Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

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.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Garden Wonderland

With its seamless integration of gardening principles with advanced design ideas, Garden Wonderland is the perfect gift for new gardeners—or anyone in need of a little inspiration.

All Nonfiction Coverage

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Alice Bolin

by Lily McLemore

In her debut collection of essays, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin explores America’s undeniable fascination with murdered, maligned and silenced women. Here, we ask her about serial killers, Britney Spears and LA freeways.

Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir Essays

Robert Anthony Siegel

Interview by Lily McLemore

by Lily McLemore

In his deeply personal and compassionate collection of essays, Criminals, Robert Anthony Siegel explores his unusual upbringing as the son of a charming, erratic criminal defense attorney, whose ethically dubious practices eventually send him to prison, and a culturally eloquent mother who was always reaching for more. Siegel’s writing is breathtaking—I had to take a walk around the block after reading the crushing, beautiful title essay.

I asked Siegel, who lives in North Carolina with his family, a few questions about his parents, the Hells Angels and the unexpected solace he found in Eastern traditions.

What was the most surprising or challenging part of writing this book?
There were a lot of surprises. The first was just the fact that I was writing a memoir at all. I’ve always thought of myself as a private person. But then the second surprise came very quickly after that, which is that I’m actually no more private than anyone else, just way more ashamed of myself.

I’m not sure either of those two surprises would matter much without the third, which is that there’s really nothing to be ashamed of. My family and I made a stupid hash of things, just like a lot of other people on this planet. The sense that this was all so very shameful, that I had to protect us with my silence—really, I was just frightened of everything I would have to feel if I ever tried to tell our story: anger, sorrow, forgiveness, and of course the hardest thing of all, love.

Do you think it’s possible to truly know your parents? Would anyone really even want to?
I sometimes feel that thinking about one’s parents is really just a way of thinking about oneself in disguise. But that’s what makes it such an important thing to do.

How accurate do you think the opening lines of Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” are?
I’ve always loved Larkin, but I don’t think that poem is about its first line. If you look at the poem as a whole, it’s really about the way pain is transferred down from one generation to the next. It revolves around a moment of compassionate insight, when the poet realizes that the harm his parents caused him was rooted in the suffering they themselves experienced as children.

But I don’t share Larkin’s conclusion, his wish to stay aloof from life. When we had our firstborn, Jonah, I couldn’t believe they were letting us leave the hospital with that beautiful little creature. Didn’t they know we knew nothing? That baby care books scared us? But a voice inside my head kept whispering, Jonah will show you how. Just listen to Jonah. If you listen to him, everything will be all right. And it was.

Growing up, your family had a fraught relationship with food, especially your father, who “believed that eating would protect us from sorrow.” Can you tell me more about how food factored into your family’s dynamic?
Food was a form of comfort, something that would make us feel a little better, at least temporarily, when we felt sad or lost or disappointed in each other. It was also something we could give to each other, a way of showing love, and something we could share, a way of experiencing connection. And it was aspirational, a form of self-transformation—we could imagine ourselves differently in a French restaurant, eating escargot with those long delicate forks.

But my father would sometimes go on eating binges that lasted for days. He seemed helpless to stop, but it also felt as if he was wielding his eating as a kind of weapon, and that the rest of us were being held hostage, a captive audience to something that we didn’t fully understand.

Your memoir beautifully recounts your growing realization as an adolescent that the parents you adore are, in fact, also flawed humans. Do you think the parent-child relationship is inevitably set up for disappointment, or is it just continually evolving?
Oh, I vividly remember the comfort of thinking my parents were magical, and that I was privileged to be at the very center of the universe. And looking back, I can still see how a little kid might draw such a conclusion. My father was the kind of criminal defense lawyer who wore cowboy boots and a beard and drove to court on a motorcycle. My mother was a lawyer, too, but gave it up to take us kids to the symphony and ballet, all the things she thought necessary to a real education.

Of course, what I see now is that my belief in them was driven by a sense of their underlying fragility, the fear that they might fall apart and then there would be nobody to take care of us. The period when my father came under investigation and I started to see the cracks in our façade was the most painful of my life. It felt as if I were cracking. But I don’t believe that kind disillusionment is a necessary part of growing up. On the contrary.

