Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

The Work of Art

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

Ingenious

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

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

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre
Business & Finance

From deadlines to the bottom line

Review by bookpagedev

After 10 years as a newspaper journalist, Philip Delves Broughton was tired of his colleagues’ cynicism and anxious about what seemed to be his industry’s inexorable decline. He left his job with the London Daily Telegraph to go to Harvard Business School, seeking more control over his own destiny. It still seems to be an open question whether Delves Broughton will find fulfillment in the world of commerce. But luckily for readers, he has used his writing skills to produce an accessible memoir of his two years at HBS that also serves as a good primer on business.

Delves Broughton, an Englishman with an outsider’s perspective, demystifies the school that has produced such varied graduates as George W. Bush, Michael Bloomberg and infamous Enron felon Jeff Skilling. Perhaps surprisingly, the student body has a high proportion of the "three M’s": Mormons, military and McKinsey – people who either have worked or want to work at the McKinsey consulting firm on their way to even more lucrative jobs. But the HBS population is also increasingly multinational, and Delves Broughton points out interesting differences between American and non-American attitudes.

There are no true horror stories in Ahead of the Curve. As at any other school, some professors are worse than others, and some students are less than collegial. But overall, HBS comes across as an institution that takes seriously its responsibility to produce ethical, well-balanced leaders. Its "case study" system of teaching – dissecting business situations based on real-life models – provides students an effective way of thinking through problems.

But Delves Broughton raises troubling questions. Most graduates gravitate to well-paid finance and consulting jobs, not to entrepreneurial risks or manufacturing. Many think more about numbers than the people affected by their decisions. Their personal lives suffer as they spend obscene amounts of time at the office. And no one in the class of 2006 seems to anticipate the coming credit crisis – though one 1965 alumnus notes that the exceptionally high percentage of current graduates choosing financial services careers was likely a sign that the markets were about to crash.

 

After 10 years as a newspaper journalist, Philip Delves Broughton was tired of his colleagues' cynicism and anxious about what seemed to be his industry's inexorable decline. He left his job with the London Daily Telegraph to go to Harvard Business School, seeking more…

Cookbooks

Bottom of the wine barrel

Review by bookpagedev

In 1985, Malcolm Forbes’ son Kip, acting for his father, paid $156,000 for a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite, part of a cache said to have been ordered by Thomas Jefferson but never delivered and found by workmen renovating an old house in Paris. The sale, and the huge publicity surrounding it, launched an era of what can only be called wretched excess (judging from some of the “tasting” menus) and of a hugely profitable market in fraudulent antique wine “discoveries” – a burgeoning hoax that would eventually tar several of the world’s leading wine experts, notably longtime Christie’s chief wine auctioneer Michael Broadbent (and to a lesser extent Robert Parker, creator of the controversial 100-point rating scale for wine).

It also cost any number of multimillionaire collectors an astounding amount of money, although Benjamin Wallace, author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, makes it clear that some deserved it: Wallace’s stories of 12-hour tastings of rare wines, of eccentric tycoon-turned-America’s Cup winner Bill Koch’s extravagant wine cellar, and of the growing number of warning signs (holes in Jefferson’s meticulous record-keeping, dealers offering multiple cases of wine that had been made in limited numbers) ignored or downplayed by the industry are a reminder that collecting is itself a sort of mania.

It’s also competitive, and Koch, who eventually spent another fortune to prove the fraud, is more concerned with revenge than restitution. The villain of the piece is Hardy Rodenstock (an alias, as it turns out), who persuades some of the most prestigious wine tasters in the world that he is the Indiana Jones of antique vintages, particularly 18th-century Yquem, first growth Bordeaux and, of course, the “Th.J.” bottles. The “hero,” if there is one, is an unlikely team of investigators and scientists that is in itself fairly astounding.

Wallace’s painstaking research, his often pungent descriptions and an ability to temper his cliffhangers as he ducks and weaves with the narratives, make this a terrific read.

