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A Boston Harbor diving mission gone wrong

On July 21, 1999, a crane lowered experienced construction diver DJ Gillis and four other men down a 420-foot shaft to the opening of an almost 10-mile tunnel beneath Deer Island in Boston Harbor. At the end of the day, only three men would return alive.

NonfictionMemoir

A biographer’s own story

Review by Heather Seggel

Blake Bailey has written notable biographies of authors John Cheever and Richard Yates, both difficult and brilliant men. While he was sifting through their lives, he was also reflecting on his own. The Splendid Things We Planned is the resulting portrait, a story of mental illness and addiction and the difficult orbits they force upon the healthy. It’s also a tribute to one family’s best efforts and inevitable failings.

Bailey’s older brother, Scott, was born while his parents were still in college. Re-established in Vinita, Oklahoma, their father parlayed his law school education into ever-increasing job responsibility while their mother followed her intellectual bliss and turned their home into a mini-salon for foreign exchange students and witty gay men. Young Blake took in scenes of infidelity and drug use, but his attention was generally on Scott, a handsome bully whose seemingly limitless potential gradually collapsed under relentless drug use and delusional thinking.

Bailey tells a difficult story with spare language that allows for some dry humor. His father remarries a woman who despises both sons equally, so he largely checks out where they’re concerned for several years. His mother dotes on her oldest boy, ever faithful that he’d turn back into the son she knew. “She missed Scott and wanted to talk about him, simple as that—to speculate about his motives, to retrace our steps to the exact point in time when everything went blooey.” Anyone who has lived with someone similarly ill will find this book painfully accurate when it comes to the mental gymnastics and survivor’s guilt involved.

The family as a whole is an eccentric bunch, and Marlies, Scott’s mother, keeps her dignity and a sense of humor while buying a pistol to defend herself against her son. If The Splendid Things We Planned is a damning portrait of mental illness, it’s also an unforgettable look at a family doing its best in the most trying of circumstances, those where no good outcome exists.

Blake Bailey has written notable biographies of authors John Cheever and Richard Yates, both difficult and brilliant men. While he was sifting through their lives, he was also reflecting on his own. The Splendid Things We Planned is the resulting portrait, a story of mental illness and addiction and the difficult orbits they force upon the healthy. It’s also a tribute to one family’s best efforts and inevitable failings.

Multiple-choice master

Debbie Stier faced a crisis. The oldest of her two children was approaching college age, and she hadn’t saved for tuition. What’s more, Ethan was, in her words: “a boy who was ‘happy getting B’s’ and had gotten an awful lot of them.” He was neither an honors student nor an extracurricular overachiever.

NonfictionHistory

The making of a great city

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Dreaming of April in Paris? In How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, astute cultural observer Joan DeJean argues that Paris has been a modern, alluring city far longer than we usually imagine. Although we tend to think of 19th-century Paris as the bustling epitome of “la vie moderne,” the roots of all we know and love about Paris today actually came into being in the 17th century.

While DeJean’s depth and scope of research are impressive, this fascinating portrait is anything but a dry history. Like its subject, DeJean’s biography of Paris emanates charm and wit. She builds her argument for the 17th-century origins of modern Paris piece by piece, unraveling the stories of how the city’s architectural elements helped to shape its urban landscape to make it “the capital of the universe.”

She begins with the oldest bridge in Paris—the Pont Neuf—which served as the 17th century’s equivalent to the Eiffel Tower (which wasn’t erected until 1889). Created by Henry IV as a center for his new capital, the Pont Neuf ushered in the concept of modern street life, including a sidewalk for promenading and street vendors.

DeJean unveils fascinating details about other aspects of the emerging city, covering the Place des Vosges, the enchanted oasis of Ile Saint-Louis and the city’s great boulevards and parks. What makes DeJean’s analysis so intriguing is her capacity to weave strands of history together. She shows, for example, how the freedom women achieved by walking along the Pont Neuf and the city’s boulevards translated into other areas of social discourse. With such rich context, How Paris Became Paris is more than a history: It’s the best kind of travel guidebook.

