Art, Art, Lifestyles, Nonfiction

The Work of Art

The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.

Biography, Nonfiction

Ingenious

Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Biography

Didion and Babitz

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.

All Nonfiction Coverage

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Her own flesh and blood

by bookpagedev

Business & Finance

Business & Finance

School of hard knocks

Review by bookpagedev

by Stephanie Swilley

“You can read all the investment books you want, but there is no substitute for lessons learned in life,” writes Jack Brennan, chairman and CEO of The Vanguard Group, in the foreword to Wealth of Experience. This fascinating book gathers the advice of 600 Vanguard shareholders, 80 percent of whom are “high-net-worth investors” whose portfolios are worth $2 million on average.

Feeling out of your league? It’s interesting to note that, of that group, 18 percent never graduated from college, and 16 percent are still in the workforce earning less than $100,000 a year. The sharp, common-sense advice they impart shows you don’t have to be a genius to be a smart investor just have stick-to-it-iveness on a few basic principles.

Author Andrew Clarke distills the many investor experiences and suggestions into a simple, practical program. He covers important ground on saving (the most important key to investment success) and creating a long-term strategy, then moves into the nitty-gritty details of taxes, estate planning and diversification. In addition, he peppers the chapters with quotes from real folks, thus enlivening topics that can sometimes feel like homework. Learning how real people cope with financial ups and downs proves to be both cautionary and encouraging. Each chapter also includes action steps from Vanguard’s advisors.

"You can read all the investment books you want, but there is no substitute for lessons learned in life," writes Jack Brennan, chairman and CEO of The Vanguard Group, in the foreword to Wealth of Experience. This fascinating book gathers the advice of 600…

Stripped down investing

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture, History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History Arts & Culture

Extra! Extra! Breaking news on a newspaper dynasty

Review by Roger Bishop

by Roger Bishop

Joseph Medill was one of the great journalists of 19th-century America. A fervent abolitionist, confidant of Lincoln and mayor of Chicago, his last words were reportedly, “What is the news this morning?” His descendants continued that tradition, playing extraordinary roles in shaping and transforming newspapers and other media well into the 20th century. As Megan McKinney demonstrates in her compulsively readable The Magnificent Medills, their achievements were accompanied by fierce competition, disappointment and tragedy, including alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide.

Joseph Medill moved to Chicago in 1855 to be part owner of the Chicago Daily Tribune and the paper’s managing editor. Many years later, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, three of his grandchildren, Cissy Patterson, Joseph Patterson and Robert McCormick, controlled the newspapers with the largest circulations in three of the country’s most important markets: New York, Chicago and Washington. They were carrying on their grandfather’s way of personal journalism—although they were leading their readers in different directions.

Joseph Patterson became a socialist, as well as a notable novelist and playwright. At the Tribune, he was responsible for the well-received Sunday edition and the development of the modern comic strip. He went on to create a new kind of newspaper, The New York Daily News, which became the most successful newspaper in the country’s history. He was a rock of support for his sister Cissy throughout her glamorous, though often troubled, life. First widely known as an international socialite, much later she became editor and publisher of the Washington Herald, in a city where she was well connected. Colonel Robert McCormick, meanwhile, remained at the Chicago Tribune. Almost alone, he designed the structure of the Tribune Company of his time, which thrived and allowed him to promote his very conservative political views.

Despite their different paths, the three grandchildren had much in common. McKinney describes each of them as “complex and eccentric, a product of atrocious parenting. The collective childhood of the cousins had created demons that would mature with time, leaving each with an insistent—and ultimately fatal—need for alcohol.”

With its backdrop of wealth and power, The Magnificent Medills reads almost like a rich historical novel. It just happens to be true.

Everybody’s favorite redhead

by bookpagedev

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

The other side of the Berlin Wall

Review by Edward Morris

by Edward Morris

Originally published in Australia and the U.K. in 2003, Stasiland describes a series of horrors and indignities visited upon the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) by the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security—in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Anna Funder began her research in 1996 by interviewing both victims and victimizers and rummaging through the vast Stasi headquarters, now a museum.

The Stasi and their spies were everywhere—and they made sure people knew it, reasoning that knowing there was no chance of privacy would discourage subversive activity. “In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people,” Funder reports. “If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.”

In this heavily policed state, private residences were routinely searched on mere suspicion or whim, telephones were tapped, mail was opened and the contents recorded. The Stasi kept voluminous records on virtually every citizen. When the Wall fell, there was an orgy of paper shredding. Even so, there were far too many files to destroy. Now there are teams trying to reassemble the shredded documents, a task predicted to take well over 300 years.

Funder’s stories are at once heartbreaking and outrageous: A 16-year-old girl is imprisoned for a year and a half, some of that time in solitary confinement, for posting “seditious” leaflets; 10 years later her sweetheart dies under mysterious circumstances in a Stasi prison cell; a young woman is summoned by a Stasi official to discuss the intimate portions of her love letters; parents are separated from their gravely ill child for the first five years of his life. Despite all this, the Stasi officials whom Funder interviewed are generally unrepentant.

Fortunately, there are flashes of Orwellian humor amid the soul-crushing darkness. In one such instance, a woman goes to a state agency to apply for a job and makes the mistake of telling the clerk there that she is “unemployed.” This enrages the clerk. “You are not unemployed!” she barks. “You are seeking work. There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!”

Fighting for our lives

by John T. Slania

Social Science

Social Science

One man’s quest to put a predator behind bars

Review by Edward Morris

by Edward Morris

People concerned for the welfare of children born and raised within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Days Saints will take small comfort in knowing that the church’s pedophile leader, 55-year-old Warren Jeffs, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. While Jeffs’ conviction should halt forever his preying on young girls and his banishment of teenage boys who might have competed with him for underage “wives,” he still leaves behind the theological mechanism and eager disciples to perpetuate this sad saga of child abuse committed in the name of God. Besides being victims of sexual depredations, FLDS children were, and are, denied access to education and cultural awareness that would enable them to function independently of the church.