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

In 1985, Malcolm Forbes' son Kip, acting for his father, paid $156,000 for a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite, part of a cache said to have been ordered by Thomas Jefferson but never delivered and found by workmen renovating an old house in Paris. The…
Biography

A life reclaimed through music

Review by bookpagedev

Steve Lopez is a newspaper columnist somewhat in the mold of Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin. He’s worked in Philadelphia and Los Angeles – also with Time magazine – and has turned out a few novels. Several years back, Lopez came upon an L.A. Skid Row denizen named Nathaniel Ayers, who impressed him with his violin playing, despite the fact that his instrument had only two strings. Sniffing a story, Lopez set out to learn more about his new acquaintance and discovered that Ayers had been enrolled at Juilliard more than 30 years earlier. Lopez’s initial column on Ayers drew wide attention, and eventually spawned many more, as Lopez gradually became intimately involved in his subject’s past and future. The Soloist directly recounts this unusual, ultimately heartwarming tale, but not before the author takes readers on a harrowing journey through the tougher elements of both mental-health treatment and the lower depths of downtown L.A.

It turns out that Ayers, after indeed spending two years at Juilliard as a promising string bass player, succumbed to a form of schizophrenia, thus disrupting his functionality, destroying his ability to continue in music school and eventually spiraling his life downward into the underclass. Encouraged by some of his concerned Los Angeles Times readers and also by cautious but supportive psychiatric professionals and social workers, Lopez forges a friendship with Ayers and for two years helps him get off the streets, pursue his music with renewed vigor, and take the huge emotional strides necessary to begin a modest re-entry into more conventional everyday living.

Lopez’s writing is as propulsive as good fiction, and his central character is nothing if not a singularly fascinating gent – prone to disjointed stream-of-consciousness outbursts as well as brief informative lectures on classical music. Yet for all its positive-striding spirit, Lopez’s book is rife with suspense, mainly because Ayers’ complex personality problems emerge as all too real and – especially since he adamantly refuses meds – require unending patience on the part of those aiding his progress. The Soloist is inspirational but also very gritty stuff; a film adaptation starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. is in the works.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

Steve Lopez is a newspaper columnist somewhat in the mold of Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin. He's worked in Philadelphia and Los Angeles - also with Time magazine - and has turned out a few novels. Several years back, Lopez came upon an L.A. Skid…
Memoir

Longtime JFK aide Sorensen recalls his life in the West Wing

Review by bookpagedev

Forty-five years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Ted Sorensen’s adoration of his old boss shines as brightly in Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History as it did when the two men were laying the foundation for what came to be known as “The New Frontier.” Kennedy hired Sorensen as his legislative assistant in 1953 shortly after being elected to the Senate and kept him on at increasing levels of responsibility throughout his presidency.

It was a strange pairing from the start. Kennedy was a Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated, Catholic war hero with fairly conservative leanings, while Sorensen was a politically progressive Nebraska native of Danish and Russian Jewish origin, a Unitarian and a registered conscientious objector. Still, they hit it off immediately. Sorensen found in Kennedy the makings of an idealist, someone who had the industry, intelligence, good will and charisma to fulfill Sorensen’s own liberal political values. Both had a rich sense of humor.

While conceding that Kennedy was unfaithful in his marriage, Sorensen does little more than nod toward that subject. In his eyes, Kennedy’s weaknesses were trivial compared to the good he achieved as president in furthering civil rights, orchestrating the removal of Russian missiles from Cuba without going to war, lobbying for nuclear disarmament and putting America on the road to pre-eminence in space exploration. He dutifully notes his superior’s flaws, such as failing to censure Joseph McCarthy and being a latecomer to the civil rights cause, but he clearly considers these as aberrations in an otherwise noble personality.

