Mouthwatering recipes, gorgeous photography and enlightening social context make Our South, Breaking Bao and more cookbooks worthy of a spot on your kitchen shelf.
Mouthwatering recipes, gorgeous photography and enlightening social context make Our South, Breaking Bao and more cookbooks worthy of a spot on your kitchen shelf.
In her plucky, intimate memoir, Glory Edim, the creator of the Well-Read Black Girl book club, tethers the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery—it’s reader catnip.
In her plucky, intimate memoir, Glory Edim, the creator of the Well-Read Black Girl book club, tethers the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery—it’s reader catnip.
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Looking for some appropriate piano accompaniment to that multi-part documentary on the Cold War you’re planning? It’s an easy call—just check out the musical archives of Van Cliburn, who became synonymous with the saber-rattling U.S.-Soviet Union standoff when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. 

Historian and journalist Nigel Cliff takes us back to the ’50s to recount that triumph, then follows Cliburn’s remarkable career through the ensuing decades against the backdrop of tension, relative calm and eventual empire breakup. (Coincidentally, when Cliburn died in 2013, tensions were entering another chilly period that persists today.) 

Cliff devotes half of Moscow Nights to the piano competition itself, and rightfully so. Many baby boomers got their first exposure to classical music (not counting  Warner Bros. cartoons) from the breathless media coverage of Cliburn’s triumph in Moscow, where the fix was presumably in for a Soviet pianist to win. With ordinary Muscovites and contest judges alike smitten with the 23-year-old Texan, Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself signed off on the winner. Such a musical high note was difficult to sustain, and Cliff pulls no punches in chronicling the professional and personal highs and lows that accompanied Cliburn for the rest of his career, inextricably tied to Cold War diplomacy.

That’s good news for the reader, as Cliff deftly weaves in such iconic moments as the pre-competition Sputnik launch, Khrushchev’s shoe-banging visit to the United Nations and the U-2 spy plane incident. Through it all, Cliburn maintains his place in popular culture even as his playing skills stagnate and eventually decline.

Part musical biography, part nostalgic look at the hula-hoop era and part Cold War history, Moscow Nights strikes the right chord in all respects.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Looking for some appropriate piano accompaniment to that multi-part documentary on the Cold War you’re planning? It’s an easy call—just check out the musical archives of Van Cliburn, who became synonymous with the saber-rattling U.S.-Soviet Union standoff when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958.
I consider myself a bit of a Jennifer Weiner connoisseur. I’ve read all her books and short stories, watched her short-lived TV series “State of Georgia” and laughed at her live-tweeting during “The Bachelor.”
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You don’t have to be an opera fan to enjoy Sing for Your Life, but if you are, prepare for a feast. Daniel Bergner seats you in the front row of the Metropolitan Opera, and his larger-than life subject, African-American singer Ryan Speedo Green, keeps you there. A study in discipline and artistry, musical agility, opera itself and the role that race has played in all of it, this would be an enlightening read even without Green. His story makes it unforgettable.

Bergner tracks Green’s rise from an impoverished, shattered family to a career as a globally acclaimed bass-baritone, alternating past and present dramas with scenes of the daunting work going on backstage at one of the world’s iconic opera houses. Green’s mother is a constant, mostly malevolent force. His father leaves, his brother goes to prison and 12-year-old Green falls apart at a juvenile detention facility.

How Green grows from there is as captivating as any opera. There’s the teacher who saves his sanity and the facility staffer who gives him a radio; the football coach who makes his players take a music class; the principal who gives Green a chance at his school for the arts, even if he can’t sing; and YouTube, where Green mimics opera stars singing in Italian and German, though he doesn’t understand a word.

Always backlit by racial prejudice—its hazy history in opera and the shadow it continues to cast—the story has moments that bristle, as when Green is expected to sing “Ol’ Man River” at a party hosted by Met benefactors. He feels “reduced, confined, simplified, compressed, concealed” by the expectation the he will “sing woefully about the oppression of black people while taking care not to make white people uncomfortable.” Yet finally, recalling Paul Robeson, who “insisted on adding dignity” by changing some of the words, he sings “with almost enough beauty to crack the wall in front of him and make it disintegrate.” You can almost hear it happen.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You don’t have to be an opera fan to enjoy Sing for Your Life, but if you are, prepare for a feast. Daniel Bergner seats you in the front row of the Metropolitan Opera, and his larger-than life subject, African-American singer Ryan Speedo Green, keeps you there. A study in discipline and artistry, musical agility, opera itself and the role that race has played in all of it, this would be an enlightening read even without Green. His story makes it unforgettable.
It’s interesting that Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life is coming out in the fall instead of May or June. While this book would make a great gift for a recent graduate, it would also be a good read at the beginning of senior year, or any other time of transition. Anyone who practices the lessons put forth here has a lot to look forward to.
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Most of the 18 brief, beautiful essays in Upstream have appeared individually in other collections by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver. Gathered together here, these prose works provide an interior roadmap to her development as one of America’s most accomplished—and most popular—poets of nature and transcendence. 

