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11 new books to read for Native American Heritage Month

Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
NonfictionFood & DrinkCookbooks

4 cookbooks sure to inspire creative moves in the kitchen

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.
NonfictionMemoir

Gather Me

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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Love where you live

Melody Warnick was not loving where she lived. After moving to Blacksburg, Virginia, Warnick looked around with dismay. The trees were menacing. She knew no one. She had young children. She was tempted to stay in and binge-watch Netflix. But she decided to try to make herself fall in love with Blacksburg. This Is Where You Belong reveals the steps in her journey, which will be relevant to many of us. As Warnick points out, Americans are, and have been for some time, “geographically restless.”
NonfictionPop Culture

What’s the deal with Seinfeld?

Review by Keith Herrell

Maybe we should add “Seinfeldia” to the lexicon, joining “yada yada,” “sponge-worthy” and “Festivus.”

In Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s view, espoused in the book of the same name, it’s not just a play on the title of the NBC sitcom that ran from 1989 to 1998 and starred comedian Jerry Seinfeld and featured four friends dedicated to zero personal growth. It’s an imaginary place, still thriving thanks to obsessive fans and enduring memes. And Seinfeldia (the book, that is) is the essential travel guide.

Armstrong is on familiar turf here: She also wrote Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, about “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and spent a decade on the staff of Entertainment Weekly. It’s a safe bet that she had a blast writing Seinfeldia, revisiting its origins, debriefing its writers (still shell-shocked from dealing with famously punctilious co-creator Larry David) and catching up with former cast members and network executives.

She’s at her best with tales from the writers, eager to dish about their turn at bat. Encouraged to mine their daily lives for stories, they came up with plotlines about dates gone wrong, shenanigans at the zoo and transgressions of the all-important “social contract.” But eventually the mines are emptied and it comes down to, as one writer once said, “sitting in an office in Studio City.”

And how did “the show about nothing” change everything? In Armstrong’s view, just look at shows like “The Office,” with its awkward humor, or “The Wire,” with its narrative complexity—both “Seinfeld” staples. But perhaps there’s nothing new under the sun: We learn that Michael Richards, who played “hipster doofus” Kramer, gleaned acting tips from watching Gale Storm in the 1950s sitcom “My Little Margie.”

 

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

Maybe we should add “Seinfeldia” to the lexicon, joining “yada yada,” “sponge-worthy” and “Festivus.” In Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s view, espoused in the book of the same name, it’s not just a play on the title of the NBC sitcom that ran from 1989 to 1998 and starred comedian Jerry Seinfeld and featured four friends dedicated to zero personal growth. It’s an imaginary place, still thriving thanks to obsessive fans and enduring memes. And Seinfeldia (the book, that is) is the essential travel guide.

Recalling shaky memories of a lost father

Chris Forhan’s aching, lyrical memoir excavates both a lost father and a lost era in American history. The middle child in an Irish family of eight, Forhan came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. He recalls spirograph toys and the Beatles, Jell-O and tuna casserole, JFK and the moon landing. These details are important because they help Forhan cinematically recreate the family from which his father absented himself, ultimately by suicide in 1973.
NonfictionHistory

The long, buried history of America’s class separation

Review by Roger Bishop

Our understanding of the past often relies on mythmaking or selective memory. So it has been with American history. We often think of ourselves as a “classless society,” but the impoverished and landless are often missing from our story. Using a wide range of sources, historian Nancy Isenberg seeks the truth in her superb White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. This survey of social class is sweeping, detailed, carefully documented and well written. It shows that, contrary to what we may believe, marginalized and expendable people have been part of our heritage from the start. 

Most British colonizing schemes in the 17th and 18th centuries were built on privilege and subordination. Wishing to reduce poverty in England, those regarded as idle and unproductive, including orphans, were sent to North America where they worked as “unfree” laborers. Waste men and waste women, as they were called, were an expendable class of workers who made colonization possible. 

The much admired thinker John Locke, who greatly influenced American revolutionaries, was also a founding member of and the third largest stockholder in the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly over the British slave trade. Contemptuous of the vagrant poor in England and preoccupied with class structure, Locke, in his Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), basically declared war on poor settlers in the Carolinas. The area divided into two colonies in 1712, and Isenberg traces in detail the curious history of why North Carolina became, as she writes, “the heart of our white trash story.” 

Government efforts to improve the lives of the poor have repeatedly met with strong resistance. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865 to extend relief to “all refugees, and all freedmen,” and the Resettlement Administration of the 1930s both failed to produce long-term success. 

Isenberg writes: “Pretending that America has grown rich as a largely classless society is bad history, to say the least. . . . Class separation is and always has been at the center of our political debates, despite every attempt to hide social reality with deceptive rhetoric.”

Her incisive and lively examination of this phenomenon deserves a wide readership.

