Emily Feng’s dazzling Let Only Red Flowers Bloom documents how Xi Jinping’s efforts to narrow Chinese identity endanger the extremely diverse country’s people.

Education, Memoir, Nonfiction

Spellbound

Phil Hanley’s frank, vulnerable, funny memoir recounts his journey from struggling student to successful comedian who wears his dyslexia “like a badge of honor.”

Medicine, Nonfiction, Science

Nonfiction Science Medicine

Everything Is Tuberculosis

Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in Everything Is Tuberculosis.

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Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe: Silver hell

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Dead man laughing

Review by bookpagedev

by Deanna Larson

It’s enough to make you want to dig up Art Buchwald as soon as he finally reaches the grave and beat him with his own shin bone (to paraphrase Mark Twain). Though dying of kidney disease, the irascible Buchwald still manages to tickle in his new memoir Too Soon to Say Goodbye. After suffering kidney failure and refusing to undergo dialysis, Buchwald enters a hospice with less than a month to live. But his body isn’t quite ready to take the dirt nap. While the rabbi, mystified doctors and weeping relatives wait, Buchwald dictates his living will (cremation, ashes scattered on Martha’s Vineyard), plans his memorial service (Carly Simon sings I’ll Be Seeing You, Tom Brokaw and Ken Starr deliver eulogies), and pens this book about the dying experience, set in the Requiem typeface, no less. I never knew how many perks were involved, he writes of his nine-months-and-counting death experience. I’ve enjoyed every moment of it. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist shamelessly drops the names of an endless parade of dignitaries and celebrities who come to visit (Walter Cronkite, Ethel Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, Mike Wallace) and observes the greeting card industry from a unique vantage point apparently Hallmark hasn’t found a hospice equivalent to Get Well. Buchwald is at his best dissecting world events with his surgically precise humor, and in suitably brief vignettes revisiting his childhood in foster care, his career in journalism and his marriage.

As readers hold one long collective breath (the acute kidney disease is now simply chronic) Buchwald also teaches, in true Buchwald fashion, that you should talk to people in hospice like they’re really there, and when one person brings a dish you like, ask for the recipe so someone else can make it for you, too.

It's enough to make you want to dig up Art Buchwald as soon as he finally reaches the grave and beat him with his own shin bone (to paraphrase Mark Twain). Though dying of kidney disease, the irascible Buchwald still manages to tickle in…

The man who followed Lincoln

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Nothing but the truth

Review by bookpagedev

by Roger Bishop

Public attention has focused in recent years on charges of professional misconduct by four prominent historians, all authors of best-selling and award-winning books. Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose were accused of plagiarism. Joseph Ellis was charged with lying about his personal experience during the Vietnam/civil rights era. Michael Bellesiles was said to have falsified research data for his Arming America. In the enlightening Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin, University of Georgia historian Peter Charles Hoffer, who has advised in cases of similar charges against other historians, helps nonhistorians understand these episodes.

Hoffer examines each of the four recent situations in detail. He acknowledges that both Ambrose, who died in 2002, and Goodwin are “superb storytellers” and that pinpointing plagiarism in earlier trade history books would be difficult. Many of those books had virtually no reference apparatus at all. The case of Ellis was personal and while Hoffer does not condone what Ellis did, he does think that these personal fictions “seemed to work wonders for Ellis’s powers of historical description and insight into the character of his subjects.” The Bellesiles case involved “serious deviations from accepted practices in carrying out [and] reporting results from research,” as stated in one official report.

Hoffer writes that when the 19th century ended, historians portrayed the U.S. as “one people, forming one nation, with one history.” This view “embraced profound fictions,” for the most part excluding women, people of color, and slavery. Significant changes came in the 1960s with the “new history.” But this also brought a demand for “methodological sophistication that . . . widened the divide between academic and popular history.” Hoffer says this led the profession to fail to provide what had made consensus history so compelling: “proof that American history could inspire and delight.” Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and frequent contributor to BookPage.

Such a strange vibration

by bookpagedev

Biography

Biography

A true renaissance man

Review by bookpagedev

by Michael Sims

Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code did not single-handedly ignite a resurgence of interest in Leonardo Da Vinci, but it certainly fanned the flames of one already in progress. The evidence is everywhere. Leonardo’s own fascinating and well-written notebooks are available in various editions. There have been numerous documentaries and books about him in recent years, including Sherwin Nuland’s excellent entry in the Penguin Lives series. The Da Vinci Code has done history fans a favor by encouraging publishers to provide more nonfiction about this fascinating and mysterious figure.

Now comes Leonardo by Martin Kemp, an art history professor at Oxford and the esteemed author of The Oxford History of Western Art. He understands Leonardo, his works, his context and his influence. Kemp’s book is relatively short and quite reader-friendly. It includes a helpful chronology and an annotated gallery of Leonardo’s paintings, which comprise perhaps a third of the book’s 60 handsome illustrations. Kemp doesn’t waste time pasting together yet another biography. Instead, he has written a scholarly but passionate essay. He wants to try to understand Leonardo’s mind, the way his imagination united art and science and brought them to bear upon each other. Kemp has an excellent chapter called “Looking” that examines Leonardo’s scientific notions about the eye and vision alongside his conception of the artistic imagination. Other chapters explore his related ideas about the body and machinery and his use of the ancient parallel between the human body and the body of the earth. A final chapter surveys Leonardo’s posthumous fame, from the 16th-century biography by Vasari to, inevitably, The Da Vinci Code. Michael Sims ranges from Leonardo to Louis Armstrong in his most recent book, Adam’s Navel, now in paperback from Penguin.

