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LifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Home, for the holidays and beyond

Review by bookpagedev

The fresh smell of line-dried laundry practically leaps off the pages of Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook. In this massive guide dressed in an easy-to-clean plastic dust jacket Stewart combines the efficient techniques learned at her mother’s knee with up-to-date information gathered by her formidable lifestyle team for maintaining every room of the home. She starts with step-by-step explanations of basic cleaning tasks (there are ways and then there are better ways), followed by room-by-room and periodic home maintenance tasks and shortcuts (clean when dirt is fresh, straighten as you go), helpful for those who didn’t learn by family modeling. Practically everything else about the home is covered, too: buying a mattress, storing wine, organizing a tool shed, preserving digital photos, emergency preparedness and moving house. While the book often reeks of Stewart’s iron the sheets perfectionism and fetishistic obsessions (most people can select a light bulb and wash a blanket without a page of instruction), it still makes an excellent one-stop-shop for cleaning up a messy act.

The fresh smell of line-dried laundry practically leaps off the pages of Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook. In this massive guide dressed in an easy-to-clean plastic dust jacket Stewart combines the efficient techniques learned at her mother’s knee with up-to-date information gathered by her formidable lifestyle team for maintaining every room of the home. She starts […]
NonfictionMemoir

Strongman in the stacks

Review by Kelly Blewett

Imagine a man who can bend a horseshoe with his hands, whose outsized literary interests include everything from Jonathan Franzen to Stephen King and who towers above most of us at six feet seven inches. He sounds like a comic book hero, but the most heroic thing about him is this: He chooses to spend his days working in a public library, even though he suffers from a syndrome that compels him to act out, often audibly. Tourette’s, which Josh Hanagarne has referred to for years as Misty (for Miss T), is a formidable foe and constant companion. And the way he deals with her—graciously, courageously, humorously—gives this book its strength and staying power.

Most readers might not know a lot about Tourette’s, but that doesn’t matter. Hanagarne explains it to us in vivid detail and without self-pity. The Tourette’s-driven desire to act out—physically, verbally—is as impossible to avoid as an oncoming sneeze, and the precise manner of acting out is ever evolving. “In the coming chapters, when I experience new, significant tics, I’ll say so,” he writes. “Once I’ve had a new type of tic, you can assume it stays in the rotation. Each new tic is stacked on top of what came before it.” When friend and future mentor Adam grasps the full reality of Hanagarne’s world, he asks, “How have you not gone insane?”

Tourette’s and the myriad of impacts it has had on Hanagarne’s life—he took 10 years to finish his undergraduate degree, for example, and had trouble holding down a job in his 20s—sounds like it would make for a depressing tale. But that’s not the case. I frequently found myself laughing aloud, such as when he described his first major literary crush: the gentle and maternal Fern from Charlotte’s Web. His story spills over with affection for his parents, especially his mom. He’s curious about the big questions of faith and life. And he is passionate about his chosen field.

Librarians, Hanagarne says, are rarely suited for anything else. They are the ultimate generalists. They are a quirky, caring, funny, readerly bunch whose daily business is different than readers might imagine (ever dealt with snarky teenagers in the stacks?) and whose field is on the edge of significant change. The World’s Strongest Librarian speaks to that change, joyfully celebrates books and reading, and illuminates an unlikely hero who will be remembered long after the final page is turned. I couldn’t put this book down.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read our Q&A with Josh Hanagarne for The World's Strongest Librarian.

Imagine a man who can bend a horseshoe with his hands, whose outsized literary interests include everything from Jonathan Franzen to Stephen King and who towers above most of us at six feet seven inches. He sounds like a comic book hero, but the most heroic thing about him is this: He chooses to spend […]
Biography

A star and his leading lady

Review by bookpagedev

As Superman, Christopher Reeve fought for “truth, justice and the American way.” As a wheelchair-bound activist he was a symbol of hope for the disabled. Wife Dana, meanwhile, came to represent the faithful caregiver. They’d been married only three years when he was thrown from his horse during a 1995 equestrian competition. Paralyzed from the shoulders down, unable to breathe without a respirator, he told her, “Maybe we should let me go.” She replied, “I’ll be with you for the long haul. . . . You’re still you.” Christopher Andersen, dubbed a “celebritologist” by Entertainment Weekly, has written books of varying quality on subjects including Barbra Streisand, Madonna, JFK Jr., Bill and Hillary Clinton and Princess Diana. He sometimes goes for the jugular, but his latest, Somewhere in Heaven, goes for the heart, paying tribute to a couple who stuck it out for better and mostly for worse.

Based in part on original interviews, Andersen’s book chronicles the Reeves’ courtship, marriage and the challenges (sexual, medical, financial and more) they faced after Christopher’s accident. Dana, who never got to fully realize her potential as a singer-actress, emerges as an especially memorable leading lady. Tragically, less than a year after Christopher’s unexpected death, non-smoker Dana was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Somewhere in Heaven is about love so deep it defies all obstacles. Have Kleenex handy.

As Superman, Christopher Reeve fought for “truth, justice and the American way.” As a wheelchair-bound activist he was a symbol of hope for the disabled. Wife Dana, meanwhile, came to represent the faithful caregiver. They’d been married only three years when he was thrown from his horse during a 1995 equestrian competition. Paralyzed from the […]
Animals

For better or worse

Review by bookpagedev

A man leaves his home one dark Manhattan night with a beagle on a leash, and then his life lodges in a single moment that never tips into the next. Abigail Thomas (Safekeeping, Getting Over Tom) writes with aching directness of being plunged into constant, quietly harrowing grief after her husband is brain-damaged in A Three Dog Life. When the doorman calls to say their beagle was found alone in the building elevator, Thomas discovers her husband Rich lying in the street in a pool of blood, hit by a car after chasing their runaway dog. This is the one thing that stays the same: my husband got hurt, she writes. Everything else changes. Those changes are catastrophic yet tragically common to anyone who has experienced health or aging issues: Rich moves into a nursing home when his brain-damaged psychosis, confusion and rages become too intense for Thomas to handle alone.

