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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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Gentle giants of the sea

When a paleontologist writing about whales begins by quoting naturalist Henry Beston—“They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time”—you know you are in for a wondrous read. And Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson is indeed that.

NonfictionBusiness & Finance

The vanishing middle class

Review by Alice Cary

What Alissa Quart calls “the failing middle class vortex” is indeed a powerful force, growing stronger every day, as she knows from personal as well as professional experience. When her daughter was born, mounting day care and hospital costs forced Quart and her husband, both freelance writers in New York City, to adjust their lives. Now, as executive editor of the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Quart spends her days investigating social and economic inequalities.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America provides an in-depth look at two things people all too often shy away from discussing: money and class. The term standard of living, Quart notes, is used less and less, perhaps because “the notion that a relatively high quality of life should include small pleasures and comforts has faded.”

Quart introduces readers to a variety of people and families being squeezed, whom she calls the Middle Precariat—a “just making-it group,” who “believed that their training or background would ensure that they would be properly, comfortably middle-class,” but whose assumptions turned out to be wrong.

There are teachers driving Uber, grading papers between rides; adjunct professors drowning in debt, whom Quart calls “the hyper-educated poor”; and immigrant nannies caring for wealthy families while their own children are left behind in their home country.

“Each story was like a tiny detail in a giant oil painting that allowed me to understand the whole picture in a different way,” Quart writes. She backs up these anecdotes with clear, sharp analysis, noting that a systemic problem is the undervaluation of caring professions such as teachers, day care workers and parents. She also points to a variety of solutions, including better, cheaper day care, a universal child allowance, public pre-K and universal basic income.

Like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Squeezed is a thoughtful, enlightening and painful analysis of the ever-growing divide in the American economy.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What Alissa Quart calls “the failing middle class vortex” is indeed a powerful force, growing stronger every day, as she knows from personal as well as professional experience. When her daughter was born, mounting day care and hospital costs forced Quart and her husband, both freelance writers in New York City, to adjust their lives. Now, as executive editor of the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Quart spends her days investigating social and economic inequalities.

Observations from the paragon of poetry

Poet, essayist and children’s book author Donald Hall looks back over his richly textured 89 years of life in his latest memoir, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. Most of his reflections here are blithely inconsequential, keen observations about nature, career and relationships. They expound no end-of-life wisdom, detail no significant literary trends or feuds and offer no general assessment of the state of poetry today. But it is this very lack of utility—the knowledge that we need not underline or take notes—that makes the book such a joy to read.

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

The ultimate TBR list

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It would be surprising if the reading list of anyone who picks up novelist, critic and professor Francine Prose’s What to Read and Why doesn’t instantly grow exponentially. After considering the 33 essays that compose this deeply informed collection, it’s tempting to ask: Is there anything worth reading that she hasn’t read?

Traversing more than a century and a half of literature, from the works of Dickens, Eliot and Balzac to the recent works of Jennifer Egan, Mohsin Hamid and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Prose’s book offers a generous serving of her wide-ranging literary enthusiasms. And Prose’s favorites aren’t limited to canonical authors. If the names Patrick Hamilton or Elizabeth Taylor (no, not the actress) aren’t familiar, Prose’s accolades may tempt you to seek out their work.

As she revealed in her book Reading Like a Writer, Prose is an evangelist for the painstaking but richly satisfying art of close reading. For her, the most rewarding way of engaging with the best writers’ work is at the level of the sentence. With apt examples, she lavishes praise on Jane Austen for the “grace and wit of her sentences” and the “thrilling attention to the shape of paragraph and sentence” in the work of Rebecca West.

Prose doesn’t confine herself to appraisals of individual authors. Several of the most satisfying essays in this book focus on broader subjects like the uses of art or the difficult task of defining the short story. The essay “On Clarity” is a masterly primer on the art of graceful writing, a gift Prose displays on every page.

What to Read and Why is a collection of love letters to the art of literature. The only impediment to devouring this book is the persistent urge to trade it for the work of one of the writers Prose so avidly praises.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It would be surprising if the reading list of anyone who picks up novelist, critic and professor Francine Prose’s What to Read and Why doesn’t instantly grow exponentially. After considering the 33 essays that compose this deeply informed collection, it’s tempting to ask: Is there anything worth reading that she hasn’t read?

The importance of beavers

As descriptive phrases go, “busy as a beaver” is right on target. Most of us probably don’t give much thought to the second largest member of the rodent family, except perhaps when they become a nuisance by felling trees and plugging waterways in residential areas. But did you know just how integral beavers are to the environment?

