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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Anyone who has ever sat facing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream with a grimness better suited to a chess match with Death himself knows Geneen Roth’s work. Roth has made a career teaching people to look within and question the motivations underlying their behavior around food, balancing ruthless self-inquiry with a gentle assessment of the facts uncovered. She’s logged couch time with Oprah, so it’s not surprising that many of her books, like Women Food and God, have been bestsellers.

The surprise she encounters in Lost and Found is that her meticulous focus on food and eating contrasted with a gaping blind spot about money, “as if money were as deadly as the plague and even thinking about it would lead me to being one of the bad guys.”

The catalyst for this realization was catastrophic: Roth and her husband lost their life savings in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. After a period of mourning, she noticed that the cycle of binge-eating and starvation she had previously worked through had now been replaced by similar patterns of shopping and hoarding. Yet if anyone could make lemonade out of such difficult circumstances, it’s Roth, whose persistence and curiosity can help make sense of any addictive behavior. She opens up a conversation about money with exercises that she has used with retreat participants, along with some of their responses, and adds plenty of insight from her own soul-searching. She writes, “If I could believe that we didn’t have enough when we did and then lose it and believe that we did have enough—what or where is enough?”

Roth and her husband are now on the path back to fiscal solvency. With Lost and Found, she has made a gift of wisdom to readers that may help them make the same journey.

 

Anyone who has ever sat facing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream with a grimness better suited to a chess match with Death himself knows Geneen Roth’s work. Roth has made a career teaching people to look within and question the motivations underlying…

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Thanks mostly to movies and television, the Mafia has been romanticized and glamorized. Historian Mike Dash isn’t interested in adding to that. Instead, his readable, revealing saga, The First Family, chronicles the birth and early days of an American institution.

Dozens of men and women figure prominently in this checkered history, so much so that Dash provides a rogues’ gallery for readers to keep up. (Note: you’ll need it.) Three people play prominent roles: Giuseppe “The Clutch Hand” Morello, a thug from Sicily—the real birthplace of the Mafia—who immigrates to New York City in 1894 and builds “the first family of organized crime in the United States.” Two lawmen give him perpetual trouble. One is Italian-born detective Joseph Petrosino, whose standing as “New York’s great expert on Italian crime” proves invaluable to the city but ultimately deadly to him. The other is William Flynn, head of the Secret Service’s New York bureau, whose dogged investigation into Morello’s counterfeiting operation marks the beginning of the end for “The Clutch Hand.”

There’s a lot to digest, but Dash (Batavia’s Graveyard) goes beyond offering a timeline with thugs. He describes the awful conditions in Sicily that created the Mafia, while examining the harsh lives of Italian immigrants in New York in the 1890s and early 20th century. Crime was a most appealing option, and since amateurs could be successful, there certainly was room for a professional outfit. Like any good entrepreneur, Morello saw a need and provided a service. He had a good run, but after his imprisonment in 1910, greed, infighting and bloodshed became increasingly common. Let’s just say that lots of people didn’t die from natural causes, including Morello in 1930.

Sexy, macho details aren’t prominent, but by eschewing those, Dash clearly shows the dark side of the plucky immigrant story. For Giuseppe Morello, the American Dream meant bringing the Mafia—his salvation—to America. Morello was a success story, just not the kind you learned about in school.

New Jersey writer Pete Croatto belongs to AAA, but not the Mafia. 

Thanks mostly to movies and television, the Mafia has been romanticized and glamorized. Historian Mike Dash isn’t interested in adding to that. Instead, his readable, revealing saga, The First Family, chronicles the birth and early days of an American institution.

Dozens of men and women figure…

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The days at issue here are those immediately following the resignation and departure from the White House of Richard Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, to succeeding president Gerald Ford’s controversial pardoning of him on Sept. 8. These were turbulent times, as Barry Werth points out in 31 Days, not simply because of the continuing Watergate scandal, but also because of a faltering national economy, rising oil prices, a potentially explosive clash between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, and the international and domestic fallout from the war in Vietnam.

Stepping into this morass was an undistinguished former congressman from Michigan whose fate it was to be struck twice by political lightning first, being elevated to the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign; then, ascending to the presidency when Nixon himself was toppled. During the transition, Ford had to cope with many Nixon holdovers, including the supremely ambitious Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. Moreover, there was the lingering problem of what to do with his unrepentant predecessor.

Given such turmoil and the power vacuum it created, it was only natural that political opportunists would move in. Werth subtitles his book: The Crisis That Gave Us The Government We Have Today. At that time, George H.

W. Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee and eager to become Ford’s vice president (a post that ultimately went to Nelson Rockefeller); Donald Rumsfeld, who also aspired to the vice presidency, was ambassador to NATO; Richard Cheney was his deputy, later to be Ford’s chief of staff; Richard Perle was an aide to hawkish Democratic senator Henry Scoop Jackson; and Ronald Reagan was still governor of California. All these figures were considerably to the right of the congenitally moderate and accommodating Ford.

