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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 Ratline

In The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive, Philippe Sands asks a thorny question: Is a son’s love sufficient to redeem a monstrous father?

NonfictionHistory

The Mission

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

The possibility that other life could exist within our universe has been an underlying hope ever since humans started exploring the heavens. In his latest book, The Mission: A True Story, writer David W. Brown (Deep State) relates the novel story of Europa Clipper, the planned NASA mission to explore Jupiter's moon Europa, home to a saltwater ocean flowing beneath its icy exterior. Even though Europa is far from the sun, its salty subterranean sea is warmed by the forces of gravity, its orbital proximity to Jupiter and the interplay of nearby moons.

Brown cleverly sets the scene for this impressive initiative by weaving together the backstories of NASA scientists, past and present. He digs deep into the NASA vault, meticulously detailing the seemingly insurmountable odds these men and women have faced over the years, including a lack of funds and wavering levels of interest and support from both the public and various presidential administrations.

As a result, The Mission is as much about the people behind space exploration as it is about the science of distant moons. Brown spent seven years interviewing these folks, and it shows in the way he vividly captures the challenges, triumphs and disappointments they have confronted, including the 20 years it took to convince NASA to sanction Europa Clipper.

Brown's experience writing for publications such as The Atlantic, Scientific American and Smithsonian also shines through as he provides context about the vast distances involved in space travel and explains the hardcore science in layman’s terms while adding a humorous tone. He writes with descriptive prose, such as when he coins Earth’s beginning as “a swelling union of dust and hydrogen . . . its rapacious core inhaling everything available.”

To help readers navigate the who’s who and what’s what of NASA, Brown graciously includes a dramatis personae in the frontmatter, listing the major players and spacecrafts mentioned throughout this weighty tome. Combining science and technology with the emotional human experience, The Mission is a fresh look at the future of space exploration.

Combining science and technology with the emotional human experience, David W. Brown’s The Mission is a fresh look at the future of space exploration.

The Crown in Crisis

In The Crown in Crisis, historian and journalist Alexander Larman details one of the royal family’s biggest scandals: When King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in order to marry his lover, Wallis Simpson.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Nobody’s Normal

Review by Amy Scribner

From autism to anorexia, people with mental illnesses or neurodivergent brains have long experienced stigma. The extent of what they endure depends on their culture—for example, some Nepalis are placed in restraints, and some Americans are incarcerated when they should be in treatment—but for centuries, humans have placed less value on humans who need more help. In fact, mental illness categories were first invented in Europe during the industrial revolution, to separate those who were not productive workers.

“We’ve long idealized the autonomous individual, dignified those who produce the most capital, and stigmatized those who produce the least,” writes anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker. In the fascinating and illuminating Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness, Grinker explores the origins of this stigmatization.

Much of how Americans think about mental illness stems from the traumas of war and our nation’s woeful response to troops’ needs. At the beginning of World War II, the U.S. Army only had 35 psychiatrists, most of whom were doctors with minimal training in mental health. In 1973, Vietnam veterans began lobbying for more attention to their psychological needs, as they experienced homelessness, substance use disorder and depression.

Yet even as society began recognizing mental illness as a real issue, there remained significant controversy about how to treat it. Grinker recalls the grim midcentury period when a neurologist in Washington, D.C., performed thousands of lobotomies by inserting an ice pick into patients’ eye sockets. His patients included Rosemary Kennedy, who was institutionalized for the remainder of her life after this surgery.

Pharmaceuticals have, of course, helped individuals with mental illness live fulfilling and stable lives, and Grinker explores how use of drugs and therapy has evolved over time. His compassion shines through in this meticulously researched and carefully written book, a passionate call for humans to think about how we view those with mental illness. “Of course, it is impossible to end stigma completely—every society can find something to demean and marginalize,” Grinker writes. “But we can still resist, name, mute, and shape it. Stigma is not a thing but a process, and we can change its course.”

In the fascinating and illuminating Nobody’s Normal, Roy Richard Grinker explores the origins of the stigmatization of mental illness.
NonfictionSocial ScienceBusiness & Finance

Made in China

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Many Western consumers know that the cheap items we buy are made by people who are paid poorly. But fewer consumers know about the worshippers, political dissidents and others in China who are forced to make these items against their will.

