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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Advice for surviving in the real world

by bookpagedev

History, Medicine, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Medicine History

The dark side of a wonder drug

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

When Sigmund Freud and William Halsted began experimenting on themselves with cocaine in the 1880s, “addiction” was not yet a medical diagnosis. Yes, people knew about the ravages of “Demon Alcohol” and saw a downside to widely prescribed opiates. But an understanding of the commonalities of something known as “addiction” was not yet documented. Cocaine, a newly popular ingredient in elixirs like Coca-Cola, was promoted as having astonishing medical properties.

In An Anatomy of Addiction, University of Michigan medical historian Howard Markel explores the impact of cocaine use on two of the period’s most prominent medical pioneers. It’s a story that has never before been told in such depth or in so readable a form. Markel, the author of the award-winning Quarantine! and When Germs Travel, has an unrivaled knack for research and narrative. So he is able to paint compelling and nuanced portraits of Freud and Halsted, the foremost surgeon of his day, and to convey the excitement and physical and psychological risk of an era of remarkable medical advances.

Halsted began exploring cocaine’s potential as anesthesia in major surgery by injecting the drug under his skin. A leading exponent of now-discredited forms of radical surgery and a highly influential leader in the adoption of sterile operating procedures, Halsted became addicted. After a number of hospitalizations he was rescued by a colleague and became leading professor at John Hopkins Medical School, which soon became the most influential medical institution in the world. Halsted remained an addict all his life, though a high-performing one, and Markel provocatively suggests that cocaine may have “given rise to the greatest school in surgery this country has ever seen,” though it also grievously stunted Halsted’s personal life.

Sigmund Freud began his self-experimentations with the drug in the dual hope of curing a friend of morphine dependency and writing a groundbreaking research article that would launch his career (and provide him the financial stability he needed to marry his long-enduring fiancée). The influence of cocaine on his early career is more difficult to precisely document, but here, too, based on his research, Markel is wonderfully suggestive.

Yet Freud managed to overcome his drug dependency. How? Markel says that Freud’s driving intellectual ambition demanded the predictable routines and accountability that “served as the ideal therapeutic program.” Soon thereafter, Freud entered the period “when he became one of the greatest intellectuals of his generation and provided a modern language for understanding the unconscious mind.”

“One only wishes,” Markel writes, “that [Freud had] had similar fortitude to put down his addictive and cancer-producing cigars, which, beginning in 1923 . . . robbed him of an intact, functioning mouth and forced him to undergo multiple painful surgeries and wear ill-fitting prostheses.” That addiction finally cost Freud his life.

Advice for surviving in the real world

by bookpagedev

Nonfiction, Technology

Nonfiction Technology

An inside look at Google’s early days

Review by Linda Stankard

by Linda Stankard

Douglas Edwards was “employee number 59,” the director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google from 1999 to 2005. In I’m Feeling Lucky,Edwards gives readers a behind-the-behemoth look at the then-“young” search giant and the absorbing personalities of those who worked there. Although he includes a glossary, you don’t need a technical background or a fluency in geek-speak to find this book fun and fascinating.

Edwards is a straightforward writer, explaining things as he goes. For example, he tells us founding members Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose the name “Google” in part because it “played to their sense of math and scale. . . . Google is a play on ‘googol,’ which is the number one followed by a hundred zeroes.” Even if you’re not an Internet whiz, Edwards writes, “At least you know what Google does. It finds stuff on the Internet.” When he was a Noogler (new hire), he admits, “I didn’t know what a web indexer, a pageranker, or a spidering robot was. I didn’t know how dogmatic engineers could be. I didn’t know how many Internet executives could squeeze into a hot tub or how it felt to ‘earn’ more in one day than I had in 30 years of hard work . . . but I do now.”

I’m Feeling Lucky is an insider’s view of the “Google Experience,” from its famously nonhierarchical corporate structure to the bricks and mortar of the Googleplex itself. Edwards makes clear that his book is not, however, a full history of the company, nor does he delve into current concerns or controversies. “I include only what happened between my first day in 1999 and the day I left in 2005,” he explains. “We weren’t yet worried about network neutrality, street-view data gathering, or off-shore wind farms.” His days were the days when the big issues were “develop the best search technology, sell lots of ads, avoid getting killed by Microsoft.” But what days they were! Prepare for (to quote some chapter titles) “A World Without Form,” where you may encounter “Managers in Hot Tubs and in Hot Water,” or “Rugged Individuals with a Taste for Porn,” where “Mistakes Were Made” but there’s “Real Integrity and Thoughts about God,” too. All in all, I’m Feeling Lucky is an insightful and illuminating peek behind the curtain of Google’s early days.

