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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n William Tyndale’s version (1525), as in most subsequent versions, the Gospel of John begins, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God: and the word was God. And in the beginning, the Word was in Hebrew, and then in Greek, and then in Latin, and then it was cobbled together into the English version we now know as the King James, or Authorized Version of 1611. But if 1611 seems to us like a long time ago, it is a relatively recent date in the Bible’s long and tortuous journey from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate of 405 to our own language. Benson Bobrick’s book is about that journey.

Today we take for granted that the holy scriptures of a religious faith should be in the vernacular of the faithful. But as early as a documented case in 1233, the first question ever asked by an Inquisitor of a Ôheretic’ was whether he knew any part of the Bible in his own tongue. It was the job of the Church to select what portions of the Bible should be known to the laity and how those passages would be interpreted. For with ready access to any document and the ability to read it, human beings begin to ask questions, and inevitably to interpret what they read. And that confers a certain freedom that brings with it an implicit challenge to established authority. The Inquisitors were rightly concerned about who had been reading what.

The story is as much a political and social history as it is a religious and linguistic one. One of the biggest and most persistent struggles was between those of Puritan inclination and those with more traditional views. The Pilgrims who came to American shores were of course Puritans, and their influence in our own history and thinking is difficult to overstate. Bobrick explains how the quest for freedom of religious belief led almost inevitably to the quest for personal freedom. And it is on this basis that he makes his claim, difficult to refute, that the translation of the Bible into the English language was of greater historical significance than its rendering into any other vernacular. For the English Bible had given its readers the idea of the equality of man. . . . It was the idea of the sacred and equal importance of every man, as made in the image of God. Bobrick skillfully manages to entice the reader to accompany him on what turns out to be a fascinating and often surprising journey.

Carl Smith teaches at the Blair School of Music of Vanderbilt University.

n William Tyndale's version (1525), as in most subsequent versions, the Gospel of John begins, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God: and the word was God. And in the beginning, the Word was in Hebrew, and then in Greek,…
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We’re each wired differently that much is for sure. Scientific knowledge about the "nature" part of our personalities is continually improving, while psychological inquiries into the "nurture" side are ever deepening. Nobody has mapped the human soul, as has happened with the human genome, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Given the outpouring of ink in recent years on the varieties of human intelligence (such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Howard Gardner’s Intelligence Reframed), it’s no surprise that business authors would seek to apply this evolving science to the workplace. This month, we look at four recently released books that delve into the connections between personality type and business performance.

The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development (Davies-Black, $18.95, ISBN 0891061495), by William Bridges, is an updated edition of a title that gained critical acclaim upon its initial appearance a decade ago. Bridges looks at businesses as organisms, with their own personal histories and inherited characteristics. He argues convincingly that a company’s character is much more than the sum of its employees’ personalities, and he offers guidance in understanding how different types of organizations think, feel, perceive, and behave. Applied properly, his analysis may be able to steer a firm away from patterns of action that are self-defeating and toward actions that better suit its strengths.

As I read through Bridges’s 16 types of organizational personalities (modeled on the individual personality types of the widely used Myers-Briggs personality assessments), a Rorschach effect sets in. I see one of my former employers in the profile of an ENFJ corporation (a type in which extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging behaviors predominate), and then I see it again in the quite different profile of an ISTJ company (introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging). I find another ex-employer in four different personality-type ink blots. Accurately defining one’s true type is hard in Bridges’ system (as it is in the Myers-Briggs system), but the very act of trying to figure out which profile fits best can improve self-knowledge.

Bridges includes in his book an "Organizational Character Index" that business teams can use to evaluate the character of their companies and, by implication, determine what kinds of people will fit best within a given corporate culture. The author is at pains to stress that his index should not be used as a screening tool by employers, stressing that there are no "good" or "bad" personality types just different types that are more well-suited, or less well-suited, to be part of a certain type of team. Just as a career counselor can help an individual focus on jobs he or she is good at, The Character of Organizations can help a company hone strategies that make the most of its strengths.

Conversely, another new book tries to help workers avoid being harmed by their own personality defects and, one must admit, we’ve each got a few of those. Maximum Success: Changing the 12 Behavior Patterns that Keep You from Getting Ahead (Doubleday, $24.95, ISBN 0385498497), by James Waldroop and Timothy Butler, is a thoughtful and useful compendium of things not to do and ways not to be, while you’re on the job.

