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Brittle Joints

In beautifully colored and evocative frames, Brittle Joints shares illustrator Maria Sweeney’s experiences living with a rare disability.
In beautifully colored and evocative frames, Brittle Joints shares illustrator Maria Sweeney’s experiences living with a rare disability.
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Grunt

Perhaps no one else walks the line of irreverent and considerate as skillfully as Mary Roach does, and with this book, she presents something important, difficult and often ugly.
NonfictionMemoir

A comedian on calamities and moving forward

Review by Edward Morris

After reading this slim, melancholy memoir, you may be tempted to turn to the Book of Job for comic relief. Notaro’s avalanche of ordeals has become such a staple of her comedy routines and interviews and is so prominently featured in the 2015 documentary Tig that many readers will likely know about them already. For those who don’t, they include, in rapid succession, a broken romance, a debilitating digestive tract disorder called C-diff, the sudden, violent death of her mother and breast cancer leading to a double mastectomy. All these calamities are revisited within a framework that embraces Notaro’s difficult childhood relationships with an endearing but irresponsible mother, a martinet stepfather and a spaced-out, absentee biological father. 

Although there are diverting comic touches (most in the ironic vein), the book’s chief virtue is Notaro’s absolute candor in describing how these devastating setbacks wracked both her body and soul. We feel C-diff sap her strength, partake of the terror she experiences when discovering she has cancer and grieve with her as the mother she emotionally relied on slips away.

The focal point of I’m Just a Person—and the turning point in her career and outlook—is the night in 2012, when she goes onstage at a comedy club and begins her routine with, “Hello. Good evening. Hello. I have cancer, how are you.” Her performance, undertaken as a wild gambit, captivated the crowd and became a milestone in comic history. Even with cancer gnawing away at her, she had triumphed.

Notaro ends the book with the happy tale of meeting and marrying Stephanie Allynne and of looking, with fingers prudently crossed, toward a bright future.

 

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

After reading this slim, melancholy memoir, you may be tempted to turn to the Book of Job for comic relief. Notaro’s avalanche of ordeals has become such a staple of her comedy routines and interviews and is so prominently featured in the 2015 documentary Tig that many readers will likely know about them already.

The inspiration behind a classic novel

As the old saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. And the two often intertwine, as we learn in Lesley M.M. Blume’s mesmerizing account of the young Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s as he prepares to write his breakout debut novel, The Sun Also Rises.
NonfictionLiterature

Convicts connect with classic literature

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Nine male convicted felons, serving long sentences for violent crimes, meet regularly with a sensitive, witty female professor inside a maximum security prison to read and discuss works by literary giants like Conrad, Kafka, Nabokov, Poe and Shakespeare. What could go wrong? The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison is Mikita Brottman’s refreshingly straightforward account about all that did go right, as together they explored Heart of Darkness, The Black Cat, Lolita and other rather unlikely candidates for prison reading. 

Brottman is an Oxford-educated scholar volunteering within the grim walls of Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institute, bringing her deep love of literature to men who, she hopes, will find something meaningful for themselves in the books she cherishes. Her own troubled childhood led her to seek escape in such works; complex characters like Conrad’s Marlow and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, she reasons, may help these convicts reach a deeper understanding of themselves and each other. They seem willing to try. But the crushing weight of prison life—unrelenting boredom, punitive corrections officers, random lockdowns, solitary confinements, illnesses and violent gang fights—takes its toll. 

They all make mistakes here: Brottman misspeaks to a reporter and worries the club will be cancelled altogether. The men nod off when high or ill. She wonders why she ever thought reading about the pedophile and nymphet in Lolita was a good idea. Then again, they make her see Gregor’s transformation into a bug in Metamorphosis in an entirely new way.

Later, when two of the men are released and Brottman meets them “outside,” she discovers they have no more interest in reading literature. “On the inside,” she concludes, “I’d loved those men. But on the outside, I’d lost them. Because literature was all I had.” Not quite all: She tells her own good story here, too.

 

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

Nine male convicted felons, serving long sentences for violent crimes, meet regularly with a sensitive, witty female professor inside a maximum security prison to read and discuss works by literary giants like Conrad, Kafka, Nabokov, Poe and Shakespeare. What could go wrong? The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison is Mikita Brottman’s refreshingly straightforward account about all that did go right, as together they explored Heart of Darkness, The Black Cat, Lolita and other rather unlikely candidates for prison reading.