In the fall of 2012, an Oregon mom was going through some Halloween decorations when something fell out of her package of styrofoam gravestones. It was a letter. She opened it up to find an anonymous plea asking the reader to report to a human rights organization about the Chinese forced labor camp where the decorations were made. Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods by Amelia Pang is the story of that forced labor camp and the man who wrote the letter.

His name was Sun Yi. He was once an employed and happily married man, but because he was a Falun Gong practitioner (a meditation practice that the Chinese government considers a cult), he was sent to a forced labor camp called Mashanjia. China calls these camps laogai—“reeducation through labor” or “reform through labor.” In laogai, prisoners are forced to make goods that are sold around the world. Yi was kept at Mashanjia for several years, making decorations for nearly 20 hours every single day.

Readers should be aware that horrific violence occurs throughout the book. Pang's reporting provides an unflinching glimpse into the human costs behind our cheap products, and those costs include sexual assault, torture, maiming and death. There are descriptions of the extensive torture Yi endured in the camp, as well as a chapter that deals with forced organ donation.

Prior knowledge about China is not needed to understand Made in China. The book is an excellent entry-level explanation of Chinese religious and political history, and how human rights abuses intersect with billion-dollar businesses. Pang connects the dots between globalization, Western consumption and sustainability to create a clear, cohesive picture of the problem, as well as of potential solutions.

Made in China is an excellent entry-level explanation of Chinese religious and political history, and how human rights abuses intersect with billion-dollar businesses.

Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires

Richard Bradford’s Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires is the third biography of Highsmith to emerge in recent years, and it is by far the most lurid. As is clear from the very first page, this is a biography that relishes in the worst that Highsmith thought, said and did.

NonfictionMemoir

Featherhood

Review by Alice Cary

In folklore, magpies are said to bring bad luck, but that certainly wasn’t the case for Charlie Gilmour. An abandoned baby bird helped this young British author finally exorcise the long shadow cast by his biological father, who abandoned him as an infant. Gilmour's remarkable memoir, Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie, explains in lively, compelling detail how caring for this bird prepared him to become a father himself.

With razor-sharp wit and storytelling, Gilmour interweaves the story of this bird, whom he and his partner named Benzene, with that of his past. His biological father, Heathcote Williams, was a poet, actor and activist very much in the public eye. After Heathcote left, Gilmour's mother eventually married Pink Floyd musician David Gilmour, who adopted Charlie. Despite the fact that Gilmour ended up having what he calls “a dream childhood,” thoughts of the elusive Heathcote haunted him. “Heathcote has lived and breathed in my head all my life,” he writes, “a sort of animated scarecrow constructed from secondhand stories and snatched encounters.” Heathcote, who was an amateur magician, would occasionally appear in his son’s life, only to vanish once again. When Gilmour was an adult, he spent a little time with Heathcote, who was by that point approaching death, and Gilmour paints a searingly honest portrait of this culmination of their fraught relationship.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Charlie Gilmour, author of Featherhood.

Gilmour freely admits that he was an unlikely candidate to become a wildlife rescuer, writing, “Even healthy animals haven’t had the best of luck in my hands.” Nonetheless, the tiny, ailing Benzene grew up and thrived—while proceeding to take over the household. Undeterred by Benzene’s free rein—not to mention her droppings—Gilmour became completely smitten by, if not obsessed with, the magpie, even holding birthday parties for her with invited guests. Benzene's life "seems more akin to that of a medieval prince than to that of a bird," Gilmour writes, "filled as it is with music, flowers, shiny baubles, and meat.”

Benzene became so tame that Gilmour feared releasing her into the wild, and at the end of the book he cautions readers not to follow his example but to consult wildlife rescue organizations instead. Nonetheless, he reveled in the experience, concluding, “Caring for this creature this past year has brought me out of myself, made me see it’s not just catastrophe that lurks in the unknown; there’s beauty to be found there too.”

Worthy comparisons can be made between Featherhood and Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk, and Gilmour was also influenced by Philip Roth’s memoir Patrimony. Gilmour’s upbringing could hardly be more different from Tara Westover’s, but like Educated, Featherhood represents the debut of a talented young writer reckoning with an unusual past.