Maximum Success is the consummate self-help guide for talented people who keep running into the same problems over and over, in different jobs. There are employees who never feel quite good enough to deserve the jobs they have. There are workers for whom no job is ever good enough. There are those who try to do too much at once, those who avoid conflict at any cost, those who can’t get along with the boss, and those who feel they have lost track of their career paths. The authors, who head up the Harvard Business School’s MBA career development office, have seen it all.

The downside of perusing a book like this is that it often brings on moments of rueful recognition. Playing the "peacemaker" or the "bulldozer," exhibiting a "reactive stance toward authority" or "emotional tone-deafness" these are workplace behaviors that emerge out of a person’s deepest psychological being. Confronting them means confronting a piece of yourself. Like Bridges, Waldroop and Butler go out of their way not to be judgmental about such habits. But, again like Bridges, they draw on a body of psychological literature stretching back to Karl Jung as they offer constructive suggestions for recognizing these tendencies and avoiding the career ruin they can cause.

The human resource manager’s role as group psychologist is the subject of Making Change Happen One Person at a Time: Assessing Change Capacity Within Your Organization, by Charles H. Bishop, Jr. (AMACOM, $27.95, ISBN 0814405282). Bishop lays out the characteristics of four different personality types, classified by how they react to change. Making Change Happen is a precise, step-by-step guide to determining who within a company will be most likely to succeed during and after the implementation of a change initiative.

Here, too, part of the lesson is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all personality template that produces ideal employees. A company with too many of Bishop’s "A-players" or "active responders" the Alpha Males of the corporate world who embrace change, pinpoint opportunities and learn from mistakes will face leadership and succession problems because there’s not room enough at the top for everyone. On the other hand, Bishop is tellingly sparse with suggested roles for "D-players" who resist change: From the HR man’s perspective, the main point is to make sure these misfits don’t get in the way. And now for something completely different but once again related to psychological typecasting. Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, by Gretchen Craft Rubin (Pocket, $25.95, ISBN 0671041282), is an archly written guide to making a complete creep of oneself. Take Rubin’s advice to heart, and you can become any organization’s worst nightmare: a talented tyrant, a "user." Like the other featured authors, Rubin is scrupulously non-judgmental. And her work is not exactly satire. It’s something that bites deeper an exposŽ of a certain type of person that lives among us.

Naturally, it begins with a personality assessment quiz. Presuming you are a "striver" and do crave power, the quiz is intended to determine whether you seek direct or indirect power. Power, Rubin notes trenchantly, will get you a lot further in life than merit. She then spells out how to use people to get power, money, fame, and sex, and then how to use power, money, fame, and sex to get more power, money, fame, and sex.

Advice like "Never let your effort show" and "Traffic only in the right products, places and pastimes" could have come straight out of J.P. Donleavy’s sadly out-of-print gonzo manners manual, The Unexpurgated Code. A discussion of "useful defects and harmful virtues" turns everything your scoutmaster tried to teach you on its head. Here as elsewhere, Rubin raises questions that cut through the book’s veil of irony for instance: "Did Richard Nixon become president despite his insecurity and mistrust, or at least partly because of those traits?" If it all sounds unsavory, and these postmodern perversions of the idea of manners strike you as something not quite cricket, then you can at least have the satisfaction of knowing how others are trying to manipulate you. Rubin is not an advocate for this sort of behavior, after all. She’s just pointing out how it works. And I know a few people who would study a book like this carefully, doing their best to follow it to the letter.

Journalist and entrepreneur E. Thomas Wood is working with author John Egerton on a book about Nashville.

We're each wired differently that much is for sure. Scientific knowledge about the "nature" part of our personalities is continually improving, while psychological inquiries into the "nurture" side are ever deepening. Nobody has mapped the human soul, as has happened with the human genome,…

The Stranger Diaries

When you’re dealing with a murder mystery set in a possibly haunted high school, you need a practical, analytical lead investigator whose sense of humor is solidly intact. Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur is my methodical queen, her assessments of characters both living and dead as sharp as a jagged piece of glass, her self- deprecation just the right amount of wicked. She’s been underestimated enough in her life—and experienced enough prejudice—to gain a significant chip on her shoulder, which is more pronounced now that she’s been called back to her alma mater to investigate a murder in Elly Griffiths’ The Stranger Diaries. A line from fictional gothic author R.M. Holland’s most famous story is found with the body, so Kaur pays special attention to English teacher Claire Cassidy. Scenes from Kaur’s family life (she lives with her Sikh parents) provide a soft place to land after her most biting appraisals, such as when she’s considering the inanity of celebrity dancing shows. Why do people like dance competition shows? DS Kaur knows many things, but she hasn’t got a clue there.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Inheritance