Table for two

When Isabel Vincent’s friend suggested that she have dinner with her recently widowed, 93-year-old father, Vincent was in need of a lift. She had just moved to New York City to take a job as an investigative reporter with the New York Post, and her marriage was falling apart.
NonfictionTravel

Step out into the world

Review by Alice Cary

You may not have heard of Geoff Dyer, but this novelist, critic and essayist has been called "one of our most original writers," and indeed his writing is unique, with titles ranging from Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It and Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. Born in Great Britain and currently living and teaching in Los Angeles, Dyer takes readers on a tour of both the world and his intriguing mind in White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World.

In nine essays interspersed with short vignettes, Dyer recounts journeys like his trip to Gauguin's Tahiti, where he "soon came to see that the real art of the Marquesas, and of Polynesia, generally, was tattooing." During a tour of Beijing's Forbidden City, he develops a crush on a young woman named Li, whom he assumes is a guide. She isn't―but she does her best to act as one. Similarly, Dyer's observations are by no means full of the usual travel guide stuff; instead, they tend to be full of unexpected details, diversions, and detours.

Dyer sums up his mission like this: "trying to work out what a certain place―a certain way of marking the landscape―means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for."

"Northern Dark" tells of Dyer's trip to see the Norway's Northern Lights with his wife Jessica, which doesn't go well, and includes the line, "Why have we come to this hellhole?" "White Sands" begins with a brief discussion of his visit to the New Mexico monument, but morphs into a riveting account of picking up a hitchhiker and then passing a sign that says, "NOTICE/DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS/DETENTION FACILITIES IN AREA."

The book's last essay is a bit of a departure, but a fitting conclusion to a book that's so much about inner reactions to the outside world. Dyer describes his experience of having a mild stroke and its aftermath, prompting him to conclude: "Life is so interesting I'd like to stick around forever, just to see what happens, how it all turns out."

You may not have heard of Geoff Dyer, but this novelist, critic and essayist has been called "one of our most original writers," and indeed his writing is unique, with titles ranging from Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It and Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. Born in Great Britain and currently living and teaching in Los Angeles, Dyer takes readers on a tour of both the world and his intriguing mind in White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World.
NonfictionMemoir

A journalist’s frank account of illness

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her closely observed memoir, A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles: A True Story of Love, Science, and Cancer, journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams reports on two years in her family’s life, during which she was treated for stage 4 melanoma. Williams first wrote about her disease in a New York Times Modern Love essay, in which she detailed her split from her husband Jeff and their journey back to coupledom. This book expands on that essay, focusing on the small ups and grueling downs of these two years.

As she begins treatment, Williams’ father-in-law succumbs to lymphoma, and her childhood friend Debbie undergoes surgery for advanced ovarian cancer. Williams is frank, funny and crass in describing these developments, as well as indignities like an infected head wound after surgery to remove her first melanoma. She and Debbie share a wisecracking philosophy: “I’m just over hearing people without cancer tell [us] how we’re supposed to do it,” Williams says. “Like there’s always supposed to be a struggle or a fight, and it’s supposed to be courageous. You know what? Bite me.”

“God, I can’t stand that battling talk,” Debbie replies. “Don’t assume I’m a warrior because I got sick.”

Williams also tenderly describes how her husband Jeff and their two school-age daughters cope and change, and she illuminates the recently revived field of immunotherapy. As a patient at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Williams qualifies for a phase-1 study of two new immunotherapy drugs. These save her life: After three months of treatment, the metastases in her lungs and back disappear, as do all signs of melanoma.

Williams often mines her cancer journey for comedy, but the scenes that stayed with me were quiet moments, such as when she drives away after visiting Debbie, not knowing if it’s the last time she’ll see her old friend. In the crowded cancer-memoir genre, this book holds its own.

In her closely observed memoir, A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles: A True Story of Love, Science, and Cancer, journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams reports on two years in her family’s life, during which she was treated for stage 4 melanoma. Williams first wrote about her disease in a New York Times Modern Love essay, in which she detailed her split from her husband Jeff and their journey back to coupledom. This book expands on that essay, focusing on the small ups and grueling downs of these two years.

Codebreakers on the invisible front lines

The role of codes and codebreakers in World War II has captured public attention recently in The Imitation Game, the biopic about Alan Turing, and the BBC’s miniseries, “The Bletchley Circle.” Bestselling author Max Hastings notes in his introduction to The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945 that his book doesn’t aspire to be a comprehensive narrative of intelligence efforts throughout World War II. Yet he manages to create something even more interesting—a fast-paced narrative that provides rich historical context and leaves readers with a thorough appreciation of the complexities of this mesmerizing subject matter.
NonfictionBiography

A reflection on Sir Paul’s life and his legacy at 73

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Just as his 1981 book, Shout!, is considered by many to be the definitive history of the Beatles, so biographer Philip Norman’s Paul McCartney: The Life will be the once-for-all-time record of the lad from Liverpool whose song lyrics and boyish good looks broke hearts and whose career after the Beatles was almost as successful as his time with them.

