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Great Women Sculptors

The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLGBTQ+

American Teenager

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
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Self-HelpLifestyles

Review

Review by bookpagedev

This handbook of melancholy is not for the suggestible. Andrew Solomon’s aim with The Noonday Demon is to present the known history of human depression and to examine the array of psychological, chemical and other defenses taken against it. For those who have never been depressed or have been only mildly so, he portrays a world of near unimaginable bleakness.

At the center of this ambitious project is the author’s frank account of his own life-draining depression. “I would have been happy to die the most painful death,” he says of one episode, “but I was too lethargic even to conceptualize suicide.” In another bout with despair, he does attempt self-destruction by trying to infect himself with AIDS.

Solomon contends that depression is so widespread and pervasive that it can no longer be dismissed as a socially negligible affliction. In its chronic form, he reports, depression besets “some 19 million” Americans, including two million children. Its ravages worldwide, he adds, are more devastating than any other health problem except heart disease. “Untreated depression [in the U. S.],” he notes, “has a mortality rate of between 10 and 20 percent.” In searching for his own cure, Solomon leads the reader through a mind-bending maze of prescription drugs, “talking therapies” and alternative treatments. At one point, he even travels to Senegal to partake of a blood-soaked ritual that involves the sacrifice of a ram and a rooster. Besides being unwaveringly honest about himself, Solomon introduces a gallery of tormented friends and acquaintances who personalize the many forms depression can take. His anatomizing of melancholy strikes a balance between the systematic, in which he compartmentalizes historic, scientific and demographic facts, and the anecdotal, through which he conveys the oppressive weight of the malady. Despite the dead-ends that victims and researchers of depression continue to encounter, Solomon ends his book with a chapter bravely called “Hope.” That quality, he shows, resides less in the glacially slow advances of drugs and psychiatry than in a recurring human condition that is as tenacious and mysterious as depression itself: the will to live.

This handbook of melancholy is not for the suggestible. Andrew Solomon’s aim with The Noonday Demon is to present the known history of human depression and to examine the array of psychological, chemical and other defenses taken against it. For those who have never been depressed or have been only mildly so, he portrays a […]

The Trials of Harry S. Truman

In the first detailed account of the Harry Truman presidency in almost 30 years, Jeffrey Frank engagingly considers Truman’s most controversial decisions.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

To Walk About in Freedom

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Civil War scholar Carole Emberton titled this insightful study of “freedom’s charter generation,” the first group of enslaved people to be emancipated in 1865, after a soothing quote from the Bible (Psalm 119:45). But she is clear: There was nothing easy about this walk away from slavery for the Black Americans of the Jim Crow South. Their stories, gathered in interviews by the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression, are carefully retold in To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner, a necessary, judicious correction to previously published accounts.

A project funded under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the FWP sent mostly white interviewers across the South to record the stories of formerly enslaved people who were still living. But before publication, the interviews underwent heavy editing to make them align with a more nostalgic vision of the South’s past. It would take Sterling Brown, a Black poet and FWP leader, to insist on authenticity and restore the interviewees’ words. Almost a century later, here they are.

Emberton’s book especially focuses on one woman, Priscilla Joyner, who told her life story to the FWP. Born in 1858, Joyner was never formally enslaved, yet her struggle to be free lasted for her entire lifetime. After the Civil War, former slaveholders did their best to subvert and sabotage the new, fragile laws of Reconstruction. Shocked when the people they had enslaved walked away without looking back, and fearful of a new balance of power, they thwarted Black voting rights and menaced teachers at newly opened schools—or simply burned the schools down.

Joyner experienced much of this hostility firsthand. The white woman who called herself Joyner’s mother did little to nurture or protect her. Joyner’s darker skin enraged her white siblings, who tormented her until, as a teenager, she was abruptly given away to a Black family. Within that community, Joyner found her people, went to school for the first time, wore ribbons in her hair and dresses that fit, and fell in love. Yet she and her family continued to struggle against inequities in pay, health care, education and professional opportunities.