A year after joining Kennedy’s staff, Sorensen began writing speeches for him and remained his chief scribe from that point on. Without discounting his own considerable input, he does deny the still pervasive rumor that he wrote Kennedy’s best-selling 1956 book, Profiles in Courage. He credits the senator with conceiving the idea, masterminding the research and doing much of the writing and editing. Profiles was such a success that instead of assigning Sorensen half of its income, as he had done for articles his assistant had ghosted in his name, Kennedy paid him a large flat fee, the amount of which the usually candid author chooses not to disclose.

Sorensen’s descriptions of his companionship with Kennedy, both in his office and on the interminable campaign tours, are charming glimpses into the ways politics used to be done – before the proliferation of pollsters, media advisors, opposition researchers and frenzied fundraising schemes. (Kennedy, of course, was amply funded by his father.) Always at his boss’ elbow – a factor, he admits, that hastened the breakup of his first marriage – Sorensen explains the various strategies that ultimately calmed the electorate’s fear of Kennedy’s Catholicism. It boiled down to the youthful-looking senator convincing voters that he truly believed in the separation of church and state. Sorensen observes that all the fears of religious dominance conservative Protestants then voiced against Kennedy have now been fulfilled by a Protestant president.

Counselor is one of the most readable political memoirs one could hope for. While not as breezy and gossipy as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Journals, it does convey the intensity, excitement and joy of those who believe that government, properly inspired and executed, can be a great force for good.

Edward Morris watches politics from Nashville.

Forty-five years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, Ted Sorensen's adoration of his old boss shines as brightly in Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History as it did when the two men were laying the foundation for what came to be known as "The…
Biography

As alike as chalk and cheese

Review by bookpagedev

The writings of George Orwell (Animal Farm) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) engaged and electrified international audiences in the first half of the 20th century. In that, these British literary lions – each with decidedly different lifestyles – are similar. Writer David Lebedoff (Cleaning Up) uncovers deeper similarities in The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, a refreshing dual biography that compares and contrasts the lives and works of these authors, both of whom held the same (dim) views of totalitarianism, morality and the future of our modern world.

At a glance, the lives of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh seem no more alike than chalk is to cheese. Though both were born in 1903 England into the same social class, their paths diverged as they were educated, grew to manhood against a background of world war, and pursued their literary callings (meeting only once). During his boarding school days, the sensitive Orwell was cruelly bullied (torture he later chronicled in the essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”). Waugh had a brash lineage (his grandfather’s nickname was “The Brute”), and was a schoolboy bully who would later habitually torment both friend and foe alike. Orwell, a socialist and atheist, chose a hard life of near poverty. Waugh, a conservative and an ardent Catholic convert, was an unabashed social climber who courted the moneyed, aristocratic echelons of British society. Waugh lived into his 60s, gaining early success as a writer; Orwell’s writings remained fairly obscure until shortly before his death at age 46.

The conceit of examining opposites to excavate similarities has driven many classic tales, and it is employed with deft honesty here, despite Lebedoff’s effusive fondness for these authors. The Same Man is a first-rate read, an adroit portrait of two prescient thinkers who feared, with the steady upward and so-called progress of the Modern Age, our collective fall into “a bottomless abyss.” Enlivened by Lebedoff’s trenchant observations of the authors’ inner and outer worlds, it is pulled down slightly by the final chapter, which strays occasionally into unfocused conjecture irrelevant to this biography’s worthy premise.

Alison Hood plans to re-read Animal Farm and Brideshead Revisited before summer’s end.

The writings of George Orwell (Animal Farm) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) engaged and electrified international audiences in the first half of the 20th century. In that, these British literary lions - each with decidedly different lifestyles - are similar. Writer David Lebedoff (Cleaning Up)…
Food & DrinkCookbooks

A sweet, savory gastronomic trilogy

Review by bookpagedev

Celebrated American author M.F.

K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come to sustain us through the winter are three savory volumes of food writing from a cornucopia of authors, including Fisher, that illuminate man’s culinary and agrarian traditions, creations, prejudices and cravings.

