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Golden Years

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
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Life on Other Planets

Astrobiologist Aomawa Shields’ Life on Other Planets is an inspiring memoir about charting her own path and merging the two worlds of science and art.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Little, Crazy Children

Review by Emma Rosenberg

Shaker Heights, east of Cleveland, Ohio, is an idyllic American town, a “planned utopia . . . plotted out, parcel by parcel.” With its mansions full of doctors and lawyers and paved streets lined with high-end department stores, it’s an unexpected place for a murder. Little, Crazy Children reveals what happens when teenagers take “justice” into their own hands, spreading misinformation and blurring the line between the accused and the guilty. 

Sixteen-year-old Lisa Pruett was known and loved by all as a romantic, a poet, a member of her church youth group—and someone who was madly in love with her boyfriend, Dan Dreifort. But in September 1990, Pruett was found dead in a back yard near Dreifort’s house, brutally stabbed. 

Dreifort admitted to having contaminated the crime scene—putting his fingerprints on Pruett’s bike while straightening it up. Dreifort’s bedroom, less than 100 yards from the crime scene, was full of empty bottles of Robitussin and contained the suspected murder weapon. In journal upon journal, investigators found that Dreifort had written of his blistering hatred for Lisa, of sacrificing a virgin and poking her eyes out with his pocket knife. 

But Dreifort was not the one the state chose to prosecute. Instead, they fixed their attention on another teenager, 18-year-old Kevin Young. An outcast in the community who vehemently denied any involvement, Young soon became the main suspect without ever being placed at the scene of the crime. 

Journalist, novelist and renowned true crime reporter James Renner (The Great Forgetting) forages for the truth among mixed-up rumors and lies. Renner writes in short chapters with propulsive pacing and cliffhanger endings, turning this disturbing journey into quite a page turner. With a casual narration style, Renner imbues his story with plenty of personal anecdotes, making it feel like readers are on the case alongside him. 

The tragedy recounted in Little, Crazy Children includes an undercurrent of romantic, religious and racial tumult. There’s a mysterious phone call predicting the murder, a series of troubling love letters and a highly loaded trial—details that are as engrossing for readers as they were for the townspeople of Shaker Heights. Much of the mystery is still unanswered, and Renner fills his final chapter with theoretical questions. You’ll have plenty to deliberate over even after you finish reading, making this the perfect pick for your book club of amateur sleuths.

In his latest true crime investigation, James Renner refuses to let the murder of Shaker Heights, Ohio, teenager Lisa Pruett be washed away by the tide of time.

Owner of a Lonely Heart

Beth Nguyen has only spent 24 hours with her mother over the course of her adult life, and her revelatory memoir depicts all the love and anguish bound up with this fact.
NonfictionMedicine

Random Acts of Medicine

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Anyone seeking medical care for a serious illness wants certainty in their diagnosis and treatment. The unsettling message of Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, however, is that those understandable desires are often undermined by pure chance. 

In their revealing book, Harvard Medical School professor and economist Anupam B. Jena and critical care physician and health care policy researcher Christopher Worsham rely on natural experiments—studies based on collecting and analyzing data from random events occurring in the real world instead of controlled environments—to illustrate the role that randomness plays in America’s health care system. It’s a system that, in 2019 alone, spent $3.8 trillion—17.7% of the United States’ gross domestic product—and yet is “inefficient, inequitable, and poorly performing compared with other wealthy nations,” they write.

Jena and Worsham report on numerous studies, some of which they helped conduct, that attempt to answer some vexing questions: Why do children born in the fall have markedly higher influenza vaccination rates than their counterparts with summer birthdays? Why, despite similar conditions, are some patients more likely than others to receive an opioid prescription in the emergency room and maintain that prescription long after they’ve returned home? Why is an obstetrician more likely to perform an unplanned cesarean section if their previous patient’s vaginal birth presented complications? The answers, they argue, can provide critical insights into how to improve the quality of health care.

The book’s sometimes whimsical chapter titles conceal serious findings. “What Happens When All the Cardiologists Leave Town?” examines the survival outcomes for high-risk cardiac patients who are hospitalized during the annual professional conference for interventional cardiologists, versus those treated when those same cardiologists are back home. “What Do Cardiac Surgeons and Used-Car Salesmen Have in Common?” considers “left-digit bias,” a cognitive blind spot Jena and Worsham believe explains the differing care patients with heart attack symptoms who are just under 40 sometimes receive compared to those who have recently passed that milestone. 

If these unexpected insights sound familiar to readers of books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, there’s a reason. In addition to his professional duties, Jena hosts the podcast “Freakonomics, M.D.,” where he explores similar behavioral economics issues. Though their tone is occasionally lighthearted, he and Worsham repeatedly drive home a serious point: The American health care system is failing to deliver optimal care, often due to the unquestioned assumptions and inherent biases of its providers. If this provocative book can spark conversations about how to examine these persistent problems with fresh eyes, its authors have accomplished something truly important.

