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NonfictionDesign

Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Chop Fry Watch Learn

Michelle T. King’s Chop Fry Watch Learn is an engrossing biography of famed cookbook author Fu Pei-mei.
NonfictionHistory

Chamber Divers

Review by Anne Bartlett

June 1939: British naval sub HMS Thetis sinks in sea trials. Ninety-nine people die. August 1942: Allied forces raid the coastal town of Dieppe in German-occupied France. Thousands are killed, captured or wounded, in part because coastal scouting was minimal. September 1942: British-manned torpedoes attack German battleship Tirpitz. All crewmen are captured or killed. Catastrophes have a way of concentrating the mind: Do it right next time. Luckily for the Allies in World War II, a group of scientists in London risked their lives in secret pressure chamber “dives” to give future underwater and amphibious missions better odds.

Author Rachel Lance is a biomedical engineer and blast injury specialist who has worked on underwater equipment for the U.S. Navy, making her unusually suited to unveil the forgotten story of these scientists in Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever.

Their project at University College London was led by J.B.S. Haldane, a brilliant, annoying eccentric who hired scientists shunned by others, among them Jewish refugees, women and Communist sympathizers. As the bombs in the Blitz exploded around them, these scientists subjected themselves again and again to dangerous pressure in chambers that simulated deep underwater dives in order to design more effective breathing equipment for submarine crews, frogmen and torpedo riders.

Relying on their experiment notes, Lance takes us inside the metal tubes where scientists suffered life-threatening injuries. She explores their backgrounds and relationships, which included a love affair between Haldane and research colleague Helen Spurway. And she ranges throughout combat zones to show us the dangers of underwater action, from the perspective of individual combatants on both sides. But Lance’s singular strength is her lucid explanations of the complex science behind the experiments, making it accessible to untrained readers. Lance also uncovers the combination of official secrecy, prejudice against outsiders and bureaucratic skullduggery that obscured this story until now.

Lance begins her book with the Dieppe disaster and ends with D-Day—an Allied triumph that might have gone badly wrong without the chamber divers’ dedication and resilience. Chamber Divers is a necessary reminder that not all war heroes were on the front lines.

In Chamber Divers, Rachel Lance uncovers the Navy scientists who risked their lives to improve the odds of underwater and amphibious missions in World War II.
NonfictionMemoir

Another Word for Love

Review by Natalia Berry

“They say love is patient and kind, but they never say what else is true: that love is also anxious and fearful, desperate and forever on unsure footing,” award-winning journalist Carvell Wallace writes in his debut memoir, Another Word for Love. Known best for his intimate celebrity profiles, Wallace now turns his pen to exploring his own childhood as the son of a single mother. With honesty and candor, Wallace reveals how the poverty and abuse of his youth impacted his views on masculinity, desire, sex and love. Another Word for Love is an excavation of his personal history that asks and answers questions about living and loving as a queer, Black man.

Wallace is a brilliant storyteller and masterful student in the language of love. But what about the things that get in the way of loving and being loved? Wallace has a lot to say here, too. For many Black Americans, like Wallace’s complicated mother, the act of loving is often superseded by the pursuit of survival. As Wallace becomes a parent himself, his essays chronicle the history of police brutality and racial violence in America, frequently asking, How can we teach our children to love in the face of fear and death? It’s here, in Wallace’s frank examinations of family and community building, that his writing truly dazzles.

Wallace’s tumultuous childhood meant he was always on the move, setting down in cities across the country without planting roots. Throughout his travels, he traversed different parts of his identity and uncovered messy, tender truths about himself and other men. From discussing the importance of Solange’s When I Get Home to unpacking letters between Pat Parker and Audre Lorde, navigating a kink space and sharing harrowing stories about the harm he’s caused others, Wallace’s prose is always sharp, witty and honest. Ultimately, though, Another Word for Love offers this radical declaration: Pursuing love is an act of defiance. No matter what trauma or complexities fill your story, love is all of our birthrights.

In Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace’s dazzling debut memoir, love is an act of defiance.
NonfictionMemoir

The House of Hidden Meanings

Review by Priscilla Kipp

RuPaul, drag superstar and pop culture icon, has been busy on his lifelong way to stardom—a destiny, he reveals, foretold by a psychic before he was born. He has been an actor, producer, author, model, dancer, singer, songwriter, media host, business mogul and creator of the multi-Emmy-winning reality TV series, “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” He has worked his way from unhoused nomad to celebrity star, including an actual one on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now 63, RuPaul turns his penetrating gaze inward, looking for deeper meanings within his journey. In The House of Hidden Meanings, he shares all with a tender clarity that renders him unforgettably human. 

Ernestine Charles chose her only son’s name because, she said, there was no one else “alive with a name like that.” Raising four children in San Diego after her abusive husband left, she was “always in a bad mood.” RuPaul entertained her with “imitations, bits, sketches, little scraps of makeshift theater. . . . I put her powder on and whipped a towel around my head as if it were a lustrous head of hair,” he recalls. As a teenager, he escaped to Atlanta and eventually worked his way to New York City. Club scenes kept him performing and partying. He always acted like a star, he says, because he knew he was one.

RuPaul paints wildly vivid city scenes: gritty New York, Atlanta alive with punk and drag, and San Diego, where his complicated childhood haunts him still. Relationships were often sidetracked by too many drugs and risky sex, but he somehow survived, always believing in his destiny—and in drag. His 1993 breakthrough video, “Supermodel (You Better Work),” turned gay stereotypes on their heads and showcased an exuberance that appealed to both the mainstream and the LGBTQ+ community.

Here, we don’t find his rise to fame, the lead-up to “Drag Race” or even his activism and philanthropic work. That information about the often-profiled star is readily available elsewhere.  The House of Hidden Meanings is about beginnings. RuPaul reveals the inner work of healing from past wounds and repairing his relationship with himself, and his memoir celebrates the potential for reinvention. “In a system where things insisted on being one or the other, drag was everything,” he writes. “That made it magic.”

In his refreshing memoir, drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul tells his life story with a tender clarity that renders a larger-than-life figure unforgettably human.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Prescription for Pain

Review by Annie Harvieux

In 2007, doctor Paul Volkman was charged with illegally distributing opioids via pain clinics in southern Ohio, leading to the overdose deaths of over a dozen patients. Journalist Philip Eil was drawn to the case because of a personal connection to the 60-year-old doctor: Volkman was a med school classmate of Eil’s father. Relying on over a decade of research, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer” retraces Volkman’s steps from the prestigious University of Chicago Medical School to the cash-only pain clinics in rural Ohio where Volkman liberally prescribed opiates and other controlled substances during the early-aughts opioid boom. “What on earth had happened in the thirty-some-odd years between these two facts?” Eil asks in his prologue. “I found the mystery irresistible.”

Eil leans into the contradictions of Volkman’s world, starting with his decline from promising honors student and med school grad to unhappy pediatrician facing malpractice lawsuits that pushed him to post-industrial Ohio, where he made a fresh start building a pain clinic empire at the expense of rural communities while arousing the suspicions of pharmacists and authorities alike. After Volkman’s eventual arrest, Eil dug into transcripts and sources from the court case, exploring the elements in Volkman’s nature and environment that led him to plead “not guilty” to the deaths of his patients.

Through his own interviews with Volkman and dozens of others who interacted with him or were impacted by his crimes, Eil depicts the doctor as a man forever convinced of both his superior intelligence and his underdog status, warping his perception of the world in order to depict himself as a persecuted victim. Highly financially motivated, largely absent in the lives of his young children and constantly on the road between his luxury home in Chicago and his clinics in Ohio, Volkman amassed a fortune prescribing wild volumes of medication indiscriminately: to those with legitimate pain as well as to longtime addicts to drug dealers. One former patient testified in court that he prescribed her 34 pills per day.

Eil provides context about malpractice law, drug regulations and the history of opioids in America. He also gives care and space to the lives and predicaments of various Volkman patients, devoting his afterword to the memory of the 13 people who died, as described by their families and communities. With Prescription for Pain, Eil joins the ranks of investigative journalists like Sam Quinones (Dreamland), Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain) and Beth Macy (Dopesick), adding a crucial piece of the puzzle to understanding an epidemic that continues to arrest the nation.