NonfictionMemoir

Paint by numbers

Review by Alice Cary

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, July 2018

As director of the African American Studies program at Princeton University, Nell Painter seemed to be at the pinnacle of her distinguished career. The renowned historian had written numerous books, including the bestseller The History of White People. But at age 64, Painter surprised everyone by leaving Princeton to take up something completely different: art school. The road was anything but easy, as she explains in her bold, brave account, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over.

Not satisfied with being what she calls a “Sunday painter,” she was determined to study art on a professional level. First she got a BFA at Rutgers University, then she earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Amid the tattoos, piercings and bright yellow hair of her fellow students, Painter’s fashion statement consisted of a white T-shirt, black pants and “sturdy” New Balance walking shoes. She was “an exotic in art school . . . a creature from another planet.” Her confidence was hardly boosted when a RISD teacher informed her that she would never be an artist. Adding to her turmoil were anguish and grief over the fact that Painter’s mother was dying on the West Coast, leaving her father depressed and needy, necessitating cross-country trips and interventions.

Nonetheless, Painter persevered, enjoying moments of absolute euphoria at having the time and freedom to paint, while also experiencing interludes of extreme self-doubt and loneliness. In the end, she triumphed by relying on what she calls her “old standbys: education and hard work.”

Painter concludes that “the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it,” but she was able to find her own artistic voice by incorporating both history and text into her work which, in a way, brought her career full circle.

Old in Art School is a fascinating memoir about Painter’s daring choice to follow a passion with courage and intellect, even when the odds seemed firmly stacked against her.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Nell Painter about Old in Art School.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As director of the African American Studies program at Princeton University, Nell Painter seemed to be at the pinnacle of her distinguished career. The renowned historian had written numerous books, including the bestseller The History of White People. But at age 64, Painter surprised everyone by leaving Princeton to take up something completely different: art school. The road was anything but easy, as she explains in her bold, brave account, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over.

Echoes of imperialist exploration

In 1542, the Omagua tribe of the Amazon River basin made a terrible strategic mistake: They saved the lives of a band of starving Spanish explorers. After the Spaniards recovered, they continued upriver, pillaging and killing. So began the violence and despoliation that continue today. The Omagua are barely hanging on; many other tribes are gone forever.

NonfictionMemoir

Ten arboreal epiphanies

Review by Kelly Blewett

Picture a tree. Perhaps you visualize it at a distance, as though observing a photograph. James Aldred, a professional climber who has been on payroll for National Geographic and the BBC, would likely conjure something much more intimate: the texture of the bark, the give of the branches. Aldred’s new book, The Man Who Climbs Trees, lets us see the trees alongside him. If you’ve ever marveled at the ecosystems housed by these majestic, ascending towers of life, you will enjoy nestling into the pages of this book.

Each of the 10 chapters focuses on a particular tree from around the world. Aldred’s descriptions are breathtaking. When climbing the “Tree of Life” in Costa Rica, he happened upon a 6-foot iguana, which he refers to as an “arboreal dragon.” When in Borneo, he paused midway up a tree, closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the rainforest. When he opens his eyes, the view “rushed at me from every direction, as if a veil had been lifted. The jungle was so much greater than the sum of its parts, and I was nothing more than an atom adrift within this overwhelming tide of energy.”

As this passage suggests, Aldred’s devotion to these natural spaces verges on spiritual. Aldred gives the reader a real sense of his embodied experience. He describes all varieties of bugs—ants, bees, wasps, spiders—and how they crawl on his skin as he scales the trees, as well as the sheer exhaustion of tossing a rope over an ever-higher target. He recalls incredible primates—gibbons, gorillas, howler monkeys and so forth—and envies their climbing expertise. He spies lumbering elephants, stealthy cats, colorful birds, graceful butterflies and determined tree frogs. Truly, Aldred offers a feast for the imagination, one that will draw you back to the landscapes that you’ve loved and pull you forward toward new ones. This wide-ranging and beautiful book, brought to life with expertise, affection and respect, is not to be missed.

Picture a tree. Perhaps you visualize it at a distance, as though observing a photograph. James Aldred, a professional climber who has been on payroll for National Geographic and the BBC, would likely conjure something much more intimate: the texture of the bark, the give of the branches. Aldred’s new book, The Man Who Climbs Trees, lets us see the trees alongside him. If you’ve ever marveled at the ecosystems housed by these majestic, ascending towers of life, you will enjoy nestling into the pages of this book.