She leaves their New York apartment and buys a country house to make her weekly visits to him easier, then realizes she’s terrified of being alone and rusty when it comes to taking care of herself. She adopts a couple of other dogs and creates a safe space under the covers where the quartet nap during the day and snuggle at night. She eats strawberry shortcake with her daughter for two weeks straight, travels to Mexico, becomes obsessed with outsider art, and befriends a young mother begging for spare change in her village. Thomas explores how she will go on with a bit of survivor’s guilt in parallel lives: one as a contented widow of sorts, and another as a loving wife who will spend hours attending to the husband she has lost forever.

A man leaves his home one dark Manhattan night with a beagle on a leash, and then his life lodges in a single moment that never tips into the next. Abigail Thomas (Safekeeping, Getting Over Tom) writes with aching directness of being plunged into constant, quietly harrowing grief after her husband is brain-damaged in A […]
Social Science

Recording the horrors of 9/11

Review by bookpagedev

From our archives: Remembering 9/11/2001
The 9/11 terrorists did not discriminate based on race, creed, gender or social standing. The victims came from all walks of life. This reality is reflected in the photographs from that day: the horrors of the destruction and the human toll were captured on both film and digital images. Author David Friend is equally egalitarian in his selection of photographs, and the stories of the people who shot the images, in his captivating book, Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11.

Friend, a veteran photographer and Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development, chronicles the events of September 11 and its aftermath through the eyes and camera lenses of both professional and amateur photographers. The photos in the book are gripping. Equally compelling are the tales behind them. For example, there is the account of a gallery owner who laced up his Rollerblades and used a $200 camcorder to shoot footage of the smoking World Trade Center towers. A computer programmer fastened a video camera to his bicycle handlebars, aimed it behind him and recorded scenes of one tower collapsing as he sped away. A commuter shot video through the windows of a subway train as it rumbled across the Manhattan Bridge.

Some of the stories and images are more personal. There is the seasoned photojournalist who shot pictures from her powerboat, praying all the while because the scene was more disturbing than the armed conflicts she covered in Bosnia and South Africa. Or the artist who stood on her roof and shot a portrait of the placid face of her neighbor’s 16-month-old son, with the damaged towers serving as a backdrop.

There have been millions of words written about the tragedy of September 11, but Friend makes a strong argument that the images tell the real story. Photographs, that September and thereafter, Friend writes, have helped to shape our understanding of the week’s events, and have helped us mourn, connect, communicate and respond. There were many heroes the victims, their families, the rescuers. Friend makes a convincing case that the photographers were also heroes in their own way. They risked, and in some cases lost, their lives, to preserve history. There were thousands among us, Friend writers, who had the poise and wherewithal to pick up a camera so that the world might witness and respond.

John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

 

From our archives: Remembering 9/11/2001 The 9/11 terrorists did not discriminate based on race, creed, gender or social standing. The victims came from all walks of life. This reality is reflected in the photographs from that day: the horrors of the destruction and the human toll were captured on both film and digital images. Author David […]
Memoir

From humble origins to the heights of power

Review by Amy Scribner

One brother served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and is now mayor of Chicago. Another is a bioethicist and White House health advisor. The third is a Hollywood power agent.

How do three such accomplished men come from one family? That’s the question at the center of Brothers Emanuel, a lovely memoir from the eldest brother, Ezekiel (the bioethicist). Certainly their parents had their hands full with three rough-and-tumble boys (indeed, there did seem to be an inordinate number of episodes in which one or more of the boys had a near brush with injury after bouncing off a bed).

But Benjamin and Marsha Emanuel also had high expectations for their sons. Benjamin, an Israeli immigrant, was a respected Chicago pediatrician who met Marsha, a radiology technician, at a Chicago hospital. They moved to Tel Aviv, where Benjamin offered medical care to five far-flung kibbutzes, before settling back in Chicago to raise their boys. Deeply involved in the civil rights movement, they regularly hosted community meetings in their living room, where the boys would listen from behind the sofa.

“Undoubtedly this experience of eavesdropping on activists helped instill in us both a moral sensibility and the desire to do something about a problem whenever we could,” Emanuel writes. “It is not hard to see Rahm’s devotion to improving Chicago Public Schools and my work on universal health-care coverage as outgrowths of witnessing these meetings in our house.”

The Emanuels also set up a “children’s study” where the brothers could do their homework and learn the art of strategy through cutthroat games of chess with dad. “Winning became so important that we each deliberately sought out the particular hobbies, sports and career interests that fit our abilities and in which we could excel,” Emanuel explains. “Life was about competition, and if you couldn’t finish at the top in one pursuit, you found the game where your talent allowed you to win.”

But adversity helped shape them, too. Emanuel recalls a summer when he and a friend biked over to the local country club to apply for a summer caddy job, only to be turned down because he was Jewish.

Brothers Emanuel is a clear-eyed, candid memoir that is unique and yet quintessentially American. It’s the story of young boys who were given a fair shot, took a few hits along the way, and made something of themselves.

One brother served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and is now mayor of Chicago. Another is a bioethicist and White House health advisor. The third is a Hollywood power agent. How do three such accomplished men come from one family? That’s the question at the center of Brothers Emanuel, a lovely memoir from […]

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