Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

Golden Years

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

About Face

Jonathan D. Katz’s About Face celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with deep scholarship and thrilling artworks.
Jonathan D. Katz’s About Face celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with deep scholarship and thrilling artworks.
Previous
Next

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre
Food & Drink

A Christmas bonus for wine lovers

Review by bookpagedev

Those who find themselves wincing at the thought of spending another holiday dinner politely complimenting their father-in-law’s unfortunate wine selection (are Chardonnays supposed to be sweet?) should consider a gift that will be appreciated at family gatherings for years to come a wine selection guide. Here are some of the season’s best.

In Leslie Sbrocco’s Wine for Women: A Guide to Buying, Pairing, and Sharing Wine, PBS personality Sbrocco gets a little cutesy talking about “building a wine wardrobe” with Chardonnay as the basic black dress, etc., but beyond the fluffy title and occasional women’s-mag tone, it’s actually a useful tool for those admittedly more often women who are less interested in pounding the platinum card balance at the restaurant than enjoying wine at home without spending too much time on it. In fact, statistics show women do most of the wine buying and drinking in this country, so playing up menu pairings and general home-bar improvements is a fair approach. This smartly designed book offers a mix of label hints, regional tips, recipes and flavor descriptions.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

Those who find themselves wincing at the thought of spending another holiday dinner politely complimenting their father-in-law's unfortunate wine selection (are Chardonnays supposed to be sweet?) should consider a gift that will be appreciated at family gatherings for years to come a wine selection guide.…
Memoir

Didion’s year of grief

Review by Alden Mudge

After 40 years of marriage, writer Joan Didion did not have a single letter from her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. This was because, with rare exceptions, the pair was together 24 hours a day. They worked together in California hotel rooms on movie scripts or down the hall from one another in their New York apartment on their respective essays and novels. "I could not count the times during an average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him," Didion writes. Returning home alone from the hospital where she has learned Dunne is dead – he collapsed and died as the couple was sitting down to dinner on December 30, 2003 – Didion remembers "thinking that I needed to discuss this with John."

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's slender, intensely personal, deeply moving and stylistically beautiful account of the year following her husband's death. It was a year in which Didion struggled with the belief that she could have and should have done something to prevent her husband's death ("I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."). It was a year in which she was constantly swept into a vortex of memories of the couple's former life. It was a year in which grief came in recursive, paralyzing waves. It was also a year in which the couple's only child, daughter Quintana Roo, was twice in a coma and not expected to live. [Tragically, Quintana died in late August, just weeks before Didion's book was published.]

At the hospital on the night Dunne died, the social worker sent to be with Didion refers to her as "a pretty cool customer." Didion is surely one of the best prose stylists writing today, and her account is almost clinically precise. She is unsparing in her examination of the "derangement" she experienced after her husband's death and during her daughter's illness ("So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries."). But The Year of Magical Thinking is anything but "cool." Instead, the book reverberates with passion and even, occasionally, ironic humor.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," Didion writes. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she offers a powerful, personally revealing description of that place.

After 40 years of marriage, writer Joan Didion did not have a single letter from her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. This was because, with rare exceptions, the pair was together 24 hours a day. They worked together in California hotel rooms on movie scripts…

Biography

The life of a flawed but brilliant writer

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, many of his fans and friends mourned the loss of the brilliant writer, whose fiction and essays wove filaments of energetic, staccato and sometimes lumbering prose around clever and piercing insights about contemporary society. As the details of his death began to emerge and critics began to publish studies of his life and writing, so did details of Wallace's life-long battle with depression, mental illness, addiction and self-abnegation.

In the first biography of Wallace, New Yorker writer Max (The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery) exhaustingly chronicles the details of Wallace's life from his happy and ordinary childhood in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where his father taught philosophy and his mother taught English, his love of, almost addiction to, television, his tennis successes in high school and his terror at leaving home to enter Amherst—which he decided to attend so he wouldn't have to face any more college interviews—to his on-again and off-again college career, interrupted by episodes of depression, and his faltering rise to success and recognition as a writer.

Max points out that as a high school junior Wallace experienced an unforgettable moment when "he clearly saw the danger of a mind unhinged, of the danger of thinking responsive only to itself . . . . [H]e would derive a lifelong fear of the consequences of mental and, eventually, emotional isolation." In spite of the flashes of brilliance in his writing, Wallace could never grow beyond the menace and threat of his own restless, anxious mind, and even the novel for which he is most praised, Infinite Jest, baffles readers with the labyrinthine excess of a soul lost in the funhouse. Although it rose quickly on the bestseller lists, the novel received a mixed response from critics; the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani famously called Wallace's novel a "big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, reminiscences and footnotes . . . arbitrary and self-indulgent." Much the same could be said of Max’s bloated and uneven biography.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story offers unsatisfying readings of Wallace's own writing, but Max provides a sympathetic portrait of a writer who struggled to show the world what it meant to be a human being—though he never managed to live up to his own expectations for the task.

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, many of his fans and friends mourned the loss of the brilliant writer, whose fiction and essays wove filaments of energetic, staccato and sometimes lumbering prose around clever and piercing insights about contemporary society. As the…

Memoir

The moving tale of a Ugandan village

Review by bookpagedev

The Price of Stones has all the markings of a Greg Mortenson knockoff. The book’s foreword contains a letter from its publisher favorably comparing it to Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. (It happens that Viking is the publisher of both books.) And the title, The Price of Stones, has a familiar ring, sounding quite similar to Mortenson’s follow-up, Stones into Schools. But The Price of Stones’ author, Twesigye Jackson Kaguri, has one thing Mortenson lacks: serious street cred. While Mortenson stumbled upon Korphe, the remote village in Pakistan where he built a school in Three Cups of Tea, Kaguri was born in the Ugandan village that he struggles to save from the ravages of AIDS.