 

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

Our understanding of the past often relies on mythmaking or selective memory. So it has been with American history. We often think of ourselves as a “classless society,” but the impoverished and landless are often missing from our story. Using a wide range of sources, historian Nancy Isenberg seeks the truth in her superb White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. This survey of social class is sweeping, detailed, carefully documented and well written. It shows that, contrary to what we may believe, marginalized and expendable people have been part of our heritage from the start.

Celebrating our National Parks

For those who may find it hard to accomplish their goals in a day’s time—or, as in this case, a year—we can be grateful that, according to an ancient Hawaiian legend, Maui lassoed the sun and made it promise to slow down its trek across the sky, so that his mother could get her work done. Be glad, too, that Mark Woods won a year’s sabbatical from his newspaper job to visit 15 national parks, a journey he shares in Lassoing the Sun. It becomes a dazzling experience indeed, one that honors the memory of his own mother and her inspiring love of the parks.
NonfictionMusicBiography

James Taylor’s life in music

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In 1971, the great rock critic Lester Bangs famously denounced James' Taylor's music (in the essay, "James Taylor Marked for Death") as "I-Rock, because it is so relentlessly, involutedly egocentric," making Bangs want to push Taylor (and Elton John) off a cliff.

Rock historian Mark Ribowsky (Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul) takes a gentler approach to the singer-songwriter whose familiar songs such as "Fire and Rain" and "Carolina on My Mind" form the soundtrack of the lives of a generation of baby boomers who now hold wine and cheese parties at his concerts.

Drawing on new interviews with various figures in the music industry and on previously published interviews with Taylor and articles about him, Ribowsky artfully chronicles Taylor's life from a childhood alternating between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Cape Cod; his early and enduring musical friendship and partnership with Danny Kortchmar; his heroin addiction and his time at McLean Hospital for depression; his affair of the heart with Joni Mitchell; his marriage to Carly Simon; and his time as the first American artist signed to Apple Records.

Ribowksy examines Taylor's music album-by-album from Mud Slide Slim—which some critics compared to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Joni Mitchell's Blue—to his 2015 Before This World, which was hailed as relaxed as Taylor's earlier albums but richer and riskier.

Although it is unfortunate that Taylor's own voice is missing here, Ribowksy nevertheless offers a rich and nuanced portrait of a musician who channeled his own struggles with addiction, loneliness and uncertainty into enduring ballads of the hopefulness that can emerge when we embrace our shortcomings.

In 1971, the great rock critic Lester Bangs famously denounced James' Taylor's music (in the essay, "James Taylor Marked for Death") as "I-Rock, because it is so relentlessly, involutedly egocentric," making Bangs want to push Taylor (and Elton John) off a cliff.

Facing the facts of the New England slave trade

The African slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean existed for centuries before the English colonization of what came to be called New England. By the 17th century, when the English joined the race for land and resources, merchants, traders, religious leaders and the crown were quite willing to use slaves (Indians and Africans) to help achieve their objectives. In her provocative and compelling New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, historian Wendy Warren asks if the early colonists disapproved of slavery. Her answer, deeply researched and well documented, is a “resounding no.”
NonfictionNature

The delicate business of dealing with bears

Review by Anne Bartlett

Exhausted from work and suffering chronic pain from an injury, Alabama farm boy Harry Walker desperately needed a break. It was 1972, so he and a friend took off to look for America. They landed eventually in Yellowstone National Park, where Harry had a blast with a new girl. Then, Harry was killed by a bear.

It’s a horribly sad story. Sure, Harry did some things wrong, and the National Park Service did its best to blame him for his own death. But the context was more complicated than that, as the NPS knew and as writer Jordan Fisher Smith carefully shows in the absorbing Engineering Eden. For Smith, a ranger for 21 years, Harry’s death by grizzly bear was the tragic result of NPS myopia.

Using the lawsuit brought by Harry’s family as a focal point, Smith introduces us to the debate that consumed the national parks in the late 20th century: How should we save these treasures from depredation? Should we step back and act merely as “guardians,” letting nature re-establish its own equilibrium? Or should we be active “gardeners,” intervening to manage the parks’ ecology?

Following decades of allowing park visitors to feed bears, either directly or indirectly at dumps, the service by 1972 had embarked on a “guardian” experiment by abruptly shutting down the dumps, with no effort to help the bears make the transition. The outcome: a surge of attacks on camps by hungry bears.

Opposing the “guardian” approach was a cadre of wildlife scientists led by the colorful Craighead brothers, pioneers of bear tagging research. Through the conflicts of the Craigheads, zoologist Starker Leopold, Yellowstone scientist Glen Cole and other nature experts, Smith shows that Harry was both the victim of a well-intentioned but misguided strategy and a catalyst for a major course change. Smith believes that change has been for the better—and that Harry’s short life had true purpose.

Exhausted from work and suffering chronic pain from an injury, Alabama farm boy Harry Walker desperately needed a break. It was 1972, so he and a friend took off to look for America. They landed eventually in Yellowstone National Park, where Harry had a blast with a new girl. Then, Harry was killed by a bear.

