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.”
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.”
Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in 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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Hers is a face recognized around the world, 65 years after her death in one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Because her picture survived, she stands for the faceless millions who were herded, stripped, whipped and forced into the gas chambers. Her personal struggle came to life in the journal she kept while her family hid in a cramped attic from the Nazi patrols.

In Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, novelist Francine Prose aims to rescue Anne Frank from the mythmakers of Broadway and Hollywood, who turned her story into a “universal” one about tolerance and human goodness. She excoriates the play and the film, which portrayed a naïve nitwit and downplayed Anne’s Jewishness.

Prose sends us back instead to Anne’s book, The Diary of a Young Girl, insisting on Anne’s prodigious literary gifts, her religious faith and her understanding of the devils who had taken over Europe. With extensive quotes and paraphrases from the attic chronicle, she calls attention to the teen’s powers of observation. Especially noteworthy are the depiction of her parents and others who shared the closed cramped space, Anne’s blooming puberty—and the fear of discovery, arrest and death.

Still, says Prose, the proof of Frank’s genius is her capacity for revision. Anne reworked her daily entries to sharpen, clarify or set in relief details of the quotidian life under the eaves. Prose writes, “Anne can render a moment in which everyone is talking simultaneously, acting or reacting, an example of barely contained chaos that poses a challenge for even the practiced writer.”

The most compelling chapters of this study are “the afterlife.” Otto Frank, Anne’s father, recovered the diary and saw it into publication, which made him a wealthy man. But the saccharine adaptations from it falsified the profundity of Anne’s work, according to Prose. The book, and only the book, can depict a brilliant young writer’s acute observation of a world gone mad.

Jim Summerville writes from Dickson, Tennessee.

Hers is a face recognized around the world, 65 years after her death in one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Because her picture survived, she stands for the faceless millions who were herded, stripped, whipped and forced into the gas chambers. Her personal struggle came to…

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Where Spivey cleans away the myths of the Olympics, Phil Cousineau seeks to restore them. In The Olympic Odyssey: Rekindling the True Spirit of the Great Games, Cousineau convincingly argues that sport is more than just amusement or exercise, but a transcendent act of body, mind and spirit that lifts participant and spectator alike in ways both more lasting and profound than the simple running of a race or throwing of a ball. In the vein of Joseph Campbell (The Faces of Myth), Cousineau calls on us to treat the Olympics not only as an opportunity for entertainment and global competition, but as a grand mythic ritual of the human spirit. His book is thought-provoking, challenging and inspiring, with just enough philosophy to make one ponder the meaning of the modern games, and lift their viewing to more than just a night in front of the TV.

Howard Shirley is a writer in Nashville.

Where Spivey cleans away the myths of the Olympics, Phil Cousineau seeks to restore them. In The Olympic Odyssey: Rekindling the True Spirit of the Great Games, Cousineau convincingly argues that sport is more than just amusement or exercise, but a transcendent act of body,…
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Greece, of course, is known not only as the birthplace of history and philosophy, but of classic art. Few works of Greek art have inspired as much interest or controversy as the famed “Elgin Marbles” in the British Museum. These magnificent fragments and sculptures from the Parthenon were transported to England (or stolen from Greece, depending on your point of view) in the early 1800s by the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin. Mistress of the Elgin Marbles: A Biography of Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin, by Susan Nagel, tells the story of Mary Nisbet, Lord Elgin’s young wife and one of the wealthiest heiresses in Europe of that era. It was Mary who funded the collection of the marbles and beguiled the Sultan himself into permitting their removal en masse. But even more lasting than Nisbet’s diplomatic successes may have been the impact of her tragedies. Shortly after their return home, Lord Elgin stunned both Mary and British society by accusing her of adultery with his best friend. The scandal rocked the British ruling class; Elgin lost his political future, and Mary lost her family. But the sensationalism and injustice of their battle sowed the long, slow seeds of reform, eventually leading to changes in British divorce law and the acknowledgement of property rights for women. Nagel has crafted a fascinating biography of a charming and intelligent woman, who pushed aside the expected boundaries of her sex and influenced the world in many ways.

Howard Shirley is a writer in Nashville.

