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Golden Years

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
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NonfictionTrue CrimeMemoir

Gator Country

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Investigative journalist Rebecca Renner’s breathtaking Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades brims with exhilarating tales of the denizens—both human and animal—that lurk in the saw grass, skunk cabbage and mangrove roots of the rapidly vanishing Everglades. The fast-paced narrative is imbued with the atmosphere of tension that shapes any good mystery story—but unlike other mysteries, Gator Country is shaped by moral ambiguities among antagonists and protagonists. With deep affection for a beloved place, Renner, who grew up in the Everglades, sketches a vivid portrait of the scraggly splendor of the land and its tenacious hold on life in a world that often fails to see its beauty.

At the heart of Renner’s book lies Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer Jeff Babauta’s struggle to balance his sympathy for wily lifetime poachers with his understanding that alligators are a key species in the conservation of a fragile ecosystem. Near retirement, he takes on one last mission, going undercover to catch alligator poachers who are stealing gator eggs from nests and selling them, despite being torn about this charge.

Who is the hero, and who is the villain? It depends on who you ask. Before the Everglades became a national park, “poaching” was simply “hunting,” and it was largely done for sustenance. As Renner points out, tourism, the rapid encroachment of urbanization, farming, the disruption of natural fire cycles and land-hungry builders who “snatched the land and made hunters into poachers” have endangered the Everglades far more than poachers.

Renner weaves Babauta’s story with her own; she grew up in south Florida, and as she puzzles through her reporting, she reflects earnestly on her relationship with the swamp. Her mission, she writes, was “to go to the Everglades and listen.” In doing so, she captures the inhabitants of the region—human, animal and ecological—in all their frailty and splendor.

At the end of this tangled environmental morality tale (no spoilers—we learn this up front), the FWC takes down the ring of poachers. For Renner, though, the moral of the story is that “To be at odds with nature is to be at odds with ourselves . . . Our centuries of war with the swamp have shown that when we attack nature, nature will fight back, and both humans and nature will lose.”

Rebecca Renner’s Gator Country follows an undercover mission to expose alligator poachers in the Everglades, revealing the scraggly splendor of the region’s inhabitants.

Listen

In his compelling nonfiction debut, award-winning novelist Michel Faber vows to change the way you listen to music.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Longstreet

Review by Roger Bishop

Historian Elizabeth R. Varon’s authoritative and fascinating biography Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South illuminates the man she calls “one of the Civil War era’s best-known—but least understood—figures.”

James Longstreet first owned enslaved people when he was just 11 years old. Influenced by his uncle, a prominent pro-slavery ideologue, he attended West Point, and soon after distinguished himself in the Mexican War. Though he would later paint a picture of his younger self as a reluctant secessionist pressured by his family, Varon points out another biographer, Jeffry Wert, revealed that Longstreet “acted with surprising haste” in embracing the cause. As a Confederate general, Longstreet “tried to preempt and to punish the many forms of Black resistance” and “worked to forestall and undermine emancipation.” His outstanding record in the Civil War led Robert E. Lee to refer to Longstreet as his “old war-horse.”

Following the Confederacy’s defeat, Longstreet and his family moved to New Orleans, where the city’s “cosmopolitan culture, entrepreneurial energy, and democratic diversity seemed fertile ground for political transformations to take root.” It was in this atmosphere that Longstreet published four public letters expressing his support for Congress’ Reconstruction Acts, changing his life forever and turning friends into political enemies. He became a leader in the state’s Republican Party, supporting Black enfranchisement and school integration. His advocacy for Black soldiers, Varon writes, was “his boldest, most radical contribution to Reconstruction.”

Longstreet’s “political journey from ardent Confederate to ardent Republican was an exceedingly unlikely one,” writes Varon. “In time, as he experienced the transformations of Reconstruction, he would come to accept fully an influential Unionist interpretation of emancipation.” Though he was celebrated as a Confederate, supporters of the Lost Cause retroactively blamed the Gettysburg defeat on Longstreet, and some blamed him for the Confederacy losing the war.

Varon relies on Longstreet’s frequent interviews with the press, his essays and his 1896 memoir published, in which, Varon says, he “succeeded . . . in refashioning himself as a prophet of sectional reconciliation between the North and South.” The transformation of his outlook was strongly influenced by Ulysses S. Grant, his close friend from when both were cadets at West Point. As newly elected president, Grant insisted on appointing Longstreet to his first political office, as surveyor of the port of New Orleans. After Grant’s death in 1885, Longstreet said the former president was the “highest type of manhood America has produced.”

