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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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NonfictionSocial ScienceFamily & Relationships

Matters of the heart

Feature by Julie Hale

Foreverland

Heather Havrilesky delivers a funny, forthright chronicle of modern wifehood in Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage. As she recounts in the book, Havrilesky met and married her professor-husband, Bill, while in her mid-30s, and 15 years of marriage have disabused her of any fairy-tale notions about the institution. “A divine catastrophe” is how she now views the union. “Having someone by your side every minute of your life sounds so romantic before he’s actually there, making noises, emitting smells, undoing what you’ve just done,” she writes.

In Foreverland, Havrilesky considers the ups and downs of married life, writing with candor about its undeviating dullness and surprising upsides, about trading the high fire of early passion for the slow burn of long-term love. Havrilesky, a journalist whose beloved “Ask Polly” advice column now appears on Substack, has a gift for highlighting moments of comedy and absurdity in the midst of major life milestones. With Bill, she starts a family, buys a house in the Los Angeles suburbs and endures the COVID-19 lockdown, learning along the way to savor the mixed blessings of marriage. “It’s the hardest thing to do, sometimes: just to stand still and be loved,” she writes. Whether single or spoken for, readers are sure to fall for Havrilesky’s charming memoir.

From Hollywood With Love

Scott Meslow’s From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy pays tribute to a seemingly imperishable cinematic category. The romantic comedy is something of a hybrid, a mashup of moods and emotions that hold forth the promise of a happy ending. In his delightful homage to the genre, Meslow notes that a romantic comedy’s “goal is to make you laugh at least as much as the goal is to make you cry.” Through an insightful survey of modern rom-com classics, Meslow explores the durability of the form, which peaked in popularity during the 1990s and early 2000s. Along the way, he looks at the careers of some of the category’s standout stars, including Meg Ryan, Hugh Grant, Jennifer Lopez and Will Smith.

Meslow writes with sparkle and wit, and in recounting three decades of rom-com history, he brings fresh perspectives to old favorites like When Harry Met Sally, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Waiting to Exhale. Meslow also takes stock of the genre’s recent resurgence, with a new generation of movies cropping up on Netflix and other streaming platforms. As From Hollywood With Love proves, our love for the romantic comedy is here to stay.

If you aren’t exactly feeling the love this Valentine’s Day, check out Florence Williams’ ‘Heartbreak.’

Black Love Matters

For the anthology Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happily Ever Afters, editor Jessica P. Pryde enlisted a stellar lineup of essayists to share their perspectives on Black love and the ways it’s portrayed in popular media. Pryde is a librarian, contributing editor at Book Riot and die-hard romance fan who has long been aware of the lack of romantic narratives featuring Black protagonists and blissful endings. As she notes in the book’s introduction, more than 90% of the titles produced by mainstream publishers in the romance category don’t focus on Black people’s experiences.

In “Finding Queer Black Women in Romance. Finding Bits and Pieces of Me,” novelist Nicole M. Jackson writes about looking for relatable figures in the romance genre. Author Piper Huguley explores the expectations and stereotypes surrounding Black leading men in her essay “In Search of the Black Historical Hottie Hero.” Other authors, scholars and critics who contributed to the anthology include Julie Moody-Freeman, Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Allie Parker and Carole V. Bell (who’s also a BookPage contributor). From astute cultural critiques to introspective first-person essays, these 14 pieces form a revealing mosaic that will fundamentally change how readers engage with love stories.

Conversations on Love

Love is the one thing most of us say we can’t do without, yet putting it into action—whether as a sibling, spouse or friend—can be one of life’s greatest tests. Journalist Natasha Lunn helps readers make sense of this important emotion in Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings. An offshoot of her popular Conversations on Love email newsletter, Lunn’s book features candid Q&As with authors and experts who provide guidance on the subject of love, including suggestions about how to find it, cultivate it and keep it alive.

Lunn’s roster of interviewees includes writer Roxane Gay, psychotherapist Susie Orbach and author Juno Dawson. While her book tackles topics that will resonate with committed couples, such as dealing with infidelity and working to maintain passion while raising kids, Conversations on Love also covers issues outside the realm of romance, such as sibling dynamics, self-love, identity and strategies for coping with the loss of a loved one. “Just as we change, our challenges in love change too,” Lunn writes. Her book is a thoughtful guide to meeting those challenges—and getting more love out of life.