Advice for surviving in the real world

by bookpagedev

Nonfiction, Politics

Nonfiction Politics

Standing in the spotlight

Review by John T. Slania

by John T. Slania

From the first nationally broadcast presidential debate in 1960, television has changed the dynamics of elections. Those who listened to that debate on the radio felt that Richard M. Nixon had won. Those who watched it on TV deemed John F. Kennedy the winner. Analysts believed a lot of it had to do with image: Nixon looked ashen and sweaty, while Kennedy was tan and relaxed. Since then, the televised debate has grown in importance, watched by millions of Americans who may decide their vote based on a candidate’s comment, a facial tic, even a sigh. At the center of many of these debates has been Jim Lehrer, longtime anchor of “NewsHour” on PBS. Now Lehrer shares his memory of the debates he’s moderated in his new book, Tension City.

Along with the opportunity to moderate 11 presidential or vice presidential debates, Lehrer also has had the chance to interview most of the candidates who have participated. The book’s title comes from former President George H.W. Bush, who when asked by Lehrer what he thought of his debates, replied, “. . . it was tension city, Jim.” Indeed, Lehrer’s behind-the-scenes observations reveal just how high-stakes these debates can be. Candidates take weeks prepping for the debates, and negotiate every detail, including the size and shape of the podium. And no matter how well prepared they are, one little “gotcha moment,” as Lehrer describes it, can determine the outcome. Lehrer colorfully recounts Al Gore’s “sighs” at George W. Bush; Ronald Reagan’s “there you go again”s to Jimmy Carter; and Lloyd Bentsen’s response to Dan Quayle: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Highlights from each of the debates Lehrer has moderated are supplemented with interviews of the candidates, making Tension Citya book rich in observation and perspective. The debaters, including all the sitting presidents, are refreshingly candid, providing critical assessments of their performances. And like the able moderator that he is, Lehrer guides the book’s narrative in a steady, balanced style. A seasoned journalist, Lehrer’s writing is detailed, but also concise. Thus, his Tension City is both educational and enjoyable, and equally suitable for both political wonk and common citizen.

Winning ways for women executives

by bookpagedev

Business & Finance, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Business & Finance

The minds behind the markets

Review by Edward Morris

by Edward Morris

The notion that the ages-old imbalance between rich and poor could be altered by learning how wealth is created and apportioned flowered in Victorian England and has been a staple of governance ever since, particularly in the West. In this richly documented study, Sylvia Nasar chronicles the personal lives and the intellectual and political impact of major economists from England’s industrial age through World Wars I and II, the Cold War and the rise of China and India as world powers.

An economics graduate of New York University and author of the best-selling biography A Beautiful Mind, Nasar examines the principal theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Irving Fisher, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Joan Robinson, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson and Amartya Sen and explains how these celebrated thinkers interacted with governments to anticipate and cushion the economic downturns that resulted from wars, overproduction, market failures and kindred ills.

It is fitting that Nasar titles her book Grand Pursuit, because it is obvious that even the stellar minds she writes about here were forever pursuing and falling short of capturing those ultimate answers that would enable them to forecast and find surefire ways of averting economic disasters. That economics is still an infant science (or else economists are the most ignored seers in the universe) is evident from the unprepared-for calamities now facing the U.S., Britain, Greece and the European Union.

While Nasar is a graceful writer, she assumes a greater knowledge of economic concepts and terminology than most readers are likely to have. However, she is thoroughly engaging when describing the academic, social and political worlds in which these economists functioned and contended with each other for supremacy. She seems to hold Marx in particular contempt, scorning not only his ideas but his personal appearance and habits as well. For the most part, though, she is content, as she should be, to let these figures rise or fall in public esteem by the consequences of their counsel.

