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NonfictionDesign

Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Lost Found Kept

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann reckons with family trauma and her mother’s hoarding disorder in her piercing, empathetic debut memoir, Lost Found Kept.
NonfictionPhotographyLifestylesFashion

Icons of Style

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Josh Sims’ Icons of Style: In 100 Garments is like a visual encyclopedia of every piece of clothing that matters, from mini skirts and leather jackets to blazers and T-shirts. Along with a brief summary that contextualizes the garment in both history and popular culture, a slew of visual components accompany each entry. For the section called The Slip, a paparazzi photo of Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell in silver slip dresses is positioned next to a concert photo of a slip-clad Courtney Love. Together, the photos tell a story of how glamour and grunge intersected and diverged. The entry for sweatshirts is among the book’s most multifaceted: An image of a young Ronald Reagan is followed by a shot of Wu-Tang Clan’s U-God wearing a hoodie, his arm raised in a gesture of triumph that’s mirrored by Sylvester Stallone in a film still from Rocky. These three seemingly opposite figures are seen here united—in fashion, at least. Icons of Style also has wardrobe inspo for miles: photos of Soul Train dancers, Queen Elizabeth II and Jean Seberg appear alongside shots from 1983’s The Outsiders and 2011’s Drive. You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more complete history of everyday style.

You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more complete history of everyday fashion than Josh Sims’ Icons of Style.
NonfictionSelf-Help

How to Be Enough

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In the follow-up to Ellen Hendriksen’s helpful guide to working through social anxiety, How to Be Yourself, the clinical psychologist takes on another common psychological challenge: perfectionism. “Demanding a lot of yourself has probably gotten you a long way. I know it’s bought me a lot,” she writes in How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists. But holding very high, perfectionistic standards can lead to isolation, burnout, loneliness and general dissatisfaction. Hendriksen notes that perfectionism—defined, in a nutshell, as generally demanding more of yourself than a situation requires—is on the rise, especially among young people.

Hendriksen covers elements of perfectionism, like being overly self-critical: “We are our own worst critics. We focus on flaws rather than what’s going well.” Perfectionists also overidentify with their own and others’ standards; their sense of self is always tied to meeting high expectations. “A mistake or shortcoming means we’ve failed, even if our standards were unrealistic,” she writes. Hendriksen describes herself as a perfectionist, and draws on her own experiences, as well as those of disguised, composite clients, to explain the sources of perfectionism and its effects. While not a diagnosis, she notes, perfectionism is closely linked to a host of issues—depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, even suicide.

Read our interview with Ellen Hendriksen, author of ‘How to Be Enough.’

The bulk of How to Be Enough is devoted to seven shifts in thought and behavior to push back against perfectionism, like learning to be kinder to ourselves, being more flexible, releasing past mistakes, comparing less and letting go of control. Hendriksen illustrates each of these shifts with the story of a struggling client, along with research to back up her advice. She also incorporates anecdotes and lessons from celebrities, like legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, and a not-so-great performance that Jon Bon Jovi and billionaire Warren Buffet once gave. Throughout, Hendriksen refers to two entertainment titans, Walt Disney and Fred Rogers, to show the difference between unhealthy, isolating perfectionism and high but healthy standards. (Spoiler: Mr. Rogers is the one to emulate.)

The book incorporates plenty of research—it contains 36 pages’ worth of endnotes—but Hendriksen’s chatty style keeps the narrative accessible. How to Be Enough shows how to quit being your own toughest critic, and is a great addition to the self-help bookshelf.

Ellen Hendriksen’s chatty, accessible How to Be Enough shows how to quit being your own toughest critic, and is a great addition to the self-help bookshelf.

Embers of the Hands

The stunning, adventurous Embers of the Hands examines the lives of everyday Vikings who otherwise might have been lost to history.
NonfictionMemoir

Dirtbag Queen

Review by Catherine Hollis

Andy Corren’s profane and hilarious obituary for his mother, the “plus-sized Jewish lady redneck” Renay Mandel Corren, went viral during the dark pandemic days of December 2021. (“Renay lied a lot,” her son wrote. “But on the plus side, Renay didn’t cook, she didn’t clean, and she was lousy with money, too.) Corren has followed up with a memoir about life with Renay, a book every bit as crass and delightful as the woman herself. A blend of Southern gothic horror and Borscht Belt humor, Dirtbag Queen is a one-of-a-kind reading experience. 