Your father represented the Hells Angels, and was careful to cast them as bumbling “characters” instead of dangerous figures, and he took you to the clubhouse regularly. Has your understanding of your father’s work changed given your adult knowledge of the Hells Angels’ white nationalist connections and today’s political climate?
I think we were always secretly uneasy about our relationship to the clients, Hells Angels included. They were criminals and did bad things we ourselves would never do. We didn’t want to be tainted by them, or feel responsible for what they did. At the same time, they were the source of everything special about us, including our money, and we wanted them to love us and need us, like we needed them.

The way we elided that contradiction was humor. In the jokes we told each other at home, we made the clients look harmless and silly, and we made our own participation in the situation feel ironic, a kind of tongue-in-cheek performance that would never have any real-world consequences.

What strikes me now, looking back, is how that kind of joking bled into the rest of our lives without anyone even noticing. We started using it among ourselves whenever we were mean to each other or failed each other in some way. Turning the situation into a joke prevented the other person from expressing any sense of hurt and erased our own sense of responsibility. The interesting thing is that the Angels used much the same strategy to talk about themselves. Just watch their self-produced documentary, Hells Angels Forever, and you’ll see what I mean: It keeps switching rhetorical modes between threat and joke. Cross us and we’ll kill you. No, just kidding! And of course, that kind of rhetorical strategy has gone mainstream now, from Neo-Nazis and racist internet trolls to our elected representatives.

You write that you are from a “family of endomorphs,” and your family was shocked by your interest in judo. Why do you think judo became such a passion for you?
If you’re not familiar with the sport, go to the internet and find a highlights reel from one of the big international competitions and you’ll understand: Judo is exquisite, a kind of human fireworks. And it’s a powerful form of self-cultivation, too: The little I know about bravery and resilience, I learned from judo.

But in my case, there were confused motives from the very start, and that’s the part I wanted to write about here. I think I wanted judo to take away my fear and my loneliness, and cure my sense that something was wrong with me. That was asking too much.

Your mother was particularly interested in being “cultured,” and you were drawn to Eastern traditions such as Taoism and judo, and you have lived in Japan and Taiwan. Why do you think Japan holds such a fascination for you?
Oh, that question has many, many levels to it. If you’ve ever been to Asia, then you know what it’s like to step off the plane and find the English language gone, even the Roman alphabet gone, an entirely new set of rules in place. It’s more than a little scary, but also incredibly thrilling.

On a deeper level, I think I had a secret wish to remake myself: to stop being me and start being somebody who came from an ancient culture and a highly nuanced civilization that offered clear rules about how to treat other people and how to make sense of life. Of course, that was a fantasy. As far as I can tell, everyone on this planet is utterly lost. But even with that understanding, I always feel better in Asia. It makes me present in the moment in a way I can’t always manage elsewhere.

What’s next for you?
Well, I’ve written the one story I was never supposed to tell, and the result is that I’m feeling a tremendous sense of liberation. Suddenly, everything seems possible. So, the short answer is that I want to write as much as I can, with all the daring that I can find.

Author photo by Jonah Siegel

In his deeply personal and compassionate collection of essays, Criminals, Robert Anthony Siegel explores his unusual upbringing as the son of a charming, erratic criminal defense attorney, whose ethically dubious practices eventually send him to prison, and a culturally eloquent mother who was always reaching for more. I asked Siegel a few questions about his family, the Hells Angels and the unexpected solace he found in Eastern traditions.

Camas Davis

by Lily McLemore

Camas Davis cares deeply about the integrity of animals’ lives. She is also a butcher. In her beautifully written memoir, Killing It, Davis makes it clear that these two aspects of her life can peacefully coexist. Davis’ lucid, striking prose recounts a life-altering journey that began when, directionless and brokenhearted, she booked a flight to France with the last of her funds to spend seven weeks learning how to be a butcher in Gascony.