This engaging narrative brings a complex figure to light. The author is, on the whole, sympathetic of the once-rebel general. “Longstreet,” writes Varon, “saw his stance on Reconstruction as an extension of his Southern identity, not a repudiation of it.” But Varon is also honest about Longstreet’s flaws and contradictions. Longstreet should enlighten many readers of American history.

Elizabeth R. Varon’s commanding biography of James Longstreet charts the Confederate general’s reinvention as a passionate advocate of Reconstruction.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

November 1942

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

It’s impossible when looking at World War II statistics to fully grasp the enormity of the war’s impact on the lives of ordinary people. In his ambitious new work, the Swedish journalist and historian Peter Englund turns his considerable research skills to addressing just this by exploring the lives of individuals during a single month during the war: November 1942.

Eleven months after the United States entered the war may not, at first glance, seem like an obvious turning point. But Englund argues that events during these four critical weeks turned the tide in favor of the Allies, although a final victory would still be years away. However, the author is not writing military history here. He has something more intimate in mind: to uncover what it was like for human beings caught up in what Englund calls the “struggle between barbarity and civilization.”

In November 1942: An Intimate History of the Turning Point of World War II, Englund explores his theme through a series of 39 interwoven biographies. Peter Graves’ translation from Swedish is seamless, and readers will be immediately invested in the vivid depictions of places and people, which have largely been drawn from memoirs and diaries. Some of the people are well known, such as author and pacifist Vera Brittain and Albert Camus. Other figures are more obscure. In the Hongkou district of Shanghai, a 12-year-old German refugee named Ursula Blomberg and her parents follow the war on a friend’s hidden radio. Englund uses Ursula’s diary to vibrantly bring her to life. And so it is with each individual that follows, whether it’s Willy Peter Reese, a young German infantry private; Royal Air Force machine-gunner John Bushby; or Lidiya Ginzburg, a Jewish resident in Leningrad.

November 1942 is cinematic in scope and execution, both intimate and wide-ranging. In the hands of another writer (and translator), interweaving so many disparate lives and the events of four weeks in a global war into a single cohesive narrative might fail to hold together. Instead, November 1942 stands out as a unique and remarkable achievement, and a significant contribution to our understanding of war.

Peter Englund’s November 1942 chronicles World War II through the lives of 39 people in a single month, creating a significant contribution to our understanding of war.

The Lost Tomb

A haunting compendium of Douglas Preston’s true crime tales, The Lost Tomb delves into the shadowy uncertainty cloaking things that resist being brought to light.
NonfictionSocial SciencePop CultureFilmArts & Culture

You Are What You Watch

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Insider deputy editor Walt Hickey won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. His wide-ranging, captivating You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything makes it easy to see why.

The average American spends three-plus hours a day consuming media. “Across a lifetime,” Hickey writes, “that’s 22 percent of our time on Earth!” No wonder we’re curious about how media affects us. He asserts that, contrary to those who consider our favorite media a “bogeyman, a brain melter, a violence inciter, a waste,” it actually is “complex, fascinating, and often rather good.”

Hickey fascinates as he demystifies pop culture, sharing the outcomes of his experiments and studies. He’s a data journalist, and cheeky and informative visuals—charts, graphs, maps and little photos of famous people’s heads—bolster his pro-pop-culture assertions and illuminate personal stories, such as when he subjected his nervous system to a “Jaws” rewatch to discern which scenes most affected him. Colorful charts like “Movies Make People Exhale the Same Chemicals at the Same Times” bring his research into focus. He notes that when “The Hunger Games” film debuted in 2012, USA Archery’s merchandise sales quintupled. Similarly, the premieres of 1943’s “Lassie Come Home” and 1992’s “Beethoven” were both followed by spikes in the popularity of collies and Saint Bernards.

The author’s keen eye for detail and ability to see connections across genres enliven the narrative beyond theory and talking points. From the WWE to the Tax Reform Act of 1976, Scooby-Doo to geopolitics, Hickey offers a bounty of enthusiasm for our favorite stories.

Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Hickey champions pop culture with a cornucopia of studies, experiments and visuals in You Are What You Watch.
Science Fiction & FantasyRomanceNonfictionMystery & SuspenseFictionFeatured

The 33 best 2023 books to read with your book club

List by Savanna, Associate Editor
STARRED REVIEW
October 16, 2023

The 33 best 2023 books to read with your book club

Ambitious, accessible and thought-provoking, these titles will make your entire reading group happy.
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Ambitious, accessible and thought-provoking, these titles will make your entire reading group happy.
FeaturedGraphic Novels & ComicsGraphic Memoirs

The best graphic fiction and nonfiction of fall 2023

List by Phoebe Farrell-Sherman
Fall 2023 Graphics
STARRED REVIEW

October 24, 2023

The best graphic fiction and nonfiction of fall 2023

The illustrations set both the scene and the tone in these thoughtful graphic novels and memoirs, plus a fascinating graphic biography.

