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The Crazies

Who owns the wind? A fifth-generation rancher and billionaire go to court over the matter in Amy Gamerman’s captivating The Crazies.
NonfictionScience

The Forgotten Sense

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Jonas Olofsson, professor and director of the Sensory Cognitive Interaction Lab at Stockholm University, is a passionate olfactory advocate who believes “the sense of smell, often unnoticed, influences so many of the most important parts of our lives.” In The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell—and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose, he offers a fascinating overview of this understudied, underappreciated sense and makes a convincing case for bringing our noses to the forefront of research, culture and everyday life.

Conventional wisdom indicates animals are superior sniffers, but at the 2015 Association for Chemoreception Sciences annual meeting, “the old myth was blown out of the water,” Olofsson writes. “Humans were more sensitive than other animals to the vast majority of odor molecules.” Certainly, “Dogs are the olfactory kings of the animal kingdom,” but “we humans actually perform so well in the smell tests that we can even give dogs a run for their money.”

The author also explores culturally prominent scents like Sweden’s “polarizing” sour herring and durian, “the stinking fruit, or as it is called in Southeast Asia, the king of fruits.” He looks at aroma-centric professions (chef, sommelier, perfumer) and pulls back the curtain on scent marketing. Ever enjoyed florals in a hotel or followed your nose to a Cinnabon? Oloffson adroitly explains the corporate strategies that rely on an aroma’s ability to trigger memories and emotions and influence our choices.

In a section on health, he notes that, as for 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic “might have left 20 million people with a permanently impaired sense of smell” and discusses the physical and psychological effects of anosmia, from loss of appetite to a “strong sense of loneliness when you can no longer share the olfactory worlds of others.”

All the more reason, then, to consider his recommendation for brain-boosting “smell training” that could improve quality of life for professional sniffers and regular folks alike. After all, Oloffson writes, “Every smell is an intersection between our thoughts and our emotions.” The Forgotten Sense is an excellent, enthusiastic guide through “the little-known depths of scent and how it shapes us.”

The Forgotten Sense is a passionate, enthusiastic guide to learning how the understudied, underappreciated sense of smell shapes us.

Matty Matheson

Matty Matheson’s new cookbook highlights the chef’s (and The Bear actor’s) unfussy nature and enthusiasm for no-frills tasty food.
NonfictionSocial ScienceSelf-Help

Reclaiming the Black Body

Review by Natalia Berry

Reclaiming the Black Body: Nourishing the Home Within explores how eating disorders, or eating imbalances, as author Alishia McCullough aptly calls them, flourish under white, Western capitalist power structures, and have a unique impact on Black and brown women. McCullough investigates the origins of our negative relationships with food and our bodies, and shares the tools we can employ to reach healing transformation.

McCullough, a licensed clinical mental health therapist and founder of Black and Embodied Counseling and Consulting, is profoundly engaging and empathetic. “Embodiment,” the core principle of McCullough’s counseling philosophy, means self-acceptance that stems from connecting the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of ourselves. She offers new language for clinical terms, writing, “It is not that our eating is disordered, it’s that our relationship to our bodies and how we have come to nourish ourselves has become fragmented and created imbalance within us.” She’s specifically concerned with how historical forces have caused this fragmentation. For example, body-hatred as experienced by Black people can be traced to chattel slavery, lack of land ownership and food scarcity; one way to process this is through somatic therapy, which McCullough defines as “a body-centered approach that examines the mind-body connection.”

This book serves as a much-needed foil to the misinformation and stigma against fat people, especially Black and Indigenous women in larger bodies. Along with sharing her own experiences in these areas, McCullough covers subjects like patriarchal indoctrination, body-shaming, fatphobia and Black beauty standards. As much as Reclaiming the Black Body is a historical and sociocultural study, it’s also a deeply insightful guide for people of color struggling with body image, self-worth and confusion around what is healthy. It takes sharp aim at diet culture, self-imposed eating restrictions and so-called “health journeys” popular in Western society. In guided practice segments at the end of each chapter, McCullough turns to the reader and asks questions to help them reflect on how food and body insecurity have played a role in their lives.

McCullough specifically addresses Black women throughout: “You are dealing with a normal adaptive response to surviving in a system that was invented to deem your existence as something that should not have survived past the plantation,” she insists, adding, “I repeat: It is not your fault.” Innovative and groundbreaking, Reclaiming the Black Body asks us to consider the ways in which we are disconnected from ourselves and why. Embodiment is a lifelong revolutionary act that requires support and self-compassion. McCullough assures us that it’s worth it, and there is hope and healing ahead.

