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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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Negative Space

Lilly Dancyger sets out to uncover the whole truth about her late father’s art, relationships and addiction, no matter how painful.
NonfictionBiographyAmerican History

Lincoln in Private

Review by Roger Bishop

Five hours after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, his son Robert Todd Lincoln wired David Davis, one of the president’s closest friends and an associate justice of the Supreme Court, to come to Washington “to take charge of my father’s affairs.” At the same time, Lincoln’s two devoted secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, assembled the president’s papers, including Lincoln’s private notes to himself, called “fragments.” In Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President, Lincoln scholar Ronald C. White selects 12 of the 109 known fragments, places them in their historical context and analyzes their representations of the president’s life and thoughts.

Almost every fragment begins with a problem Lincoln was facing, and it’s fascinating to see how he grappled with each one. A few fragments may have been first drafts for speeches, but most are reflections that never reappeared elsewhere. Among the issues Lincoln examined are slavery, the birth of the Republican Party, God’s role in the Civil War and how to be a good lawyer.

Lincoln frequently tried to see things from his opponents’ points of view. In a fragment on slavery, Lincoln does this by giving three justifications for being pro-slavery. Then he shows the basic contradictions within each reason and demonstrates how race, intellect or interest could easily be turned around to make the enslaver the enslaved.

Lincoln wrestled with his decision to join the Republican Party. As a longtime Whig, he questioned the meaning, mission and challenges of the new party. To sort out his thoughts, his fragments reveal that he turned to the U.S. Constitution and the historical record, two sources he often used when analyzing a problem.

A fragment on the Civil War begins, “The will of God prevails.” Both the Union and the Confederacy claimed God was on their side, but that couldn’t be true. As Lincoln meditates on how God acts in history, he writes that “it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.”

These glimpses of Lincoln’s thinking offer us a fresh way to view him. White’s commentary is excellent, and anyone interested in Lincoln will want to read this book.

In a must-read book for anyone interested in Abraham Lincoln, a scholar analyzes the president’s most personal notes to himself.

Holding Back the River

Tyler J. Kelley examines the delicate dance of commerce and nature on America's waterways—and presents some creative solutions to maintain the equilibrium.
NonfictionEssays

Goodbye, Again

Review by Kelly Blewett

What does it mean to find work that you love? To make a home in one city only to move somewhere else for a job? To be friends—real friends—in adulthood? Jonny Sun approaches these questions in his new book, Goodbye, Again. Composed of dozens of short essays and illustrations, Sun’s captivating and immersive book invites readers to listen in as he thinks aloud on the page. 

This book is at once sad and hopeful. It’s sad about the cultural pressure to be constantly working. It’s sad about the inevitability of change. It’s sad about the many ways we say goodbye to each other, whether ending a visit or moving away. But it’s also attentive to life and movement in unlikely places. For example, Sun contemplates house plants—their small leaves, tilting to water and warmth. They need the right kind of care for life to take root, and even when a plant seems to die, it can in fact be growing in a different direction.

Through descriptions like these, the reader feels Sun’s desire for renewal. The book is hopeful as it shows how little moments from the past, something as simple as cooking an egg, can reverberate in the present. In this way, we never really say goodbye. We are still together, still remembering each other in small daily ways.

To spend time with this book is to spend time in the private world of a creative, sensitive person who finds life inviting, beautiful and rich, but also overwhelming, scary and exhausting. Goodbye, Again acknowledges the crushing constancy and anxiety of work, but it also celebrates the joy of creating something where nothing was before—the pleasure of being totally immersed in work and the way that work can make us come alive. By acknowledging both sides of this reality in gentle and specific ways, Sun ultimately gives his readers license to experience their own contradictions and to be fully human.

To spend time with Goodbye, Again is to spend time in the private world of a creative, sensitive person who finds life inviting, beautiful and rich.

Facing the Mountain

Most of the Japanese American patriots who formed the 442nd Infantry Regiment are gone, but their stories live on in this empathetic tribute to their courage.
NonfictionTrue CrimeMemoir

Everything Is Fine

Review by Alice Cary

On July 24, 2014, while experiencing schizophrenic psychosis, 23-year-old Tim Granata murdered his beloved mother. Although Tim’s mental health had been declining for several years, the family’s worry was that Tim would take his own life, not harm others.

Soon afterward, an acquaintance wrote to Tim’s brother, Vince: “I hope you will eventually be able to find some peace and feel whole again, though that might be your life’s work.” Despite the enormity of the task, Vince Granata bravely and lovingly chronicles his family’s story—before, during and after the tragedy—in his riveting memoir, Everything Is Fine. 

Tim’s illness “began as a whisper” late in high school and during his first year of college, but it slowly took over his life. Repeated hospitalizations and therapy didn’t help, and he refused medication. Because of his background as a champion wrestler in high school, Tim lifted weights to try and calm the cacophony of his increasingly psychotic thoughts.

Granata shut down after his mother’s murder, unable to think of her without remembering her horrific death. Plagued by nightmares, he avoided sleep and turned to caffeine and alcohol. Still, he was wracked by magical thinking, wondering if he might have been able to save his mother had he been present instead of 1,000 miles away tutoring children in the Dominican Republic.

Granata writes with compassion, reflection and unsparing honesty of not only his brother’s metamorphosis but also his own transformation after the crime—how he was finally able to find his way back to his life, memories and love of his brother. Some of the book’s most memorable scenes take place during his visits with Tim in Connecticut’s Whiting Forensic Hospital, where Tim was sent to be “restored to competency” so that he could eventually be tried for his crime.

