499), is a clever, emotionally resonant take on a timeslip romance with an utterly dreamy love interest: 1970s punk feminist Jane Su, who is mysteriously trapped outside of time on the New York City subway. As they proved in their already-iconic 2019 debut, Red, White & Royal Blue, McQuiston understands that in order for readers to wholeheartedly invest in a heightened scenario, it helps to have characters who are going through things that are eminently relatable. And so, recent New Orleans transplant August Landry’s quest to rescue Jane is balanced by the travails and triumphs of her job at Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes (one of the best fictional diners ever?) and the slow blossoming of her relationships with her roommates into something like family. It’s an achingly sweet portrait of a closed-off loner finding community for the very first time, and an ode to being young, broke and happy in NYC. It all culminates in a perfect finale, where August must draw on her new connections to pull Jane free and secure their happily ever after.

—Savanna, Managing Editor

The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu

Our whole planet is migrating in the title story of The Wandering Earth (Tor, $19.99, 9781250796844) a collection by Cixin Liu, renowned author of The Three-Body Problem. Faced with proof of the sun’s imminent death, humanity collectively seeks to escape obliteration by installing giant plasma jets to propel the Earth toward a new solar system. As mankind’s home is transformed into one massive spaceship, an unnamed protagonist watches decades of his life pass, narrating with straightforward melancholy as he witnesses tragedy and chaos. As changes to Earth’s orbit cause boiling rain to fall and oceans to freeze, the cataclysmic, sublime journey of “The Wandering Earth” will batter you with alternating waves of immense beauty and terror. And don’t expect a chance to surface for air after finishing this first story: The next nine continue to pummel the reader with Liu’s staggering imagination and rare talent for combining grandiose backdrops with personal stories suffused with aching emotion, such as that of a man climbing a mountain made of water, or a peasant boy growing up to become a space explorer. Liu’s eye for detail and mind for the poetic add a profundity to The Wandering Earth, elevating it to stand among the best science fiction.

—Yi Jiang, Associate Editor

Does warmer weather and the approach of summer have you feeling restless? Pick up one of these stories featuring journeys great and small.
NonfictionLifestylesFood & DrinkCookbooks

Zao Fan

Review by Yi Jiang

How complicated can breakfast possibly get? In Zao Fan: Breakfast of China, Michael Zee writes that the enormity of Chinese cuisine is “both terrific and terrifying”—and what is usually the simplest, smallest meal of the day is no exception. Yet Zee demonstrates a knack seldom seen in English-language cookbooks for succinctly yet fully conveying the vastness and complexity of Chinese cuisine throughout the delightful recipes featured in Zao Fan. From fried Kazakh breads to savory tofu puddings, Zee provides in-depth yet accessible insight into a thorough swath of breakfast foods.

Rarely does a writer’s passion for their subject matter leap as vividly as it does from these pages, which are chock-full of recollections of personal visits to restaurants and observations of traditional techniques. Zee accompanies the recipes with his own photos of the dishes in all their gorgeous mouthwatering glory—meat pies sizzling on a griddle, a bowl of Wuhan three-treasure rice, neat rows of Xinjiang-style baked lamb buns—which provide an authentic sense of immersion, as do his portraits of daily life in China. The neat, color-coded organization of the recipes into logical categories such as noodles and breads provides a remarkable sense of cohesion, making Zao Fan an absolute must for cooks across all skill levels.

Zao Fan collects traditional Chinese breakfast recipes in all their mouthwatering glory.

Tits Up

After reading Sarah Thornton’s revelatory Tits Up, you’ll never look at boobs the same way again.
NonfictionSocial Science

The White Bonus

Review by Catherine Hollis

Acclaimed journalist Tracie McMillan’s muckraking, experiential methods have earned her prizes, acclaim and the special animosity of Rush Limbaugh, a sure sign of the power of her investigative work. With The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America, McMillan offers a powerful and necessary exposé of the financial benefits of whiteness in the U.S.

In a style reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich, The White Bonus spotlights five working- and middle-class white families, including a very revealing and honest look at McMillan’s own. The book examines how zoning laws, discrimination in trade unions and the failure of school desegregation have rippled into the present, giving white families what McMillan calls the “white bonus,” a multigenerational “societal and familial security net unavailable to Black Americans.” In chapters focused on school, work, poverty and crime, McMillan develops case studies of how individuals and families benefit from whiteness even when they are accused of crimes or are scraping by on minimum wage. McMillan’s quantitative analysis starkly reveals how American institutions continue to benefit white people at the expense of Black Americans. 

Each case study is supported by extensive interviews and reporting, and presented with novelistic detail in a propulsive narrative. A chapter about the Becker family of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, illustrates “the steady reemergence of racially homogenous schools after a few decades of progress toward racial integration” that followed Brown v. Board of Education. The Beckers bucked the trend of white flight and sent their children to local public schools that had predominantly Black student bodies. While the oldest sibling benefitted from “gifted and talented” programs that primarily served white students in an otherwise diverse student population, the youngest sibling experienced a stark decline in educational quality at the same school after many of the white families left the district. 

McMillan’s own family story is told with admirable honesty, particularly regarding the impact of her father’s abuse after her mother’s death. These autobiographical chapters not only provide a detailed financial accounting of her own family’s white bonus, but also brilliantly shape a central insight that analogizes its dangers: The silence surrounding domestic violence is replicated in our society at large when we avoid addressing the impact of structural racism. Remaining silent about either is incompatible with morality.

Journalist Tracie McMillan’s latest investigates how five families—including her own—benefit from systemic white privilege.
NonfictionSocial Science

The Way That Leads Among the Lost

Review by Amanda Haggard

When anthropologist and Stanford University professor Angela Garcia went to Mexico City to study a new urban development, she instead discovered families threatened by the violence of the drug war committing themselves or their family members to anexos, coercive drug rehab programs run out of private homes. There, staff members inflict beatings and emotional abuse unironically called “treatment.”