In folklore, magpies are said to bring bad luck, but that certainly wasn’t the case for Charlie Gilmour. An abandoned baby bird helped this young British author finally exorcise the long shadow cast by his biological father, who abandoned him as an infant.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Crooked Path to Abolition

Review by Roger Bishop

Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist. Instead, as noted Civil War historian James Oakes believes, Lincoln’s evolving views on racial equality were based on an antislavery view of the Constitution. According to such a view, the text of the Constitution refers to people who were enslaved as “persons” and never as property, making it (with the exception of two carefully defined rights of enslavers) an antislavery document. By the time he was inaugurated, Lincoln had gone on record to support the major principles of such an interpretation, and now Oakes explores this subject in his compelling and detailed The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution.

Oakes demonstrates that the goal of all antislavery politics through the Civil War was to use federal power to prevent new territories from becoming slave states and allow existing slave states to do away with slavery on their own. Slavery was abolished, Oakes shows, because the Civil War radically accelerated the decadeslong shift in power between slave and free states. Lincoln’s object in emancipating enslaved people, as important as that act was, was not an end in itself as much as a means to pressure the states to abolish slavery individually.

Lincoln spoke eloquently of a society in which everyone had a “fair chance in the race of life,” but on several occasions he made disturbing public comments that raised questions about his views on racial equality. In 1858, he specified four areas in which he did not advocate equality: voting, serving on juries, holding elective office and intermarrying between Black and white people. All of those areas were regulated by the states during this age of “constitutionalism,” during which major issues were debated in constitutional terms.

This relatively short book is richly rewarding and helps us see the full context of political decisions that put slavery, as Lincoln said, on “a course of ultimate extinction.”

The Crooked Path to Abolition is richly rewarding and helps us see the full context of political decisions that put slavery, as Lincoln said, on “a course of ultimate extinction.”

The Berlin Shadow

In 1939, Hans Lichtenstein’s mother put him on a train from Berlin to England. In 2015, he and his son Jonathan returned to Berlin in search of peace.
Business & Finance

Drug Use for Grown-Ups

Review by Sarojini Seupersad

As more and more states across the country legalize marijuana, and as popular opinion toward the war on drugs sours, Dr. Carl L. Hart’s new book arrives at the perfect time. In Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, Hart makes a thoughtful and persuasive (if controversial) case that everything we’ve been taught about drug use is wrong and that it’s high time we legalize all drugs and consider a more humane way forward.

Hart, a scientist and a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, is an expert in drug abuse and addiction. He’s also a recreational drug user. Through careful research and illuminating personal stories, Hart dispels many drug myths and shows us that happiness can be found through responsible drug use, just as through drinking alcohol responsibly. He argues that if we truly believe in liberty as established in the Declaration of Independence, then the pursuit of this particular happiness should also be part of our protected civil liberties.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: We chatted with Dr. Carl L. Hart about the war on drugs, the stigma of being a drug user and the pursuit of happiness in the United States.

Even though we mostly hear about the dangers of drugs, most drug users are functional adults who experience no negative effects from their drug use, according to Hart’s research. He also posits that illegal drugs are dangerous because they are illegal, not because they are inherently dangerous substances. What makes a drug truly dangerous is its unregulated quality and potency, as well as ignorance about mixing drugs. Hart laments the opioid crisis in his book, while arguing that most overdoses and deaths related to drug use wouldn’t occur if the person knew what they were taking. He also suggests that opioid deaths and other overdoses would decrease if people had access to regulated opioid products, rather than forms of the drug that are laced with powerful and sometimes deadly additives.

Hart’s scientific training and personal use of drugs has informed his research and opinions, but the book is also shaped by his experience as a Black man. Although drug use is popular across all races, Black people—and Black men in particular—have been penalized for possessing and selling drugs at far higher rates than any other group. Hart convincingly asserts that this discriminatory enforcement of drug laws has had a more devastating effect on Black communities than drug use itself.

Drug Use for Grown-Ups argues that it makes no sense to continue the war on drugs, which has failed to put even a dent in the illegal drug trade. Throughout history, people have always taken drugs, and they are a part of our society. This book’s soundly researched views on a safer approach to drug use and regulation will have many readers rethinking their assumptions.

In Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, Dr. Carl L. Hart makes a thoughtful and persuasive (if controversial) case that everything we’ve been taught about drug use is wrong and that it’s high time we legalize all drugs and consider a more humane way forward.

The New Climate War

In The New Climate War, Michael E. Mann argues for the necessity and possibility of aggressive, systemic changes. It’s a bracing read—both eye-opening and even fun.

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