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NonfictionMemoirGraphic Memoirs

The Talk

Review by Emily Koch

Like many little boys, Darrin Bell wanted a water gun when he was 6 years old. Unlike the white boys in his neighborhood with slick black water guns, he received a bright green one, accompanied by “The Talk” from his mom. She explained that “the world is… different for you and your brother. White people won’t see you or treat you the way they do little white boys.” It’s The Talk that parents of Black children are all too familiar with in America.

Bell is a Pulitzer Prize winner known for his editorial cartoons and for being the first Black cartoonist to have his comic strips, Candorville and Ruby Park, nationally syndicated. The Talk, Bell’s striking debut graphic memoir, utilizes wit and emotional openness to chronicle the ways in which racism has shaped his life, from a police officer terrorizing a young Bell over his green water gun to protests in 2020 over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Most of the book is illustrated in shades of blue, with flashbacks that come on suddenly and disjointedly—like real memories do—in yellows reminiscent of sepia photographs. Flashes of red are often used during intense moments, and one particularly philosophical page uses a purple that only appears again during the climax. Hyperrealistic pop culture items placed throughout both unsettle the illustrations and ground the reader within the timeline of Bell’s life, from the early 1980s until present day. At the end, Bell even includes some of his most iconic editorial cartoons.

This book is heavy, both emotionally and physically. The size allows Bell to use graphic conventions unlike those he’s usually confined to in a four-panel newspaper comic strip, frequently doing full-page illustrations or removing the panels all together. But during several important conversations, including The Talk between Darrin and his mother, as well as The Talk he has with his own son, Bell returns to an even grid of panels that hearken back to his old format and emphasize how important each moment is.

The deeply honest conversation Bell is able to have with his son is especially compelling when presented in contrast with a much more limited conversation about racism he had with his father, shown through a flashback. Witnessing their generational growth filled me both with empathy for Bell’s father and with hope for what Bell’s radical truth-telling can bring.

Darrin Bell’s striking debut graphic memoir utilizes wit and emotional openness to chronicle the ways in which racism has shaped his life, from a police officer terrorizing a young Bell over a green water gun to protests in 2020 over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
FictionGraphic Novels & Comics

My Brilliant Friend: the Graphic Novel

Review by Mariel Fechik

On a quiet street in postwar Naples, two young girls embark on a complex friendship that will encompass decades of strife, jealousy, bitterness and fierce devotion. Since early childhood, Lenu and Lila have been each other’s protectors and confidantes. Lenu lives in fear of her domineering mother, while Lila is expected to put work and family first, with her education being a low priority.

Lenu worships the enigmatic Lila, believing her to be smarter, more beautiful and more interesting than herself. But Lila’s shifting moods are inscrutable, giving way to unpredictable bouts of anger, irritability and depression. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Lenu sticks by Lila’s side. As Lenu and Lila age, they are pulled in opposite directions—but they remain fixed points in each other’s orbits, for better or for worse.

Chiara Lagani and Mara Cerri’s adaptation of the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend: The Graphic Novel, is a brief and impressionistic rendition of the original. Lagani’s spare text (through Ann Goldstein’s translation) provides broad vignettes of the novel’s pivotal moments while Cerri’s artwork brings to life the often grim setting of Lila and Lenu’s neighborhood.

Ferrante’s original is a dense book, spanning years of childhood and adolescence over more than 300 pages. Rather than cover each event in detail, the graphic novel pinpoints the most life altering events for Lenu and Lila. The artwork is the true star of this adaptation. Using pencil, charcoal and pastels on coarse, off-white paper, Cerri reflects the harsh reality of postwar Italy—its grit, its violence and its fear. The panels are large and without straight lines as Cerri alternates between aerial views and intimate, uncomfortable moments. Similarly, the color palettes range from hyper-pigmented to washed out. The materials used imbue the book with an aged appearance, as though Lenu herself had crafted it as a diary—Cerri often leaves original pencil sketches in place, and the reader can see exactly where the drawing was altered.

