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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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NonfictionTravelHistory

The Far Land

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

The tale of a British ship called the Bounty and the subsequent mutiny of some of its sailors has been endlessly scrutinized, romanticized and depicted ever since the event occurred in the late 1700s. With so many memoirs, historical accounts and fictional tales based on the Bounty’s story, it’s easy to assume that nothing new could be unearthed or written about it. But in his debut book, The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific, travel journalist Brandon Presser does exactly that, and brilliantly. By sifting through many of these prior texts, as well as other resources such as captain’s logs and interviews, Presser has managed to create a fact-based book that reads as grippingly as any thriller.

As a travel writer, Presser has crisscrossed the world to report on memorable locales and adventures. When he was offered the chance to do a story on Pitcairn, the tiny, isolated isle in the South Pacific that became the home of the Bounty’s mutineers, and where 48 of their descendants still live, he knew he had to take it, driven by his need “to know what happened when you fell off the map.” Visiting Pitcairn, a full month’s journey from his home in New York, certainly falls into that category.

Presser spent three years researching and writing this thorough account of the mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath. In the process, Presser spent time on both Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island in Australia, where some of the mutineers’ descendants later migrated. His narrative toggles between past and present, fleshing out the timeline of events—epic in nature and sprawling in scope—and cast of characters, particularly the Tahitians who accompanied the mutineers to Pitcairn and whose roles have previously been underrepresented.

Although some facts remain a mystery (such as the breaking point that made Fletcher Christian snap and take over the ship from Captain William Bligh), Presser’s detailed interpretation allows many of the formerly fuzzy pieces to fall into place. His personal experience on the islands combined with fastidious research make The Far Land such an incredible, unforgettable tale that Presser had to stress in an author’s note that it is “indeed a work of nonfiction.”

Brandon Presser's brilliant book about the infamous 1700s mutiny aboard the Bounty is as gripping as any thriller.

In Love

Amy Bloom is known for examining the dynamics of intimacy in her fiction, but she has never gotten closer to the flame than in this memoir of her marriage.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Never Simple

Review by Alden Mudge

Growing up, Liz Scheier’s mother, Judith, insisted that all parties be held in their Upper West Side, rent-controlled apartment and nowhere else, because you simply couldn’t trust other people. At first, Scheier thought her schoolmates’ moms accompanied them to these parties because these women were friends with her mother. Only later did she understand that the women were there because they didn’t trust her mother, who frequently screamed at their children and raged at and battered her own daughter.

Even as Scheier began to doubt everything her mother said—Had her father really died in a car accident? How could the two of them afford to live in their apartment when Judith had no means of support? Was everything Judith said a lie?—she worshiped her mother. “I loved her smoky cackle and her jokes. . . . I loved that she adored me above everything else on earth,” she writes.

In her teens and 20s, Scheier tried to separate from her loving, controlling, raging, truth-shading mother. After college, during her first job in publishing, she learned that Judith had been concealing a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. This knowledge didn’t protect Scheier from her mother’s incessant, desperate phone calls, but it did force her onto a wobbly identity quest. Scheier tracked down information about her deceased father, with help from her first girlfriend’s aunt. She found jobs that took her away from New York. She drank to excess. She refused her mother’s calls. Still, when Judith was threatened with eviction, Scheier sold her eggs to a fertility clinic to pay back rent. Even after Scheier got married, moved to Washington, D.C., and had two children, there seemed to be no escape from her mother.

This is just the beginning of the tense and heart-rending story Scheier tells in Never Simple, her memoir of growing up with her ”petite, stylish, sardonic mother.” In relating this story, Scheier is sometimes as sardonic as her mother, as well as funny and frequently clever. (For example, she titles the chapter describing her hookup with the man who became her husband “Switching Teams.”) The narrative sometimes feels undercooked, but ultimately Never Simple writhes with the sorrow and guilt only a deep and complicated love can arouse.

Liz Scheier’s memoir of growing up with her loving, controlling, raging mother writhes with the sorrow and guilt only a deep, complicated love can arouse.