Growing up gay and Jewish in rural North Carolina in the 1970s and ’80s would have been tricky enough for the young Andy, before factoring in a lack of stable housing or access to food. Add in four older brothers, only some of whose nicknames can be printed in a family magazine, a deadbeat dad and a sexual awakening during the “celestial wonders” of the Mormon variety show Donny & Marie, and you’ve got a coming-of-age story unique in the field.

Andy’s job as a child was to be his mother’s emotional support animal, sharing her waterbed, her Judith Krantz novels and her love of all things Hollywood and trashy. A scene where a child Andy massages his mother’s feet, swollen from obesity and her late-night triple shifts, suggests how this childhood has burdened Corren’s less-than-successful adulthood. Yet he captures Renay’s outsized passions for Pepsi, bowling, porn and gambling with genuine love and affection.

While there are other memoirs that document rural poverty and parental neglect, few manage the feat with the humor and sparkle of Dirtbag Queen. Never sentimental or self-pitying, the memoir records Renay’s dying moments (at 84) with a good dose of compassion and love. Of course, Renay’s passage from life into death would be both rose-scented and marked by fraternal discord. Of course, her memorial took place at the bowling alley she lorded over. And clearly, in the end, she was dearly loved by everyone she ever stole from. Her dubious charms and outsize presence, in all senses of the word, now grace readers everywhere in this moving tribute.

In his moving, hilarious coming-of-age memoir, Andy Corren eulogizes his delightfully crass “Jewish lady redneck” mother.

Elements

Stephen Ellcock returns with his signature visual alchemy in a compendium of images related to the elements of the natural world.
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

Cold Kitchen

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

“The kitchen is a portal to a hundred different places, people, times and experiences,” Caroline Eden writes in Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels. Over the course of many trips organized by the year’s four seasons, she showcases the power of memoir to transport readers to another person’s life. Eden creates a sense of place in each chapter, taking the reader on a journey—whether to Istanbul or Riga, Latvia, or Warsaw, Poland—before returning home. In her subterranean kitchen in Edinburgh, Scotland, Eden recreates the flavors of her travels, reconnecting to these far-flung destinations with the comfort of her dog at her side.

A love of cooking isn’t necessary to enjoy this thoughtful collection of essays. But for those who do, Eden concludes each chapter with a recipe representative of the place and time of year she has just described. (Vegetarians may be pleased to discover that only one of the 12 recipes includes meat!) She ponders why we fawn over cuisine from and travel to some places and not others. That’s an apt question, and this book is full of stories from places less traveled (except maybe by your friend with the most passport stamps). Eden has a particular affinity for Central Asia, and items from her travels serve as talismans when she’s at home. She invites readers into the journey not only by sharing her experiences, but by recounting history, too. Her experience reporting on former Soviet countries and current events is clear in how she roots her story in greater context.

Cold Kitchen is a quiet book with little dialogue, but it’s full of illuminating and sensual details. When Eden writes about Armenia, for example, she recalls fluttering flags announcing recently buried soldiers, the sound of folk music playing in a guide’s car and the aroma of a ripe apricot. Her travels and her adventures in her own kitchen boast flavor after flavor.

Although Cold Kitchen recounts Eden’s travels, at heart it’s a meditation on home: “How fragile peace is. How perishable home is. All of it so easily lost. Home is many things; it is fixed for some, movable for others. . . . Either way, it is surely foolish to ever take it for granted.” Eden’s kitchen is the heart of her home. But as the world outside that kitchen reminds us daily, nothing but death is guaranteed. Cold Kitchen is an invitation to appreciate every morsel of the present moment.

In her thoughtful culinary memoir, Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden visits far-flung destinations and returns home to cook their food.
NonfictionReligion & Spirituality

Aflame

Review by Alison Hood

As with so much of writer and world traveler Pico Iyer’s body of work, Aflame: Learning From Silence takes readers on a different sort of journey—not to some far-flung global destination, but deep into the interior terrain of self-reflection, stillness and solitude.