Emberton’s attention to detail, whether she’s describing an inept FWP interviewer, an intimidated storyteller or the heavy-handed project editor, succeeds in debunking any nostalgia attached to the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.

Carole Emberton’s insightful study of the first group of enslaved people to be emancipated is a necessary, judicious correction to Confederate nostalgia.
MusicArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

f jazz is a living art form, it is due in no small part to the leadership of Wynton Marsalis, who has gone, in what seems like the blink of an eye, from being the hot young gun of jazz to being its elder statesman. There is no one on the scene today who can do what Marsalis does with his trumpet, but musical ability is only part of his talent. A visionary, he has become an articulate voice on behalf of music education in America’s schools.

Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life is not your typical music book. It contains almost no history, offers few facts and boasts only six photographs. Rather, it is a slice of life from the road adventures of Marsalis and his band. Stylistically, the book is innovative. Co-author Carl Vigeland supplies the eyes and ears, while Marsalis offers the heart and soul.

Marsalis’ remarks, which appear in italics, are presented in a stream of consciousness style similar to the way he plays his horn. Vigeland’s role is the same as the rhythm section in Marsalis’ band to provide a rhythmical framework to which the soloist can return after a virtuoso outing.

Marsalis has a great deal to say in this book, but he is never more interesting than when writing about his instrument. “The trumpet can tell when you’re afraid of it,” he writes. “That’s why it’s best to approach your horn with seriousness whenever it comes out of the case.” Sometimes Marsalis’ actions are more eloquent than his words. Once, while speaking to a group of students, a skeptical woman standing at the side of the room asked him if there was really such a thing as a love song. Stunned at first, Marsalis thought a moment, then brought his horn to his lips and played Gershwin’s Embraceable You. At the end of the song, the woman nodded, questioned answered.

I cannot imagine a jazz fan who will not enjoy this narrative, but I suspect the book will find an even broader audience among those who read for pleasure and, as Marsalis himself would say when he’s in the groove, “that’s cool!” James L. Dickerson is the author of an upcoming biography of jazz legend Lil Hardin Armstrong.

f jazz is a living art form, it is due in no small part to the leadership of Wynton Marsalis, who has gone, in what seems like the blink of an eye, from being the hot young gun of jazz to being its elder statesman. There is no one on the scene today who can […]
NonfictionAudioHistory

The 1619 Project

Review by Deborah Mason

In 2019, the New York Times Magazine published 10 articles written by a team headed by Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones. Collectively known as the 1619 Project, these essays argue that the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619 ​​was a defining event for our nation, one that has affected basically every aspect of life in the centuries since. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (19 hours) expands on this original work with additional essays and literary works.

The essays alone would have made compelling listening, but the pairing of historical analysis with artistic interpretation makes the audiobook especially moving. Some pieces are read with great passion, such as Hannah-Jones’ “Democracy.” Others, like Khalil Muhammed’s reading of “The Sugar Trade,” have a determined objectivity that underscores the human misery behind the historical fact. But nothing compares to the gut punches delivered by ZZ Packer’s short story “An Absolute Massacre” or Rita Dove’s poem “Youth Sunday.”

The audiobook’s variety of voices and styles allows the listener to understand American history on a profoundly human level. The result is a powerful lesson not only about what our history is but also how it feels.

Read our starred review of the print edition of ‘The 1619 Project.’

The variety of voices and styles in The 1619 Project audiobook allows the listener to understand American history on a profoundly human level.
Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