It’s difficult to say if My Brilliant Friend: The Graphic Novel can stand on its own; most of its readers will likely be those who have read the original, and it’s unclear whether there are plans to adapt the rest of Ferrante’s quartet. That said, it is a unique and evocative tribute to a modern classic.

The artwork is the true star of this unique and evocative adaptation of the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.
FictionGraphic Novels & Comics

Roaming

Review by Mariel Fechik

It’s spring break in 2009. Childhood best friends Dani and Zoe are freshmen in college, and are finally spending a week in New York City like they’ve always dreamed. Accompanying Dani is her classmate Fiona, a cigarette-smoking, tragically hip art student whose uninhibited and self-possessed attitude attracts Zoe immediately.

Dani wants to do classic tourist things: eat pizza and see Coney Island, Times Square and the Statue of Liberty. But Fiona, who has been to New York many times, scoffs at the mere mention of tourism, instead suggesting they see “real” neighborhoods. Zoe, caught in the middle but unable to deny Fiona’s magnetic coolness, agrees. As the trio navigates a late-aughts New York with spotty cell service and tenuous personal connections, they will each have to reckon with something—whether it’s each other or something within themselves.

Roaming, cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s first graphic novel collaboration for an adult audience, is a slice-of-life story about growing up and growing apart, being on the cusp of adulthood and exploring an unfamiliar city. The characters and their experiences hit hard because of how incredibly real they feel; despite the intrinsic brevity of the format, Dani, Fiona and Zoe are fully fleshed out.

As a duo, the Tamakis possess a talent for crafting stories of immense substance out of small, zoomed-in moments. Because of their specificity, these micro-stories speak to a much broader macro-story: Almost everyone knows a Fiona, has been a Zoe or has become frustrated with the hesitance of the Dani in their life.

Jillian’s color palettes are typically spare and minimal, relying on thick black lines and one or two pastels—for This One Summer, a light, muted indigo; for Roaming, swaths of periwinkle, peach and white. The palette places a gauzy haze over the story’s heaviness, much like the function of memory itself.

Roaming is about young adults, new to being on their own and easy to see as naive. But the magic of the book is that it will speak to the 18-year-old in every reader—whether they’re just out of college or at retirement age. Some things, no matter how much time has passed, never change.

Cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki have created a slice-of-life story about growing up and growing apart that will speak to the 18-year-old in every reader—whether they’re just out of college or at retirement age.
NonfictionGraphic MemoirsFamily & Relationships

This Country

Review by Nicole Brinkley

In 2016, New Yorker cartoonist Navied Mahdavian and his wife needed a change, so they packed up their lives and fled—with their dog—from San Francisco to a cabin in rural Idaho. Despite not knowing what wood best keeps houses warm in frigid winters or how to stop a car from freezing during snowstorms, Mahdavian couldn’t help but want his version of the millennial American dream: living off the land in a house you own while building a career as an artist.

Most of Mahdavian’s debut graphic memoir This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America takes place on the six acres around his family’s cabin. There, Mahdavian wanders with his dog, tends to the garden and learns the history of the land—both the stories maintained by his white neighbors and the deeper Indigenous history. Mahdavian’s minimalist illustrations convey how large and rural Idaho can be, and they make it hard not to fall in love with that sort of hopeful landscape. Swaths of blank pages are populated by only the horizon and the plants and animals Mahdavian loves. If Idaho were simply gooseberries and black-billed magpies, it would be impossible to leave.

As Mahdavian settles into his cabin and tries to revel in the slow day to day of his life, he begins to fall in love with the natural world around him, even as his gun-toting neighbors remind him that people like Mahdavian—who is Iranian American—are considered outsiders. Beneath the big blue sky, Mahdavian struggles with their small-minded thinking and wonders if this place he loves can become home–and what choosing to make this place home really means.

It’s the surrounding people that leave Mahdavian feeling disconnected from the land whose history he seeks to understand. Mahdavian’s candid anecdotes showcase neighbors who welcome him and help during crises—even while slinging racial slurs and perpetuating stereotypes. Despite the serious and occasionally threatening nature of these exchanges, Mahdavian’s humor and thoughtfulness honors the kindness contained in these strange relationships while refusing to gloss over the harm that such insular thinking can cause.

Both poetic and personal, This Country meditates beautifully on what it means to create a home in the pockets of America where not everybody is wanted, due to their race or other aspects of identity. This Country is a must for fans of graphic memoirs like Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, and it’s not one to miss for anybody interested in insightful explorations of America’s heartland.