Kaguri writes movingly about growing up in a country where almost a third of the adult population is infected by AIDS. The disease is so prevalent in Uganda, he informs us, that natives have given it a nickname: slim. The shadow of death darkens the doorway of Kaguri’s home, with AIDS claiming the life of his brother, Frank, and sister, Mbabazi. When he becomes the guardian of one of his brother’s children, he discovers that more than a million Ugandan children have been orphaned by the AIDS epidemic, and he vows to take action. Returning to Uganda from his studies in the United States, Kaguri builds a school for these orphans.

The Price of Stones is an engaging account of the work of Kaguri and his wife, Beronda, to build Nyaka School, which provides free education, meals and medical care for some 200 orphans. Nyaka School not only educates students, but also has a working farm to grow food for the children, a program to teach villagers to build clean water systems, vocational training and a program to assist caregivers for the orphans. The school’s success has even led to the establishment of a second school in a nearby village.

The accomplishments of Nyaka School are the result of Kaguri’s perseverance, having overcome obstacles (from the superstitions surrounding AIDS to his father’s initial refusal to help) to raise money, transport supplies and building materials to a rural area, and maneuver around the corruption of government officials. Kaguri rightly earns admiration for his achievements, and The Price of Stones earns accolades for its inspiration.
 

The Price of Stones has all the markings of a Greg Mortenson knockoff. The book’s foreword contains a letter from its publisher favorably comparing it to Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. (It happens that Viking is the publisher of both books.) And the title, The…

NonfictionMemoir

A superior writer’s final words

Review by Catherine Hollis

In his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens wrote of wanting “to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive”: to confront mortality with the same gimlet-eyed vision he’d brought to his musings on culture, politics and religion. A diagnosis of esophageal cancer while on a book tour for the memoir forced his hand, and in a series of essays for his longtime journalistic home at Vanity Fair, he documented his crossing into the “new land” of the unwell, now assembled into his final essay collection Mortality.

With characteristic brio, intelligence and dry wit, Hitchens engages with his illness and its inevitable outcome head-on, without the consolations of religion or a belief in an afterlife. Given his reputation as an outspoken atheist, Hitchens finds himself the focus of a national prayer campaign: “what if I pulled through, and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.” This tone of comic paradox, quintessentially Hitchens, becomes starkly brave in this context.

These essays explore the lessons and fears of mortal illness, and how this experience radically shifts a person’s identity: “I don’t have a body, I am a body.” Ultimately, the cancer begins to deprive Hitchens of his ability to speak, prompting some of the book’s most moving passages. “To a great degree, in public and private, I ‘was’ my voice,” he acknowledges, and when he thinks of what he wants most to wrest from the hands of death, it is his voice—“the freedom of speech”—that he longs to hold on to.

The literature of illness is marked by the struggle to translate pain into language; in Virginia Woolf’s words, the ill writer must take “his pain in one hand” and a “lump of pure sound in the other” and “crush” them together to create the new idiom of his or her experience. In Mortality, Hitchens has achieved just that, applying all his life’s talents to the challenge of giving voice to the approach of death. These essays are brave and fitting final words from a writer at the end of his journey.

In his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens wrote of wanting “to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive”: to confront mortality with the same gimlet-eyed vision he’d brought to his musings on culture, politics and religion. A diagnosis of esophageal cancer while on…

NonfictionEssays

A community’s resilience

Review by bookpagedev

A lot has happened since Heather Lende introduced us to the small town of Haines, Alaska, in her best-selling 2005 memoir If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name. First, Lende was (literally) hit by a truck, suffering a broken pelvis just as she was about to begin her book tour. The following year, her mother died of leukemia. Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs celebrates the resilience of ordinary people, gathered together to help one another with the business of living and dying.

As a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, Lende’s beat is small-town Alaska, and she shows us how her community functions as a source of strength for its residents. In one story, a local Tlingit Indian carves a new totem pole called “Yei eek kwa neix,” or “You Are Going to Get Well.” When over 140 people, including a recovering Lende, help raise the pole, we see how a community coming together, even in sorrow, can offer healing.

Reading this memoir is like listening to an old friend; Lende’s voice is conversational, frequently addressing the reader directly. Her stories are digressive, even circular, as an anecdote about yoga prompts a story about a hospice patient smoking cigarettes while dying of cancer. The effect is pleasantly intimate, as if we were sitting next to her on the Juneau ferry.

Lende has been compared to both Anne Lamott and Annie Dillard; she is a writer who attends to both everyday grace and the natural world, and her Christian faith is explicit but never overbearing. Her Alaska is a harsh landscape infused with sublimity: The winter mountains, summer dusks, smoked salmon and bald eagles all create a palpable sense of Alaskan life. While Lende’s Alaska is not a paradise by any means, it is a good place for ordinary people to live with one another.

 

A lot has happened since Heather Lende introduced us to the small town of Haines, Alaska, in her best-selling 2005 memoir If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name. First, Lende was (literally) hit by a truck, suffering a broken pelvis just as she was…

Want more BookPage?

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Nonfiction

All Nonfiction

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features