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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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An elegy for a way of life

When perusing the endless variety of foods lining the shelves of grocery stores, it’s easy to forget where it all comes from. This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm by Ted Genoways offers insight into the farming process, which has experienced significant changes over the years.

NonfictionFamily & Relationships

Maintaining monogamy

Review by Edward Morris

Without infidelity as a theme, there would be a precipitous decline in the number of novels and movies produced, not to mention the utter destruction of country music and much of the legal profession. Whether or not one has personally been unfaithful to a romantic partner, one almost certainly knows people who have been.

As a practicing therapist for more than 30 years, Esther Perel’s goal in The State of Affairs is to go beyond the standard victim-versus-victimizer model of adultery and explore its infinite complexities—the better to salvage something even slightly worthwhile from the experience, preferably for both partners.

One reason infidelity is so catastrophic, Perel says, is that we are culturally groomed to believe marriage should provide us everything we need emotionally, including sex, offspring, friendship, stability, inspiration and refuge. When it falls short, as it almost always does for at least one of the partners, it can open the door to straying. “Not only can an affair destroy a marriage,” Perel writes, “it has the power to unravel an entire social fabric.”

But infidelity, she points out, is not all that easy to define. Depending on the aggrieved partner’s standards, it can range from flirtation or viewing pornography to maintaining a furtive, long-term romantic relationship. To illustrate how varied the “cheating” scene is, she explores the stories of dozens of couples she has counseled.

Among the conclusions she reaches are that you can’t adultery-proof a marriage, that complete honesty in trying to mend the ravages of adultery can sometimes do more harm than good, and that infidelity isn’t always caused by marital dissatisfaction. Sometimes it just happens.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Whether or not one has personally been unfaithful to a romantic partner, one almost certainly knows people who have been. As a practicing therapist for more than 30 years, Esther Perel’s goal in The State of Affairs is to go beyond the standard victim-versus-victimizer model of adultery.

Lone Star saga

Roger D. Hodge couldn’t get out of Texas fast enough. After a boyhood spent doing the things that a South Texas kid from a ranching family does—working with livestock, hell-raising in Mexico—he drove off to college at 18 and didn’t look back. He never planned to become what he calls a “professional Texan.” But it’s not easy to extract your homeland from your heart. The legendary Texas borderland ranch culture is fading, and Hodge takes an unsparing look at how it developed, what it meant and how it’s dying in Texas Blood.

NonfictionLiterature

No woman is an island

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

When we think of the writing lives of iconic female authors Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, we imagine them going it alone, Austen at her tiny table, her sister and mother bustling around her, and Brontë stuck in her father’s spare parsonage, with siblings for company. But those images tell only part of the story, write Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, who detail the writerly friendships that sustained Austen and Brontë, as well as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, in A Secret Sisterhood.

Drawing on a wealth of letters, Midorikawa and Sweeney reveal long friendships that were glossed over or even suppressed by descendants and biographers. For Austen, that friend was Anne Sharp, governess to Austen’s niece and an amateur playwright. Brontë first encountered lifelong friends Mary Taylor (who later wrote a feminist novel) and Ellen Nussey in boarding school, creating a middle school friendship triangle. Later, Brontë and Taylor studied French in Belgium, a transformative experience. Eliot grew an epistolary friendship with blockbuster author Harriet Beecher Stowe; the two never met, but they corresponded intermittently for decades after Stowe wrote an admiring letter to Eliot. And as for Woolf, a friendship with short-story writer Katherine Mansfield was fraught, but lasted until Mansfield’s untimely death.

In their approachable style, Midorikawa and Sweeney illuminate these novelists as each struggles to write and publish in an era hostile to women and cope with both anonymity and fame. We also get a sense of the relationships among these four: Brontë complained about Austen to Eliot’s partner, while Eliot herself was a great admirer of Austen. Woolf, in turn, revered Eliot. A Secret Sisterhood is bookended by a lovely foreword from Margaret Atwood and an epilogue noting other female literary friendships.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When we think of the writing lives of iconic female authors Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, we imagine them going it alone, Austen at her tiny table, her sister and mother bustling around her, and Brontë stuck in her father’s spare parsonage, with siblings for company. But those images tell only part of the story, write Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, who detail the writerly friendships that sustained Austen and Brontë, as well as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, in A Secret Sisterhood.