High above the Pacific, in California’s Big Sur, is a Catholic monastery inhabited by monks of the most contemplative Camaldolese Benedictine order. For more than three decades, Iyer has come here to retreat from the rush and distractions of the so-called real world, to sit in silence with kind, welcoming monks who “don’t ask anything of visitors other than a ‘spirit of quiet and recollection.’ ”

In Aflame, Iyer’s intimate, memoiristic essays steadily chronicle his accumulated observations and journey into the self during these quiet moments within the monastic community, and show how these hours of “nonaction” come to inform his daily life, replete with its responsibilities, cherished relationships, joys, mysteries and tragedies. What especially shines throughout Iyer’s clear, luminous prose are gentle, compassionate wisdoms derived from Catholic and Buddhist traditions. These are also illuminated through Iyer’s ongoing relationships in the “outer” world, including conversations with his holiness the Dalai Lama and Zen monk and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, as well as Iyer’s perusals of the writings of Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

As Iyer’s self-knowledge expands, his growing closeness to the Camaldolese community and fellow retreatants bolsters him. The powerful, centering silence of reflection and contemplation helps him meet various life challenges: missing a spouse who is living far across the world, a daughter’s cancer diagnosis, a parent’s death and the losses that California’s ever-looming fires impose, both on the Camaldolese monastery, lodged in the coastal fire zone, and his family home. In reflecting on these flames without and the flame within, Iyer cites wisdom from Merton: “Sooner or later the world must burn.” Yet, Iyer notes, Merton “also knows that the monk’s first duty is to keep the fires within alight.”

Amid the clear skies, radiant ocean sparkle and wild nature that surround the Camaldolese retreat, Iyer wonders: “I’m not a monk, and never will be, so what exactly am I playing at in my borrowed cell? . . . These days of sunlight can only be a means to gather a candle to carry back into the unlit corners of my, or any, life.” Perhaps it’s a small flame to better explore the human mysteries of living and dying.

 

With luminous prose and gentle, compassionate wisdoms, Pico Iyer contemplates life’s challenges from a Benedictine monastery.
NonfictionSocial SciencePolitics

99% Perspiration

Review by Alejandro Ramirez

American ideology stresses the value of hard work, tying it not just to wealth but to character. But we know hard work doesn’t always pay: Today, income inequality is worse than ever and wages have stagnated. But the pernicious idea that one’s value is tied to their employment status persists, influencing policies around welfare, housing, education and more. The COVID-19 pandemic changed many people’s views on work and government aid, but also inspired employers to rail against workers who sought employment elsewhere. It is against the pandemic backdrop that Adam Chandler begins 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, which seeks to break down the myth of the American work ethic and offer new ways to think about our relationship with our jobs. 

Chandler, a journalist who traced the history of modern America through fast food in 2019’s Drive-Thru Dreams, uses the first half of his book to track how the U.S. came to place so much emphasis on the value of “hard work.” That’s not just the somber toil of farmsteading Pilgrims, but also the individualist hustle associated with Thomas Edison. Chandler dives into history, picking apart the folklore that became the basis for our modern attitude towards work, from Benjamin Franklin’s musings to the glitz of the Chicago World’s Fair. 

There’s an element of travel journalism at play, as he visits areas like Plymouth Rock and an Osage Nation reservation in Oklahoma. Sometimes these excursions feel more like detours from the subject at hand, as Chandler sets up a stronger second half, which slices through modern Americans’ unhealthy relationship to work. Technology keeps office workers tethered to their desks regardless of time or location, low-wage workers struggle with erratic schedules, and politicians decry the neediest as leeches. While Chandler explores possible solutions, like a universal basic income, he also calls for a realignment of this country’s values, touting the benefits of a society more invested in the health of the community than the potential for individuals to strike it rich.

Chandler’s breezy writing style makes the book an easy read with plenty of eye-popping statistics and gut-wrenching anecdotes. More importantly, 99% Perspiration will make readers question their own relationship to work, what their jobs mean to them, and why employment is so integral to our identity.

Adam Chandler’s history of labor can make readers question their own relationship to work, what their jobs mean to them, and why employment is so integral to our identity.

A Man on Fire

Douglas R. Egerton’s magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire charts the extraordinary life of multitalented abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

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