Biography, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Biography

Maxwell King

Interview by Kelly Blewett

by Kelly Blewett

Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor explores the life and enormously influential work of Fred Rogers, the creator and star of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

You clearly did a lot of research for The Good Neighbor. What’s a fact about Rogers that most people wouldn’t know?
Most people wouldn’t know that, when Fred was about 10 years old, his maternal grandmother bought him an extraordinarily expensive piano. He loved music, and often played for his grandmother on his toy piano, and she told him how very good he was. Finally, she told him she would buy him a piano, expecting it to be a small, modest instrument suitable for a little boy. She gave Fred a ticket for the trolley, and he traveled to the Steinway store in downtown Pittsburgh. Fred spent almost three hours there; when he left, the salesmen chuckled among themselves that the little boy had picked an ebonized Steinway Concert Grand that could have cost as much as $60,000 in today’s dollars—they assumed his family could never buy it for him. When he told Nancy McFeely, his grandmother, she was shocked. But she had made a promise, and she kept it, trusting the child to be worthy of this faith and this investment. The little boy traveled back down to the Steinway store with a check. Fred Rogers kept this piano for the rest of his life, took it with him to New York, to Toronto and back to Pittsburgh, composed 200 songs and a dozen operas on it and played it joyfully for decades. And he let his grandmother know that her trust had changed his life.

What made Rogers such a genius at working with children?
Two things: authenticity and high standards. Children can tell a phony a mile away, and Fred Rogers was the opposite: an utterly genuine person. Rogers’ training under Dr. Margaret McFarland at the University of Pittsburgh gave him the background in child development and early childhood education to set the very highest standards for his programming. And his fierce commitment to excellence enabled him to sustain those standards for decades.

Can you tell us more about Rogers’ foray into programming for adults? Why did he want to do it, and how long did it go on?
After years of programming television for children, Rogers decided in the mid-1970s that he needed a break and that he might like producing issues programming for grown-ups to watch on television. But he never fully engaged or felt comfortable with it, and his technique—so extraordinarily powerful for children—wasn’t as successful with adults. He was relieved in 1980 to get back to his true calling.

What did your research reveal about how Rogers conducted himself as a friend?
Rogers was always concerned about treating everyone with great respect and being a good friend to whomever he was dealing with. In fact, he got up in the early morning each day to pray that he would be as good to the people he would encounter that day as he possibly could. And he readily gave his respect and kindness to everyone, whether they were homeless or the president of a large bank.

Why were puppets a part of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”? When did Rogers start developing those characters?
Rogers began developing his puppet characters as a little boy, performing his puppet theater in the attic of his parents’ home in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. And it was pure serendipity that led to his use of the puppets much later when he began producing children’s television. The night before his first program—”The Children’s Corner”—started on WQED in Pittsburgh, the station manager, Dorothy Daniels, gave Fred a small puppet as a gift. That puppet got used on the spur of the moment on the first program and then became Daniel Tiger, the first of many puppets Rogers would use on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

How did Rogers’ childhood in Latrobe shape his television program?
Everything on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”—the trolleys, the streets, the houses, the shops, the companies—all sprang from Rogers’ recollections of his childhood in Latrobe.

What did the number 143 mean to Fred Rogers?
Two things: his weight, all his life, and the expression “I love you.”

What’s one story you learned about Rogers that surprised you?
Fred got mad—not often, but sometimes. Once, he was so frustrated with a tape recorder—which he thought was going to erase an important consulting session with Dr. Margaret McFarland—that he swore at it and threatened to smash it. His secretary, Elaine Lynch, gently took it from his hands and got it fixed.

Why is Rogers’ legacy particularly valuable in our current cultural moment?
Because of all the stresses in modern life—rapid change, greater and greater complexity to society, the growing presence of technology, globalization—we live in a very tense, sometimes angry and hateful environment. Fred’s messages—there is nothing as important as human kindness, and there is nothing we cannot deal with if we just slow way down and talk to each other—are the most important, enduring truths of our time.

In what ways did Rogers’ faith inform his television program?
Rogers was always guided by his Christianity, and his strong values—human kindness, respect, caring, integrity, duty—all derived from his faith. But he was very careful, while emphasizing those values, never to preach or proselytize on the children’s program. And he became, as an adult, a great student of many of the world’s religions and philosophies. He was very happy to find that the same humanistic values showed up in all faiths.

What do you think Rogers would want to communicate to children today?
Be yourself, be full of love, and be full of the joy of life and learning.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Good Neighbor.

Author photo by Joshua Franzos for The Pittsburgh Foundation.

Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor explores the life and enormously influential work of Fred Rogers, the creator and star of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Mary Beard

by Alice Cary

Mary Beard has an extraordinary knack for making art history palatable. She has been called “Britain’s most beloved intellectual,” and this summer Queen Elizabeth II honored her many achievements by naming her a dame.