The trials of a complex president

Move over, Hamilton! Might there be room for a Broadway musical about Ulysses S. Grant? There’s certainly a vast treasure-trove of material in Grant, a stupendous new biography by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow, whose book Alexander Hamilton inspired the hit musical.

NonfictionScience

A doctor’s diagnosis

Review by Edward Morris

The “hacking” Dr. Lustig refers to in The Hacking of the American Mind has nothing to do with sinister forces invading and taking over our computers. Rather, he believes that the processed food and pharmaceutical industries and their lackeys in government are doing the hacking of our bodies and minds. He also casts a wary eye on the addictive properties of technology, which, he says, is more likely to amuse than fulfill us.

A professor of pediatrics, Lustig fired his first salvo at sugar, the most pernicious ingredient in processed foods, in his 2012 bestseller, Fat Chance. He persists in his battle here against sugar here. However, Lustig’s overarching goal in The Hacking of the American Mind is to delineate the differences between mere pleasure, which is episodic and a doorway to addiction, and the more enduring state of happiness. In doing so, he begins with a discussion of the brain—its designs, functions and defenses against injury. Despite his breezy, conversational style, this early part of the book is fairly slow going.

But the remainder of his text is plainspoken observation, analysis and advice. America is suffering from a health crisis, Lustig says, principally because corporations have taken over virtually every aspect of our lives—from offering mindless entertainment, to feeding us bad food, to selling us medical insurance and supposedly life-enhancing drugs—always for private profit, never for public good. Lustig explains how Lewis Powell Jr., first as a pro-business lawyer, then as a Supreme Court justice, was instrumental in helping destroy government checks against corporate abuses, and subsequent Court decisions have continued to erode these safeguards.

The upshot, Lustig concludes, is that we are basically on our own when it comes to constructing sane and safe lives. To that end, he suggests we hold technology at arm’s length, get more sleep, do more home cooking, be more altruistic and find comfort in mindfulness and in the congenial company of others. And always avoid sugar.

The “hacking” Dr. Lustig refers to in The Hacking of the American Mind has nothing to do with sinister forces invading and taking over our computers. Rather, he believes that the processed food and pharmaceutical industries and their lackeys in government are doing the hacking of our bodies and minds. He also casts a wary eye on the addictive properties of technology, which, he says, is more likely to amuse than fulfill us.

Shaky foundations

Unless they reside on the West Coast, many Americans may assume they are immune to the shaking and damage wreaked by a destructive earthquake. Well, earthquakes are actually more ubiquitous than people think. Kathryn Miles (Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy) explains why in her fascinating new book, Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake.

NonfictionBusiness & Finance

Object history

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

You might expect a book about inventions that shaped the modern economy to begin with the invention of computers, the internet, or perhaps some important but obscure financial software you can’t begin to understand. Instead, bestselling author Tim Harford, a senior columnist at the Financial Times whose previous works include The Undercover Economist, begins with the plow.

Yes, the plow. And for good reason. According to Harford, not only did the plow create the underpinnings of civilization, different types of plows led to different types of civilizations which reshaped social structures, family life and economic and political systems.

From this beginning, Harford effortlessly leaps across time and continents to show readers various inventions in a new light, revealing unexpected insights into 21st-century society. Harford notes, “Inventions shape our lives in unpredictable ways—and while they’re solving a problem for someone, they’re often creating a problem for someone else.”

Some of the inventions Harford highlights are what you might expect to find: the bank, double-entry bookkeeping and the iPhone being among them. And then, of course, for anyone old enough to remember The Graduate, there’s plastic.

But other inventions may be less known, including the Billy Bookcase (a cheaper bookcase), M-Pesa (more than 20 million Kenyans use it to move money by mobile phones) and the Haber-Bosch process (which uses nitrogen from the air to make ammonia, which can then be used to make fertilizer).

Tim Harford ends his fantastically enlightening book by talking about an invention that has improved our lives “almost beyond our ability to measure.” I’ll give you a hint: if you’re reading this review after dark, you’re probably using one somewhere in your house.

