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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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NonfictionBiography

The socialite spy

Review by Edward Morris

The motives for living the life of a spy, author Howard Blum tells us, are subsumed under the rubric MICE—Money, Ideology, Coercion, Excitement. For the well-educated and well-to-do socialite Betty Pack (1910-1963), the prime motivation was clearly excitement, with just enough ideology thrown in to give her actions a veneer of nobility. Born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, she realized early that her striking good looks and sense of command made her irresistible to men. She invested (rather than lost) her virginity at 14 and enjoyed a series of lovers until she found herself pregnant at 19 and uncertain of who the father was. She then very prudently ensnared and married Arthur Pack, a minor British diplomat who, if nothing else, gave her rank and entry into various government circles where official secrets were kept—and, thanks to her zeal, stolen.

But Pack, animated as she was by “a terrible restlessness,” brought considerably more than sexual magnetism to the job. She was also courageous, quick-witted and doggedly persistent once given an assignment. When it appeared that a night watchman was about to catch her and her accomplice on a safe-cracking mission, she quickly stripped naked, leaving the guard to mumble his apologies for interrupting—after he’d gotten an eyeful, of course. Although she was an American, Pack began spying for the British in the late 1930s against Germany, Italy and Vichy France at outposts in Chile, Spain, Poland and Washington. After America entered World War II, it also became a beneficiary of the intelligence she collected.

Drawing on memoirs, diaries, letters and official documents, Blum takes us into Pack’s mind—both as she assessed her thoughts and motives and as those around her did. The Last Goodnight is a very intimate accounting of a singular personality. Pack was a faithless wife and an indifferent mother, but one could hardly imagine a more attentive lover. After all, every tryst was a report in the making.

The motives for living the life of a spy, author Howard Blum tells us, are subsumed under the rubric MICE—Money, Ideology, Coercion, Excitement. For the well-educated and well-to-do socialite Betty Pack (1910-1963), the prime motivation was clearly excitement, with just enough ideology thrown in to give her actions a veneer of nobility.

The fight to protect the mountain lion

Unlike OR-7, the much-watched Oregon wolf whose wanderings have captured the public’s attention, the mountain lion in science writer William Stolzenburg’s Heart of a Lion has no name. Nor is there a happy ending to his story—in June 2011, the 140-pound mountain lion (Puma concolor, cat of a single color) was killed on a parkway in Connecticut, where his like had not roamed for more than a century.
Nonfiction

Exploring our process of perception

Review by Sheila M. Trask

What captures your attention? How does that shape your thinking, and ultimately, your actions? That’s the question Dr. David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, asks in Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering. He answers the question by putting people—sometimes troubled, sometimes brilliant, often both—at the heart of his research. While he provides the basic neuroscience and survey of psychological thought we would expect for a book on this subject, Kessler himself seems more captured by the personal stories he’s gathered, from figures including Dostoyevsky and David Foster Wallace.

Wallace appears repeatedly in Kessler’s explorations, and the conversations Kessler had with the lauded writer’s parents are moving as well as illustrative. Kessler’s thesis is that many emotional struggles and mental illnesses have a common underlying mechanism: Some stimulus takes hold of our attention and shifts our perceptions so we become increasingly focused on the stimulus and anything related to it. This “capture” can drive incredible creativity—witness Wallace’s astounding literary feats, including the mammoth novel Infinite Jest—but it can also trigger an endless downward spiral, as in Wallace’s deep depressions and eventual suicide.

Kessler shows the mechanism of capture at work in the lives of a wide range of mostly literary luminaries, showing us how much Dostoyevsky’s gambling problem has in common with Caroline Knapp’s alcoholism, for instance. He also explores, more briefly, the pure joy of “capture,” in sections devoted to shifts of focus that have led to activism, social justice movements, incredible musical compositions and religious rebellions. Stories like that of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, offer hope that even from the depths of addiction, one can experience a shift of perception that changes everything and leads to a meaningful and fulfilling life.

What captures your attention? How does that shape your thinking, and ultimately, your actions? That’s the question Dr. David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, asks in Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering.

The euphoria of being a grandparent

How does an award-winning journalist contemplate a transformative change in her own life? With prodigious research that finds room for the blind love growing in “a whole new chamber in my heart.” Lesley Stahl, longtime correspondent for “60 Minutes,” has a lot to share about Becoming Grandma.
NonfictionParenting

A father’s quest to connect

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

For journalist Ron Fournier, connecting with his youngest child, Tyler, wasn’t easy: Tyler hated sports, which his dad loved, and he was socially awkward, which made Fournier cringe. His warmhearted memoir, Love That Boy, details a father’s journey to understand and bond with his son, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the relatively late age of 12.