Arts & Culture, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Arts & Culture

Anne Boyd Rioux

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

by Carla Jean Whitley

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era.

You first read Little Women in your 20s. What led you to the book at this time? How did it affect you upon first reading?
I first read Little Women in graduate school. It was assigned in a course on American literary realism as a kind of companion piece to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It meant a lot to me then to read about Jo’s literary ambitions and her conviction, as she says at the end of the book, that she believes she will write better books one day for her experiences as a wife and mother. When my daughter was born about 10 years later, I gave her the middle name Josephine, so obviously it really stayed with me.

When and why did Little Women become a subject of scholarship?
It was largely ignored by academics, who were mostly male, until feminist critics began to establish themselves in the 1970s. The first truly scholarly examination was in 1975 in Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination. Then Judith Fetterley’s essay “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War,” published in the journal Feminist Studies in 1979, really showed what could be done in an extended analysis that applied the new tools of feminist criticism to Alcott’s novel. Ever since, the novel has proven to be a rich text for scholars using a wide variety of approaches, including Marxist criticism, cultural studies and queer theory.

Which March sister do you find the most relatable?
Jo always meant the most to me. Her ambitions made her the kind of foremother I needed—someone who had grappled in the mid-19th century with the same things I was still grappling with in the late-20th century.

Why isn’t Little Women included on more teachers’ syllabi?
To put it quite simply, because it’s viewed as a book for girls. There is no room in today’s classrooms, (as far as I can tell from national surveys, what teachers across the county have told me, and my own knowledge about schools in my area) for books about girls—unless they focus on other issues such as civil rights or the Holocaust, as is the case with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank. Teachers feel as if they have to teach books about boys because they believe boys won’t read about girls, but girls don’t mind reading about boys. As one school librarian told me, there is a lot of concern with making sure that students read books from the perspective of other cultures, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., but no one appears to be concerned that boys aren’t reading books about the other half of the population. As I talk about in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, there is plenty of evidence that boys can and will read Little Women and other books about girls if we help them overcome the stigma attached to all things female and feminine. And that is a larger project that will benefit boys and girls.

How have you seen your own students impacted as they study the novel at a collegiate level?
I’ve seen a range of responses. Initially, they are dismayed at its length (nearly 500 pages), and some wonder why we were reading a children’s book (until I remind them that Huck Finn is a children’s book, and it’s often taught in college literature courses). But once we start reading Little Women, they grow attached to the March sisters and Laurie and find themselves quite invested in the choices they are making as they mature. They realize that the book is dealing with some of the same life choices they are also facing, so it isn’t the children’s book they were expecting. Although I did have one male student who obviously refused to even buy the book, I’ve also found that many of the men are as affected by it as the female students. One man came into class very upset the day we read the part where Jo turns down Laurie. Another wrote in his final response that even though he was a 30-year-old man, he was so glad to have read the book and was sorry it was over.

In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, you write about literary heroines who have followed in Jo March’s path. Is there one character in this tradition whom you find the most appealing?
Rory Gilmore, from the television series Gilmore Girls, is particularly interesting because we see her grow and develop over the course of about seven years. The summer my daughter spent binge-watching the series on Netflix, I realized that Rory was to her what Jo March has been for generations—she was a touchstone, a girl whose personality, experiences and life choices my daughter could identify with, measure herself against and learn from. And Rory’s choices aren’t always what we’d want them to be, just as Jo’s weren’t. But it’s the way that girls and young women see themselves reflected in these characters and how they judge and compare themselves to them that really interests me.

You’ve written extensively about Alcott’s contemporaries, including Constance Fenimore Woolson. Who are other female writers of the era you believe merit more recognition?
There are many, but I will mention particularly Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stoddard, Sui Sin Far and Zitkala-Sa. And when we examine the writings of women from these earlier eras, we need to be able to evaluate them on their own terms as well as ours. Looking back and expecting women writers to conform to our contemporary ideas of what makes great writing is not going to help us understand the paths that earlier women writers have forged. Each of these writers is available in print with introductions or essays that can help put them into the context in which they lived and wrote. I highly recommend them!