Both poetic and personal, This Country meditates beautifully on what it means to create a home in the pockets of America where not everybody is wanted, due to their race or other aspects of identity.
NonfictionHistory

Washington’s Gay General

Review by Nicole Brinkley

Biographies can intrigue and educate with subject matter alone, but some of the most interesting give both the story of a life and the reason behind the author’s fascination. Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben tells the story of the titular war general, who rose from Prussian obscurity in the 1700s to become a once legendary yet now forgotten leader, and why Eisner Award-winning author Josh Trujillo found his life so interesting.

Ambitious and idealistic, Baron von Steuben quickly rose through the ranks of the Prussian Army through a combination of genius, white lies and good old flirting. However, relationships with Prussian royalty and a reputation as a leader in the army weren’t enough to keep him safe from charges of impropriety, and von Steuben found himself fleeing his home country.

After arriving in America, Benjamin Franklin recruited him to help the Americans organize their untrained rebel army. With the help of young men, some of whom were his lovers, von Steuben shared Prussian army techniques with George Washington, eventually writing the Blue Book guide that laid the foundation for training American soldiers. Yet because of his romantic partners and his immigrant status, it was always a challenge for von Steuben to form a legacy that would be remembered.

Thoughts from Trujillo (and, occasionally, illustrator Levi Hastings) stitch together the gaps in the available information on von Steuben’s life by weaving in compelling modern conversations on queer identity and queer history. They don’t shy away from darkness: The book discusses the fact that von Steuben enslaved people and highlights how his relative wealth and status protected him from what poorer, less powerful queer folk faced.

Hastings ditches the more colorful artwork found in his children’s books in favor of a classy triad color scheme of black, white and blue–quietly patriotic, much like von Steuben himself. The most beautiful piece of art comes at the very end of the book: a single-page spread of von Steuben’s beloved hound, curled up asleep in a bed made of von Steuben’s coat and hat.

Washington’s Gay General examines the same questions of ideology and legacy that permeate the Broadway show Hamilton, and fans of the production will certainly find much to enjoy. For those who are less interested in early American history and simply want to connect with their queer roots, Washington’s Gay General offers an accessible introduction to the life of Baron von Steuben and, through him, the queer people throughout history who have been hiding in plain sight.

Washington’s Gay General examines the same questions of ideology and legacy that permeate Broadway’s Hamilton, and fans of the show will find much to enjoy in this historical graphic novel.

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The illustrations set both the scene and the tone in these thoughtful graphic novels and memoirs, plus a fascinating graphic biography.
NonfictionMusicMemoir

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

At the height of their fame, Sly and the Family Stone carried audiences higher and higher with electrifying funk-rock performances. In Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Sly Stone invites readers to join him on a rollicking ride and regales them with the ups and downs of his own rock and roll life.

Born Sylvester Stewart in 1943 Denton, Texas, Stone grew up surrounded by music, soaking in the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, The Soul Stirrers and The Swan Silvertones. Not long after he was born, his family moved to Vallejo, California, where he started singing solos in church when he was 5. Always with an instrument in his hand, Stone put together a singing group called The Viscaynes that eventually gained enough popularity on a local TV show to be offered a record deal. Stone learned his first lesson in the music business when he discovered that the rights to the song he’s written for the group are kept by the label head. After high school, Stone became a DJ at KSOL, and then started producing songs for a number of artists, including Grace Slick and the Great Society and Billy Preston. 

But more than anything else, Stone wanted a band. After a few years, Sly and the Family Stone was born. “The band had a concept—white and black together, male and female both, women not just singing but playing instruments.” After “Dance to the Music” rocketed to the top of the charts in 1968, Sly and the Family Stone released one album after another, riding high with their music and live performances until the mid-1970s. During this time, The Roots drummer and frontman (and author, filmmaker, actor and record producer) Questlove writes in the book’s foreword, Sly was “cooler than anything around him by a factor of infinity.” (Thank You is also the inaugural title of Questlove’s new imprint, AUWA.) 

As quickly as the band ascended into the rock stratosphere, it descended into a stasis marked by drug addiction and internal disharmony. By 1975, the Family Stone was over. Despite Stone’s personal struggles holding him back from attaining the level of stardom he had reached with the Family Stone, he nevertheless continued to have one goal: He wanted his music to “elevate whoever heard it.” Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) takes fans on the tour of Stone’s life they’ve been waiting for.

The long-awaited memoir from the frontman of Sly and the Family Stone is a rollicking ride about a rock life well lived.

Blood Memory

Renowned documentary makers Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns chronicle the chilling past and hopeful future of the American bison.

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