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What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

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.
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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The Cause

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis superbly captures the issues, personalities and events of the American Revolution in The Cause.
NonfictionMemoir

Smile

Review by Kelly Blewett

“In fairy tale logic, you must trade something for something you desire,” writes Sarah Ruhl. “By this logic, I traded my face for my children. And it was a fair trade.” This is just one of the many arresting sentences in Ruhl’s new memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face, which details Ruhl’s pregnancy and subsequent experience of facial paralysis, a condition that set in immediately after delivery. The memoir moves from the intimately personal to the nearly universal: motherhood and medicine, soul and body, and the poetic logic that underlies everyday life. A playwright with an incredible eye for detail and a searing voice, Ruhl excels at putting striking ideas into simple forms that vibrate with power and energy.

Sarah Ruhl recalls passing her time on bed rest by reading the Twilight series. “We can’t predict how our minds will behave in extremis or when we are ill.”

Though Ruhl spent years avoiding her face in daily life, on the page she stares at it without flinching. She recalls refraining from looking at her reflection and how she came to rely on gestures and murmuring to communicate what her mouth and eyes could not—excitement, welcome, affirmation, connection. Behind this performance, or maybe because of it, Ruhl began to disassociate from her face, which no longer expressed her essential self. As a playwright, Ruhl works with actors, whose faces are the tools of their trade and who believe that bodily expression and the inner life are intertwined. Reflecting on these relationships, Ruhl wonders whether appearing more aloof and disengaged has, in fact, made her so. 

Meanwhile, life carried on. Ruhl wrote plays and essays, tried acupuncture and meditation and attempted to raise three children under five while remaining herself. Her memoir is wildly funny about the day-to-day realities of mothering. “My children’s temperaments can be summed up in the way that they vomit,” begins one memorable anecdote. In all, this is a beautiful book that expresses the big feelings of life and the daily practices that allow for incremental progress.

A playwright with a searing voice, Sarah Ruhl excels at putting striking ideas into simple forms that vibrate with power and energy.

Praying to the West

Praying to the West explores the Muslim population of the Americas in all its staggering diversity and makes it impossible not to see Islam’s rich complexity.
NonfictionHumorEssays

Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

From dubbing Michael Keaton an “Eyebrow Zaddy” to writing a treatise on barrister wigs “looking like a sad-ass Halloween costume and smelling like Seabiscuit’s haystack,” Phoebe Robinson is as hilarious as ever in her third book, Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes, the first title from the comedian-podcaster-actor-host’s new Tiny Reparations Books imprint.

As in her previous memoirs-in-essay (You Can’t Touch My Hair and Everything’s Trash, but It’s Okay), not only is the bestselling author’s work super funny, it’s also enlightening and thought-provoking. Whether she’s offering advice to aspiring bosses, dismantling the “patriarchal narrative [that] every woman . . . wants the same things” (especially motherhood) or explaining why the #ITakeResponsibility initiative in the summer of 2020 enrages her (“celebrities heard but did not listen to what Black people wanted and raced to put together something so shoddy and tone-deaf”), Robinson’s voice is sure and strong.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Phoebe Robinson shares what she hopes to accomplish as the publisher of Tiny Reparations Books.

Her essay “Black Girl, Will Travel” is particularly moving. She explains that, while her parents are team “#NoNewFriendsOrAcquaintancesOrWorldlyExperiences,” one of the benefits of her career is the ability to see more of the world. It can be “downright terrifying and life-threatening to travel while Black”—and the lack of movies, books, shows and ads featuring Black people abroad certainly makes it seem as if travel isn’t for Black people. But visiting unfamiliar places has changed her, and she urges readers to remember “evolving can’t always happen when we’re confined to our area code.”

In “4C Girl Living in Anything but a 4C World: The Disrespect,” Robinson describes a journey of a different kind: Her own rocky path to feeling at home in and with her hair. She examines the historical and cultural influences that have shaped Black women’s feelings about their hair and details the racism, colorism and cruelty that persists to this day. It’s a memorable, meaningful reading experience dotted with hits of poetry, anger and revelation—as is Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes as a whole. So slip into your inside cardigan (a la Mr. Rogers) and settle in for another rollicking and resonant Robinson read.

Not only are Phoebe Robinson’s essays super funny, they’re also enlightening and thought-provoking, dotted with hits of poetry, anger and revelation.