Anyone trying to better understand the cruel grip of psychosis will learn much from Everything Is Fine. As Granata concludes, “We can only conquer terror when we drag what scares us into the light. We only understand horror when we think about what we know, when we look at all the pieces.”

On July 24, 2014, Vince Granata’s 23-year-old brother, while experiencing schizophrenic psychosis, murdered their beloved mother.

Everybody

Olivia Laing casts a breathtakingly, ambitiously wide net, and the stakes of her subject—freedom for all bodies—could not be higher.
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

Crying in H Mart

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

“Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” From the moment we read the opening sentence of Michelle Zauner’s poignant memoir, Crying in H Mart, we’re hooked. It’s a rare gift; Zauner perfectly distills the palpable ache for her mother and wraps her grief in an aromatic conjuring of her mother’s presence.

The daughter of a white father and Korean mother in a rural area outside of Eugene, Oregon, Zauner felt closest to her mother when shopping for and eating food together. She shares fond memories of them prowling the aisles of H Mart, the Asian grocery store and food court where she discovered kimchi, rice cakes and tteokguk, a beef and rice cake soup. Growing up, Zauner found that her mother could be distant, but she soon learned that “food was how my mother expressed her love.”

As a girl, Zauner traveled with her mother to Seoul, South Korea, where Zauner met her aunts and grandmother and celebrated life and family with hearty meals. When Zauner was in her 20s, she moved from Philadelphia back home to Oregon to take care of her mother as she died of cancer. As Zauner recounts her mother’s slow, painful decline, she recalls the highs and lows of their life together, often in stories of meals shared with friends and family. After her mother’s death in 2014, Zauner struggled to accept it. She writes, “Maybe we hadn’t tried hard enough, hadn’t believed enough, hadn’t force-fed her enough blue-green algae.”

Crying in H Mart hardly ends in defeat, however. As difficult as her grief is, Zauner celebrates her mother in the very place they shared their most intimate joys, losses and pleasures: H Mart.

Michelle Zauner perfectly distills the palpable ache for her late mother and wraps her grief in an aromatic conjuring of her mother’s presence.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

Out of the Shadows

Review by Anna Christensen

Spirit mediums have been capturing imaginations since the rise of spiritualism in the 19th century. A veiled woman commanding the attention of a room, speaking in the voices of the beloved dead as tables tilt, loud mysterious knocks echo from the corners and unlikely objects materialize out of thin air—such a woman is either an ethereal figure from a ghost story, or she is a charlatan, a silky smooth con artist who exploits the grief of others.

But what if there were a third option, one of revolution and rebellion? In Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, Emily Midorikawa unveils the triumphant, tragic and deeply unconventional lives of six of the Victorian era’s best known spirit mediums.

Midorikawa roots her story in both the history of spiritualism and the powerlessness of Victorian women like the Fox sisters—Leah, Maggie and Kate—who were left to grasp for influence in seemingly manipulative ways. As the book proceeds through the extraordinary lives of Emma Harding, Victoria Woodhull and Georgina Weldon, we witness women masterfully wielding the public’s fascination with the revelations of the dead. They capitalized on this fascination not only to improve their own lives but also to uplift other disenfranchised people across the United States and Great Britain. Strident orations on abolition, women’s rights within marriage and suffrage, which would have been ridiculous coming from a constricted and disregarded 19th-century woman, suddenly gained gravitas when spoken by the all-knowing dead.

Midorikawa breathes life into these long-ago women in ways that make them feel contemporary despite their extraordinary circumstances and distance in time. Her description of Harding enduring an incident of stalking resonates with chilling familiarity. You’ll feel these women’s frustration and conviction, and you’ll cheer at their progressive empowerment.

It’s remarkable that none of these women seems disingenuous. Throughout Out of the Shadows, they occupy a liminal space between genuine belief in supernatural forces and the ingenious ways they used those forces to their own ends. By the book’s end, it no longer matters whether you believe these six remarkable spirit mediums were hoaxes or not; you’ll certainly believe in them.

Emily Midorikawa unveils the triumphant, tragic and deeply unconventional lives of six of the Victorian era’s best known spirit mediums.

Why Peacocks?

Have you ever thought, What my household needs is a few peacocks? Me neither. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying this entertaining, sweet and often funny book.
NonfictionAudioSocial Science

The Sum of Us

Review by Norah Piehl

A wide-ranging examination of racial inequity in America, written by the former head of a progressive think tank, might not be the most obvious audiobook choice for your next road trip. But to write The Sum of Us (11 hours), Heather McGhee traveled across the country—from coastal Washington and rural Kentucky to an evangelical church in Chicago and a Nissan plant in Mississippi—to understand the roots of white America’s zero-sum attitude toward racial equity and how this mistaken belief system damages everyone.

McGhee, who narrates the audiobook, brings the same thoughtfulness to her reading as to her writing. Listeners can hear the despair in her voice as she describes the atrocities of white plantation owners and the devastation caused by predatory housing lenders, as well as her hopefulness when she introduces listeners to coalitions succeeding in confronting voter suppression. From health care policy and environmental justice to the ongoing legacy of segregation, McGhee places urgent topics in a new framework, supported by research and illustrated by stories of Black and white Americans from across the country.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of the print version of The Sum of Us.

Heather McGhee, who narrates the audiobook for The Sum of Us, brings the same thoughtfulness to her reading as to her writing

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