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NonfictionGraphic Memoirs

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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When obsession crosses the line

Obsessive-compulsive disorder has become a joke in our culture. We label ourselves OCD if we prefer our socks folded a certain way or our desktop arranged just so. In The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought, David Adam exposes the insensitivity of these casual mentions by sharing his own struggle with this crippling mental illness. His book puts the OCD diagnosis in historical context, but he combines this broader frame of reference with his personal story, which adds humor, pathos and authority.
Social Science

What we can learn from Scandinavia

Review by Edward Morris

Annoyance can be a powerful prod to action. And so after being annoyed for years by the praise much of the world lavishes on the supposedly enlightened Scandinavians, British writer Michael Booth has bestirred himself to take a closer, more jaundiced look at the people, customs, institutions and landscapes of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and his adopted homeland of Denmark. Are these five nations the political incarnation of human happiness? Well, maybe.

In The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, Booth brings a deliciously droll sense of humor to his mission. But he is no dilettante, no mere passer through. In striking a balance between Chamber of Commerce and chamber of horrors, he undergirds his personal observations by citing copious studies and statistics and interviewing a wide swath of sociologists, historians, politicians, journalists and common folk. Apart from a history of being tugged and battered by larger countries, the commonalties Booth finds among Scandinavians are hardiness and resourcefulness (no doubt enhanced by the unforgiving climate), social cohesiveness, devotion to economic and gender equality, respect for education (in Finland, he discovers, teachers are “national heroes”) and a secular approach to problem-solving.

And there are problems aplenty, both current and impending, Booth says. Social safety nets are expensive to maintain, particularly for aging populations, which portend even higher taxes and greater productivity. Security can and does lead to a certain level of individual indolence. Immigration, besides being socially disruptive, is giving rise to racist political parties in Denmark and Sweden, although the latter country strives mightily to welcome and integrate its newcomers. Norway’s vast oil wealth enables its citizens to maintain their smug, provincial ways. Iceland, while recovering from its recent financial disaster, still has remnants of the American-style capitalism that got it into trouble in the first place.

Even so, Booth emerges as a cautious cheerleader for the region. As societal and economic role models for the rest of the world, he declares, “The Nordic countries have the answer.”

Annoyance can be a powerful prod to action. And so after being annoyed for years by the praise much of the world lavishes on the supposedly enlightened Scandinavians, British writer Michael Booth has bestirred himself to take a closer, more jaundiced look at the people, customs, institutions and landscapes of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and his adopted homeland of Denmark. Are these five nations the political incarnation of human happiness? Well, maybe.

Why our species thrived

Originally published in Israel, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant history of humankind has already become an international bestseller. A specialist in world history, Harari undertakes a daunting task in Sapiens: to examine the rise of our species and discern the reasons behind our remarkable success.
NonfictionMemoir

A family’s reel-to-reel history

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

“It began with a death in the family. My Uncle Ed, the most debonair of the clan, a popular guest of the Gentile social clubs despite being Jewish, had succumbed at age ninety-five with a half glass of Johnnie Walker on his bedside table.”

With that opening sentence, Alan Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams) invites us into his own remembrance of things past in his elegant memoir, Screening Room: Family Pictures. In episodic prose that shimmers with cinematic quality, Lightman recalls a time when aunts and uncles, cousins and siblings, parents and friends gathered in the Memphis moonlight to drink, talk in hushed tones about neighbors, sort out perplexing and slowly evolving attitudes about race and ponder the ragged ways people fall in love and out of it.

At the center of Lightman’s journey stands his grandfather, M.A. Lightman, who built a movie theater empire across the South, and whose presence and power haunted his family for generations. Not only does Alan Lightman’s father inherit the job of running a movie theater, he makes his son the assistant manager of the theater one summer; the young Lightman develops “a high-level expertise in making popcorn.” He sees two to three movies a week—“sometimes three movies in a single day”—and it’s then that he starts “seeing life as a series of scenes.”