Dreaming of April in Paris? In How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, astute cultural observer Joan DeJean argues that Paris has been a modern, alluring city far longer than we usually imagine. Although we tend to think of 19th-century Paris as the bustling epitome of “la vie moderne,” the roots of all we know and love about Paris today actually came into being in the 17th century.

Love story of the Great Plains

In her memoir, The Ogallala Road, Julene Bair chronicles the last days of her family’s Kansas farm, as well as the bittersweet love affair that feeds her hope of saving the place her folks called home. She makes the case that modern farming practices are inexorably eroding the vast resources her ancestors took for granted, and she mourns the unraveling of the tapestry that once bound together her family, their history and the land they shared.

NonfictionBiography

The man behind the Black Power movement

Review by Roger Morris

On a humid night in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, 24-year-old Stokely Carmichael exhorted his audience of 600 to start proclaiming “Black Power.”

“All we’ve been doing is begging the federal government. The only thing we can do is take over,” he told the crowd. After several years of organizing sit-ins, demonstrations and voter registration drives, Carmichael had come to believe that African Americans would never achieve justice until they had the capacity to rule their own lives. His speech and the reaction to it significantly changed the course of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Between 1966 and 1968, Carmichael was more vilified than Malcolm X (who was killed in 1965) had been. The FBI trailed him; politicians accused him of treason; and the Justice Department came close to charging him with sedition.

Carmichael’s complex life and legacy are the subject of Civil Rights historian Peniel E. Joseph’s engrossing and enlightening biography Stokely: A Life. The author makes a strong case that his controversial subject, more than any other activist of his generation, shaped the contours of Civil Rights and Black Power activism. Carmichael’s extraordinary journey took him from involvement in early nonviolent sit-ins to serving as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, from which he was eventually expelled, to his role as honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party, from which he resigned.

Carmichael also became an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and in 1969, he left America for permanent residence in Guinea. There, he changed his name to Kwame Ture and became an ideologue for a revolutionary pan-Africanist movement.

Joseph makes us keenly aware that despite his historic successes, Carmichael made serious errors in judgment and had numerous large and small political failures. He admired both Malcolm X, with whose ideas he identified, and Martin Luther King Jr., who became a good friend. The morning after Carmichael’s Black Power speech, King urged the younger man to stop using that slogan, but was rebuffed.

This nuanced biography helps us understand a key player in the Civil Rights movement and illuminates the different approaches to social justice within the movement.

On a humid night in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, 24-year-old Stokely Carmichael exhorted his audience of 600 to start proclaiming “Black Power.”

Into the heart of the Amazon

Because he seldom cites specific dates or alludes to what’s happening in the outside world as he’s prowling through the jungle in Peru, Paul Rosolie’s Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon has a breathless, dream-like quality—a tone one might find in the journals of a relentlessly eager and factually retentive Boy Scout.

NonfictionMemoir

An intimate look at classic Hollywood glam

Review by Pat H. Broeske

One of those guys seemingly born to wear a tux, Robert Wagner proves an expert tour guide in the sometimes dishy, always perceptive You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age.

In recent years, Wagner has come to be known for small screen roles on “Two and a Half Men” and “NCIS”—as well as deadpan appearances in the “Austin Powers” film franchise. He was married to the luminous Natalie Wood (for the second time) at the time of her still-puzzling 1981 death. But Wagner also enjoyed movie stardom in the ’50s and early ’60s. And he has long mingled with the rich and famous, having grown up in swanky Bel Air.

And so, with historian-critic Scott Eyman, R.J., as he’s known, has written what he calls “a mosaic of memory.”

The book was inspired, in part, by the wacky 2002 wedding of Liza Minnelli and David Gest. Though “not exactly a Fellini movie, it was close,” Wagner says, recounting how Liz Taylor kept a church filled with guests waiting, because she didn’t like her shoes; when the ceremony at last concluded, Gest “tried to suck the lips off Liza’s face.” (“Ewww, gross,” whispered actress Jill St. John, Wagner’s wife since 1990.)