Alishia McCullough’s groundbreaking Reclaiming the Black Body takes a sharp aim at diet culture, providing a much-needed foil to the misinformation and stigma about fat people and a deeply insightful guide for women of color struggling with body image.
NonfictionMemoir

Lost Found Kept

Review by Amy Scribner

As someone who could only watch the lurid reality TV show Hoarders through my fingers, I approached Lost Found Kept with trepidation. The A&E show’s dramatization of mental illness and exploitation of its subjects is disturbing, to say the least. So, three hundred pages describing the layers of accumulated possessions and trash in one woman’s home? Can one read through their fingers?

But Lost Found Kept is no Hoarders on the page. Author and clinical psychologist Deborah Derrickson Kossmann has created a beautiful, piercing and empathetic—if at times tough to read—memoir in which she reckons with her chaotic childhood: a deeply flawed mother and an abusive stepfather who eventually exited their lives in a haze of mental illness and alcohol.

When Kossmann and her sister realize their aging mother is no longer able to care for herself, they finally visit their childhood home to prepare it for sale. The sisters have long suspected the house had fallen into disrepair, but their mother insisted they not come past the curb. When Kossmann opens the door, she understands why. “There is no floor, there’s kind of a sloping step made of things: bags, unidentifiable solidified objects that are about a foot tall,” she writes. “It feels like two worlds have collided in a planetary disaster, and I’m standing in the middle of the rubble.”

Kossmann and her husband wear long sleeves, pants, hiking boots and respirator masks. They spray themselves with insect repellant and enter what they have darkly begun calling the Hoarder House. Alongside her sister and brother-in-law, they spend weeks unearthing old family treasures strewn about in unthinkable conditions. Yet even as she sweats her way through the project in the late summer humidity, raging at her mother for letting things get so bad, Kossmann shares clear-eyed reflections on her conflicting feelings about the woman who raised her. The most remarkable thing among many remarkable things in Lost Found Kept is Kossmann’s ability to acknowledge the humanity and goodness in a woman who has brought her so much pain, in part by learning how the pattern of mother-daughter trauma started before her birth.

“From mother to daughter, the anger and pain from your mother, it’s like a stone in your heart,” a family therapist tells Kossmann’s mother. And while that stone can never be truly dissolved, through her poignant memoir, Kossmann provides a sketch for anyone seeking to forgive and move forward.

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann reckons with family trauma and her mother’s hoarding disorder in her piercing, empathetic debut memoir, Lost Found Kept.

Icons of Style

You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more complete history of everyday fashion than Josh Sims’ Icons of Style.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

In Open Contempt

Review by Kelly Blewett

Who are American heroes? What are American values? How do the answers to these questions change with time and perspective? Irwin Weathersby Jr. takes up these fundamental issues of our times in his indispensable In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space, which examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma, both collectively and individually.

Weathersby opens the book in New Orleans, just after Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s 2017 fiat that Confederate statues be removed from public spaces. He visits the sites of these absences and talks with people there: unaware tourists, gloomy white supremacists, a man who paused to see whether his dog would be willing to pee on a pedestal that used to elevate the figure of Jefferson Davis. Elsewhere, sites attempt to tell a more complete history, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which offers a tour about the lives of Jefferson’s over 600 slaves. Weathersby also visits sites of counternarratives, including the partially completed Crazy Horse memorial that stands in tension with Mount Rushmore, and Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, a bronze statue of a contemporary Black man atop a horse in the style of Civil War monuments. Weathersby explores public spaces from Louisiana to Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, New York and beyond, and his vivid prose will likely have you searching online to see what he describes.

Weathersby also examines the history of the public spaces he encountered throughout his life as a Black person from Louisiana. Weathersby’s longing for education led him to Morehouse, a historically Black college in Atlanta whose campus showcases inspiring sculptures created by Ed Dwight, the first Black candidate for NASA’s astronaut program, whose rejection by NASA spurred him toward the arts. Learning about Dwight’s life showed Weathersby “how our lives are often unconsciously shaped by unseen sculptors of the physical and divine.” The New Orleans street where Weathersby grew up was one of dozens in the city named after enslavers. His family home was demolished after Hurricane Katrina. Monuments, Weathersby writes, “may appear to underscore the past—and they do this too—but in the process, they suppress other events and stories that shaped the commemorated life and space.”

