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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.
NonfictionPhotographyLifestylesAnimals

Faithful Unto Death

Faithful Unto Death is a thoughtful investigation into the bonds of pets and their owners that chronicles the ways in which we grieve and remember the animals we love.
Faithful Unto Death is a thoughtful investigation into the bonds of pets and their owners that chronicles the ways in which we grieve and remember the animals we love.
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Nonfiction

When the levee breaks

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When it comes to natural disasters, the question is not so much “if” but “when.” In certain areas of the world, rivers will continue to flood, earthquakes will continue to shake the earth, and volcanoes will continue to erupt. Anyone living in these areas exists in an uneasy truce with nature, always wondering when the next disaster will strike. In her fascinating study, The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do about Them), seismologist Lucy Jones examines 11 of history’s most destructive natural events, from the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and the floods in Sacramento in 1861-1862 to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 and the great 1927 flood in Mississippi, to reveal what we can learn from them.

As Jones points out so astutely, humans label earthquakes and other natural activities “disasters” because of their effects on human lives, yet such events are simply a fluctuation in the natural environment necessary for the support of life. While many cultures have found ways to be resilient—even returning to the scene of a disaster to rebuild—she offers advice about living in areas prone to natural disasters (though any area, she counsels, could experience them): “Don’t assume government has you covered,” “work with your community,” “remember that disasters are more than the moment at which they happen.”

Jones’ fascinating book takes a long view at natural events in order to help us understand our environment and to prepare for and survive natural disasters.

When it comes to natural disasters, the question is not so much “if” but “when.”

Step into the ring

The threat of mortality has a peculiar way of amplifying a person’s regrets. The Electric Woman, an honest and emotionally vulnerable memoir by Tessa Fontaine, chronicles the author’s relationship with her mother, who suffered a massive stroke that left her a shadow of her former self.

Nonfiction

The science of psychedelic drugs

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Psychedelic drugs often conjure images of the colorful, mind-bending world of 1960s counterculture. But therapists and scientists at the time also used these drugs to treat and research issues such as depression, alcoholism and anxiety. However, when publicity began to take a negative turn, focusing on bad trips, psychotic breaks, flashbacks and suicides, the drugs became illegal and largely unattainable—until now.

In his fascinating book How to Change Your Mind, bestselling author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Cooked) discusses the recent psychedelic drug resurgence. Starting in the 1990s, a new generation of scientists began to quietly reinvestigate the potential of these drugs, not only to treat mental illnesses and addiction but also to help cancer patients cope with the prospect of dying and “explore the links between the brain and mind, hoping to unravel some of the mysteries of consciousness.”

Pollan discusses the different types of psychedelic drugs and their history in detail, from plant-based forms such as psilocybin (mushrooms) and mescaline (cacti) to LSD (synthetically produced). The current psychedelic renaissance piqued his interest and prompted him to do his own exploration. He devotes a whole chapter, appropriately named “Travelogue,” to these encounters. He writes, “Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words,” but he does his best, thoughtfully deeming a “trip” as the relinquishment of the ego power struggle most of us go through every day.

As Pollan describes, this altered state of consciousness can be spiritually enlightening, mind-opening and life-changing. It can also be terror-provoking. How to Change Your Mind chronicles the unusual power of these substances, instilling a better understanding of their capabilities in helping to discover, heal and change our minds. It’s a trip worth taking.

 

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

Psychedelic drugs often conjure images of the colorful, mind-bending world of 1960s counterculture. But therapists and scientists at the time also used these drugs to treat and research issues such as depression, alcoholism and anxiety. However, when publicity began to take a negative turn, focusing on bad trips, psychotic breaks, flashbacks and suicides, the drugs became illegal and largely unattainable—until now.

The corruption of Lake County

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King returns to Lake County, Florida, in Beneath a Ruthless Sun, a tense and stunning true-crime read. As in Devil in the Grove, his previous exposé of the corruption and racial injustice carried out by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, King’s exhaustive reporting details the frightening chokehold white supremacists had over a Florida agricultural town in the very recent past.