Among the dozens of wives Jeffs took during his nine-year reign were some as young as 12 years old. Other child brides were conferred on Jeffs’ favorite lieutenants, many of whom were also middle-aged or older. So strong was Jeffs’ authority that fathers and mothers seeking his goodwill enthusiastically surrendered their daughters to him. Anyone who resisted or hesitated to comply with his draconian, ever-changing rules ran the risk of being driven from the community and having his or her family taken away.

In Prophet’s Prey, Sam Brower, a private detective and member of the mainstream Mormon church—a very distinct entity from its fundamentalist offshoot—all but sputters with outrage as he recounts Jeffs’ increasingly flagrant offenses. Brower began investigating the FLDS after a trip to its headquarters on the Utah/Arizona border in 2004. There he found a closed, clannish and menacing society designed solely to perpetuate an us-vs.-them mentality. State and local law enforcement agencies tended to look the other way. From that point on, he began compiling evidence of Jeffs’ offenses and their effects on his followers. Occasionally, Brower worked in league with author Jon Krakauer, who had already written about two murderous fundamentalist Mormon brothers in his book Under the Banner of Heaven and provides the foreword here.

Although his focus is on Jeffs, Brower’s narrative makes it clear that as long as government officials are overly solicitous of religious practices—no matter how vicious and antisocial they are—children and childishly naive adults will always suffer.

Sound advice from doctors to patients

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Finding the familiar comforts of the kitchen

Review by Linda Stankard

by Linda Stankard

Struggling to cope with her mother’s sudden death, Donia Bijan finds a source of solace and inspiration (fittingly) in her mother’s kitchen. Packed in drawer is a stack of recipes, mostly handwritten, which provide the catalyst. In Bijan’s skillful hands, these recipes become a storytelling medium, and Maman’s Homesick Pie is at once a compelling portrait of her remarkable Iranian parents, a chronicle of her culinary career from a stagiaire (an unpaid apprenticeship) in France to award-winning chef and restaurateur in Palo Alto, and a lavish taste of Persian culture and cuisine.

As she takes us from the early years of her parents’ marriage, when they worked at the hospital her father built “brick by brick” in the outskirts of Tehran—he as a much-in-demand obstetrician and her mother as a registered nurse and midwife—to the family’s exile under Khomeini and ultimate immigration to America, she smoothly melds savory tidbits—“Feta cheese and shelled walnuts with piles of fresh mint, tarragon, and basil”—into her prose like egg whites being gently folded into a batter. New to America, her parents “quickly set about acquiring driver’s licenses and social security cards,” but also brought the comfort of familiar foods and aromas into their home: “Slowly we had been stocking our pantry with turmeric, cumin, saffron, cinnamon, allspice, dried fruit, lentils, fava beans, and basmati rice. In Iran, I had climbed onto the kitchen counter to look at my mother’s cooking spices, opening them one by one, taking in their prickly scent. Now, it reassured me to see them lined up again like stepping stones across a vast ocean.”

Through the legacy of her recipes, her mother again helps her bridge the “ocean” between past and present. Each chapter ends with anecdotes and a couple of mouthwatering recipes like Ratatouille with Black Olives and Fried Bread or Braised Chicken with Persian Plums. “In most Iranian homes,” she tells us, “there is no better way to begin a story than with a cup of tea, served hot, in a glass to better see its amber hue, with two lumps of sugar, and a dish of sweets.” Try it for yourself by making a pot of Persian Cardamom Tea and a Persimmon Parfait before curling up with this compelling, poignant and most delectable book.

Testimony from under the big tent

by Catherine Hollis

Arts & Culture, Literature, Nonfiction, Pop Culture

Nonfiction Pop Culture Literature Arts & Culture

The dawn of the Renaissance

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Browsing through a sale bin in search of summer reading, Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World) happened upon a paperback with an extremely odd and erotic cover. Intrigued, he bought a copy of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) for 10 cents. Through the random discovery of this poem, Greenblatt recognized a worldview that mirrored his own, for the ancient poet wrote that humans should accept that we and all the things we encounter are transitory, and we should embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world.

In The Swerve, Greenblatt elegantly chronicles the history of discovery that brought Lucretius’ poem out of the musty shadows of obscurity into an early modern world ripe for his ideas. At the center of this marvelous tale stands an avid book hunter, skilled manuscript copyist and notary: Poggio Bracciolini. While Poggio’s adventures in book hunting had not turned up much of value for several years, one day in 1417 changed his life and the world forever. He pulled down a dusty copy of On the Nature of Things from its hidden place on a monastery shelf, knew what he had found and ordered his assistant to copy it. The manuscript of Lucretius’ poem had languished in the monastery for over 500 years; the monks ignored it because of its lack of religious value. In Poggio’s act of discovery, he became a midwife to modernity.

With his characteristic breathtaking prose, Greenblatt leads us on an amazing journey through a time when the world swerved in a new direction. The culture that best epitomized Lucretius’ embrace of beauty and pleasure was the Renaissance. Greenblatt illustrates the ways that this Lucretian philosophy—which extends to death and life, dissolution as well as creation—characterizes ideas as varied as Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’ chronicle of his mad knight and Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet. This captivating and utterly delightful narrative introduces us to the diverse nature of the Renaissance—from the history of bookmaking to the conflict between religion and science—and compels us to run out and read Lucretius’ poem.

Twisted roots run deep

by Kelly Blewett

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Trending Nonfiction

Nonfiction Politics Memoir

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Maria Ressa

By Sarojini Seupersad

Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.