ing together meditation and travelogue in his insightful new nonfiction book Paradise, Larry McMurtry captains the reader through two very different worlds his parents’ long and rocky marriage and the remote Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. Disparate though these worlds might seem to be, the author laces them together snugly with an all-encompassing vision. Like every other paradise, he observes, marriage is an ideal that reality inevitably sullies. At home in Texas or afloat on the Pacific, he is acutely aware of Eden’s fragility. McMurtry begins this slim volume (160 pages) by describing his parents’ provincial and often bleak existence in west Texas, contrasting it unsentimentally with his own wanderlust. His father is dead and his mother is near death as he sets out on the voyage that will provide him with the solitude to reflect on this aspect of his past. After a stop in Tahiti, McMurtry boards the freighter Aranui, which ferries supplies to the far-flung Marquesas. His companions on the ship are well-heeled Europeans on the lookout for ever more exotic locales. As they pursue the primitive, they bring with them a lust for shopping and a zeal for self-improvement. For the most part, McMurtry is gentle in his treatment of his fellow Eden-seekers. But he admits that there is something troubling about them. “What is off-putting, finally,” he concludes, “is just the massed power of their money, the weight of which is so great that it produces a kind of indifference to the experience of those like the Marquesans who are radically different from themselves.” As befits a man who has had many of his books made into movies (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment), McMurtry depicts the islands through cinematically vivid long-shots and close-ups. From a distance, most of the islands look majestic and pristine. Closer in, the pores show cases of Coca-Cola stacked on the docks, kids listening to Sting in their Isuzu pickup trucks as they wait to perform native dances for the tourists. McMurtry doesn’t play the amused sophisticate that S. J. Perelman did in his hilarious 1948 travelogue Westward Ha!, but he does have a sharp eye for the absurd.

Returning from his tour, McMurtry watches kids cuddle with their parents in the Los Angeles airport and muses: “Perhaps that is paradise: the fresh, unqualified love of children for their moms and dads a love before knowledge, which was the sort of love the God of Genesis intended for Adam and Eve.” It is his paradise lost.

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.

ing together meditation and travelogue in his insightful new nonfiction book Paradise, Larry McMurtry captains the reader through two very different worlds his parents’ long and rocky marriage and the remote Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. Disparate though these worlds might seem to be, the author laces them together snugly with an all-encompassing vision. […]
Self-HelpFamily & Relationships

Review

Review by bookpagedev

s he approached the age of 40, Joe Kita did what many men his age have done: took stock of his life. Despite his successful career as a writer for Men’s Health magazine and a wonderful marriage, Kita realized that he had regrets. So far his story sounds familiar, but then the author took the unusual step of setting out to rectify his life’s regrets. He shares the story of that quest in Another Shot.

Inspired by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who said he would have regretted not starting the company more than if he had tried and failed, Kita reviewed his own life, identified the things he’d most regret in another 40 years and set out to do something about them. The efforts Kita chronicles in his book make inspiring and thought-provoking reading. He hunts down his first car, the one he wished he hadn’t sold, attempts to regain his sexual vigor and tries to mend fences with his mother. Although not always fully successful, Kita’s yearlong quest to relive his life provides many valuable lessons for people at any stage of their lives. One of the book’s most touching vignettes concerns Kita’s relationship with his father. Although Kita refers to his father’s love, warmth and wisdom throughout Another Shot, he reveals his regret that his father died before he could tell him how much that love meant to him. His quest to ease that regret brought Kita to a clairvoyant who had a reputation for contacting spirits of the departed. The medium helpfully provided Kita with an audiotape of the session. Kita revisited it several times with his family, who agreed that the medium either had some connection to his father or was an incredibly lucky, if not fully accurate, guesser. The emotions Kita conveys from his regret at his father’s sudden death to the awe at possibly contacting him are among the book’s most powerful. Significantly, Kita is not always able to turn his regrets around, but invariably the effort is rewarding. Indeed, Kita’s occasional failures are nearly as inspiring as his successes. Even when he doesn’t achieve his goal, he is enriched by the experience. And this lesson functions both as an example and a caution sometimes you can change things about your life, and sometimes an opportunity comes only once. Readers should seize the opportunity to read Another Shot and take its lessons to heart.

Gregory Harris is a writer and editor living in Indianapolis.

s he approached the age of 40, Joe Kita did what many men his age have done: took stock of his life. Despite his successful career as a writer for Men’s Health magazine and a wonderful marriage, Kita realized that he had regrets. So far his story sounds familiar, but then the author took the […]

The Bald Eagle

In this rich cultural and natural history, Jack E. Davis’ dazzling writing evokes the bald eagle’s majesty as he explores its place in American history.

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