In their revealing book, Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham illustrate the role that pure chance plays in medicine.
NonfictionTrue CrimeBiographyArt

The Art Thief

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Most art thefts are simply for financial gain. The thieves, often opportunistic crooks and rarely art connoisseurs themselves, view their stolen masterworks as loot to be fenced. Stéphane Breitwieser is different. Growing up in the Alsace region of France, he fell in love with art and artifacts under his grandfather’s tutelage, and by the time he was in his 20s, he had begun to steal compulsively from museums, auction houses and even churches. In eight years, often aided by his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine, he filched more than 300 irreplaceable works—including small oil paintings, silver chalices, ivory sculptures, tapestries and a historic bugle—estimated to be worth billions. When he was ultimately caught, Breitwieser said his sole motivation for stealing was to surround himself with beauty. He never sold anything he procured but instead displayed it all in a cramped attic room he and Anne-Catherine occupied in his mother’s house.

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by journalist Michael Finkel is a fascinating account of Breitwieser’s crime spree that attempts to understand the mind of this criminal aesthete. This proves a herculean task, since Breitwieser’s singular condition has defied clear-cut diagnosis by a passel of mental health experts, but Finkel’s re-creation of the thief’s nefarious activities is nonetheless a riveting ride. As the only American journalist who was granted interviews with Breitwieser, Finkel spent some 40 hours with him, even accompanying the now ex-con on visits to some of the museums and churches from which he once stole. From this personally reported material, as well as other interviews and documentation, Finkel has fashioned an engrossing true crime narrative—mostly told in present-tense prose to heighten the drama—that takes readers along on Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine’s daring robberies, quite often carried out in plain sight. 

The Breitwieser whom Finkel deftly portrays is a social misfit, a virtuoso of stealth, an inveterate moocher and, most of all, a self-deluded hero. (He claims he is protecting and preserving the art by stealing it.) Anne-Catherine seems a complicit accomplice—a lovestruck Bonnie to her cultured Clyde—until Breitwieser is caught and the tables turn. Breitwieser’s enabling, much-in-denial mother, meanwhile, alters the course of events in a way that will shock and disturb art and history lovers. Obsessive crime, dangerous beauty, ill-fated love: The Art Thief is the stuff of noir fiction, made all the more compelling and audacious for its authenticity.

Stéphane Breitwieser stole more than 300 irreplaceable artworks. Journalist Michael Finkel now attempts to understand why this criminal aesthete hoarded those treasures in his attic.
NonfictionParentingMemoir

The Light Room

Review by Catherine Hollis

Kate Zambreno’s work blends memoir, art criticism and literary history/gossip to brilliant effect, and in recent years, her books have become even deeper and richer as they have been suffused with the experience of early motherhood. The Light Room, like her 2021 book of literary criticism, To Write as if Already Dead, records the impossibility of finding time and space to write as a new mother. But instead of suffering from these restrictions, the book blossoms because of them, written in furious spurts that both describe and embody the stolen moments between feeding, waking and sleeping.

The Light Room offers readers who are new to Zambreno a perfect entry point into the patterns of thinking and writing that her work is known for. As it follows a daily record of Zambreno’s life with small children during the COVID-19 lockdown—the groceries, the laundry, the mess, the exhaustion and the outings to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York—the book also considers the developmental experience of pandemic babies who see unmasked faces only at home and who haven’t yet met their extended families. Zambreno tracks experiments in early education during a pandemic as well, from an outdoor “forest school” to using Montessori methods at home. 

The unending domestic care work, however, is balanced by Zambreno’s reading, writing and thinking. Nursing at 4 a.m. while reading Yuko Tsushima’s novel Territory of Light about single motherhood in 1970s Japan conjures a sense of “cozy dread.” A child’s collection of found objects evokes visual artist Joseph Cornell’s box art. Translucent building blocks suggest a literary form for the book itself: a mother writing in tiny increments, stealing bits of time to build, entry by entry, a chronicle of “seasons and exhaustions.”

The restrictions, fear and grief of parenting during a pandemic are ultimately measured against moments of joy and glimmers of beauty, what Zambreno calls “translucencies.” Thinking through Natalia Ginzburg’s 1944 essay “Winter in the Abruzzi,” Zambreno approaches a vital truth that lies at the heart of this memoir: What if these days of domestic constraint turn out, in the long run, to be the happiest time in a family’s life together?

Kate Zambreno’s memoir The Light Room measures the fear and grief of parenting during a pandemic against moments of joy and glimmers of beauty.