Initially, Ford’s openness and congeniality won over both the country and a Congress that was overjoyed to be rid of the tainted Nixon. But when Ford announced against the advice of many of his counselors that he was pardoning his predecessor, the honeymoon was over and the stage was set for his defeat three years hence by the upstart Jimmy Carter. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

 

The days at issue here are those immediately following the resignation and departure from the White House of Richard Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, to succeeding president Gerald Ford's controversial pardoning of him on Sept. 8. These were turbulent times, as Barry Werth points…

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Jennet Conant is a genius at finding significant World War II-era stories that have largely gone untold or unnoticed in the more comprehensive chronicles of that period. As the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, the eminent chemist, statesman and longtime president of Harvard University, she has had particular access to the behind-the-scenes workings of history. From that access have come the dramatic and well-documented narratives Tuxedo Park, 109 East Palace and The Irregulars.

Now Conant is back with A Covert Affair, an equally readable account of larger-than-life Julia Child and her husband, Paul Child—not as culinary pioneers, but in their earlier incarnations as information-gatherers and propagandists for the World War II intelligence network, the Office of Strategic Services. Fascinating as these two figures are, though, the book’s real focal point is their good friend, the daring and alluring socialite and spy Jane Foster.

Julia and Jane were both from wealthy, conservative families in California; Paul, who was 10 years older than Julia, grew up relatively poor in Boston. Idealists all, they volunteered for the war effort and initially served together in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), working in league with the British. Later, in various configurations, they would continue their government services in Indonesia, China and Vietnam. An impulsive do-gooder, Foster grew incensed that the Dutch, French and English were intent on reasserting their colonial claims in the East once the Japanese were driven out. After the war ended, she argued eloquently and publicly on behalf of the Indonesian resistance movement—one of many political indiscretions that would come back to haunt her when the American government embarked on its witch hunt for Communists.

Conant devotes the last half of her book to showing how the Childs were caught up in Senator McCarthy’s red-baiting. Both were indignant at what they perceived as Foster’s persecution, and both spoke out in her defense, even when evidence filtered in that she might be more culpable in spying for Russia than she admitted. As Foster’s star was sinking, the irrepressible Julia’s was rising. After the war, she took cooking classes to impress hard-to-snare Paul—they were finally married in 1946—then expanded her studies when they were posted to France. By the time Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961 to near-universal acclaim, Foster was living in exile in Paris, embittered, separated from her old friends and contemplating the enormous costs of her political sympathies. Conant’s account of the three friends’ stories is another masterpiece of historical reporting.

 

Jennet Conant is a genius at finding significant World War II-era stories that have largely gone untold or unnoticed in the more comprehensive chronicles of that period. As the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, the eminent chemist, statesman and longtime president of Harvard University, she…

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It can be fairly argued that only three rock icons from the hippy-dippy ’60s have really endured: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, who is the subject of the massive, keenly detailed and anecdote-laden authorized biography Shakey.

With style and intelligence, veteran music journalist Jimmy McDonough tells the amazing tale of Young’s emergence from the Canadian folkie scene into the wild post-Beatles, pre-psychedelic mayhem of mid-1960s L.A., where he first made his mark as a member of the legendary (and legendarily dysfunctional) pop-rock group Buffalo Springfield. Hailed as a songwriter of genius, Young struggled a bit thereafter, mostly in the face of criticism of his reedy, strangely iconoclastic vocal stylings. Yet a string of groundbreaking solo albums Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest were followed by a highly publicized stint as a member of the acclaimed Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and superstardom was his, with all the attendant professional madness and personal heartache. While most of Young’s contemporaries dropped off the industry road map due to natural attrition, he continued to produce music through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, building new audiences and maintaining a touring presence while also retooling his act through seemingly unlikely alliances with bands such as Devo and Pearl Jam.

McDonough’s analysis of Young’s musical vision and brilliance is matched with fascinating insights into the life of a man who has certainly experienced his share of physical and psychic pain his parents’ early breakup, childhood polio, extended bouts with epilepsy, failed relationships and marriages (including his very public liaison with actress Carrie Snodgrass), the premature deaths of musical friends from drug overdoses, and the birth of a son with cerebral palsy.

On the surface, Young has always been perceived as a somewhat frail, introspective and private individual. Yet, if nothing else, McDonough’s exhaustive, eminently readable account serves as testament to one man’s abilities to survive the dog-eat-dog music business and triumph through his art.

It can be fairly argued that only three rock icons from the hippy-dippy '60s have really endured: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, who is the subject of the massive, keenly detailed and anecdote-laden authorized biography Shakey.

With style and…
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A few years ago, committed amateur golfer Ron Cherney and sportswriter Michael Arkush sent letters out to 200-plus pro golfers, male and female, soliciting their feedback about their personal best individual shots in competition. The result is My Greatest Shot: The Top Players Share Their Defining Golf Moments, which compiles the responses of 80 pros, active or retired, including Palmer, Nicklaus, Woods, Watson, Billy Casper, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson, Mickey Wright, Kathy Whitworth, Carol Mann and others. For each respondent, the authors provide a brief bio, career highlights and quotes on the game and life in general.

A few years ago, committed amateur golfer Ron Cherney and sportswriter Michael Arkush sent letters out to 200-plus pro golfers, male and female, soliciting their feedback about their personal best individual shots in competition. The result is My Greatest Shot: The Top Players Share…

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