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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.
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LifestylesEnvironment

One day at a time

Review by bookpagedev

For people who want to take their revolution a little slower, there’s Michael Norton’s 365 Ways to Change the World: How to Make a Difference One Day at a Time, a clever spin on books with daily meditations. Each page corresponds to a day in the year and offers a bite-sized thought or activity that could plausibly make a small positive impact on the planet. One day, 365 Ways to Change the World will have you sending a cash donation to Zimbabwe; the next, you’ll be asked simply to meditate on gender inequities. Readers are frequently called on to organize meetings of like-minded thinkers who will offer safety in numbers as well as many hands to make light work of projects. Other pages have you thinking about how even your tippling habits affect the planet. Did you know that Spanish growers of oak cork are in danger of losing their livelihoods and surrendering their forests to clearing from the advent of plastic wine corks? Lynn Hamilton writes about environmental issues from Tybee Island, Georgia.

For people who want to take their revolution a little slower, there's Michael Norton's 365 Ways to Change the World: How to Make a Difference One Day at a Time, a clever spin on books with daily meditations. Each page corresponds to a day in…
LifestylesEnvironment

How high is the water?

Review by bookpagedev

If we back up a few paces, Joseph Romm’s Hell and High Water: Global Warming the Solution and the Politics and What We Should Do will tell us exactly what the crisis is and why we need to change our ways. In 2005, Romm’s brother lost his Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina. Since Romm holds a doctorate in oceanography, his brother naturally sought his advice on whether to rebuild. Romm’s response was grim but clear: Coastal dwellers from Houston to Miami are now playing Russian roulette with maybe two bullets in the gun chamber. In a rising sea of apocalyptic warnings about global warming, Romm’s new book is perhaps the most unequivocal in its predictions. Coastal cities could be partly underwater by as early as 2050, he writes, and the rest of us will be dropping from deadly heat waves. Romm’s rhetoric is more problem-centered, and he offers fewer solutions than other writers here, but he does say that taking action against global warming is the single most important thing we will do and we’ll hate ourselves if we drop the ball.

Lynn Hamilton writes about environmental issues from Tybee Island, Georgia.

If we back up a few paces, Joseph Romm's Hell and High Water: Global Warming the Solution and the Politics and What We Should Do will tell us exactly what the crisis is and why we need to change our ways. In 2005, Romm's brother…
Travel

Travelogues take you a world away

Review by bookpagedev

J.R. Daeschner knows more than a little something about participatory journalism. In True Brits: A Tour of 21st Century Britain in All Its Bog-Snorkelling, Gurning and Cheese-Rolling Glory, he travels the United Kingdom in search of all things eccentric and extraordinary. With little regard to safety or sanity, Daeschner squares off for a shin-kicking contest in the Cotswolds and snorkels bravely through the murky muck and cold of a Welsh bog. He makes his way to every village festival and small-town celebration he can, knowing that such events survive "because they reinforce a sense of identity, community, and continuity." More importantly, he understands that "people take an inordinate pride in the local idiosyncrasies that distinguish them from a thousand other places: they’re proud to be peculiar." In Daeschner’s world, this is certainly cause for celebration.

LACEY GALBRAITH

 

J.R. Daeschner knows more than a little something about participatory journalism. In True Brits: A Tour of 21st Century Britain in All Its Bog-Snorkelling, Gurning and Cheese-Rolling Glory, he travels the United Kingdom in search of all things eccentric and extraordinary. With little regard…

Travel

Travelogues take you a world away

Review by bookpagedev

Long ago Jamaica Kincaid proved herself to be a writer of enormous talent with works such as Annie John, Lucy, My Brother and The Autobiography of My Mother. She tackles the travel memoir with her latest, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. In writing that is gracefully evocative, she describes trekking through the Himalayas of Nepal in search of seeds to collect for her garden back home in Vermont. With her small yet eager band of botanists, she encounters Maoist guerillas and a natural world where the sky looms large and brilliant blue, where fruit bats hang from trees and butterflies suddenly appear in a swarm. To read Among Flowers is to follow Kincaid into this other world, to fall into that state where, as Kincaid writes, it is “so dreamily irritating to be so far away from everything I had known.” LACEY GALBRAITH

Long ago Jamaica Kincaid proved herself to be a writer of enormous talent with works such as Annie John, Lucy, My Brother and The Autobiography of My Mother. She tackles the travel memoir with her latest, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. In writing…
Lifestyles

Learning from the masters

Review by bookpagedev

It’s no secret that celebrities glow and look glam because teams of beauty experts follow them around. The Handbook of Style, bound in faux croc, is everywoman’s chance to even the field. As told to Francine Maroukian and Sarah Woodruff, the handbag-sized, illustrated guide poses common and slightly obscure questions to beauty and fashion insiders, from makeup artists, skin specialists and hair stylists, to clothing designers, jewelers, magazine editors and consultants. The result is like sitting next to Jeanine Lobell of Stila Cosmetics, Mireille Guilliano (French Women Don’t Get Fat), Annoushka Ducas of Links of London, and Donald J. Pliner at a dinner party you’ll learn how to create a smoky eye, choose the perfect black dress or white shirt, deal with a blemish, travel in style, become a hat person and spot a comfortable, sexy shoe. Now, if only a financial coach could reveal how to pay for it all over coffee. Deanna Larson is a writer in Nashville.

It's no secret that celebrities glow and look glam because teams of beauty experts follow them around. The Handbook of Style, bound in faux croc, is everywoman's chance to even the field. As told to Francine Maroukian and Sarah Woodruff, the handbag-sized, illustrated guide poses…
Graphic Memoirs

Looking at the past through pictures

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Like a blend of Persepolis and A Christmas Carol, Parsua Bashi's graphic memoir of growing up in Iran, Nylon Road, takes a playful tone but covers some seriously dark material along the way.

Bashi was born in Tehran in 1966 and moved to Switzerland in 2004. Her memoir is narrated from Switzerland in the present day, but the story is triggered by a little girl she suddenly sees one day in her kitchen. The little girl, it turns out, is Bashi herself as a child. Once she figures this out, she suddenly starts running into previous versions of herself all over the place, and interacts with each of them in an effort to reconcile various elements of her difficult past. It's a neat trick that lends itself well to the graphic novel treatment: we get to see Bashi as she is now talking with Bashi at 21, or at 35. In one scene, for example, one of her more argumentative former selves appears at her side during a dinner party, and Bashi locks herself into the bathroom to hash things out with her.

Some of her former selves are more fun to run into than others. Bashi avoids herself at 29, for example. At that age she was a young mother whose 5-year-old daughter had been taken away in court because Bashi divorced her husband. Under Iranian law at the time, a woman who asked for divorce gave up all custody rights. A straight re-creation of the event might seem overwrought, but Bashi's technique makes even such heartbreaking scenes light enough not to drag the story down.

The drawing is similarly light and fluid, not weighed down by excessive detail but effective at telegraphing ideas that would be hard to express in words. Illustrating the difficulty of moving to a country where no one speaks your language, she draws a shivering girl standing in a snowstorm, holding a tiny umbrella labeled "my knowledge of foreign languages," between a sunny gazebo labeled "Farsi" and a locked-and-guarded brick fortress labeled "Deutsch." It's funny and inventive, and you know exactly what she's getting at. Bashi's style, in other words, takes a comlicated, difficult story and makes it improbably easy to relate to.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

Like a blend of Persepolis and A Christmas Carol, Parsua Bashi's graphic memoir of growing up in Iran, Nylon Road, takes a playful tone but covers some seriously dark material along the way.

Bashi was born in Tehran in 1966 and moved to Switzerland in 2004.…

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