A memorable meal might offer superb dishes and exquisite vintages served in a delightful ambiance. Mark Kurlansky, author of The New York Times bestseller Cod, delivers just such a remarkable repast with his gastronomic anthology, Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. Literary writings from an eclectic company of authors focus on man’s knowledge and appreciation of food and drink through the ages. From Plato, Brillat-Savarin and Thoreau to Elizabeth David and Alice B. Toklas (who reveals the best way to clobber a carp), these “cuts” analyze culinary arts and exaggerations, degustation and man’s enduring desire for crispy pommes frites.

Kurlansky’s clear, well-researched introduction (a small history of food writing) and commentary enliven his selections, which are tucked into chapters on gluttony, food and sex, the primary food groups, culinary rants, food politics and the seductions of chocolate. Choice Cuts is an erudite treat containing practical instruction on preparing your Thanksgiving turkey, arcane lore on the aphrodisiacal properties of celery, and peculiar recipes, such as how to make your whole roasted cow look alive again. A book for culinary aficionados, Cuts casts a wide appeal as pure entertainment, especially when garnished with a comfortable armchair, favorite libation and a plate of chilled, crunchy celery at hand.

When French winemakers speak of terroir, they refer to a signature confluence of natural elements that distinguish one vineyard from another, helping to produce unique, legendary wines. This concept of distinction is no less evident when considering American Southern cuisine, which is bound intimately to its terrain and cultural diversity. The Southern way with food is feted in Corn Bread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing (University of North Carolina, $16.95, 304 pages, ISBN 0807854190), edited by John Egerton. Cornbread draws an endearing culinary portrait of the South, long renowned for its anomalies of habit and culture.

These collected essays from contemporary writers such as Rick Bragg, Roy Blount Jr., James Villas and others, are a celebration of Southern food, cooks and culinary traditions many of which have fallen prey to progress. Funny, perceptive, and wise, often a touch odd, these evocative writings are a paean to the vanishing South. There are not many men left like 96-year old Coe Dupuis, a Cajun moonshiner, who contributing writer Craig Laban calls the “wizard of whiskey, a Stravinsky at the still.” And it is hard to find a good batch of livermush, a fragrant mess o’ beans and hocks, or ambrosial ‘cue at just any corner cafŽ. These are special dishes of heredity, place and the sometimes strange finesse of Southern cooks.

Cornbread Nation, sponsored by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a Mississippi group dedicated to preserving Southern food culture, is not a definitive study of its subject, but provides a soulful, enlightening window on the terroir of Southern cuisine. With tributes to cooks Edna Lewis and Eugene Walter, debate on country- versus chicken-fried steak and a rhapsody to watermelon, even readers north of the Mason-Dixon Line will want to pull up a chair to the convivial Southern table.

Jeffrey Steingarten, indefatigable eater and food critic for Vogue, pulls no punches: He will go to the ends of the earth to debunk quackeries of taste and uphold gastronomic veracity. It Must’ve Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything (Knopf, $27.50, 464 pages, ISBN 0375412808), a compilation of his essays for Vogue, chronicles Steingarten’s investigatory travels into the truth about how, why and what we humans eat.

Steingarten’s introduction, “The Way We Eat Now,” asserts that misguided attitudes toward food are at the root of global angst. He believes that bringing an open mind to the table can foster personal, and ultimately global, goodwill. The author’s culinary quest is often perilous: He takes a turbulent trip on a tuna boat in search of the elusive bluefin, endures a claustrophobic brain scan to prove that gourmandise is not caused by insidious brain lesions and suffers an overstuffed stomach searching out the last honest Parisian baguette.

These essays, a delight for discerning eaters, are lavished with Steingarten’s self-deprecating wit, obsessive doggedness and his devotion to “the elemental, primordial glee we feel every time we are called to dinner.” He preaches a simple gospel: Eat happily, be happy!

Celebrated American author M.F.

K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come…

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