To document a lifestyle “that has vanished as surely as birch bark canoes,” Wagner gives us a mix of history and I-was-there recollections. Like the dinner party at Clifton Webb’s home, where guest Judy Garland gave an impromptu serenade at the piano—for nearly an hour—as 15 other attendees gathered ’round. Once a caddy for Fred Astaire, Wagner went on to become a regular golfing buddy; he played softball with John Ford’s “group,” which included Duke Wayne and Ward Bond; and he spent New Year’s Eves at Frank Sinatra’s famed Palm Springs digs.

Wagner tells us about favorite decorators (the gay Billy Haines ruled), fashion trendsetters (the Duke of Windsor), the liveliest and even most unlikely night spots (including how Don the Beachcomber’s came to be), all the while dropping yummy nuggets. (Sinatra’s aftershave was witch hazel, or Yardley’s English Lavender.)

Wagner does it all with grace—never taking overt shots at today’s Hollywood, but making one thing clear: The so-called golden age was no cinematic fantasy.

One of those guys seemingly born to wear a tux, Robert Wagner proves an expert tour guide in the sometimes dishy, always perceptive You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Cultivating an unusual friendship

At first, Carol Wall’s memoir, Mr. Owita’s Guide to Gardening, sounds like a book you might have read before: An unlikely friendship develops between two people who appear to have nothing in common. Giles Owita is an immigrant from Kenya who works part-time as a gardener. Wall is a high school English teacher and writer whose work has graced the pages of magazines like Southern Living. But things are not as they seem.

NonfictionTravelFood & Drink

A salute to the fabulous food of New Orleans

Review by Eve Zibart

Finally, a book on New Orleans restaurants that feels like summer in the city: gusty, alluring, oppressive, extravagant and intentionally over the top.

Eat Dat New Orleans is a love letter from ex-pat and food junkie Michael Murphy to one of the most complex and addictive cities in the world. While it covers some 250 restaurants, cafes and pop-ups, it’s anything but typical or predictable in tone.

Murphy, who spent 30 years with a variety of New York-based publishing firms, used to go to New Orleans regularly to visit authors, particularly culinary icons Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Hooked on the city’s culture, he threw himself and his wife a rockin’ destination wedding in New Orleans and moved there permanently in 2009. He has become, like most converts, the most zealous of disciples, and this highly personal but extensively researched book is like a food blog on steroids.

The restaurant profiles are, as he says, stories rather than critical reviews, as much anecdote as information. Murphy salutes the great waiters as well as chefs and owners. (This, of course, is how Southerners explain things: "You know who her people were . . .") The décor, the regular crowd, even the volume level get as much attention as the menu.

The title, for anyone who has managed to escape the ubiquity of NFL culture in America, is a reference to “Who Dat,” an old minstrel show phrase—something like the “Who’s on first?” of early jazz—that has become most closely associated, especially post-Katrina, with the beloved New Orleans Saints. It has an irresistible and characteristically New Orleans combination of underdog bravado and working class pride. (Not entirely coincidentally, one of the most striking local accents, called “Yat,” has a family resemblance to the famed Brooklyn/Jersey dialect, a reminder of the city’s immigrant and longshoremen builders. Though originally a mid-Westerner, Murphy calls himself a Pat-Yat.)

While Murphy is not shy about admitting a bias, and almost boasts of his lack of critical training, he has assembled a panel of backup experts, nine cookbook authors and journalists, to pick up any pieces and even to disagree with him. In fact, most of the prejudices in Eat Dat are laudable. Murphy acknowledges the tourist traps for their notable histories, and skewers some for what they aren’t anymore. Reluctantly but logically, he has imposed geographical boundaries on his book, sticking mostly to the areas within reach of tourists. However, his lists of “best-ofs” in the back cover a much broader spectrum.

The book was produced on a short schedule, and there are a few flatter, less engaging moments. The black-and-white photos by Rick Olivier, on the other hand, show great affection for the “real people” of New Orleans.

Murphy intends his book for out-of-towners and newcomers. However, a large number of “tourists” are there on convention business, and there are a few aspects of New Orleans dining that it would be nice to see a second edition address: handicapped access (always tricky in such historic structures), places comfortable for solo diners, especially women, lighting levels as well as volume, etc. The great bartenders and cocktail historians of the city, such as Chris McMillian, could get a little more credit. And I insist he mention the amazing collection of Mardi Gras costumes in the free upstairs museum at Arnaud’s Restaurant—air conditioning heaven in August.