If you’re searching for clarity regarding the elusive emotion of love (and who isn’t?), start with these four perceptive nonfiction books.
NonfictionTravelDesignCookbooks

Lifestyles: February 2022

Feature by Susannah Felts

★ Grist

James Beard Award-winning chef Abra Berens and her collaborators have created a most magical combination of aesthetics, soul and practical guidance in Grist, a cookbook focused on humble stuff: beans, legumes, grains and seeds. Let it be said that I love beans, and I really love the way Berens provides, along with specific recipes, a number of templates to follow for any combination of ingredients you crave or happen to have on hand. For example, a bean + vegetable + flavor + texture chart starts with beans (any kind), then lists four suggested ingredients for each step: add veg, add flavor, add extra texture and serve. Elsewhere, she walks us through a week’s worth of lentils without boredom, and her recipes regularly include three or more variations. Topping it all off are Lucy Engelman’s beautiful illustrations, which make this a true work of cookbook art. 

Where They Purr

A bedroom decked out in lush linens and pillows—and a cat, luxuriating on the bespoke duvet. A kitchen with floor-to-ceiling windows—and a cat, nonchalantly surveying the room from atop the dining table. This is the fabulous world of Where They Purr: Inspirational Interiors and the Cats Who Call Them Home, in which images of sleek interiors foreground the homes’ feline overlords. Photographer Paul Barbera got the idea for a cat-centric home design book while working on a previous project, Where They Create, and the result takes those “how they styled it” shots we’ve all seen while shopping online—a sofa, say, captured with the owner’s pet proudly lounging—to the next-next level. The homes featured here are mostly high-end and very modern, full of sharp angles and long lines. You might be inclined to call some of them cold, except how could you when fluffy Pud or Pippi or Gustov is lurking or perched or sprawled in their midst? As a cat lover, my only quibble with this purrfectly delightful book is that there are too few orange tabbies in the mix. I suppose we all, like our cats, have our own prefurences.

Wanderess

As I prepare for a solo journey to the Southwest, I’m happy to have in my pocket Wanderess: The Unearth Women Guide to Traveling Smart, Safe, and Solo, a guide for women, by women, and geared toward solo travelers. Whether you’re going it alone for the first time or planning a girls’ trip, the editors from Unearth Women have assembled in this colorful book all the resources, hacks and advice you could ask for, including tips for traveling while pregnant and specific recommendations for women of color and travelers who are trans, lesbian or queer. The writers also offer an outline for creating your own Feminist City Guide, which centers women-owned businesses; if you like, you can pitch your guide(s) to Unearth Women for possible publication.

From the humble bean to the high and mighty feline, the books in this month’s lifestyles column colorfully celebrate the joys of food, art and travel.
LifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Robert Dash’s columns in the East Hampton Star have delighted readers for 12 years. He writes about gardening with an expert’s eye and his own unique ear for wit, exhibiting both the intensity required for planting a garden, but also the resilience required of anyone who undertakes such a potentially frustrating project. Notes from Madoo is a compilation of these columns. It is the perfect book for anyone who gardens, a harvest of images to sample as you contemplate plans for your own Madoo.

Dash’s columns often give very practical, yet simultaneously reverent, accounts of the plants he likes most, which he titles Plant Portraits. As he writes of the plume poppy, A wonder of a plant, nearly eight feet in height and, placed properly in the garden, of splendid effect. I like it opened up and do quite a bit of stem-stripping (hence, saffron hands) in order to see the fine silken sheen of its blue-green but nearly silver stem. The image of Dash staining his hands bright yellow in an attempt to make the plume poppy as majestic as possible inspires gardeners to put forth this kind of effort in their own gardens, even if their foliage is considerably more pedestrian.

But Dash does not restrict himself to accounts of even his most exotic plants. In a section called simply Fairies, he writes about the old folk tale that says that anyone who stands in a fairy ring of mushrooms and moss on Midsummer’s Eve will have countless wishes granted. Dash’s wishes are, of course, botanical, and he recalls that for different gardens he has tended over the years he has wished for such necessities as more level ground, better soil, a longer frost-free season, and simply rain.