Greece, of course, is known not only as the birthplace of history and philosophy, but of classic art. Few works of Greek art have inspired as much interest or controversy as the famed "Elgin Marbles" in the British Museum. These magnificent fragments and sculptures from…
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Veteran sportswriter Dave Kindred’s byline has appeared, most prominently, in the Louisville Courier-Journal, The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is an obvious and excellent candidate to have written Sound and Fury: The Parallel Lives and Fateful Friendship of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. Kindred’s own prime reporting years coincided with the rise of both of his subjects and he knew them well, not only as iconic figures but also as people. He deftly balances his insider knowledge with a sincere effort to explain each man’s rise to fame, the contentiousness that surrounded their careers and the strangely fortuitous intersection of their personas. His aim is to capture Ali and Cosell as they crossed paths in the ’60s and ’70s, and to replay for his audience how the explosion in television sports of that era made huge stars of them both.

Yet much of his book offers alternating chapters on each man as an individual, filled with insightful biographical detail and infused with the good journalist’s desire to achieve balance in his coverage. Cosell the pushy Brooklyn Jew who, fairly late in life, parlayed his connections as a lawyer into a broadcasting career emerges as a somewhat pathetic antihero, but one whose essential egotism and neediness were ultimately leavened by his success as a family man. Ali is the brash, mouthy, Louisville-born wunderkind boxer who became the world heavyweight champion at the age of 22, regained the crown twice more, and became a hugely controversial public figure when he refused to enter the Army during the Vietnam War. Ali evokes pathos as well, by virtue of his ultimate naivete, his premature physical deterioration (which shocked a public that knew him so well as a godly athlete), and the ease with which he was manipulated by opportunistic others, including Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.

Kindred’s narrative rises and falls with the pulse of an involving title fight, its combatants vying fiercely for personal attention and airtime. With its focus on two of the most recognizable names in the history of modern sports, this volume will draw immediate and wide interest from well-rewarded readers.

Veteran sportswriter Dave Kindred's byline has appeared, most prominently, in the Louisville Courier-Journal, The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is an obvious and excellent candidate to have written Sound and Fury: The Parallel Lives and Fateful Friendship of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell.…
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In popular culture, when men talk about being men they follow a certain formula. We’re probably going to hear about the protagonist looking deeply into the eyes of his firstborn child, his wild single days and the emotional rigors of being a husband. There’s almost a sense that men live the same life; just the names of the primary characters change.

Novelist Michael Chabon’s book of essays, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, fits into that paradigm, but not perfectly. Thank goodness. Chabon focuses on the almost-overlooked moments of his life, and the result is a sparkling, clear-headed collection that provides a glorious look at the makeup of a man.

The Pulitzer Prize winner (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Wonder Boys) waxes poetic about the creative benefits of the crappy TV shows and movies of his youth, compared to the polished, CGI-animated treats of today, which “don’t leave anything implied, unstated, incomplete.” He talks about the growing sense of doom accompanying his daughter’s blossoming into womanhood and how getting a men’s purse, or “murse,” represents one of the key benefits of getting older—not caring what other people think. Chabon also installs a towel rack, worries about his wife and examines other wonders of childhood: getting lost, the seductive power of basements and the shattered world of scatological humor.

As has been observed repeatedly, Chabon is an awesome talent. He’s blessed with observational shrewdness and a gift for nimble wordplay, but that never obscures the points he makes. (That last talent has served him well as a novelist, and it’s especially helpful here.) The essays, most of which previously appeared in Details, are nostalgic, funny and introspective while never straining for style points or wallowing in sentiment. It’s the kind of writing you read twice, not to get a better understanding, but to better appreciate the man’s abilities. Chabon is a regular guy—except that he can expertly explain himself with smooth, embracing eloquence. The rest of us have to stick to the same old story.

Pete Croatto is a New Jersey-based freelance writer.