Of love lost and found

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Medicine, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir Medicine

Revealing an inner life of compassion

Review by Carol Cooper

by Carol Cooper

The many lurid and confessional hospital dramas now on television can make it seem like nothing new or particularly revelatory can be said about the inner lives of healthcare professionals. Challenging this assumption is an unusual new memoir—by turns both brutal and lyrical—by a longtime itinerant nurse who first discovered her talent for lucid introspection as a published poet.

Mary Jane Nealon’s Beautiful Unbroken is a parable about the elastic limits of our ability to help others. It pivots around one specific tragedy: the death of Nealon’s younger brother Johnny from cancer in the 1970s. Freshly graduated from nursing school but emotionally unable to stay beside her family during Johnny’s swift decline, she subsequently spent her 20s and 30s practicing compassion at strangers’ bedsides to exorcise feelings of guilt.

Despite this psychic burden, Nealon comes across as an earthy, engaging character. This 20-something fledgling nurse loved reggae and Latin dancing and was not averse to a little recreational cannabis or regular bouts of unmarried sex. Comforted by the fact that a saint-like desire to save lives and ease suffering could be fulfilled by someone far from saint-like, she identified more with her dashing cop father than her demure mother.

She wrote and performed poetry while serving in Manhattan cancer wings and kept writing whenever she was posted to cities where poetry workshops were available. The best sections of this autobiography show the results of these apprenticeships: unflinching revelations couched in beautiful allusions and startling metaphors. She tells us her brother’s laugh was “like smooth hay blowing this way and that way around the house.” She describes her acceptance to a year-long writing fellowship as a needed break from fighting the AIDS epidemic: “I felt as if I had finally come out of the dressing room wearing my own skin, and in the mirror I saw the possibilities of my own shape.”

Nevertheless, this is not an easy book to read. If you are squeamish, be warned that Nealon makes us watch while she attends the severely injured or dying. She skillfully evokes the messy fluids and despair of home hospice work and AIDS units. Yet her vivid recollections, so cool and succinct, evoke empathy rather than horror. How many times have we passed a nurse or doctor in hospitals and wondered how they survive daily exposure to so much pain? Beautiful Unbroken doesn’t completely answer that question, but it makes us understand through Nealon’s own triumphs and failures exactly why the question must be asked.

Unexpected spirituality

by Amy Scribner

History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History

A brutally honest depiction of war

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Last year Karl Marlantes published Matterhorn, the best novel to date about American soldiers’ experience of combat in Vietnam. Gritty, gripping and remarkably soulful, it offered readers a profoundly moving picture of what it was like to go to war.

Now Marlantes has written a sparklingly provocative nonfiction book called What It Is Like to Go to War. In it, readers will discover the outlines of some of the events he heightened and fictionalized in Matterhorn. Marlantes is an exceptional writer and his depictions here are vivid. But his purposes in this book are quite different from the purposes of his novel.

Here Marlantes uses his personal experiences as illustrations of the psychological, philosophical and spiritual dilemmas that combat soldiers face—in the field and upon returning home. He reflects with crackling insight on such topics as killing, guilt, lying, loyalty, heroism. He warns of the perils to a culture’s psyche in fighting war at a remove, as we now do with unmanned drones. And he writes of his own experiences with searing honesty, rejecting what he calls “jingoistic clap trap.” In one passage, for example, Marlantes says, “The least acknowledged aspect of war, at least these days, is how exhilarating it is.”

This will be off-putting to some, but Marlantes is not a warmonger. He is a realist. Part of his argument is that, since we will continue to fight wars, we risk damaging both the young warriors and the society that sends them to war if we avoid integrating those experiences into our collective psyche. At its simplest, his idea is that we must create rituals and reflective spaces in which frontline soldiers (usually in their teens and 20s) can care for their spiritual and psychological health. To do so one must be truthful about the full experience of combat, including what Marlantes, borrowing from Carl Jung, calls its shadow side.

Marlantes, a Yale graduate, left a Rhodes scholarship to join a Marine combat unit in Vietnam as a second lieutenant. He won the Navy Cross, two Purple Hearts and numerous other medals. He knows whereof he speaks. What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes says, is the product of 30 years of reading, writing and thinking about the meaning of his combat experiences. His reading has been wide, and his thinking deep. In his final chapter, he offers advice on how our society can improve its relationship with the gods of war. It’s advice worth heeding.

Now Marlantes has written a…

Risking the Northwest Passage

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

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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.