The memorable scenes he brings us in Screening Room range from a wedding reception at the Peabody Hotel (where the famous ducks wouldn’t cooperate) to a 1960 meeting with Elvis (who attended private showings at M.A.’s personal theater). Lightman, who went on to become a theoretical physicist as well as a celebrated novelist, captures the South’s troubled racial history and offers poignant recollections of his family’s African-American housekeeper, Blanche.

He brings down the curtain with a wistful flourish: “I have found, and I have lost. . . . I have smelled the sweet honeysuckle of memory. It is all fabulous and heart-wrenching and vanished in an instant.”

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“It began with a death in the family. My Uncle Ed, the most debonair of the clan, a popular guest of the Gentile social clubs despite being Jewish, had succumbed at age ninety-five with a half glass of Johnnie Walker on his bedside table.”

Making a voluntary change

There was no major emergency that motivated John Marshall to uproot his family for six months of global volunteer work. It was lots of little things: declining intimacy with his wife of 20 years; the desire for quality time with their teenagers; and a general sense of boredom at work. Their travels do change their lives, in ways both expected and highly surprising.
NonfictionMedicine

Taking the pulse of medical history

Review by Alden Mudge

What makes Rob Dunn’s narrative history of advances in heart research so fascinating is on vivid display in the opening chapter of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. Here Dunn tells the story of a Chicago surgeon who performed the first-known repair to the pericardium, the protective sac around the heart. The year was 1893, and Chicago was abuzz over the World’s Fair. The patient, a railroad worker, had been stabbed in a knife fight at a local bar. The surgeon, a talented, ambitious African-American man, had been forced by racial prejudice to found his own poorly funded hospital, serving Chicago’s lower class. At a time when a knife to the heart was almost always fatal, the revolutionary procedure was delicate and complex because there was no technology to sustain the heart while a surgeon worked on it. To everyone’s amazement, the procedure succeeded.

There, in a nutshell, is the enticing weave of biography, social history and heart-related scientific drama that will entice and satisfy readers throughout the book.

From this opening, Dunn relates many fascinating stories, ranging from Leonardo DaVinci’s contributions to our understanding of the heart to the complexities of developing the heart-lung machine. The book takes its title from an experiment by Werner Forssmann, an ambitious surgeon wonderfully described as “more forearm than frontal lobe,” who, in a dangerous stunt, inserted a catheter in his arm, running it all the way to his heart, an exploit that eventually earned him a Nobel Prize.

Dunn, a biology professor and widely published popular writer on science, says we are far more ignorant about the workings of the heart than we think, and there is much more to learn. That is undoubtedly true, but for a general reader, Dunn’s book is a great contribution to our understanding of the lifelong work of our beating hearts.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What makes Rob Dunn’s narrative history of advances in heart research so fascinating is on vivid display in the opening chapter of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. Here Dunn tells the story of a Chicago surgeon who performed the first-known repair to the pericardium, the protective sac around the heart. The year was 1893, and Chicago was abuzz over the World’s Fair. The patient, a railroad worker, had been stabbed in a knife fight at a local bar. The surgeon, a talented, ambitious African-American man, had been forced by racial prejudice to found his own poorly funded hospital, serving Chicago’s lower class. At a time when a knife to the heart was almost always fatal, the revolutionary procedure was delicate and complex because there was no technology to sustain the heart while a surgeon worked on it. To everyone’s amazement, the procedure succeeded.

Finding the root of heartbreak

Grandparents who love their only grandchild fiercely, but haven’t spoken since their divorce 50 years ago, incite her urgent question: What happened? As she writes in A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France, Miranda Richmond Mouillot hopes to recreate a fairy tale of love found, and somehow lost, amid the turmoil of World War II. But her grandparents, Armand and Anna, are growing frail and their memories of fleeing Nazi-occupied France are painful.
NonfictionMemoir

Sticks and stones

Review by Alice Cary

In 1971, 10-year-old Allen Kurzweil arrived at a Swiss boarding school called Aiglon. He was a Jewish boy from New York; his father had died, and his mother was “test-driving her third husband.” Kurzweil was happy to be back in the Alps—his Viennese father had brought him there for winter holidays and imbued him with a love of alpine hiking and skiing.