The Theory of Everything Else

The existence of ghosts, aliens and cryptids will seem like tame notions by the time you finish Dan Schreiber’s hilarious book about life’s greatest mysteries and most peculiar theories.
NonfictionMemoir

Through the Groves

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Before Walt Disney World paved Orlando with parking lots and erected glittering idols to commercialism, lush orange groves carpeted central Florida. Children were entertained not by a grinning rodent wearing a bow tie and white gloves but by playing among the glossy green leaves and sweet-smelling blossoms, or by chasing after the mosquito fogging trucks that arrived every evening in the summer. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull’s exquisite memoir, Through the Groves, carries readers back to a time when citrus, not Disney, was king in Florida, even as she reveals the fissures in her life beneath those fragrant orange blossoms.

As a young child, Hull spent her summers riding shotgun with her father, who was an inspector for a citrus grower. They bounced through the rutted aisles of the orange groves, car antenna whipping through the leaves and knocking fruit into the car. She met the growers and those who worked for them, whose bodies had been ravaged by years of close contact with pesticides. “I had never seen such a reptilian assemblage of humanity,” she writes. “Their faces cracked when they smiled. Cancer ate away at their noses.” During one of those rides, when she noticed her father screwing the cap back onto a bottle that was different from the Pepto-Bismol bottle he often drank from, Hull realized that her father was abusing alcohol.

Hull’s mother, who looked like “Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” had dreams of being a journalist. But when the family moved to Sebring, Florida, her mother instead started teaching elementary school. Hull’s father’s drinking eventually drove a wedge between him and his wife, and Hull and her mother moved in with family in St. Petersburg. She recalls the opening of Disney World around this time and its effects on the region, writing, “I hated it before it ever opened. . . . It was front-page news; it was practically a religious holiday in Florida.” As she grew up, Hull learned to navigate the streets of St. Pete and to live life on her own terms. During her first year at Florida State University, she awoke to her attraction to women, and her mother accepted and embraced her. Hull left college to become a rep for Revlon, and instead of oranges, the back seat of her car was crowded with “six-foot-tall beautiful women made of cardboard.”

As Hull walks out of the Florida groves and into her adult life, she can clearly see the shadows they cast on her world. In her closing chapter, she shares a valuable gem of wisdom that reveals her vulnerability and ours: “Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It’s bought, sold, paved over, and reimagined in a cycle that never quits. The landscape I saw through my father’s windshield as a child has been so thoroughly erased I sometimes wonder if I made it up.” Through the Groves captures the ugliness and the beauty of growing up in a Florida now long gone.

Anne Hull’s exquisite memoir carries readers back to a time when citrus was king in central Florida, even as she reveals the fissures in her life beneath the fragrant orange blossoms.

What an Owl Knows

Bestselling author and passionate bird advocate Jennifer Ackerman goes around the world to find out why owls so intrigue humans in her wide-ranging and wonderful new book.
NonfictionTrue CrimeMemoir

What the Dead Know

Review by Alice Cary

Early on in her job, Barbara Butcher got an invaluable piece of advice from a colleague: “When you leave here each day, surround yourself with things of beauty. Enjoy nature and art and food and music and love. Just do it, and don’t skip a day.” Those words turned out to be crucial, lifesaving wisdom for Butcher, who spent 22 years working at the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It was her job to investigate the circumstances surrounding unexpected deaths, carefully examining the bodies and their surroundings for clues to determine if it was an accident, a suicide, a death by natural causes—or a murder. Although she calls it “the best career I could ever imagine,” the emotional toll was painful—often excruciating—as she explains in her colorful, compelling memoir, What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator.

Barbara Butcher shares fond and chilling memories from the career that both saved and ruined her life.

Butcher’s life was almost upended by depression and alcohol addiction. Despite rising in the ranks as a physician assistant and a hospital administrator, she was on an extreme crash course to destruction when she landed in Alcoholics Anonymous. By chance, after she got sober, she was hired as a medicolegal death investigator. Butcher was only the second woman to hold the job; the first had quit after only a month.

Writing in a fast-paced, no-nonsense, sometimes funny and always precise style, Butcher shares a treasure trove of life and death stories that touch on racism, wealth, poverty, prejudice, misogyny, justice and injustice. In many ways, it’s the ultimate behind-the-scenes tour of the Big Apple from the 1990s through 2015, including the 9/11 attacks. Butcher guides readers through mansions, flophouses, back alleys, squatters’ buildings, train tunnels and more while taking note of the immense breadth of humanity, both living and dead.

Visceral, impassioned and hard to put down, What the Dead Know is a lively account of an unimaginable career.

Writing in a fast-paced and precise style, Barbara Butcher shares a treasure trove of stories from her 22 years as a death investigator in New York City.

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