One thread of the memoir follows father and son on a series of post-diagnosis road trips. Tyler loves history and Fournier is a former White House correspondent, so they visit presidential house-museums—the White House; Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill; the Adams home in Quincy; Jefferson’s Monticello. Fournier tries to connect the dots for Tyler: Roosevelt suffered asthma and was bullied as a child but grew up to be wildly popular, he tells him. “You’re trying too hard,” Tyler says.

Divided into two parts, “What We Want” and “What We Need,” the memoir is also a familiar meditation on parenting—our outsize expectations for our kids’ success, popularity and happiness. To get at these issues, Fournier interviews other parents, some who have a child with Asperger’s or depression, others who call themselves tiger moms. Fournier intersperses these with his family’s story, including the slow path to Tyler’s diagnosis and one daughter’s adolescent struggles. He’s clear-eyed about his own shortcomings—he repeatedly put work ahead of family, and his anxious expectations for his college-age daughters, Holly and Gabrielle, led him to give them wrong-headed advice (which they wisely ignored).

Fournier also secured substantial visits with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he vividly describes the former presidents’ empathy and generosity with Tyler, who didn’t make those visits easy. But Love That Boy is most affecting when we see how far Tyler has come since his diagnosis and how far his father has come as well.

 

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

For journalist Ron Fournier, connecting with his youngest child, Tyler, wasn’t easy: Tyler hated sports, which his dad loved, and he was socially awkward, which made Fournier cringe. His warmhearted memoir, Love That Boy, details a father’s journey to understand and bond with his son, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the relatively late age of 12.

Jefferson’s mission

Thomas Jefferson was arguably the central figure in the early American republic. No one contributed more to the formation of the country or had more sustained influence. But how did he think of himself and what he was doing in the world? How did he want others to perceive him?
NonfictionBiography

A publishing titan finally gets her due

Review by Catherine Hollis

The remarkable life story of Blanche Knopf, who co-founded Alfred A. Knopf publishers in 1915, encompasses the history of 20th-century literature. Many of Knopf’s most distinguished authors—including Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir—were brought into the firm by Blanche’s wide-ranging literary interests. Inevitably, however, this is also a story about gender in the workplace: Although Blanche was an equal partner in shaping the company, she owned less of it than did her husband and his father. 

Blanche’s marriage to Alfred Knopf lies at the heart of Laura Claridge’s capacious and engaging biography. Although the Knopfs shared a passionate commitment to literature, they were not well-matched intimately and quickly settled into a “open” marriage. Blanche mainly lived in an apartment in Manhattan, while Alfred preferred to settle in the nearby suburbs. Despite the distance between them, they had two children: their son, Pat, and the publishing company, which is still thriving today.

One especially timely and tragic theme in Blanche’s life concerns her lifelong drive to be thin. Beginning in the 1920s, when fashionable women pursued a skinny flapper’s body, Blanche spent an inordinate amount of time and energy dieting. Living on a menu of cocktails and olives, supplemented by a popular diet pill that damaged her eyes, Blanche seems to have channeled the stresses of the workplace into a lifelong eating disorder. 

Despite her rocky personal life, Blanche’s true passion was finding and signing new authors. She was personally responsible for bringing to Knopf popular hard-boiled detective novelists like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and her immersion in the Harlem Renaissance led her to authors Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen. 

In The Lady with the Borzoi, Claridge triumphantly restores Blanche Knopf’s central place in 20th-century publishing history.

 

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

The remarkable life story of Blanche Knopf, who co-founded Alfred A. Knopf publishers in 1915, encompasses the history of 20th-century literature. Many of Knopf’s most distinguished authors—including Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir—were brought into the firm by Blanche’s wide-ranging literary interests. Inevitably, however, this is also a story about gender in the workplace: Although Blanche was an equal partner in shaping the company, she owned less of it than did her husband and his father.