The chance that you’ve heard of an anexos is slim; a quick Google search elicits few results, the top result of which is an academic paper by Garcia herself. In her new book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, she studies these complicated places and the social forces that have created them. Based on direct observation and interviews with people living in several such run-down centers, Garcia shows the diverse experiences that brought them there: A trans woman named Sheila self-admitted and becomes a den mother to young teen residents; an introverted 14-year-old with the nickname Catorce was dropped off by his mother before she left town; and teenage Daniel was violently apprehended after his desperate mother called an anexos for help about his drug addiction.

The stories of anexados vary, but the essential reason the centers exist is the same: The violence inside the walls of an anexos is less frequent and severe than that outside. As Garcia observes life in these makeshift drug rehab centers, she reckons with her own past abandonments, familial addiction and homelessness. Garcia is careful not to run a straight line from the violence of these programs to the healing of their participants. More often than not, people either spend long periods of time living in the anexos, or they are in and out of them as they vacillate between safety and danger, flush and broke.

Yet anexos serve a purpose to many in the communities where they exist. Garcia reflects on the pain many parents feel sending their children to anexos, knowing they’ll suffer violence within, but otherwise unable to keep them from the threat posed by the drug war in their neighborhoods. The Way That Leads Among the Lost is both a heavy and enlightening history of how anexos came to be, and a compassionate look into the lives of those impacted.

Correction, April 23, 2024: This review previously misstated the name of author Angela Garcia.

The Way That Leads Among the Lost investigates the heavy yet enlightening history of anexos, clandestine Mexico City drug recovery centers.

The Swans of Harlem

Karen Valby’s spirited The Swans of Harlem brings the remarkable story of trailblazing Black ballerinas to center stage.
NonfictionBiography

The Rulebreaker

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Barbara Walters may forever be remembered as Barbara Wawa, thanks to Gilda Radner’s 1976 performance on “Saturday Night Live.” Radner, Rachel Dratch and Cheri Oteri played the character for the next four decades, illustrating that Walters and her contributions to television journalism had become enduring features of popular culture. Indeed, her presence would dominate television from the late 1960s to the early years of the new millennium.

Drawing on over 150 interviews and on extensive archival research, biographer Susan Page paints a colorful portrait of Walters in her compulsively readable The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Tracing Walters’ life and career from her childhood through her three failed marriages, her estrangement from her daughter and her groundbreaking interviews with celebrities and political figures, Page reveals an ambitious woman who reached the pinnacle of her profession, even as she was dogged by insecurities and fear of failure. Page describes how both Walters’ ambition and her fear were fueled by her father, an entrepreneur and impresario who opened several high-profile nightclubs in Boston, New York City and Miami, but whose gambling and often extravagant spending resulted in his professional failures. Page traces Walters’ early career, cutting her teeth as a publicist, Redbook staffer and host of the “Today” show. Her big breakthrough came in 1976 when ABC offered her a $1 million salary to co-anchor its evening news program. But she didn’t stay for long. Three years later, she became co-host of “20/20.” The rest is history. 

Walters is best known for penetrating interviews of political and entertainment figures, never shying away from asking probing, and sometimes regrettable, questions. She asked Ricky Martin about his sexuality before he came out publicly; pushed Fidel Castro to admit the impoverished state of Cuba when the leader touted his role in the country’s prosperity; and asked Monica Lewinsky how she planned to explain the Clinton scandal to her children. Walters pioneered the tell-all interview and took it to new heights with “The View,” which premiered in 1997. 

The Rulebreaker explores the cultural history in which Walters and her career developed and flourished. Readers will be compelled by this story of an American icon who shaped the expectations that viewers have of television news programs, and whose flair and penetrating approach revealed the private lives of the powerful and famous.

Biographer Susan Page paints a colorful portrait of trailblazer Barbara Walters in her compulsively readable The Rulebreaker.

The Internet of Animals

The bonkers and delightful The Internet of Animals tells the story of author-scientist Martin Wikelski’s efforts to connect animal researchers across the globe, and understand animals anew.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Demon of Unrest

Review by Stephen Elliott

There’s no such thing as a spoiler alert when a story’s subject is taught in most every American history class across the country. Injecting hold-your-breath suspense into a narrative history, particularly one in which we already know the story’s ending, is a task that Erik Larson has mastered. In the Garden of the Beasts took on Nazi Germany on the cusp of war; The Splendid and the Vile explored Winston Churchill’s stewardship of under-siege England. In his new book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, Larson turns his attention to the immediate aftermath of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the unlanced boil where the war began: Fort Sumter.

Larson covers just a few months of American history—but perhaps the most consequential few months. Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and other well-known figures from the period play key roles, but so too do a British journalist on assignment, a young private stuck in the besieged fort and a Southern society woman watching the events unfold. They aren’t key characters in the grand arc of the Civil War or the country’s history, but they did write a lot down. Their accounts help Larson propel the narrative without relying entirely on the stories of people who have already been the subject of hundreds or thousands of other books.

There are obvious parallels to the current moment: a refusal to accept the results of a presidential election, threats to march on the Capitol, a tendency toward civility and appeasement in the face of existential threat and other more subtle links to the present. Some of the connections are unavoidable and necessary; others, Larson perhaps injects as a result of recency bias.

Even after a century and a half of books about the subject, it remains remarkably unclear what course of action key figures should or could have taken to avoid America’s bloodiest war. Maybe we’ll never figure that out, but The Demon of Unrest is a damn good read.

In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson crafts a tale of hold-your-breath suspense about the crucial three months leading up to the Civil War.

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