Why do you believe it’s valuable to tell the stories of these 19th-century female writers?
In addition to the fact that if we forget the past we are in danger of repeating it, I’m also concerned that so many women writers today seem to feel, as Virginia Woolf did in the 1920s, that there isn’t much of a tradition behind them. Or they might not want to think of themselves as belonging to a separate tradition of female writers. But it’s important to recognize that they aren’t the first women writers to feel that way and to struggle to belong to an American literary tradition. There have been many who’ve been there before and whose legacies have been forgotten, ignored or suppressed. I see women writers today struggling with many of the same issues that early women writers did: wondering if they can combine their lives as writers with motherhood, trying to assert their value as writers and not only as women writers, pushing against male critics’ expectations, and resenting the bias they feel directed toward them as women writers. How can we move beyond these issues if we don’t recognize how long-standing they are and continually repress them as each new generation of women writers is largely forgotten?

What’s next for you?
I’ve actually become very interested in a forgotten woman writer from the 20th century: Kay Boyle. I have the same feeling when I read her stories as I did about Constance Fenimore Woolson’s—namely, why don’t I know her, why is she not read today, and what can I do about it? For now, I’d like to help get more of her incredible stories into print. She wrote about the rise of fascism in Europe, the German occupation of France and the aftermath of World War II in Germany. Her stories make you feel as if you are right there living the experience with her. I’ve never read anything like them.

Author photo by Jennifer Zdon.

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

by Deborah Hopkinson

Award-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has coalesced her presidential expertise in her stunning book on four presidents, Leadership: In Turbulent Times.

History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History

Susan Orlean

Interview by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

The idea began with an interview. Susan Orlean’s then 6-year-old son had a school assignment to interview a city employee in their new hometown of Los Angeles.

A boy after his mother’s own heart, he chose a librarian. As the pair walked through the doors of a nearby branch library, Orlean, the famed author of The Orchid Thief, was overcome by what she calls “a Proustian kind of moment” filled with memories of countless childhood visits to the library in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with her mother, who worked in a bank but frequently declared that she would’ve loved to have been a librarian.

Now, years later, that moment has come full circle with the publication of Orlean’s spellbinding love letter to this beloved institution, The Library Book, dedicated to her son (now a teenager) and late mother, who died from dementia as Orlean wrote her tribute.

“I got very emotional, thinking, these are amazing places and my association with them is so profound,” Orlean recalls, speaking by phone from Banff, Canada. “I love writing about places that I feel that I know very well but have never really examined. The library was exactly that sort of place.”

Nonetheless, when she casually mentioned to her publisher that she would enjoy spending a year in a library to see what goes on, she knew some sort of essential ingredient was missing from her pitch. “It felt a bit amorphous. I loved the idea of it, but it had a little bit of a saggy-baggy feel, and it didn’t quite create a narrative.”

“I love writing about places that I feel that I know very well but have never really examined. The library was exactly that sort of place.”

It wasn’t long before Orlean discovered—quite literally—the spark to enliven her account. She was invited on a personal tour of the Los Angeles Central Library, and at one point her librarian guide cracked open a book, held it to his face and “inhaled deeply,” saying, “You can still smell the smoke in some of them.”

Orlean was puzzled, asking if patrons had been allowed to smoke in the building in the past. The librarian shot her a wary look, then proceeded to tell her about a disastrous fire that consumed the building on April 29, 1986, reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and burning for more than seven hours, destroying or damaging more than a million books. Miraculously, there were no fatalities.

“I just about fell off my chair,” Orlean says. “It was such an amazingly interesting and complicated story, and it provided me with this other narrative thread to take me through this bigger story of writing about libraries in general.” Adding to the narrative appeal, the fire’s cause remains a mystery—arson was suspected.

Orlean’s account of the arson investigation reads like a whodunit. In her minute-by-minute account of the conflagration, she writes, “The library was spreading fluidly, like spilled ink.” The stacks acted as fireplace flues, while the books provided fuel.” One firefighter later told Orlean, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell.” The main suspect was a young wannabe actor named Harry Peak, who died in 1993. An infuriating yet irresistible personality, Peak had a series of constantly changing alibis.

After interviewing Peak’s family and friends, Orlean concludes that as likable as he seemed to be, he was “mighty close” to being a pathological liar. She notes that he offered each of his changing alibis “with certainty and a full-throated delivery of, ‘This is exactly what I was doing that day.’”

That’s very rare, Orlean explains. “A lot of people have an alibi for a crime. It’s rare to have seven.”