Terror in Texas

In 1885, Austin, Texas, was terrorized by a series of murders so seemingly random and brutal they’re considered the work of the first American serial killer. People were reluctant to pay attention when the victims were servant girls or young women of color, ascribing the crimes to a gang of “bad blacks,” in part because Austin was prosperous and growing; murders in the news were bad publicity. In The Midnight Assassin, Texas Monthly editor Skip Hollandsworth tells the little-known story in riveting fashion, presenting this historical page-turner in spellbinding detail.
Nonfiction

A firsthand look at life as a female scientist

Review by Alice Cary

“I will never stop being ravenously hungry for science, no matter how well it feeds me,” writes Hope Jahren, a paleobiologist, winner of three Fulbright Awards, a professor at the University of Hawaii and now author of a marvelous memoir, Lab Girl. What’s it like being a female research scientist? You’ll have no better tour guide than Jahren, who is witty, thoughtful, informative and who writes exceedingly well.

Jahren, whose work focuses on plant life, grew up playing beneath the chemical benches in her father’s community college lab in Minnesota, knowing that someday she would have her own lab. Today she does (her third), calling it her refuge, her asylum and “a place to go on sacred days, as is a church.”

Her lab partner, Bill, is her loyal sidekick, whom she adores like a fraternal twin. Their adventures, chronicled here in high style, include overturning a van during a snowstorm, hanging off the sides of cliffs in Northern Alaska and tromping through Irish highlands in search of moss.

Jahren also writes about the difficulty of being a female scientist, sometimes forced to work with “pasty middle-aged men who regarded me as they would a mangy stray that had slipped in through an open basement window.” She relates the ongoing task of securing funding—in their early days as a team, Bill lived in his car when he couldn’t afford his own place. 

Jahren shares her struggles with bipolar disorder (although this isn’t the focus of the book), and the joy of finally meeting the man she would marry and becoming a mother. Along the way, she includes elegant short chapters about the natural world, artfully explaining the way in which various species’ struggle for survival mirrors her own.

Lab Girl presents an edifying and entertaining look into the world of a serious research scientist.

 

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

“I will never stop being ravenously hungry for science, no matter how well it feeds me,” writes Hope Jahren, a paleobiologist, winner of three Fulbright Awards, a professor at the University of Hawaii and now author of a marvelous memoir, Lab Girl. What’s it like being a female research scientist? You’ll have no better tour guide than Jahren, who is witty, thoughtful, informative and who writes exceedingly well.

Searching for answers about her assailant

On July 9, 1984, reporter Joanna Connors was on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer when she was raped on the stage of an empty theater at Case Western Reserve University. Her assailant, 27-year-old David Williams, was arrested and sent to prison. In I Will Find You, she offers an insightful account of this life-changing event and its harrowing aftermath.
NonfictionMedicine

Discovering a new depth of feeling

Review by Kelly Blewett

John Elder Robison is already well known for his 2007 memoir, Look Me in the Eye, which detailed his life as a successful adult with Asperger’s syndrome. A key feature of this bestseller, and of Robison’s stance toward Asperger’s in general, is that being on the autism spectrum is a gift rather than a disease. And so, when given the opportunity, why did he submit to a series of experimental brain treatments? This is one of the questions Robison struggles to answer in Switched On, his eloquent, vivid and utterly compelling new memoir.

Robison undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) because it might increase his emotional awareness, or so researchers predict. But his reaction to the treatments far exceeds their expectations. His experiences are hallucinogenic, highly charged and deeply meaningful. They change him forever. Readers see Robison in the throes of the treatments and their dramatic aftermath—staying up all night listening to music, reconsidering relationships, reveling in his ability to finally look people in the eye. These stories are so moving and unpredictable that I found myself reading them aloud. 

It’s been seven years since Robison initially underwent TMS, and the long-term implications are still unfolding. Ultimately, though, this book provides an intellectual and emotional initiation into a different way of perceiving the world. Like books by Andrew Solomon and Oliver Sacks, Switched On offers an opportunity to consider mental processes through a combination of powerful narrative and informative medical context. Readers can put their hands, for a moment, on the mystery that is the brain.

 

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

John Elder Robison is already well known for his 2007 memoir, Look Me in the Eye, which detailed his life as a successful adult with Asperger’s syndrome. A key feature of this bestseller, and of Robison’s stance toward Asperger’s in general, is that being on the autism spectrum is a gift rather than a disease. And so, when given the opportunity, why did he submit to a series of experimental brain treatments? This is one of the questions Robison struggles to answer in Switched On, his eloquent, vivid and utterly compelling new memoir.

Understanding the Godfather of Soul

James Brown’s impact on American popular culture reverberates so deeply through music and race relations that writers are still attempting to uncover the man behind the legend. In Kill ’Em and Leave, acclaimed writer James McBride (The Color of Water) seeks to explain why, for African Americans, Brown remains the “song of our life, the song of our entire history.”

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