On Animals

Susan Orlean is such a virtuoso of unexpected joys and delights that she can make even the story of a lost dog read like a thriller.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Concepcion

Review by Priscilla Kipp

A diligent reader might begin this absorbing journey into an immigrant family’s fortunes, made and lost, by seeking the meaning of its title, Concepcion. They would discover that, like the generations revealed in Albert Samaha’s probing account, the answer isn’t simple. Concepcion is the surname of Samaha’s ancestors, the name of one of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships, a city in the Philippines and a word that aptly suggests a beginning.

Now nearing the same age as his mother, Lucy, when she first arrived in California, Samaha wants to understand what led her there. If Lucy was initially blinded by the promises of a country that held sway over her comfortable middle-class life in the Philippines, he wonders, how does she feel now? How have his other family members fared within the diaspora in the U.S., and how do they regard their ties to their homeland? Their answers are surprising and complex.

Samaha writes from the perspective of a successful, educated and skeptical American adult, declaring, “I found it easier to see what my elders could not: the height of the climb and the length of the fall.” Applying his skills as an investigative journalist to his family’s far-reaching saga, he filters their experiences as immigrants through the Philippines’ tumultuous history and the effects of their acquired American culture. It’s a deftly executed back-and-forth, and he shares his own enlightenments—and criticisms—as he goes. The role of race in the history of the National Football League and the influence of religion on political preferences are among his targets.

Samaha’s deep dive into Philippine history begins with Magellan’s colonization of the Philippines in the 1500s, flows through the centuries to Ferdinand Marcos’ long, controversial reign as the 10th president of the Philippines, and ends with Rodrigo Duterte’s current iron grip. Japan’s brutal occupation during World War II led to a U.S. takeover (the spoils of victory), and America has loomed large as a land of opportunity ever since. When U.S. immigration rules relaxed in 1965, Filipinos knew where to go.

Now, having benefited from his mother’s years of devotion and hard work, his absent father’s money and the support of their larger family in the Bay Area, Samaha is sensitive to their struggles amid what he sees as the failed promises, economic inequities and racial injustices of their adopted country. From the disadvantages of their lower paying jobs—such as his uncle’s work as an airport baggage handler after abandoning his career as a rock star in the Philippines—to their resilient, steadfast beliefs in democracy’s ideals despite its failings, Samaha plants their stories alongside his own and grows a remarkable family tree.

Journalist Albert Samaha's investigation into his family’s decision to emigrate from the Philippines turns up some surprising and complex answers.

Chasing Ghosts

Marc Hartzman gives a lighthearted account of ghostly legends, haunted houses and other unearthly visits from beyond the grave.
NonfictionHumor

A Carnival of Snackery

Review by Jessica Wakeman

It’s a curious prospect, reviewing a book composed of journal entries. A journal is typically a writer’s innermost private thoughts, which should be beyond a critic’s purview. Many lives have mundane periods, so it seems unfair to deduct points for lack of action. And when the author of the journal is humor writer David Sedaris, the book critic wonders how many of these tales are actually real. All this is to say that A Carnival of Snackery is a difficult book to review. Sedaris shares nearly 600 pages of his diary entries from 2003 to 2020, and the emotions they provoke run the entire gamut.

Sedaris’ political musings span from post-9/11 to the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a globe-trotting author, he brings an outsider’s perspective to many historical moments. But his personal entries are the more touching ones. Sedaris is best known for his humor essays, in which his eccentric Greek American family members often appear. But A Carnival of Snackery invites the reader to share his family’s heartbreak and losses, too. Sedaris’ thoughts about his estrangement from his sister Tiffany, her eventual suicide and his difficult relationship with his conservative and judgmental father (complicated by Donald Trump’s presidency) are woven among his lighter entries.

There are plenty of laughs to be had as well; one of the reasons readers love Sedaris is that he’s the first person to laugh at himself. This remains true in A Carnival of Snackery, especially as the bestselling author comes to grips with his late-in-life wealth. Sedaris tours constantly to promote his books, and several entries recount jokes that audience members have shared at book signings. A few of these jokes may be considered tasteless, but many will have you giggling in spite of yourself.

There is plenty in A Carnival of Snackery that longtime Sedaris fans will love.

David Sedaris shares nearly 600 pages of his diary entries in A Carnival of Snackery, and the emotions they provoke run the entire gamut.