She may not wear a trenchcoat or carry a magnifying glass, but novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro can investigate a mystery with the best of them. In her 2019 blockbuster memoir, Shapiro does an at-home genealogy test on a whim and accidentally uncovers a 52-year-old family secret: Her late father was not her biological father. This revelation kicks off a search for the truth that winds its way through all manner of thorny questions. What role did the emerging field of fertility science play in Shapiro’s conception? Were her parents aware that she was conceived using donor sperm? Did they intentionally keep this a secret? Were they duped by their doctor? Is her biological father still alive? Shapiro’s chops as a novelist shine in Inheritance, which is plotted as well as any mystery, with enough twists to keep you guessing about what detail she might uncover next. Determined to get to the root of her family tree, she is as indefatigable, dogged and determined as any fictional gumshoe.

—Christy, Associate Editor

I Want My Hat Back

The ursine protagonist of Jon Klassen’s debut picture book, I Want My Hat Back, is an exemplary detective. Faced with the mystery of his hat’s location, he immediately begins questioning potential witnesses. He’s polite and thanks everyone he meets for taking the time to speak with him, even though they offer no useful leads. He stays focused on the task at hand and isn’t waylaid by existential meanderings, such as when an armadillo asks, “What is a hat?” He’s helpful to his community, as we see when he offers assistance to a turtle who’s been trying to climb a rock all day. He believes the best of everyone, even rabbits wearing familiar red hats who claim they would never steal a hat. When he hits an investigative wall, he does exactly what I would do: He lies down and despairs until the solution comes to him. And he would never, ever, ever eat a rabbit. Not even a rabbit who stole his hat.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

The Devil and the Dark Water

In Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water, Samuel “Sammy” Pipps is basically a globe-trotting, 17th-century Sherlock Holmes. When a mysterious, seemingly demonic force begins to haunt Saardam, the ship he’s sailing on from the Dutch East Indies back to the Netherlands, you’d think that Sammy would immediately be on the case. There’s just one problem: Sammy’s locked in the Saardam‘s brig, where he is to remain for the entire voyage. Enter his bodyguard, Arent Hayes, an enormous former mercenary and all-around nice guy who’s deeply grateful to Sammy for giving him a purpose beyond body-slamming anybody dumb enough to face him in battle. As Turton gleefully tilts things into Grand Guignol horror, Arent is the down-to-earth port in the storm: humble to a fault, instinctively feminist when faced with a few female passengers who might be better at this whole sleuthing thing than he is and possessed of an unshakable (but still somewhat flexible) sense of justice. Turton maintains that he never conceived of Arent as being, well, sexy—but rather tellingly, many readers insist that he very much is.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

None Shall Sleep

To catch a teenage serial killer, the FBI recruits Emma Lewis and Travis Bell, who are teenagers themselves, for their capabilities as well as their atypical circumstances: Travis lost his father to a serial killer, and Emma is the sole survivor of one. The heroes of Ellie Marney’s thriller None Shall Sleep are remarkably refreshing as their personal and professional involvement in the investigation builds genuine tension and inner conflict. However, despite the novel’s many plotlines, Emma is at the heart of it all. I felt attached to her early on, especially when witnessing her navigate her sense of duty toward solving the case while grappling with the crime’s triggering nature. Her unique perspective and talents provide forward momentum, as she comes to conclusions that people who lack her insight would never think of. At the novel’s end, I wanted to keep following her as she drove away.

—Jessie, Editorial Intern

It takes a certain spirit to leap into action and pursue the slightest of clues. Our favorite sleuths, both real and fictional, get right down to business exposing the evidence and solving seemingly unsolvable quandaries, and we love them for it.
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Mowed over If you’d prefer to spend your summer Saturdays lounging in a hammock rather than trudging behind a lawn mower, pick up a copy of The Landscape Revolution. Authors Andy and Sally Wasowski instruct homeowners on converting their yards from chemical-drenched, high-maintenance wastelands to attractive natural landscapes. The Wasowskis are wise and witty never preachy as they extol the advantages of native plants. The Landscape Revolution will lead you through the process of converting your yard and your neighbors to the natural approach. So join the revolution and park that mower!

Mowed over If you'd prefer to spend your summer Saturdays lounging in a hammock rather than trudging behind a lawn mower, pick up a copy of The Landscape Revolution. Authors Andy and Sally Wasowski instruct homeowners on converting their yards from chemical-drenched, high-maintenance wastelands to…
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Mooreland, Indiana, Haven Kimmel’s hometown, had around 300 residents when she was born in 1965. Her father nicknamed her Zippy because of the way she zipped around, and although Kimmel did not speak until the age of three, she continually observed and took in the world around her. Hers was the world of the small-town Midwest, a place that seemed very simple and very complicated at the same time.