Drawing on scores of interviews with McCartney’s family, friends and associates, Norman delivers a sprawling, year-by-year chronicle filled with details about McCartney’s personal and professional life that will be familiar to many devoted fans. The book ranges from McCartney’s childhood and the devastating death of his mother—after which, he said, “I learned to put a shell around me”—to his love of rock ’n’ roll and his early days with John and George in The Quarrymen. From a young age, McCartney capitalized on his considerable appeal to the opposite sex. “Ever since kindergarten, he’d been aware of his attractiveness to girls and the infallible effect of turning his brown eyes full on them,” Norman writes.

The author chronicles the Beatles’ apprenticeship in Hamburg, the acrimony that tore the band apart and the beginnings of Wings, as well as McCartney’s relationships with Linda Eastman, Heather Mills and Nancy Shevell.

Along with the biographical narrative, Norman weaves in analysis of McCartney’s music as it evolved. For example, Wings’ 1973 album, Band on the Run, appeared at first to be out of control, but the band, according to Norman, “made a courageous journey through unfriendly territory” to emerge with a record that garnered “reviews as ecstatic as those of his previous albums had been dismissive.” On Ram, McCartney includes an instrumental to please his father, Jim, a former big band musician in declining health when the album appeared in 1971.

The author paints a portrait of a musician driven constantly to reinvent himself and a perfectionist who still deeply loves the process of songwriting. While Norman never shies away from revealing McCartney’s shortcomings (“the inexhaustible geniality Paul showed the world was not always replicated in private,” for example) his enthusiasm for the artist turns this book into a sympathetic look at McCartney’s life and his deep contributions to music.

Just as his 1981 book, Shout!, is considered by many to be the definitive history of the Beatles, so biographer Philip Norman’s Paul McCartney: The Life will be the once-for-all-time record of the lad from Liverpool whose song lyrics and boyish good looks broke hearts and whose career after the Beatles was almost as successful as his time with them.

The power of determination

Grit seems to have been written for those who find the maxim “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” too pithy to be useful—thus the 352-page elaboration. A professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, author Angela Duckworth begins by exploring the distinction between “grit,” which she defines as a combination of passion and perseverance directed toward a goal, and natural talent, the ability to achieve a goal without excessive or prolonged effort. Grit will get you farther than talent alone, she maintains, adding that “talent is no guarantee of grit.”
NonfictionHistory

A brutal struggle for America’s Southwest

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In this turbulent election year, as issues like human rights for minorities intensify, The Apache Wars relates the attempted annihilation of a culture more than a century ago, supported by government policy and encouraged by popular prejudice. It is compelling—and a timely if distressing read. University of New Mexico Professor Paul Andrew Hutton’s meticulously researched and exhaustively chronicled history of the longest war in U.S. history (1861-1886) reintroduces the many legendary heroes and villains of the early days in America’s Southwest. It is also a thorough accounting of the cost—in lives and destinies—paid by Native Americans, the settlers who claimed their tribal lands and the postwar military forces left looking for another fight.

Leading the way through these tales of barbarism and perfidy in Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas is Felix Ward, a one-eyed 12-year-old boy of mixed Irish/Mexican heritage, whose kidnapping by the White Mountain Apaches in a raid on his family’s ranch ignited the many simmering conflicts between settlers and natives. Adopted by the tribe and taught their traditional ways, the youth became Mickey Free, riding astride two cultures as an expert Apache scout for the U.S. Army and the adopted son of his Apache captors. Revered for his hunting and tracking skills and reviled as a “miserable little coyote,” Mickey Free figured in almost all encounters between these enemies, who “could never decide if he was friend or foe.”

Hutton brings to life many characters, among them Geronimo, the last Apache chief to surrender and doomed to become a tourist attraction; Civil War generals like Philip Sheridan, who reportedly said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian;” the ever-elusive Apache Kid; warriors Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, Lozen, and Victorio; and Army scouts Kit Carson and Al Sieber. All played their parts in the “bleak and unforgiving world” known as Apachéria, and all figured in the Indians’ ultimate removal from their tribal lands.

 

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

In this turbulent election year, as issues like human rights for minorities intensify, The Apache Wars relates the attempted annihilation of a culture more than a century ago, supported by government policy and encouraged by popular prejudice. It is compelling—and a timely if distressing read.

A fresh look at Elizabeth’s later years

We can’t get enough of the Tudors. Despite the centuries that have passed, the clan that began with Henry VII and ended with Elizabeth I continues to command legions of loyal subjects, from BBC watchers and biography buffs to fans of historical fiction.

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