Seeing Ghosts

Like the experience of grief itself, Kat Chow’s memoir is meditative, fragmentary, sometimes funny and occasionally hopeful.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Unbound

Review by Amy Scribner

Before she was the world-famous creator of #MeToo, the movement that sparked a reckoning with the mistreatment of women, especially women of color, Tarana Burke was a community organizer and journalist. Her experience as a reporter will be no surprise to anyone who reads Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, her unflinching, open-hearted, beautifully told account of becoming one of the most consequential activists in America.

Burke was molested by a neighborhood boy in the Bronx when she was 7. Over the years, despite the presence of several loving adults in her life, Burke was repeatedly sexually assaulted. “I was a grown woman before I truly understood the word rape and was able to relate it to my experience,” she writes. “Language like rape, molestation, and abuse were foreign to me as a child. I had no definitions and no context. Nobody around me talked like that.”

In spite of her trauma, Burke writes with humor and gratitude about her experiences. She delves into the rich history of her family, led by a granddaddy who “believed in celebrating Blackness in as many ways as possible” and a mother who was a devout Catholic. In school, Burke was both academically gifted and an agitator who spent time in the principal’s office. A high school leadership program led Burke to Selma, Alabama, where she laid the groundwork for #MeToo after realizing there was an utter lack of programs to support and protect young women as they spoke their truth about sexual abuse.

Burke also writes honestly about her reaction to #MeToo becoming a viral phenomenon on social media in 2017, initially without her knowledge or participation. After spending more than a decade traveling around the country, conducting workshops and speaking on panels about surviving sexual assault, she worried social media would water down or misuse her work.

Ultimately Burke realized that “all the folks who were using the #metoo hashtag, and all the Hollywood actresses who came forward with their allegations, needed the same thing that the little Black girls in Selma, Alabama, needed—space to be seen and heard. They needed empathy and compassion and a path to healing.”

Unbound is not just a thoroughly engrossing read. It’s also an important book that helps us understand the woman who has been so influential as our country struggles to acknowledge women’s trauma.

In the audio edition of ‘Unbound,’ Tarana Burke’s story is rendered all the more potent by her confident voice.

Unbound is Tarana Burke’s unflinching, beautifully told account of founding the #MeToo movement and becoming one of the most consequential activists in America.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Travels With George

Review by Priscilla Kipp

As the familiar story goes, George Washington, the Revolutionary War’s iconic general, led the Colonies to an improbable victory over the crushing British monarchy and its oppressive taxation. But according to Nathaniel Philbrick in Travels With George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, Washington’s real challenges as a leader began after that. With abolitionists to the north, enslavers to the south and anti-Federalists everywhere (even in his own Cabinet), Washington set out just months after his 1789 inauguration on an uncomfortable, arduous tour of the shaky new union he felt compelled to unite.

In the late summer of 2018, in a time hardly less politically fraught, Philbrick, his wife and their “red bushy-tailed Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever,” Dora, embarked from Washington’s Mount Vernon to follow in the former president’s footsteps. Inspired by Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck—who wrote, “We do not take a trip; a trip takes us”—Philbrick expected “a journey of quirky and lighthearted adventure” that instead “proved more unsettling and more unexpected than I ever could have imagined.”

Read our starred review of the ‘Travels With George’ audiobook, narrated by the author.

Visiting the cities Washington once rode through on his white horse, or paraded through in a cream-colored carriage with two enslaved postillions, or strode into wearing a simple brown suit (the new president had a feel for political theater), Philbrick delivers the details. He explains how Washington became “the father of the American mule,” debunks myths about the first president’s wooden teeth and enriches facts with help from local archivists, librarians, curators, docents and even the descendants of those who were there. But Philbrick keeps one foot in, and a respectful perspective on, the present throughout, assessing hazards then—such as when Washington’s horses fell off a ferry—and now—such as when Philbrick’s own sailboat nearly capsized in a vicious storm on his way to Newport, Rhode Island.

When BookPage interviewed Philbrick in 2006 for Mayflower, his Pulitzer Prize history finalist, he said, “I think it’s really important that we see the past as a lived past rather than something that was fated to be.” With Travels With George, he succeeds again at this aim. Washington emerges as the complicated, flawed but no less heroic leader that his newborn country desperately needed. The quantity and quality of the details Philbrick gathers as he straddles past and present make this an extraordinary read.

As Nathaniel Philbrick retraces George Washington’s tour of the shaky new union, the first president emerges as a complicated, flawed but no less heroic leader.

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