NonfictionEssays

Looking back on a life spent in transit

Review by Priscilla Kipp

From The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) to The Tao of Travel (2011), Paul Theroux has taught us how to travel: intently, adventurously and lightly.

While the title may suggest a single painting, the 30 essays included here are alive with locales as varied as Theroux’s many journeys. He is a collector of experiences with the famous and infamous, the familiar and the exotic, the literati and the little guys. There’s a helicopter flight over Neverland Ranch with Elizabeth Taylor as she discusses her Peter Pan and Wendy-esque friendship with Michael Jackson. Walks with Robin Williams and Oliver Sacks reveal their inspiring humanity. A dominatrix explains everything. Hunter S. Thompson is remembered for his writing and demons, “familiar, because they are our demons, most of them anyway.”

Theroux gets around the globe as well, whether searching for a fabled drug high in Ecuador, residing in England for 18 years, rediscovering Vietnam or paddling around in Hawaii.

Having been everywhere and done almost everything, Theroux concludes Figures in a Landscape closer to home, examining his childhood and parents with the circumspection of a worldly-wise adult. Yet his insatiable curiosity continues, and he wonders what his own legacy should be. For Theroux, the idea of leaving no trace has never been an option.

 

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

From The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) to The Tao of Travel (2011), Paul Theroux has taught us how to travel: intently, adventurously and lightly.

A history of horrors

Stacy Horn opens Damnation Island with a description of the advent of electricity on the streets of New York in the late 19th century. She contrasts this mystical wonder, which enchanted people and gave them a feeling of eternal progress, with the stagnation experienced just a short boat ride away. Blackwell’s Island, now known as Roosevelt Island, was—simply put—a hellscape.

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

Everybody wants to rule the world

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve) makes no secret of the fact that this compact study of the portrayal of tyrants in the work of William Shakespeare was inspired by his dismay over the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. But even those who don’t share Greenblatt’s political perspective should find his well- informed survey of the making and unmaking of autocratic rulers to be instructive and entertaining.

Tyrant ranges across an ample array of Shakespeare’s dramatic works as Greenblatt explores Shakespeare’s fascination with the “deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?” Describing Shakespeare as a “supreme master of displacement and strategic indirection,” he explains how, by never placing his politically charged stories in a contemporary setting, the playwright was able to deftly illuminate the political struggles of the Elizabethan Age without risking his safety.

Whether Shakespeare was using his plays to expose how a budding tyrant could capitalize on the infighting of political factions to ascend to power, or how another might promote a populism that “look[s] like an embrace of the have-nots” but is “in reality a form of cynical exploitation,” Greenblatt credits the Bard as both an astute observer of the political world and an acute judge of human character. And for all the havoc wreaked by monstrous characters like Macbeth and Richard III, Greenblatt argues, Shakespeare believed in their ultimate doom. Concluding this lively book on an optimistic note, he points to the “political action of ordinary citizens” as the antidote for a threat that will persist as long as there are leaders and people demanding to be led.

 

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

Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve) makes no secret of the fact that this compact study of the portrayal of tyrants in the work of William Shakespeare was inspired by his dismay over the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. But even those who don’t share Greenblatt’s political perspective should find his well- informed survey of the making and unmaking of autocratic rulers to be instructive and entertaining.

Milk!

Have you ever tried donkey’s milk? Probably not. But according to Mark Kurlansky’s fact-rich Milk!, donkey’s milk is probably closest in consistency and composition to human breast milk. How cows came to predominate our consumption of milk is just one of the many thumbnail histories Kurlansky packs into his fascinating new book.

NonfictionHistory

Cold war secrets exposed

Review by Edward Morris

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, May 2018

The Cold War between the U.S. and Russia was at its iciest from the early 1950s until well into the 1960s. Neither side knew a great deal about the other’s military capabilities and even less about any grand designs for world supremacy. The information the two superpowers did possess came mostly from spies, diplomats, gossip and news reports. Although securing reliable intelligence was clearly in the Pentagon’s interest, its chief focus was on improving its weaponry. However, the nascent Central Intelligence Agency was interested in experimental aerial reconnaissance projects.