Soon, however, Kurzweil (the youngest student at Aiglon) was being tormented by one of his roommates, 12-year-old Cesar Augustus, a native of Manila. Cesar’s abuse came in many forms, both physical and psychological, and Kurzweil begins Whipping Boy by taking readers back to that monumental time in his life.

Kurzweil leaves the school after a year, but the memories of being bullied continue to haunt him, even as an adult. As a novelist, he writes a children’s book featuring a bully modeled after his nemesis. When Kurzweil decides to look into what became of the real Cesar, he discovers that he’s in federal prison for his part in a bizarre international swindling scheme.

Kurzweil’s long-term pursuit of this strange story and his eventual confrontation of Cesar reads like a thriller, full of intrigue as well as humor and self-reflection. “Why am I still pursuing Cesar?” the author asks himself. “Is it to uncover his story? To avoid my own? The bottom line is this: I’m not sure what I’m after. Nor can I explain what compels me to travel cross-country to spy on the actions of a convicted felon I have promised my wife I will not confront.”

Kurzweil puts both his journalistic and literary skills to wonderful use in his “investigative memoir,” making numerous trips to revisit his school and to interview old classmates, staff, swindling victims, prosecutors and federal agents.

Kurzweil’s final meeting with Cesar is a worthy finale, bound to prompt plenty of meaningful discussions among readers about the nature of childhood, bullying and memories.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1971, 10-year-old Allen Kurzweil arrived at a Swiss boarding school called Aiglon. He was a Jewish boy from New York; his father had died, and his mother was “test-driving her third husband.” Kurzweil was happy to be back in the Alps—his Viennese father had brought him there for winter holidays and imbued him with a love of alpine hiking and skiing.

Too far from home

Alexandra Fuller’s hardscrabble African lyricism returns in her third memoir, which focuses on the push-pull of her marriage to American adventurer Charlie Ross. Although much of Leaving Before the Rains Come is set in Wyoming, where Fuller settles uncomfortably into American domesticity, her war-torn childhood in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the drunken pragmatism of her parents continue to shape her worldview.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

How a great society became law

Review by Roger Bishop

The civil rights laws and social programs initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s transformed U.S. society. Although they were highly controversial at the time, laws establishing Medicare and Medicaid, public broadcasting, help to those in poverty, consumer and environmental protection, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities and many other programs remain in place today. Though President John F. Kennedy introduced civil rights legislation shortly before his death, it was his successor, Johnson, who was able to get the legislation passed and move on to other aspects of what became known as the Great Society. Most of the credit for the achievements has gone to Johnson, who is lauded for his vision and the “political magic” he perfected as majority leader in the Senate. Historian Julian E. Zelizer acknowledges that LBJ‘s political acumen was essential to the legislative successes, but his enlightening new book, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, offers a brilliantly documented and nuanced look at the many other people and factors that led to the passing of the Great Society legislation. The title of the book is taken from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963: “We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”

The author deftly explores two myths that have often distorted the history of the period. The first is that the 1960s was the apex of American liberalism. It was not. Even in the 1930s, New Deal legislation was compromised as Congress was dominated by a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans who rejected liberalism. This continued to be the case going forward. The major difference in 1964-65 was the makeup of Congress that included, for a very short period, huge liberal majorities and bipartisan cooperation. In 1966, LBJ noted, “I am willing to let any objective historian look at my record. . . . FDR passed five major bills in the first 100 days. We passed 200 in the last two years. It is unbelievable.”