Eve Zibart is a former restaurant critic for The Washington Post and the author of 10 books, including The Unofficial Guide to New Orleans.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a behind-the-book essay by Eat Dat New Orleans author Michael Murphy.

Finally, a book on New Orleans restaurants that feels like summer in the city: gusty, alluring, oppressive, extravagant and intentionally over the top. Eat Dat New Orleans is a love letter from ex-pat and food junkie Michael Murphy to one of the most complex and addictive cities in the world.

Full steam ahead

Grab your tickets and climb aboard Train, Tom Zoellner's full-steam-ahead, rollicking express ride on the great trains of the world. Part memoir and part history of the railroads in several countries, Zoellner's chronicle of days and nights spent crammed in crowded coaches or sleeper cars, chatting with crossing guards at remote outposts in India, or marveling at the engineering of formerly grand stations now in disrepair recalls both the romance and the risk of riding the rails.

Social Science

The secrets of our success

Review by Edward Morris

The “triple package,” as the authors anatomize it, is a cluster of traits that enables groups, individuals and even nations to get ahead materially. Specifically, the three traits are: (1) an innate sense of superiority co-existing simultaneously with (2) feelings of situational insecurity and powered by (3) impulse control so that gains made through concentration, hard work and thrift are not dissipated by transitory urges and appetites.

This “recipe for success” hardly comes as a surprise to most of us. In fact, it seems little more than an update of Ben Franklin’s bootstrapping wisdom. But what the authors add to what we’ve already been told or surmised are study-supported insights into how these traits emerge, change and disappear within populations and what the consequences are.

It bears noting that Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are married to each other, both law professors at Yale and both offspring of ethnic groups that have flourished by activating the triple package. Chua, whose parent were impoverished Chinese immigrants, set talk shows and op-ed pages buzzing in 2011 with her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she argued for a more rigorous and disciplined approach to educating children, offering her own kids as examples. Here, however, Chua and Rubenfeld forswear the first-person approach, electing instead to present more generalized evidence to undergird their conclusions.

In examining how Asians, Jews, Nigerians, Mormons, refugees from Cuba and other sub-groups have risen to the tops of their professions, it would have been easy to simply stereotype. But the authors point out repeatedly that triple-package virtues are not endemic to any particular race or religion nor embraced by all members. Rather, these qualities are inclined to blossom and wither according to external circumstances and tend to weaken or even vanish in succeeding generations. Moreover, they promote “success” only in a narrow, material sense. They don’t promise satisfaction or happiness.

The authors use their last chapter to argue that America has abandoned the triple package formula that once made it the envy of the world. And they blame a number of factors, from the lack of thrift to a mindless embracing of the self-esteem movement that teaches people, especially children, that they have a right to feel good about themselves without having achieved anything by their own efforts.  “With those . . . elements [of insecurity and impulse control] gone,” they lament, “what remained was superiority and the desire to live in the present—a formula not for drive, grit, and innovation, but for instant gratification.” Time will tell if they’re right.

 

The “triple package,” as the authors anatomize it, is a cluster of traits that enables groups, individuals and even nations to get ahead materially. Specifically, the three traits are: (1) an innate sense of superiority co-existing simultaneously with (2) feelings of situational insecurity and powered by (3) impulse control so that gains made through concentration, hard work and thrift are not dissipated by transitory urges and appetites.

A comic looks at marriage

Cindy Chupack is a writer extraordinaire: She's had columns in Glamour, Oprah, The New York Times, et al; she wrote the best-selling essay collection The Between Boyfriends Book; and she won Golden Globes and Emmys for her work on "Sex and the City" and "Modern Family." It's no surprise, then, that The Longest Date: Life as a Wife is a truly enjoyable read, a collection of essays about love and marriage that hits a range of notes—madcap, poignant, self-deprecating, thoughtful—and ultimately makes it sound like there's fun to be had when Cindy and Ian are around.

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