Into this jurisdictional minefield entered four inordinately talented civilians who took it upon themselves to build and test technology that might reveal what was actually happening in Russia: Edwin Land, the inventor of the first Polaroid camera and a genius in the field of optics; Kelly Johnson, an engineer who zeroed in on designing lightweight, high-flying aircraft that could photograph the Russian landscape while, ideally, evading radar detection; Richard Bissell, a Connecticut blue blood the CIA assigned to oversee and facilitate the hush-hush project; and Francis Gary Powers, one of the daredevil pilots selected to test the new spy plane, which they called the U-2. Powers would later be shot down over the Soviet Union in the U-2, sparking even more saber-rattling.

Among the more colorful characters traipsing through this wide-ranging narrative are the bulldoggish General Curtis LeMay, J. Edgar Hoover, the influential and socially well-connected columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, the surprisingly restrained and canny Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy and Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who regarded Powers as a coward and traitor because he didn’t kill himself before being captured by the KGB.

A story as well told as Monte Reel’s A Brotherhood of Spies is an irresistible call to binge-reading.

 

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

A story as well told as Monte Reel’s A Brotherhood of Spies is an irresistible call to binge-reading.

An erudite look back at a life devoted to science

In Maker of Patterns, Freeman Dyson weaves a quilt sewn from the colorful memories of the early years of his life. The Princeton physicist emeritus stitches together the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and the professional and personal triumphs and failures of his early life in this collection of letters, written mostly to his family from 1941-1978. He interweaves his later reflections between the letters, commenting on various events or figures he’s described in the letters.

NonfictionHistory

The dark heart of progress

Review by Roger Bishop

The Industrial Revolution in Britain is usually portrayed as the transformation of an agricultural economy to an industrial one through the rise of visionary inventors and technology supported by private enterprise. Historian Priya Satia challenges that understanding in her sweeping and stimulating Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1688 and 1815, Britain was either at war, preparing for war or recovering from war. During those years, Britain declared war eight times. War and the development of a modern state demanded military necessities that set the context for an industrial-military-economic complex in which the Industrial Revolution took place. Manufacturers in Birmingham were the center of “war machine” activity. Satia describes this activity in significant and interesting detail in this extensively researched and carefully crafted narrative.

Satia is also concerned with the role of the gun in society, as well as the moral responsibility of those involved in war efforts and what it meant for future generations. We learn of Samuel Galton Jr., a prominent Quaker whose family’s wealth came from gun manufacturing. In 1795, Quaker leaders questioned the conflict between Galton’s pacifist faith and his business. Galton understood guns and war to be products of the entire nation’s economy rather than an individual’s moral decision. He was part of an economy focused on war, and his business was essential to the spread of civilization based on property. Britons understood war as something that happened abroad and kept them safe at home as their empire and economy expanded. Galton’s family story shows how the military-industrial economy worked. There were no villains. But often, horrible developments happen because of incremental decisions of decent people.

The book traces the evolution of the literal and symbolic uses of small arms down to the present day, when sales of weapons remain robust. The various international attempts to control or limit small-arms sales are discussed. This important book helps us to look at British and United States history in an unconventional way and makes for great reading.

The Industrial Revolution in Britain is usually portrayed as the transformation of an agricultural economy to an industrial one through the rise of visionary inventors and technology supported by private enterprise. Historian Priya Satia challenges that understanding in her sweeping and stimulating Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution.

A family torn apart

Drawing on copious interviews and verbatim excerpts from the subjects’ social media, Åsne Seierstad offers us an over-the-shoulder look at a Somali family in Norway being torn apart by the religious fanaticism of the family’s two teenage daughters. Two Sisters is a harrowing read, as it lays bare the most barbaric aspects of humanity, taking us into the ISIS camps in Syria where young children are brutalized and made to participate in beheadings, stonings and crucifixions all in the name of pleasing God.

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