The gritty side of Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village in the 1970s did not have a shortage of local eccentrics, but one was particularly notorious. Wandering at random, clad in a dirty bathrobe and slippers and adorned with several days’ stubble, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante certainly appeared to be unwell. Yet even when he was on one of many stays in mental hospitals, Gigante was a shot-caller of the first order, the head of the Mafia’s Genovese family. Chin is the story of his mob career and the ruse that kept him out of prison for four decades.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Get your life right

Review by Amy Scribner

If you gravitate toward wholesome, “Dear Abby”-style advice, steer clear of Heather Havrilesky. But if profound, profane wisdom is your jam, this book is for you.

How to Be a Person in the World compiles some of Havrilesky’s best columns from “Ask Polly,” which ran first on quirky website The Awl, then on New York magazine’s The Cut. It also includes a lot of fresh material. Saying that Havrilesky has a way with words is like saying Marilyn Monroe liked diamonds. Havrilesky doesn’t just write—she dances with the words, building empathetic responses that can’t be classified as just advice columns. They are more keen observations of human behavior.

“When you spend your days staring at bony teenagers in tall boots and touching soft things that cost more than your monthly salary, it eats away at your soul like a hungry little demon-rabbit,” she writes to a woman working in fashion who feels miserable and shallow. 

“Repeat after me, WB: ‘I will not lose myself. I can earn money and create art, too. I can befriend Buddhists and women in $300 heels. I am not a one-dimensional, angry human with boundary issues, like those others who get so fixated on being ONE THING AND NOTHING ELSE.’”

It was hard to choose a favorite quote, mostly because she’s so pithy but also because so many of the quotes I loved in this book included a string of F words. 

The contents are divided into sections with titles such as Flaws Become You and Weepiness is Next to Godliness, each prefaced by a deadpan comic strip. 

Whether she’s tackling alcoholism, STDs or deadbeat boyfriends, Havrilesky is a pure joy to read. She’s the tough-love friend who tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. As she tells one advice seeker, “This is your moment. Seize your moment, goddamn it!”

 

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

If you gravitate toward wholesome, “Dear Abby”-style advice, steer clear of Heather Havrilesky. But if profound, profane wisdom is your jam, this book is for you.

A real-life Atticus Finch

Like almost everyone else in the U.S., Atlanta attorney Joseph Madison Beck had read To Kill a Mockingbird, and he decided in 1992 to satisfy his curiosity about the similarity between the novel and an episode in his own family history. He wrote to author Harper Lee: Did she know about his white father’s legal defense of an African-American man accused of raping a white woman in 1938, not far from where Lee was then growing up in south Alabama? No, Lee wrote back politely; though she could see there were “obvious parallels,” she didn’t recall the case at all.
NonfictionBiography

Behind the lens of America’s chronicler of the strange

Review by Julie Hale

When Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971, she was only 48 years old, and her career was on the climb. One of the foremost photographers of the 20th century, she had the remarkable ability to call up and capture the idiosyncrasies of just about anyone who submitted to her lens. As Arthur Lubow observes in Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, she “excavated the truth—or a truth” about her subjects.

In this new biography, which is brisk and accessible despite its 700-page length, Lubow tells the story of an artistically brilliant but emotionally fragile figure. During her relatively brief career, Arbus managed to capture with her camera a broad cross-section of humanity, including nudists, cross-dressers and the mentally handicapped. Born in 1923 into an affluent Jewish family (her brother was the poet Howard Nemerov), Arbus grew up in New York City. She received her first camera from her husband, Allan Arbus, with whom she started a successful fashion photography enterprise. Around 1956, she quit the business and began taking the forthright, unstaged portraits that made her famous, shooting in black and white the very young and the very old, mixed-race couples and nuclear families, millionaires, movie stars, bums, and sideshow freaks.

The book’s chronology is cued by her photographic output. In tracking the timeline of Arbus’ life through her art, Lubow brings to bear on the narrative a deep appreciation for her pictures and an impressive technical grasp of photography. An award-winning journalist, he explains the circumstances that shaped Arbus’ most iconic shots and—prompted by newly discovered letters and exclusive interviews—explores the controversy she courted by becoming close to some of her subjects. Bringing Arbus out from behind the lens, Lubow sheds new light on her genius and delivers a definitive portrait of the artist.

When Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971, she was only 48 years old, and her career was on the climb. One of the foremost photographers of the 20th century, she had the remarkable ability to call up and capture the idiosyncrasies of just about anyone who submitted to her lens. As Arthur Lubow observes in Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, she “excavated the truth—or a truth” about her subjects.

The colorful life of Einstein

One would be hard-pressed to think of a more beloved, admired or popular scientist than Albert Einstein. In the third installment in their graphic biographies, following Freud and Marx, writer and historian Corinne Maier and illustrator Anne Simon take us through the life of our first rock star intellectual from March 14, 1879 to April 18, 1955.

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