She spent four and a half years researching, interviewing and writing. “I made a decision that I wanted to spend time in every department. Every piece of the library, from the people in the basement cataloging all the way up through all of the subject departments. That took a good amount of time, as well as just going [to the library] a lot to get a feel for the place.”

Orlean’s far-reaching research even involved starting her own little inferno so she could see firsthand what Peak might have experienced if he had indeed started the fire. Appropriately enough, she decided to burn a paperback copy of Ray Bradbury’s classic book-burning novel, Fahrenheit 451. She chose a windless day in her backyard, finding the task “incredibly hard,” because she has “come to believe that books have souls.”

She was amazed to discover that books catch fire “like little bombs.” She adds, “It just seemed like [the book] grabbed the flames and went boom. I remember asking my husband, ‘Did that just happen?’ I kept thinking, ‘Wow, that was just crazy that went so fast.’ There was nothing left.”

With crackling, page-turning prose, Orlean manages to seamlessly weave the story of the library’s devastating fire and the aftermath with a bird’s eye look at both the mechanics of LA’s immense city library and its unexpectedly riveting history. Just like the library itself, Orlean’s book is filled to the brim with a wide array of fascinating details and behind-the-scenes personalities and anecdotes. For book lovers, it’s a veritable treasure trove.

Orlean mentions that librarianship has become more popular. “It really does combine a sense of social contribution with a generation of young people who’ve grown up with information technology. I think there’s a fascination with curating and accessing information, and then you combine that with doing something that feels like it has a social value.”

Might her latest book inspire readers to join the profession?

“If that were to happen, I would feel that I had done something amazing.”

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Noah Fecks.

The idea began with an interview. Susan Orlean’s then 6-year-old son had a school assignment to interview a city employee in their new hometown of Los Angeles.

Nicole Chung

by Carla Jean Whitley

In her memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung, who was adopted as a baby by a couple in Oregon, explores how the truths that were revealed upon finding her birth parents changed her life. Here Chung discusses growing up Asian-American in a white family, her writing and editing career and more.

Essays, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Essays

John McPhee

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Despite the fact that John McPhee’s delightful new collection of essays, The Patch, is his 33rd book, he thinks it’s “ridiculous” to call him a prolific writer.

“Here’s the thing,” he says during a call to his home in Princeton, New Jersey. “Every day you go over there [to his office at Princeton University] and try to get going. And you don’t get going, and you don’t get going—and you spend your whole day staring at the wall. Then a little panic sets in because you’re getting nothing done. Then maybe between 5 and 6 in the afternoon, you get something done. Then you go home, and the next day is the same, and the next day is the same. In other words, you spend most of your time not only alone, but getting nothing done!”

McPhee says he imagines the “something” at the end of day—a paragraph or two—as a few drops in the bucket. “If you do that 365 days or 330 days a year, the bucket is going to have some water in it.”

But still, a lot of people haven’t written 33 books, right? “And a lot of people aren’t 87 years old,” he replies, laughing.

At 87, McPhee is still writing and teaching his influential undergraduate writing class at Princeton, where he grew up as the son of a University team physician. McPhee has an office in Guyot Hall in “a kind of fake medieval turret that used to be a paint closet,” and he rides his hybrid bicycle roughly 2,000 miles a year.

Readers of The Patch first learn about McPhee’s bicycle riding in an amusing essay called “The Orange Trapper.” But while a bike getaway is an important part of the story, the essay is really about McPhee’s obsession with collecting golf balls. The titular “Orange Trapper” is a device he uses to sate his particular appetite. McPhee writes that he quit playing golf altogether at age 24, but as this and another great essay (“Linkland and Bottle”) convey, he’s still very interested in the details of the sport and the changing nature of the ball itself.

“My fascination with golf was from the war years, when I was a little kid and caddying at a local golf course. [The scarcity during] the Second World War made it clear that hunting for balls was like a treasure hunt. That’s the source of my compulsion to find golf balls.”

Clearly, McPhee is also obsessed with the arduous task of producing precise, invigorating nonfiction narratives. He is probably best known for his stunning narrative of America’s geological history, sections of which appeared over the years in the New Yorker magazine and in separate books. When collected into the single, strapping volume Annals of the Former World, McPhee was awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. But he has written books on an astonishing range of other subjects—oranges, the Alaskan wilderness, America’s nuclear power technology and basketball player Bill Bradley, to name a few. McPhee’s writing and teaching has influenced generations of writers of literary nonfiction.