The unfairly forgotten story of African-American pioneers

The role free black settlers played in opening up the Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War remains virtually unmentioned—and certainly unexamined—in most general American histories. To show the extent of this migration toward supposed freedom, Anna-Lisa Cox, a fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, begins this study by citing the locales of 338 black farming settlements that were established between 1800 and 1860 in the territory that would ultimately become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Nonfiction

Is there anyone out there?

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Are we alone in the universe? Is there life on other planets? These are questions astronomers, philosophers and theologians have been asking for centuries. It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of intelligent life on Mars and Venus was entertained. Once scientists determined this was not the case, they began to look elsewhere in the cosmos. Their discoveries have been amazing; uncovering the realization that countless other planets are out there, many that could be in the “habitable zone” in their orbit around a sun—just like Earth.

In Light of the Stars, astrophysics professor and science writer (About Time) Adam Frank cleverly links Earth’s current climate change with the possibilities of life on other planets. He postulates that “humanity and its project of civilization represent a kind of ‘cosmic teenager,’” lacking the maturity to take responsibility for our actions and future. He stresses the importance of our global societies to adapt and become fully sustainable as human activities continue to strain the Earth’s resources and climatic systems.

This is not a new concept. What is revolutionary is Frank’s contention that other worlds have likely evolved enough to create intelligent civilizations, and the knowledge gleaned from studying other planets can be used to reach the necessary level of maturity to face our future. He discusses the groundbreaking work of famous thinkers and researchers, from Greek philosopher Epicurus and Renaissance-era Copernicus to modern-day astrophysicists Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. One breakthrough after another is covered in fascinating detail; not only in astronomy and physics but also in the history of life on our planet, particularly its geology and the numerous climate shifts it is gone through during the past five billion years.

Providing multiple levels of fascinating science, Light of the Stars proposes a novel theory of how astrobiology and the study of life on other planets can help us understand climate change and civilization on Earth.

Are we alone in the universe? Is there life on other planets? These are questions astronomers, philosophers and theologians have been asking for centuries. It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of intelligent life on Mars and Venus was entertained. Once scientists determined this was not the case, they began to look elsewhere in the cosmos. Their discoveries have been amazing; uncovering the realization that countless other planets are out there, many that could be in the “habitable zone” in their orbit around a sun—just like Earth.

A history of power

Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance. In a fast-paced narrative, he conducts readers on a journey from humanity’s dependence on wood as the primary fuel source to the use of coal and up to the development of nuclear energy and solar energy.

NonfictionHistory

Battling for the soul of America

Review by Roger Bishop

What did the founders intend to be the heart and soul of our country? In his carefully crafted, sweeping and beautifully written The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer and historian Jon Meacham finds the answer in the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and it is “incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities.” The struggle to be “the better angels of our nature,” in Lincoln’s words, must contend with contrary forces such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Scare, which divide rather than unite us in the effort to achieve that vision. Issues of extremism, racism, nativism, isolationism, gender equality and others that we face today are not new. How Americans have addressed such issues in the past gives Meacham reason to be optimistic about our future.      

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote shortly before her death, “One thing I believe profoundly: We make our own history.” But it is important that we know and understand what has happened in our collective past, and Meacham explains that past brilliantly. He writes, “Many Americans are less than eager to acknowledge that our national greatness was built on explicit and implicit apartheid.” Even Americans with historical amnesia cannot refute Meacham’s rigorously documented text.   

Reformers and citizen activists can wield great influence, but the leadership of the president is crucial. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted during the 1932 campaign, “The presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it . . . it is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” Meacham says he wrote this book “not because the past American presidents have always been right, but because the incumbent American president is so often wrong.”

The better presidents and many others, such as Martin Luther King Jr., do not give in to the mentality that would use hate and fear and sometimes violence to achieve their ends. Instead, “they conquer them with a breadth of vision that speaks to the best parts of our soul.” The compelling narratives presented here show that, despite tremendous pressure to surrender to the forces of division, we can all work to achieve the founders’ vision. This insightful and reader-friendly book should be widely read and discussed.     

What did the founders intend to be the heart and soul of our country? In his carefully crafted, sweeping and beautifully written The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer and historian Jon Meacham finds the answer in the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and it is “incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities.” 

An all-too-common nightmare

Kelly Sundberg’s memoir of domestic violence brilliantly records the shock, physical and emotional pain and, perhaps most poignantly, the confusion of abuse. The same man who could proclaim his love for Sundberg and their young child was also capable of verbally and physically assaulting her.

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