You might expect a book about inventions that shaped the modern economy to begin with the invention of computers, the internet, or perhaps some important but obscure financial software you can’t begin to understand. Instead, bestselling author Tim Harford, a senior columnist at the Financial Times whose previous works include The Undercover Economist, begins with the plow.

NonfictionMemoir

Tales from the liberated kitchen

Review by Eve Zibart

People often associate Julia Child, who made French food accessible to the home cook, with Alice Waters, whose restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, was one of the epicenters for the movement toward simple, locavore dining. And the two culinary queens do have much in common, especially as crusaders for what might be called “real food” in a time when most Americans’ dining experiences ran the culinary gamut from A to B, as Dorothy Parker would say.

But while Child and Waters are both legendary free spirits, there are striking differences between the two. Child was a classicist who mastered technique and fine detail, a quirky sophisticate who believed “all things in moderation,” while Waters, a card-carrying advocate of 1960s-style exuberance, is a hedonist, punch-drunk with flavor and scent and texture.

Waters’ new memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, is a reminiscence of an extended adolescence spent not only navigating the enticements of postwar liberation—drinking, sex, art and anti-establishment politics—but also foreign countries, including France, Turkey, Georgia and Greece, to name a few, places that embrace community and kindness as much as food and cooking.

Waters’ memoir, as touching as it sometimes is, can be a little helter-skelter: There are italicized inserts that shoulder into the narrative, supplying details of a person’s biography or offering foreshadowing or philosophical asides. And there are plenty of famous names dropped, unavoidably, as Waters’ friends are connected to an impressive array of filmmakers, more experienced chefs, artists and writers.

These diary-like passages, and Waters’ almost stream-of-consciousness remarks on the importance of mood, music, visual arts and flowers on the dining experience, come to a head with the hilariously chaotic opening of Chez Panisse in 1971. If the way to counterculture’s heart is through its stomach, Chez Panisse is the start.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Waters’ new memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, is a reminiscence of an extended adolescence spent not only navigating the enticements of postwar liberation—drinking, sex, art and anti-establishment politics—but also foreign countries, including France, Turkey, Georgia and Greece, to name a few, places that embrace community and kindness as much as food and cooking.

Step away from the screens

In Bored and Brilliant, Manoush Zomorodi argues that stepping away from technology is not just healthy, it is essential for creativity and productivity. Research shows that people are now shifting their focus every 45 seconds while working online due to interruptions and competing messages. But being constantly tethered to a phone or tablet is no way to treat our brains if we want to foster new ideas.

NonfictionMemoir

Rising above

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Throughout her stunningly powerful memoir, We Are All Shipwrecks, Kelly Grey Carlisle runs a finger over everything, from the tide-pool sea creatures she inspected as a child to photographs of the mother she never met. That thoughtful touch reveals dark complexities and provokes her curiosity, which becomes her lifeboat as she searches for truth.

Raised by Richard, her eccentric, self-absorbed grandfather, and his much younger wife, Marilyn, on a yacht that “looked something like a three-tiered wedding cake” in a run-down California marina, Carlisle knew little about her mother, a 23-year-old prostitute brutally murdered by a killer who was never caught, and even less about her father. Left behind in a motel drawer at 3 weeks of age, Carlisle grew up asking many questions and receiving ever-changing answers. Life with her grandfather was anything but stable, and even succeeding as a competitive swimmer in high school meant little at home: Richard simply missed having her there in time for dinner.

It was the good company of her equally unconventional, often down-and-out neighbors living on the pier that sustained Carlisle and fed her desire to move on from her life on the harbor. Finally, after college, marriage and the birth of her daughter, Carlisle seems to have found the balance she was looking for. Richard once told her, “Blood is important. Where you come from is important. It’s who you are.” Yet clearly, Carlisle’s pursuit of her past is also about whom she chose to become, and what it took to get her there.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Throughout her stunningly powerful memoir, We Are All Shipwrecks, Kelly Grey Carlisle runs a finger over everything, from the tide-pool sea creatures she inspected as a child to photographs of the mother she never met. That thoughtful touch reveals dark complexities and provokes her curiosity, which becomes her lifeboat as she searches for truth.

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