The range of McPhee’s interests is on joyous display in the second section of his new book, which he calls “an album quilt.”

“It’s called an album quilt because each block in an album quilt is unique; it doesn’t repeat the other blocks.”

“It occurred to me that there was a lot of material that I had written in various places, including for private purposes, that had never been in book form, and there was a lot of fun in some of it,” he explains. “I wanted to do a piece with fragments of that stuff, fragments that would be amusing and interesting to read in 2018.”

So over time, McPhee went through years of material, amassing a collection of some 250,000 words from nearly 60 years of writing. He threw out almost 200,000 words in the editing process.

“The goal was not to preserve anything. I kept 56 items, some of which are a fraction of a page, and the longest of which are about four pages. I wrote a cover story in Time magazine on Sophia Loren, for example, and there are two or three paragraphs from that story because they were the ones that fit this idea. I put them together without dates or an index. I wanted it to have a kind of antique impression, talking about Jackie Gleason, talking about Richard Burton, a passage on Cary Grant and so on. It’s called an album quilt because each block in an album quilt is unique; it doesn’t repeat the other blocks. That seemed like a good title.”

McPhee dedicates The Patch to his 10 grandchildren. He lists them in alphabetical order—he doesn’t want to appear to express preference. “My grandchildren are much beloved to me,” he says.

The title piece of the collection is about McPhee’s father. The essay describes in exquisite, meditative detail fishing with a friend for chain pickerel, a tricky fish other fishers consider a nuisance, around a patch of lily pads on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The magic arises from how he links this memory of fishing with the stroke and eventual death of his father. These brief nine pages are a beautiful encapsulation of all that makes McPhee a great writer.

“There’s no accident that this piece is number one in the collection,” McPhee says. “And the number one reason that I am pleased that this collection is going to exist is that this piece is in it.”

This poignant essay—along with other gems—make The Patch worthy of any curious, thoughtful reader’s attention.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Yolanda Whitman.

Despite the fact that John McPhee’s delightful new collection of essays, The Patch, is his 33rd book, he thinks it’s “ridiculous” to call him a prolific writer.

Steve Kornacki

by Alice Cary

Anyone who has watched MSNBC and NBC News correspondent Steve Kornacki on air knows how much he revels in the many twists and turns of politics. Now Kornacki brings his insights and enthusiasm to his captivating new book, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, which tackles the question that everyone on both sides of the political aisle has been trying to answer: How did our country become so divided?

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Rob Dunn

Interview by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Rob Dunn’s Never Home Alone will change the way you look at your house. Our homes—no matter how much we scrub, spray and clean—are a rich, biodiverse environment, filled with insects, bacteria and life that has yet to even be discovered. Dunn explores the life that can be found in our homes not with disgust, but with wonder. You will no doubt be surprised by how helpful this unseen world can be to us and how dangerous our obsession with sterility can be. We asked Dunn a few questions about microbial misconceptions, beneficial molds and dog mouths.

What was the most surprising thing you learned in your research into the biodiversity of our homes?
I’ve been working on homes for more than 10 years now and, again and again, the thing that surprises me is how little we know. Every day we breathe in thousands of species from the air in our homes. A few of them are dangerous (very few). A few are extraordinarily beneficial. Most don’t have names and have never been studied by anyone, ever. When I was a graduate student, scientists talked about completely inventorying a tropical rainforest, finding and studying every species. That would be an amazing accomplishment, but it is a century away. We still don’t know all of the species in the average house. I know these things, and yet, each time some totally new phenomenon emerges (we recently found extreme and strange microbe species in salt shakers, for instance) I am surprised. Gobsmacked by wonder.

Why did you decide to write this book now?
We have spent 10 years studying the life in homes, and it was becoming increasingly clear that the public perception about such life and what we were learning were totally at odds. It seemed time to share what we were beginning to understand. I could have waited 20 years, until we knew more, but I wanted to share this particular moment when we have begun to see, through the haze of our collective ignorance, an outline of what is going on, but many of the individual mysteries remain to be resolved. I wanted to share some of those mysteries so that readers could begin to help study them, too.

For example, the timing is perfect for us to engage readers in helping us to study the animals in houses around the world.