But in the end, he concludes that it is better to take your chances and know the garden is your own, warts and all. For, as he writes, The voices would speak and I would heed them all and all good things would come to my garden. Or should I say their garden, for the garden would no longer be mine. I don’t think that I want a fairy-run, fairy managed garden. As a matter of fact, it is out of the question. Eliza R.

L. McGraw lives and writes in Nashville.

Robert Dash’s columns in the East Hampton Star have delighted readers for 12 years. He writes about gardening with an expert’s eye and his own unique ear for wit, exhibiting both the intensity required for planting a garden, but also the resilience required of anyone who undertakes such a potentially frustrating project. Notes from Madoo […]

Free

Political scholar Lea Ypi’s memoir is fresh, poignant and funny as she explores Albania’s journey from socialism to liberalism through a child’s eyes.
NonfictionBiographyAmerican History

Until I Am Free

Review by Priscilla Kipp

When then-California Senator Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for vice president of the United States, she spoke of a long history of inspiring women, including the impoverished Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. “We’re not often taught their stories, but as Americans, we all stand on their shoulders,” Harris said. Historian Keisha N. Blain’s extensively researched chronicle Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America ensures that Hamer’s story—and her lessons for activists—will live on.

The granddaughter of enslaved people and the youngest of 20 children growing up on a plantation in the Jim Crow South, Hamer’s formal education ended in the sixth grade. Her parents needed her to pick cotton in order to put food on the table. In 1962, at age 44, Hamer attended a meeting organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and learned for the first time that she had a constitutional right to vote.

After attempting to exercise that right got her thrown off the plantation, Hamer began organizing voter education workshops and registration drives. Her family became targets of violence, her husband and daughter were arrested and jailed, and their home was invaded. Eventually her work with SNCC activists almost cost Hamer her life: Jailed after a voter workshop in Winona, Mississippi, she took a beating that left her with kidney damage and a blood clot in one eye.

Undeterred, Hamer went on to challenge the all-white Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, arguing that the delegation couldn’t represent the state when Black Democrats had been excluded from the selection process. President Lyndon Johnson held an impromptu press conference to prevent television coverage of her graphic testimony, in which she detailed her beating, but it aired anyway and sparked outrage. Eventually the credentials committee offered the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which included white and Black people, two at-large seats with no voting power. Hamer’s response: “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats.” Four years later, she would become a member of Mississippi’s first integrated delegation.

With SNCC, Hamer helped organize the legendary Freedom Summer in 1964 and later launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative to tackle rural poverty. She fought for inclusion in the women’s movement, and until her death in 1977, she remained strident about the global need to liberate all marginalized groups seeking political and economic justice. As readers take in Hamer’s life story throughout this rallying cry of a book, they will find that her message still resounds today: “You are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free.”

Historian Keisha N. Blain’s extensively researched chronicle ensures that Fannie Lou Hamer’s story—and her lessons for activists—will live on.

Manifesto

Bernardine Evaristo’s debut memoir is a thoughtful, vivid, often funny work by an author who refuses to play it safe.
Memoir

A reporter’s diary made public

Review by bookpagedev

Like Leno and Letterman, he is a fixture of the after-hours cultural zeitgeist. But instead of delivering monologues and Top Ten Lists, Ted Koppel delves into issues. His name is synonymous with ABC’s Nightline, the respected news show he has anchored for more than 20 years. Esteemed for his journalistic skills, especially his intrepid interviews, Koppel is a preeminent force in TV news. Befitting that status, he has been toasted and roasted (of his decidedly bad hair, the Washington Post declared, "it looks like a Brillo pad ). And, he has journeyed from the small screen to the book shelves.

In his televised reports, Koppel strives for objectivity. Viewers are not privy to his personal thoughts. So he has delivered them in print.

Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public originated as a journal what Koppel calls "an exercise in self-discipline. Speaking by phone from the Nightline offices in Washington, D.C., Koppel explained that on the last day of 1998 he got the idea to keep a day-to-day record of his observations on the events of the following year. "My grandmother was born in 1899. I thought what a joy it would have been, for our family, if there had been a journal detailing the dawn of 1900. Determined to detail the dawn of 2000 for Grace Anne, his wife of 40 years, and their four children, Koppel wrote daily initially alternating between yellow legal pad and laptop. "Then I realized that everything I was writing on the legal pad I was transferring to the laptop. The legal pad was abandoned. Off Camera marks his second print project about Nightline. The first, largely written by former Nightline producer Kyle Gibson (with Koppel contributing) was the 1996 title, Nightline :History in the Making and the Making of Television. It took readers behind the scenes of the show. Off Camera also takes readers behind the scenes of Koppel’s childhood in England, his contemporary family life, and his work as a TV newsman. To Koppel’s dismay, in current news reporting, there is "this tremendous rush to be first with the obvious. His book underscores the perils of that rush, pointing out what happened when CNN broke the news of a shooting at the Armenian parliament. After reporting the death of the prime minister, a CNN anchor went on to report that the prime minister was actually at a hospital, in critical condition. (He did die, but it was never made clear when.) "It was a perfect example of all that is wrong with television’s electronic tail wagging the editorial dog, writes Koppel.

After all, he elaborated, "Journalism entails more than focusing a camera on an event. It entails providing some kind of context. Koppel also voices his concerns about the racism inherent in our society. (He once quizzed five of his black Nightline colleagues and found they had all been behind bars, if only in a holding cell.) Then there is Koppel’s theory about the Vannatizing of America, as in Vanna White, the beautiful game show personality who attained her fame without offering up opinions. "This, I believe, is the root of her popularity. We are able to project on her whatever we please, and, therefore, find her sympathetic, writes Koppel, who wryly wonders if George W. Bush’s popularity is likewise due to the Vannatizing of America. He also questions Bush’s continued refusal to squarely answer questions pertaining to rumors of possible drug use. Koppel, who has done numerous shows about this country’s correctional institutions and their inhabitants believes Bush owes the public the truth. After all, he is governor of a state known for dispensing tough penalties, in the form of stiff prison sentences, to drug users.

"A lot of the offenders are young people who are not going to be finding themselves on the path to the presidency. In fact, their options will be severely limited after they have served 10 to 15 years. As for the future: he is not yet sure how the internet will ultimately impact news. He worries that there are no watchdog agencies to make sure cyberspace news sites abide by "professional standards. Until that day comes, he advises news junkies to stick with solid news sources that are unafraid to weigh in late on a story. "The New York Times has retained its [lofty] reputation. I think they’d rather be beaten on a story than be inaccurate, said Koppel. Without skipping a beat, he added, "And so would I. Pat H. Broeske explores the worlds of crime and punishment as a segment producer for Court TV’s Anatomy of Crime.

 

Like Leno and Letterman, he is a fixture of the after-hours cultural zeitgeist. But instead of delivering monologues and Top Ten Lists, Ted Koppel delves into issues. His name is synonymous with ABC’s Nightline, the respected news show he has anchored for more than 20 years. Esteemed for his journalistic skills, especially his intrepid interviews, […]
NonfictionSocial Science

Eating to Extinction

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

The terms endangered and extinct are most commonly applied to animal species, particularly as human activities encroach on wildlife habitats worldwide. But the global human population explosion over the past few centuries has also wreaked havoc on human nutrition, decreasing food diversity and threatening the global food supply and our environment in general.

Food journalist Dan Saladino spent over 10 years researching at-risk foods and food cultures, and his discoveries about the dangerous consequences of decreased food diversity are outlined in Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them. This decline in diversity isn’t necessarily visible to consumers now that food is shipped all over the world, seemingly providing more variety to many of our diets. However, in order to feed an ever-increasing population, major food crops such as rice, wheat and corn have become more and more homogeneous, making them more susceptible to disease and less nutritious.

Saladino traverses the globe to find out what scientists, conservationists and food experts are doing to dial back the increasing sameness in our diets. His journalistic skills are key as he interviews a wide range of people, from food corporation executives and government officials to botanists and farmers. Divided into 10 parts about topics such as cereals, vegetables, meat and fruit, each section covers food from many locations around the world, such as bere barley from Orkney, Scotland, and the Kayinja banana from Uganda. A map key in the front of the book pinpoints each setting, providing geographical context.

Fascinating and extremely well written, Eating to Extinction combines comprehensive history with science, culture and geography. At 464 pages, it’s a lengthy tome that undoubtedly could have been much longer, as it just scratches the surface regarding the number of foodstuffs affected by diminishing biodiversity. Saladino raises a serious issue that needs to be addressed with global urgency and cooperation.

Dan Saladino spent over 10 years researching foods that are at risk of going extinct, culminating in the fascinating and well-written Eating to Extinction.

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