The title essay, for example, is an impressionistic remembrance of straying away from her family as a young child, wandering upstream and becoming lost. Within a few short pages, it becomes an exhilarating celebration of being lost in nature. The essay concludes: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Attention and devotion are what readers have come to expect from Oliver’s poems. The same traits are evident in her prose. In the astonishing “Swoon,” she watches with great curiosity and sympathy as a female spider produces eggs, nurtures her newborns and painstakingly traps a cricket—“with a humped, shrimplike body and whiplike antennae and jumper’s legs”—in her web. Questions arise in her mind about what she is witnessing, and she writes: “I know I can find [answers] in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!

Other essays contemplate her poetic and intellectual forebears—the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and poets Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and William Wordsworth. Still others relate her soulful encounters with nature during her walks in the woods and along the shore near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. These places have often been sources of inspiration for her poems and will be familiar to many of her readers. So the final essay about leaving Provincetown, nuanced as it is, comes as a shock. 

Oliver, now in her 80s, has moved to Florida. And she remains a joyful advocate for the palace of discovery.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Most of the 18 brief, beautiful essays in Upstream have appeared individually in other collections by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver. Gathered together here, these prose works provide an interior roadmap to her development as one of America’s most accomplished—and most popular—poets of nature and transcendence.
In Hero of the Empire, bestselling author Candice Millard (The River of Doubt, Destiny of the Republic) offers a revealing portrait of a young Winston Churchill, smarting from his first political defeat and hungry for the fame he had yet to achieve.
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Ever the clear-eyed reporter, ABC television journalist Elizabeth Vargas honestly investigates her own psyche in this candid examination of the crippling anxiety and alcoholism she hid from the world for years. From her anchor position at "20/20," and at "World News Tonight" before that, Vargas has always transmitted cool confidence even as she detailed the most horrifying news, whether from Baghdad or closer to home. Between Breaths offers an intimate look at what was going on behind the news desk, where Vargas was throwing light on the world’s darkest corners while keeping her own demons tightly under wraps.

The story Vargas tells may seem familiar—many a memoir has been penned about hitting bottom with the bottle, and Vargas herself came clean about her alcoholism in a Good Morning America interview in 2014—but her telling is unique because it’s almost entirely unsentimental, and certainly unembellished. In straightforward, simple prose, Vargas shows us that conditions like anxiety and alcoholism can hit even the most accomplished among us. She never feels sorry for herself on the page; she’s reporting the facts, as always. Yet, her confessions show how her life spun out of control, how her illness endangered her marriage, her role as a mother and even her life. If you didn’t previously believe that alcoholism was an excrutiatingly difficult disease to recover from, you will by the time you finish this book.

While Vargas’ internal struggle would be engaging enough, she also includes material that we all remember from the news. We go back in time with her to Bob Woodruff’s IED injuries in Iraq and to Peter Jennings’ cancer diagnosis. We’re there when she reports from Baghdad and when she interviews Amanda Knox’s parents. By invoking unfolding global events, Vargas expertly involves us in her personal world as well. We see clearly the immensity of the world’s problems, and the strength it took for someone like Vargas to keep telling the truth. And now, she’s telling the biggest truth of all: her own.

Ever the clear-eyed reporter, ABC television journalist Elizabeth Vargas honestly investigates her own psyche in Between Breaths, a candid examination of the crippling anxiety and alcoholism she hid from the world for years.
Plenty has been written about our 32nd president, who guided our nation to the New Deal and through World War II. But rarely has Franklin Delano Roosevelt been portrayed with such steely-eyed insight as in former New York Times executive editor and Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Lelyveld’s His Final Battle. It is a deeply revealing look at a famously enigmatic president, inaccessible at times even to his closest advisors and his own children. (His son James once said, “Of what was inside him, what really drove him, Father talked with no one.”) It also is a portrait of a master of foreign and domestic relations.