Many of the anecdotes in A Girl Named Zippy resonate within the tradition of American memoir, focusing on Kimmel’s loved ones. Readers learn about her family, including her best cat, PeeDink. Neighbors play a large role as well, and number among them an older lady who wears the same dress for 23 days by Zippy’s count and scares her because, as she tells her friend Julie,

Mooreland, Indiana, Haven Kimmel's hometown, had around 300 residents when she was born in 1965. Her father nicknamed her Zippy because of the way she zipped around, and although Kimmel did not speak until the age of three, she continually observed and took in the…

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A scream in the night. A tangle of clues. Befuddled police being led by the nose as a sharp-eyed and unlikely detective examines the evidence. The drawing room denouement. All these are, of course, well-known tropes of the classic murder mystery—a genre made famous in part by the queen of the sleuthing story herself, Agatha Christie.

Christie’s works are so engrossing, and enduring, because they manage to tread that thin line where the cozy mystery and the high-stakes whodunit meet. While readers are wrapped up in the fantasy of an English country home or hamlet, the imminent danger is truly spine-tingling. Somewhat less examined, however, are Christie’s reputation as a meticulous researcher of forensics, a field that was newly developing in the early 20th century, and her medical and pharmacological background. A perfectionist who volunteered as a nurse and pharmacist during World War I, Christie was businesslike about blood and gore, more than aware of the effects of certain chemicals on the body and keenly curious about the new scientific methods being used to investigate real-life murders. Her appetite for the crossroads of science and crime was so great, in fact, that she co-founded the Detection Club, a social club of crime writers who gathered for supper and lively discussions on murder.

In The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie, Carla Valentine, a longtime mortician, curator of a museum of Victorian pathology and voracious Christie reader, expertly moves through the study of fingerprints, toxicology, ballistics, blood spatter and wounds. (A memorable example: The practice of “gloving” involves the autopsist wearing the skin of the deceased’s hand like a glove in order to collect fingerprints.) Christie ignited Valentine’s own curiosity about the forensic sciences, and with the enthusiasm of the true fan, Valentine illuminates Christie’s meticulous genius by dissecting some of her most famous fictional murders and illustrating how both the crime and the solution are supported by science. It’s an engrossing read for any Christie lover, or simply any true-crime obsessive. However, a strong stomach is recommended; Valentine, like Christie, has no qualms about gore.

The best murder is the well-researched murder. Happy reading.

Of all the ways there are to kill a person, poison is the one most inextricably associated with Christie. Dispatching over 30 of her victims in this way, Christie was well versed in toxins from her wartime days in a pharmacy. In fact, she wielded her toxic substances with such descriptive accuracy that her novels have been used to detect symptoms of poisoning in real murder attempts. Author and toxicologist Neil Bradbury pays homage to this fact in his book A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them by opening three of his chapters with excerpts from Christie’s novels. All together, this is a book that Christie herself would have found excellent fireside reading material, as Bradbury devotes a chapter each to 11 major poisons used throughout history, including real-life murder cases in which they were used and, sometimes gruesomely, how they work on a molecular level to kill their victims.

Bradbury’s poisons run the gamut from the unexpected (insulin) to the gothically romantic (belladonna and wolfsbane). There’s even a section on polonium, the radioactive poison carrying a very famous victim count of one. Far from being dry molecular science, A Taste for Poison makes the reader horrifyingly aware of the devastating effects these substances have on the body’from corroding their organs to interrupting their essential electrical impulses to death. Yet it is with an excitement and love for his subject matter that Bradbury discusses these baneful materials, frequently reminding us that they are themselves blameless and often used in smaller doses to heal.

Christie’s murder mysteries were so steeped in science and so brilliantly complex that some think her novels were used as manuals to carry out attempts at the perfect murder. (Note: The would-be criminal masterminds failed in every known case.) Both Bradbury and Valentine seem to nod at this with their own warnings to readers who might use the knowledge their books impart to nefarious purposes. Forensic science will catch you, warns Valentine. Bradbury absolves himself in the appendix with a note informing us that his book is educational in nature and strictly not for the encouragement of murder. However, as Christie knew, the best murder is the well-researched murder. Happy reading.

Poison, fingerprints and toxicology—oh my! Carla Valentine and Neil Bradbury reveal how murderers have wielded chemistry and biology.

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