In Open Contempt asks the reader to explore their own landscapes, and Weathersby knows what they will find: many traces, both obvious and subtle, of white supremacy. “Go looking for white supremacy, find it everywhere. Go looking for nothing, find white supremacy everywhere.” In this impeccable book, Weathersby exhorts readers to pay attention, and he offers his own story of looking so that we can see—and confront—our history alongside him.

Irvin Weathersby Jr.’s indispensable In Open Contempt examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma.

How to Be Enough

Ellen Hendriksen’s chatty, accessible How to Be Enough shows how to quit being your own toughest critic, and is a great addition to the self-help bookshelf.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Embers of the Hands

Review by Alden Mudge

There is much that glitters in Eleanor Barraclough’s learned excavation of Viking history, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. No surprise there. Her title comes from a metaphor for gold found in a Norse kenning, a type of figure of speech. She herself is a witty, sometimes earthy writer and a wiz at popularizing scholarly pursuits. (In 2013, she was named one of 10 BBC New Generation Thinkers for her ability to turn her research into programs for broadcast).

After an introduction with a sketch of Viking history, she takes up matters of love, belief, home, slavery, play, physical life and travel. By “travel,” she does not mean the oft-told tales of raiding parties of Viking barbarians like the one that fell upon the English island monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 C.E., launching, some say, the Viking Age. Instead she means “a web of connections that spanned cultures, countries and continents,” including exchanges with Eastern Europe and Turkey and the colonization of Iceland and Greenland.

Her interest is in the experience of common Vikings, the “everyday humans who fell between the cracks of history.” She tells their stories through well-crafted riffs on bone fragments, game pieces, discarded implements, farmstead scraps of material and other detritus that remain centuries after their deaths. A stick etched with runes informs us that a woman named Gyda wants her man home from the tavern. The surprising pervasiveness of combs and corroborating travelers’ accounts let us know that Vikings were unexpectedly well groomed. Other objects enable a reasonable reconstruction of what an older man in a brown woolen tunic looked like. Still others suggest the desperate hardships of living on remote farmsteads in Greenland as the climate changed and it became too cold to sustain farming.

Embers of the Hands is a stunning and perplexing adventure. Stunning because we have these sharp splinters from the past that tell us something about Vikings. Perplexing because our knowledge is so incomplete, so unstable, so subject to revision and change. With a revolutionary sort of scholarly caution, Barraclough even questions the boundaries of the so-called Viking Age; she proposes here three alternative beginnings and three alternative endings to the era. Instead of being a canal with compartmentalized locks, history “is more like a great untamed river,” she writes. Some readers will surely seek higher ground away from the torrents of time. Others will plunge into the deep.

The stunning, adventurous Embers of the Hands examines the lives of everyday Vikings who otherwise might have been lost to history.

Dirtbag Queen

In his moving, hilarious coming-of-age memoir, Andy Corren eulogizes his delightfully crass “Jewish lady redneck” mother.
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

Elements

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Stephen Ellcock has been described as an “image alchemist,” which is a term that may sound vague or even nonsensical until you thumb through his tightly focused treasuries of esoteric imagery. Then, the term makes perfect sense. Following The Cosmic Dance and Underworlds, Elements: Chaos, Order and the Five Elemental Forces is the third title in Ellcock’s trilogy of books that explore the natural world. Using the ancient Greek categorization of the five natural elements—air, fire, earth, water and celestial aether—as a springboard, Ellcock has compiled a cabinet of curiosities out of images from across the globe, from ancient to contemporary times. It’s a vast assortment that maintains a singular vision: that elemental forces are the cornerstone of all existence. As Ellcock writes in the book’s introduction, “the five classical elements remain universal symbols, omnipresent archetypes embedded deep within the collective unconscious and the popular imagination.” A photograph of the sea by artist Wolfgang Tillmans makes a new kind of sense when viewed in proximity to Eugene Delacroix’s 1853 painting Christ Asleep During the Tempest. Illustrations from a 17th-century Japanese fireworks catalog take on a different meaning when paired with an 18th-century Indian painting of women lighting fireworks during Diwali, and offer another kind of insight when positioned next to an 1887 photograph of a building on fire. Elements truly is visual alchemy, and will be a treat for anyone who is interested in the intersection of art, science, religion and culture.

Stephen Ellcock returns with his signature visual alchemy in a compendium of images related to the elements of the natural world.

Cold Kitchen

In her thoughtful culinary memoir, Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden visits far-flung destinations and returns home to cook their food.

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