Dan Brown's blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code did not single-handedly ignite a resurgence of interest in Leonardo Da Vinci, but it certainly fanned the flames of one already in progress. The evidence is everywhere. Leonardo's own fascinating and well-written notebooks are available in various…

Love’s labors found

by bookpagedev

Sports

Sports

You’ll look sweet upon the seat

Review by bookpagedev

by Alden Mudge

John Keats may have been a great poet but he wasn’t much of a seer. According to bicycle historian David Herlihy, the famous English Romantic poet dismissed a faddishly popular precursor of the modern-day bicycle as a fleeting novelty.

For a brief moment, as Herlihy’s comprehensive new book Bicycle: The History shows, Keats seemed to be right. In its earliest days, the bicycle was a plaything of the wealthy and the trendy. It was too expensive, too heavy (at more than 50 pounds) and too difficult to ride on the poor road systems in Europe and the U.S. to achieve widespread popularity. Only late in its development did it become the hoped-for utilitarian mode of transportation that sees something like a billion bicycles in use (or at least in garages) today.

Herlihy’s history follows the ebb and flow of bicycle popularity from the earliest days of invention, when an 1817 bike-precursor called the draisine was seen as an enhancement to walking, through the "boneshaker" and "high wheel" eras, through the development of the "safety bicycles" (so named because their lower height meant less serious injuries in crashes or falls), to the modern proliferation of specialized bicycles.

Bicycle is best as it approaches the modern age. Here Herlihy’s weave of anecdotes and analysis adds up to a fascinating social history. The bicycle contributed to women’s greater independent mobility, as well as practical changes in fashion. Bike clubs were effective advocates for better roads long before automobile drivers. And bike builders made essential contributions to the development of the motorcycle, the automobile and, of course, the airplane.

To Herlihy’s and our good fortune, the rise of the bicycle also coincided with the golden age of illustration. Herlihy and Yale University Press have taken full advantage of this fact. The author’s prose is brought to life by the extraordinary and plentiful period photographs and illustrations. Bicycle is a handsome and visually pleasing volume.

Alden Mudge rides his 1999 Lemond Buenos Aires more than 3,500 miles every year.

John Keats may have been a great poet but he wasn't much of a seer. According to bicycle historian David Herlihy, the famous English Romantic poet dismissed a faddishly popular precursor of the modern-day bicycle as a fleeting novelty.

For a brief…

Something fishy

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture, Photography

Photography Arts & Culture

Have horse, will travel

Review by bookpagedev

by Sharon Kozy

Would you like to delight your resident horse-lover this Christmas with something other than another item from her State Line Tack wish list? Widely acclaimed photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand has culled 15 years of pictures and selected his favorites for a new collection, Horses. From the lens of a master who is at ease whether working from a bird’s-eye view or up close in the studio, these pictures convey a depth that is rarely seen in standard horse photography. Focusing on the complex relationship between his equine subjects and their caretakers, Arthus-Bertrand’s photographs reveal almost as much about horse-lovers as they do about the horses themselves.

Starting with photos taken in Eurasia, where the horse’s ancestors developed into the present day species Equus, representatives of many breeds are shown against the backdrop of Arthus-Bertrand’s signature brown tarp canvas. Befitting an artist who has spent a significant portion of his career photographing the earth from the air, Arthus-Bertrand includes several beautifully composed shots in which the canvas is a small element of a wider, lush scene. Thoughtful commentary by Jean-Louis Gouraud enhances the photos and focuses on how the various breeds have evolved in response to regional cultures. This armchair tour of the horse world is a captivating journey.

Revisiting an old ballgame

by bookpagedev

Animals

Animals

In focus

Review by bookpagedev

by Amy Scribner

Mammals of North America is the latest entry in the Kaufman Focus Guides series, launched to much acclaim last year with Kenn Kaufman’s Birds of North America. This innovative nature series uses digitally enhanced photographs, rather than drawings, to help users identify each entry. The new guide, Mammals of North America, limits its scope to those wild mammals known to occur on our continent, and the result is a perfect gift for campers and avid outdoorsmen. With keys for recognizing every animal from the elk to the marmot, this user-friendly guide also includes a map of the area in which each animal is likely to live, as well as the size and appearance of the animals’ tracks. “For the most part, mammals are what we have in mind when we think about the thrill of seeing wild animals,” Kaufman writes. “Let a fox or deer cross the path, let even a chipmunk approach the group, and it will become the center of attention. The mammal trumps everything else.” Amy Scribner is a writer in Olympia, Washington.

Mammals of North America is the latest entry in the Kaufman Focus Guides series, launched to much acclaim last year with Kenn Kaufman's Birds of North America. This innovative nature series uses digitally enhanced photographs, rather than drawings, to help users identify each entry. The…

Ancient history made vividly alive

by bookpagedev

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.