Off the Edge

Before you cut off a loved one who won’t shut up about their pet conspiracy theory, you really should read Kelly Weill’s extraordinary debut book, Off the Edge.
Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

ons from the East Jim Rohwer, a senior contributing editor at Fortune and former executive editor of The Economist offers a scintillating and thought-provoking argument in Remade in America: How Asia Will Change Because America Boomed Anyone with a business or personal interest in the globalization of markets and the impact of Americanization in the world economy should pick up this 3well-argued book. Rohwer says that after the Asian crisis of the ’90s, the continent began a radical transformation. After learning the hard way that interdependence on the American economy is real and lasting, Asians are now “intent on learning how the common future of mankind now being born in America is going to work and how Asia can profit from it.” Rohwer argues that Asia possesses underlying advantages which will guide it to success, from hard-working people to strong families to young societies. He predicts the next generation will see fast economic growth, based in part on the Internet. How Asia will succeed and where its strengths lie are the important insights of Remade in America.

ons from the East Jim Rohwer, a senior contributing editor at Fortune and former executive editor of The Economist offers a scintillating and thought-provoking argument in Remade in America: How Asia Will Change Because America Boomed Anyone with a business or personal interest in the globalization of markets and the impact of Americanization in the […]
Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Tony Earley crafts an elegant reinvention of the past The line between fiction and nonfiction is often blurred and in most cases arbitrarily drawn. In his new book, Somehow Form a Family, a collection of essays that reads like the cohering fragments of a memoir, Tony Earley walks gracefully along that line, writing about growing up in the South in the 1970s, the eccentricities of love in most families, and the essential longing to connect with a community that any writer feels but is rarely able to satisfy. "All writers are spies in their own country," Earley said in a recent phone interview. "We are afflicted or blessed with this strange sort of consciousness in which we are always looking in from the outside. I can remember being a kid walking through the playground, imagining myself as I did it, conscious of my every move, always feeling different and never comfortable in any group. Perhaps that’s why we become writers, to deal with that longing." Earley, a North Carolina native and an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of the 1994 short story collection Here We Are in Paradise and the highly acclaimed novel Jim the Boy, published in 2000. A few years back Granta magazine named him one of America’s best young authors, and shortly after that announcement, The New Yorker featured him in an issue that focused on the best new fiction writers in America. The last three stories in Here We Are in Paradise depicted Jim Glass and his family. From those stories, Earley developed the idea for the novel Jim the Boy, a work whose style has been compared to both Ernest Hemingway’s and E. B. White’s. Being compared to Hemingway would not come as an unwanted surprise to most young contemporary fiction writers, but a comparison to E. B. White, in our deconstructed new world where any writer worth his ink seems destined to have a distant, ironic voice, may not seem a compliment. Earley, though, is happy with the comparison and thinks he understands its source. "I started it," he said. "It’s flattering, but the comparisons probably came from my epigraph to the novel from White’s Charlotte’s Web

Tony Earley crafts an elegant reinvention of the past The line between fiction and nonfiction is often blurred and in most cases arbitrarily drawn. In his new book, Somehow Form a Family, a collection of essays that reads like the cohering fragments of a memoir, Tony Earley walks gracefully along that line, writing about growing […]

Scoundrel

Scoundrel is the electric story of a killer who managed to fool everyone around him, as told by the superb crime writer Sarah Weinman.
Food & Drink

Review

Review by bookpagedev

aps nothing is so ubiquitous in 21st-century America as fast food. Fully one-half of the country’s food expenditures takes place in restaurants, and the large majority of those dollars is spent on fast food. It is no surprise that the two best-known brands worldwide are McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser examines fast food “as a commodity and as a metaphor,” and his new book a fascinating blend of cultural history and groundbreaking reportage should prove of interest to anyone who’s ever polished off a Big Mac and fries.

Fast Food Nation tours the slaughterhouses and potato farms that supply this country’s franchises. Readers get a look at the factories that develop and manufacture the smells that make Value Meals and combo specials so appealing. From nutritional content to labor practices, much of the book’s material is unsettling. Just as the nation’s sensibilities were shocked 100 years ago by Upton Sinclair’s vivid descriptions of meat packing practices in The Jungle, so too will today’s readers feel a bit squeamish about the slaughterhouses currently operating. As Schlosser reveals, fast food has shaped the nation’s landscape more than most readers would imagine, and his consideration of the fast food phenomenon as a cultural metaphor is especially intriguing. With sensitivity and insight, he explores the ways in which the explosion of franchised restaurants has contributed to the homogenization of popular culture. This proliferation, he posits, says something about our lifestyles. The increase in restaurant meals, for example, is surely symptomatic of a society organized less around the family than around obligations and activities outside the home. Eric Schlosser, a contributing editor of Atlantic Monthly, has created a narrative that is at once artful and eye-opening, humorous and uniquely significant. By examining this particular facet of American culture, he has shed new light on our nation as a whole.