For dedicated World War II readers comes an absorbing history of an unusual rescue mission in the closing days of the war in Europe. Elizabeth Letts, author of The Eighty-Dollar Champion, is an accomplished equestrian herself, and her love of horses shines through this complex story.

The author introduces readers not only to the key human players, such as Austrian Olympian Alois Podhajsky, director of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, and Hank Reed, a career officer who saw the last days of the U.S. cavalry, but also to a few of the horses caught up in the war: Witez, “the Polish Prince,” and Podhajsky’s faithful stallion, Africa.

While the daring, unexpected mission in which Col. Reed and his men (with the blessing and permission of his fellow polo player General George Patton) rescued more than 300 horses from a stud farm in Czechoslovakia in April 1945 forms the centerpiece of this history, Letts has a more ambitious goal in mind. Her narrative encompasses the role that thoroughbred horses played in Poland and Austria, shows how horse breeding was viewed by Gustav Rau, a German horse expert in the Third Reich and reveals the heartbreaking costs of conflict on individuals. 

Letts does an excellent job of bringing the various players to life, and The Perfect Horse includes a helpful list of characters, as well as an epilogue detailing what happened to some of the men and horses in the postwar years, including a touching interaction in 1950 between Podhajsky (who performed for Gen. Patton before his death), and Mrs. Patton.

Although not all the rescued horses ended up in their original homes, it was especially heartening to learn that Witez, the magnificent colt who was almost lost several times during the war, celebrated his 27th birthday in California in 1965 with a carrot cake. The Perfect Horse would be a perfect gift for horse lovers fascinated by history.

For dedicated World War II readers comes an absorbing history of an unusual rescue mission in the closing days of the war in Europe. Elizabeth Letts, author of The Eighty-Dollar Champion, is an accomplished equestrian herself, and her love of horses shines through this complex story.

Our understanding of history does not always match the documented evidence. The American Revolution was not as orderly and restrained as we sometimes think. American colonists who remained loyal to the king and those wanting to break away often treated one another inhumanely. A plundered farm, the target of small raiding parties, was more common than a battle charge. After the war, 60,000 Loyalists became refugees.
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Swimming in the Sink is a comeback tale told straight from the heart—the big, intrepid heart belonging to Lynne Cox. In refreshingly candid style, the legendary open-water swimmer details her many achievements and sets the stage for her greatest challenge. From setting a world record crossing the English Channel (at the age of 15) to swimming in Arctic waters without a wetsuit, she swims with a purpose, whether promoting peace between Argentina and Chile or calling attention to environmental concerns. In 1987, her swim across the frigid Bering Strait helped to ease Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. 

As an elite athlete with a unique ability to acclimatize to cold, Cox also participated in scientific research studying the body’s response to extreme cold, helping to refine surgical and emergency treatment for cold-related traumas. When it came to recovering from the deaths of her beloved elderly parents, however, Cox found herself suddenly helpless, gravely ill and frightened by her damaged heart. Its fitting diagnosis: broken heart syndrome. Medications for atrial fibrillation, along with exercise and dietary restrictions, reshaped everything she knew about her body. Her swimming life seemingly over, Cox despaired: “I did not know what I was. I didn’t like the way I was. I didn’t like what was happening to me.”

With the help of good friends and caring physicians, she uses the mind-body connection to lower her heartbeat and restore proper breathing. She tries to swim again—beginning, improbably, in her kitchen sink. Mindfulness and positive thinking, added to her athletic grit, help Cox learn what it takes to swim—and love—all over again.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Swimming in the Sink is a comeback tale told straight from the heart—the big, intrepid heart belonging to Lynne Cox. In refreshingly candid style, the legendary open-water swimmer details her many achievements and sets the stage for her greatest challenge. From setting a world record crossing the English Channel (at the age of 15) to swimming in Arctic waters without a wetsuit, she swims with a purpose, whether promoting peace between Argentina and Chile or calling attention to environmental concerns. In 1987, her swim across the frigid Bering Strait helped to ease Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Before anyone had ever heard of Katharine Graham, there was Alicia Patterson. She built a major newspaper out of a small-town gazette, hobnobbed with presidents, wrote about hotspots around the globe and was a close adviser to Adlai Stevenson, the dominant liberal politician of the 1950s. She was also his lover, despite the fact that both were married.

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