The second myth concerns Johnson’s use of presidential power. As president, he had to rely on legislators to do much of the work he used to do himself. LBJ once said, “The only power I’ve got is nuclear . . . and I can’t use that.” Despite his carefully planned strategy with Congressional leaders, at times even LBJ was surprised at developments in Congress. Another part of the picture is the decision he made in 1964-65 to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He felt that a liberal Democratic president had to be a hawk on foreign policy to be successful. But eventually he was caught between liberals who supported his domestic policies but opposed the war and conservatives who did not like his domestic policies while at the same time felt he was not doing enough to defeat communism abroad. Protests against the war and a budget crisis made it clear that the nation could not have both guns and butter.

Zelizer’s authoritative account of the era’s political landscape never slows down. It is particularly strong as he writes of the debates and strategic and tactical maneuvers by the administration and legislators of both parties. His portraits of powerful political players such as Howard Smith of Virginia and Carl Perkins of Kentucky in the House and James Eastland of Mississippi and Everett Dirksen in the Senate are vivid and insightful. Johnson benefited greatly from public pressure that led to passage of the 1964 civil rights bill and election victories in the fall. His years in Congress had taught him that when you have power, the best move is to maximize your advantages. On the day after he was elected in 1964, Johnson was on the phone helping to make sure that the Democrats took every possible step to capitalize on their election victories.

Anyone who wants to understand how the Great Society legislation came to be and why the heart of it remains intact will want to read this important book.

The civil rights laws and social programs initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s transformed U.S. society. Although they were highly controversial at the time, laws establishing Medicare and Medicaid, public broadcasting, help to those in poverty, consumer and environmental protection, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities and many other programs remain in place today. Though President John F. Kennedy introduced civil rights legislation shortly before his death, it was his successor, Johnson, who was able to get the legislation passed and move on to other aspects of what became known as the Great Society.

A new look at the complex Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell and the Tudor Court have had something of a resurgence in popular culture. While Showtime’s melodramatic “The Tudors” focused on Henry VIII and his six wives, Hilary Mantel’s Booker-Prize winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies dramatized the political rise of Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Tracy Borman’s vivid new biography, Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, is a timely addition to histories of the era.
NonfictionMemoir

Finding a life’s work

Review by Marianne Peters

In his bestseller The Other Wes Moore, Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran and White House fellow Wes Moore pondered how his youth propelled him to the pinnacle of success while another Baltimore man with the same name sank into poverty and crime. Moore’s inspiring new book, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters, could be considered a sequel, as Moore describes what happened when he became an adult. More than a travelogue of adventures, however, this memoir shares his quest to understand how people find their true calling.

Moore’s career has not had a straight trajectory, and readers puzzled about their own direction might find his indirect path encouraging. In choosing employment, he found more motivation in compassion and a hunger to serve than in personal gain or status. Moore’s course has intertwined with larger events such as the war in Afghanistan, where he served as a paratrooper, and the recession, which found him working in New York’s financial district at the time of Wall Street’s collapse. His inside accounts of these events strongly evoke the concerns of those times.

Between each chapter, Moore tells stories of other people who bring their unique talents to lives of service. These stories underscore Moore’s point that the meaning of life is clearer when we are willing to serve others, whether as an inner-city principal or a social entrepreneur. The Work will resonate with people seeking their own purpose in life.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his bestseller The Other Wes Moore, Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran and White House fellow Wes Moore pondered how his youth propelled him to the pinnacle of success while another Baltimore man with the same name sank into poverty and crime. Moore’s inspiring new book, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters, could be considered a sequel, as Moore describes what happened when he became an adult. More than a travelogue of adventures, however, this memoir shares his quest to understand how people find their true calling.

Film junkie

Patton Oswalt’s career has ranged from earnest stand-up comedy to material that requires an encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture to simply follow along. In Silver Screen Fiend: Learning about Life from an Addiction to Film, he describes how a lifelong love of cinema led him from hubris to humility and back on more than one occasion.

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