Mark Rembert writes from Nashville.

aps nothing is so ubiquitous in 21st-century America as fast food. Fully one-half of the country’s food expenditures takes place in restaurants, and the large majority of those dollars is spent on fast food. It is no surprise that the two best-known brands worldwide are McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser examines […]

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is a tender, uproarious chronicle of Séamas O’Reilly’s upbringing in Northern Ireland. Despite the title, it feels bracingly alive.
Lifestyles

Review

Review by bookpagedev

s a mother can love There’s no better way to celebrate Mother’s Day than with a gift book that immortalizes the maternal role. Joyce Ostin’s Hollywood Moms, a volume of radiant photographs, does just that. In Ostin’s touching tribute to womanhood, some of Tinseltown’s biggest names shed their glamorous facades, and the results are simple, stripped-down pictures that reveal the buoyancy, serenity and joy inherent in the mother-daughter relationship.

Much in the limelight, these mothers have daughters named Coco and Collette, Stella and Chelsea, girls with above-average genes who are, in the end, just regular girls. More than 50 black and white photos feature the likes of dynamic duo Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson; Madonna and a saucer-eyed Lourdes Leon; Melanie Griffith and Stella Banderas (inheritor of Antonio’s brooding stare). Anecdotes and poems from the moms themselves and Carrie Fisher’s introduction to the book offer fresh insights into the mother-daughter connection. With an intuitive eye, Ostin has captured this classic bond, revealing the reality behind the fantasy the private sides of these very public women. Ostin, a two-time breast cancer survivor, will donate all of the proceeds from Hollywood Moms to cancer research.

“The family is one of nature’s masterpieces,” wrote George Santayana, and his statement is proven true by a volume of stunning pictures called Family: A Celebration of Humanity. Photographers from around the world some of them Pulitzer Prize winners have captured the unit in its many configurations (a family, after all, can be as small as two or as large as two dozen). There are brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, children and pets; there are families in poverty and families who flourish. Spanning the globe, the book touches down in Russia, Mexico, South Africa, Australia and the United States, and the multiplicity of cultures makes for some wonderful visual juxtapositions. Artful, honest and at times, graphic (the photo of a baby, fresh from the womb, its umbilical unwound like a telephone cord, is not a sight for the weak-eyed), Family, the first volume in a series by M.I.

L.

K. Publishing, Ltd., offers timeless images of humanity at its best. M.I.

L.

K., an acronym for Moments of Intimacy, Laughter and Kinship, hopes to develop a collection of photographs showcasing diversity in family, friendship and love, and will publish two more books in September.

Two new titles celebrate one of the world’s most famous moms, that icon of family and fashion, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The woman who founded a modern-day dynasty and helped set style standards throughout the ’60s and ’70s is the inspiration behind Jay Mulvaney’s Jackie: The Clothes of Camelot. Filled with fabulous, Camelot-era photographs, Mulvaney’s book features Jackie’s dreamy dresses, frocks like confections from Oleg Cassini and other designers done in sugary pink, pastel blue and vivid tangerine, clothes fit for a queen or a First Lady. Those classic suits boxy, modest and perfectly chic are included, too. With over 300 photos and sections on Jackie’s fashion influences, her casual wear and her style during the post-Camelot years, this volume presents a well-rounded fashion portrait of one of the White House’s most regal matriarchs. Mulvaney, author of Kennedy Weddings: A Family Album, contributes lucid captions that set the context for the costumes. Dominick Dunne provides the book’s introduction.

Jackie Style by Pamela Clarke Keogh is part biography, part beauty book. Covering the former First Lady’s childhood in New York, her years at Vassar, her time in the White House and her work as an editor at Doubleday, this volume offers a behind-the-scenes look at Jackie’s life while providing advice on how to make her style your style. Jackie’s makeup and fashion ideas are included, along with never-before-seen photos and sketches, and exclusive interviews. Keogh, author of the bestselling Audrey Style, has created a loving tribute, which has an introduction by fashion designer Valentino.

Both Jackie titles are being published to coincide with a May retrospective of Kennedy’s White House wardrobe at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an exhibit that will commemorate the 40th anniversary of Camelot.

s a mother can love There’s no better way to celebrate Mother’s Day than with a gift book that immortalizes the maternal role. Joyce Ostin’s Hollywood Moms, a volume of radiant photographs, does just that. In Ostin’s touching tribute to womanhood, some of Tinseltown’s biggest names shed their glamorous facades, and the results are simple, […]

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