Prescription for Pain investigates how a pediatrician built an opioid empire in rural Ohio, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake.
NonfictionSocial Science

The Age of Magical Overthinking

Review by Deborah Mason

It’s hardly groundbreaking news that the world is increasingly confusing and isolating. Deaths by despair continue to rise, and America has long been in a mental health care crisis. Our screens feed our wildest conspiracy theories and our equally wild celebrity fantasies, while distancing us from friends and family. We put our faith in “manifesting” our reality, while ignoring the advice of experts. We have access to never-before-imagined amounts of information, but we are no wiser. We contrive conflicts with people online whom we have never met. Our anxiety culminates in a nagging question: “Is it them, or is it me?” Amanda Montell, author of The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, would probably answer, “It’s all of us.”

A linguist, podcaster and writer, Montell explored the links between language and power in her books Cultish and Wordslut. In her new book, Montell takes on an even more ambitious project: explaining how our cognitive biases combine with our brain functions to skew our perceptions of reality.

This is heavy stuff, but Montell combines erudition with humor and self-deprecation to make it accessible. Her explanations of a dozen cultural biases are clear and backed by research, while her cautionary tales of their destructive impact are personal, often hilarious and frequently moving. So, for example, her commitment to an abusive relationship was the result of the sunk cost fallacy—the conviction that “spending resources you can’t get back . . . justifies spending more.” Her affection for a thoroughly mediocre seat cushion that she made from “the innards of a neglected dog toy” is a charming symptom of the IKEA effect—that “we like things better when we’ve had a hand in creating them.” And our fascination with the vlogs of young women dying from painful disease is an example of survivorship bias. There is no condemnation or exasperation in this book, but there is plenty of humor, compassion and reason.

Reading The Age of Magical Overthinking feels like listening to your smartest friend give excellent advice. Hopefully, we’ll take it.

Amanda Montell explores our cultural and cognitive biases and their perilous consequences in the funny, compassionate The Age of Magical Overthinking.
NonfictionSelf-HelpEnvironment

Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Like so many of us, poet and Brown University professor Kate Schapira is deeply worried about the future of our planet. Rather than fret alone, in 2014 she set up her Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth (inspired by “Peanuts” character Lucy van Pelt) in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, as a means of communication and commiseration.

Now, she’s distilled what she heard, discussed, felt and learned into her debut book, Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live With Care and Purpose in an Endangered World. Schapira, who writes in a voice resonant with empathy, encouragement and fierce determination, recommends the book be read “in order and together” because “the progression of stories, questions, and practices is designed to unwind tightly tangled grief, frustration, exhaustion, and inertia . . . into a followable path of courage, capability, and strength.”

Such a path was far from clear when her booth debuted in 2014: “No one I knew seemed to want to discuss it at all,” she writes, “and that made me feel frantic and alone.” But as her network of climate-conscious compatriots grew, Schapira developed a process to help readers “transform what [they] feel, with others, into connection and action,” which this book details across eight chapters rife with information and analysis.

Schapira also takes on capitalism and white supremacy, which she believes create and perpetuate climate change. For example, she describes so-called sacrifice zones, “places where ecology, including human well-being, is sacrificed for power and profit,” noting residents “are usually people culturally devalued by their city or nation.” And she cites the work of activists she encountered, like Mark, who walked a cross-continent barefoot pilgrimage to Brooklyn-based BK ROT, a compost-hauling service whose hiring practices ensure “some of the people hit hardest by capitalism and white supremacy feed themselves, their families, and the soil.”

Ultimately, Schapira writes, her book is “not the last word on anything—or the first word either,” but it’s certainly a valuable reading experience for those seeking shared solace as well as motivation for positive, productive communal action. An extensive contributors and resources section, as well as a glossary, nicely bolster Schapira’s smart, heartfelt and inspirational efforts.

Kate Schapira offers a guide to transforming climate angst into collective action in her inspiring Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.

Where Rivers Part

In the extraordinary Where Rivers Part, Kao Kalia Yang writes with deep feeling and grace about her mother, a Hmong woman who escaped the cascading violence from the Vietnam War.

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