What good are household critters like meal moths and camel crickets to us?
Nature can be extraordinarily useful, and we have done such a bad job searching for nature’s values to humanity that we can find totally new values even in species living right around us. The first antibiotics, of course, came from bread molds. Bread molds saved us from some of the deadliest pathogens! Until we realized their value they were just there, an ordinary problem in the pantry. By the same token, meal moths (another problem in the pantry, albeit a rather beautiful one to my aesthetic) have proved to have bacteria in their guts that have transformed, totally transformed, agriculture. Wasps, of the sort that nest on eaves and in windows, have proven to have novel yeasts in their guts that make totally new kinds of beers. And in camel crickets, we have found bacteria that are able to break down waste from the paper pulp industry. All of this is to say that if we pay attention to the species around us all the time, literally underfoot, they can often offer societal solutions that in their benefits vastly outweigh any nuisance we might perceive. In part, this is because any species can offer such value, but also because some of the unique features of the species in our houses may make them more likely than chance to have such values.

Is there any real harm in letting our dogs lick us on our mouths?
Ah, tricky question. Depends on what your dog licked before it licked you. If your dog licks feces and then licks your mouth, well, it probably isn’t great. That said, at the same time we know that in some cases, children are missing key gut microbes that they can receive from dogs, and the process of such “acquisition” is probably just such a smooch.

You point out that “favoring biodiversity is like making bread or kimchi.” What do you mean by that?
In making fermented foods, such as sourdough bread or kimchi, we have found ways to favor communities of organisms that contain wild species. But they are wild species that are living in a way that simultaneously excludes pathogens. The acid produced by the microbes in kimchi or sourdough starters kills pathogens. The alcohol in beer kills pathogens. These foods are both biodiverse and self-regulating. We need to develop ways to favor communities of species around us that are wild and wondrous and, ideally, like these foods, also help to keep the less wondrous (at least from our perspective) species at bay. Bakers and cooks are better at this than modern medicine is. We can learn from the deliciousness they have wrought.

You mention “rebooting and rewilding” our gut. Can you talk a little more about that?
Fecal transplants are becoming common. They vary in their details. But basically what happens is that someone is given a dose of antibiotics and then an “offering” of the fecal microbes of another, healthier, person. This rewilds their gut with microbes that might have gone missing because of overuse of antibiotics or for other reasons. It is incredibly effective in a number of medical contexts, but it is also, of course, primitive. We don’t yet know which species of microbes we need, which ones are going missing, and so we regrow the whole forest. It is both a huge advance—a life-saving advance—and a measure of our humility before the grandeur of nature.

Can you talk a little bit about how our mania for keeping our houses clean can make us sick?
It is really pretty simple. If we clean, madly, obsessively, constantly, as many of us do, we never, ever, ever, ever kill all of the life around us. Instead, we kill the most susceptible life. We kill species that are the ones most likely to benefit us (or to be benign). What we leave behind are the toughest, weediest, most problematic species. We inadvertently garden dangerous species, species resistant to antibiotics and pesticides, species we can’t control. When you see a hyper-sterile environment, scrubbed recently with antimicrobial wipes (for instance), what you should think is not “clean” but instead “haven for resistance.”

What lessons would you like readers to take from your book?
Our lives only make sense in light of nature, we only make sense when we remember that we are ALWAYS embedded in nature. We can try to create sterile lives lived amidst sterile homes. But we will fail and, in our failure, make ourselves ever sicker with evermore unusual chronic diseases. We need to keep deadly pathogens at bay, but most of the life around us is not deadly. Most of the life around us is wondrous, mysterious and potentially beneficial. Open your windows again. Throw out your antimicrobial wipes. Start fermenting food. Embrace biodiversity in your home, and in your backyard, and in your life.

Author photo by Amanda Ward

Dunn’s Never Home Alone will change the way you look at your house. Our homes—no matter how much we scrub, spray and clean—are a rich, biodiverse environment, filled with insects, bacteria and life that has yet to even be discovered. Dunn explores the life that can be found in our homes not with disgust, but with wonder. You will no doubt be surprised by how helpful this unseen world can be to us and how dangerous our obsession with sterility can be. We asked Dunn a few questions about microbial misconceptions, beneficial molds and dog mouths.

Alice Robb

by Sarah McCraw Crow

Alice Robb’s book Why We Dream explores the science behind dreams and what we can learn from them.

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