In popular culture, when men talk about being men they follow a certain formula. We’re probably going to hear about the protagonist looking deeply into the eyes of his firstborn child, his wild single days and the emotional rigors of being a husband. There’s almost…

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An Iranian writer recalls her youth in the Land of No’ It is perhaps the direst disaster that can befall a writer: the loss of his or her cherished books, diaries, notebooks, the ultimate evidence of the writer’s existence, wiped out. It means the severing of crucial personal relationships, perhaps not yet articulated or even fully comprehended, from the words and writers of the past. It means a re-creation, in the purest sense, of the individual. And yet this immolation sometimes works the phoenix trick. This blow struck Roya Hakakian when she was 17, the youngest in a once-prosperous Jewish family in Iran on the verge of revolution. Looking back on that frightening era more than 20 years later, she captures her experiences in a haunting memoir, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God” . . . and the word created order out of chaos. Religion aside, the first phrases of Genesis are a succinct and powerful metaphor for the act of writing. The word is the expression of the essential self, and the manner in which we re-create our universe. Hakakian thought she had understood pretty well the upheaval of the late 1970s and early ’80s in her native Iran the deposing of the Shah, the increasing sway and eventual consolidation of power by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the purges that followed but once she began to write about that time, the act of writing both clarified and reshaped those events.

“Everything came into focus,” she said in a recent interview, “and I was able to make sense of things I thought were unconnected. You get engaged with your own memories, as if they were discrete. You don’t think how to present them, how they should be arranged, what context they should be in.” She also discovered how thoroughly the power of the word had affected her life. Hakakian, who has written poetry in Persian and translated the poems of Emily Dickinson (and who writes with the automatic rhythm of a poet), early on discovered that storytelling was a kind of code, and that she could bring into being a whole world just by writing in her notebook. She also discovered that despotism fears the Word (she tells a story of how she and her friends escaped into the mountains with books of poetry only to discover they had been censored before printing) and that the crudest form of the Word the splashing of the graffiti “Johoud,” which meant both “Jew” and “dirty,” on the wall of their home could be a terrible weapon.

Finally, in one of the most engaging sections of the book, she meets the teacher who will inspire her, the Harpo Marx-ish Mrs. Arman, who encourages her not only to write but also to find the great refuge that is literature.

That she owes much of her intellectual fearlessness to her upbringing is clear. First one and then all three of her brothers must eventually flee to America for anti-Shah activities, and when an almost cartoonishly fundamentalist Muslim takes over as principal of her school, Roya discovers that using words to make fun of the mini-tyrant empowers her and endears her to her fellow pupils.

It is also clear from her memoir that her family’s religion was central to her life in Tehran, and to the reversal of fortune they encounter. But oddly, it was something of a surprise to Hakakian. “I never thought that having been a Jew had played a part in who I was until I finished the book,” she says, “and if asked, I don’t think I would be able to articulate it, but I was clearly affected by being raised as a Jew. I sat down to write as a secular Iranian girl who had witnessed a revolution, but when I finished I realized how much more there was to the story.” It was a complex, often confusing identity. Her family seemed truly observant only at Passover, and yet it violently opposed her uncle’s going outside the religion to marry a Muslim woman. The Jewish Iranian Students Organization was where Roya and her friends spent their evenings, but it was founded to hurry the assimilation of Jews into secular Iranian society. There they mimeographed editorials about the war with Iraq, the perfidy of the U.S. and even the struggles of the Palestinians under the “Zionists.” And despite the enthusiasm with which the Jews of Tehran embrace the post-Shah regime, they quickly become familiarly and ominously segregated. Non-Muslims are ordered to drink from designated water fountains. Non-Muslim shop owners must display signs in the windows identifying the business as such; Jewish doctors who rush to treat wounded soldiers are rejected as “dirty.” And by the time her father seeks to renew their passports, they are rejected.

Finally comes the ultimate blow, and one that is delivered, in the name of her safety, by her own father. He burns Roya’s notebooks, her records, her Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen. “It is time,” her father says, with the heavy drumbeat of a concerto’s climax, “we leave for America.” Since coming to the U.S., Hakakian has worked as an associate producer at “60 Minutes” and directed several documentaries, including the critically admired “Armed and Innocent,” about child soldiers in Africa.

Hakakian now lives just outside New Haven, and occasionally contributes essays to Connecticut Public Radio. Though she has begun work on another book, she says it is not about Iran. Eve Zibart is a writer for The Washington Post and the author of numerous books, including The Unofficial Guide to New York City.

An Iranian writer recalls her youth in the Land of No' It is perhaps the direst disaster that can befall a writer: the loss of his or her cherished books, diaries, notebooks, the ultimate evidence of the writer's existence, wiped out. It means the severing…

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