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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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Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Sometimes you get more attention by keeping your life and thoughts to yourself. J.D. Salinger managed it for years. In an era admittedly less rife with press and public relations, Johannes Vermeer managed it for a lifetime.

For him, it still works. Recent art exhibitions and authors from Proust onward have played on the few known facts of Vermeer’s life and drawn on the haunting details of his 35 extant recognized paintings. Recent years have seen a vast increase in this attention, with a number of novels and vaguely historic treatments appearing in the last couple of years alone. It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before a movie or TV program mines the same infertile but productive ground. (If Attila the Hun can make the USA channel, why not Vermeer?) The producers could do worse than base it on Anthony Bailey’s Vermeer: A View of Delft, a book that is part history, part travelogue, part critique. Called by its author primarily a biography . . . of an extremely elusive man, it’s an intelligent and engaging look at the world and paintings of Vermeer and at the scant personal fragments that have been gleaned (or assumed) about his personal life. In other words, the artist in his frame.

Because there is no documentary information about Vermeer between the dates of his baptism and his betrothal, and precious little after that, the reader has to put up with a great many speculative qualifications ( may have, perhaps and can’t say for sure ). In spite of all this, the book sustains the reader’s interest and offers further rewards in its coverage of such matters as the Thunderclap (a gunpowder explosion that leveled whole streets of Delft, the artist’s hometown), the camera obscura, the tulip mania of the 1630s, the use of paintings in the Netherlands as legal tender, and the artist’s way with perspective, light, reserve and melancholy.

Author of 21 books and a writer for The New Yorker for a quarter-century, Bailey provides thoughtful and beautifully written appraisals of Vermeer’s work (many of the artist’s paintings are included) and of his continuing contribution to art itself. Time passes, Bailey muses, finally, wheels around on itself, and then keeps moving. It will not be fettered, though we sometimes dream that we can halt it, and Vermeer did as well in that respect as anyone can. Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

 

Sometimes you get more attention by keeping your life and thoughts to yourself. J.D. Salinger managed it for years. In an era admittedly less rife with press and public relations, Johannes Vermeer managed it for a lifetime.

For him, it still works.…

Business & Finance

A wealth of books on millionaires

Review by bookpagedev

I made my first million in Poland, back in 1992. All I had to do was buy a hundred dollars worth of zloty at the currency exchange. A few years later in Romania, as the leu fell victim to hyperinflation, it took not a Franklin but a mere Grant for me to re-enter the millionaires’ club.

The dirtiest little secret of American pop culture today is that a million U.S. dollars ain’t all that much. It’s worth more than a million of some play-money scrip from Eastern Europe, to be sure, but it’s hardly worth the heavy breathing you hear these days about millionaires.

A sudden million can change the life of some smart-aleck who wins it on Regis Philbin’s omnipresent game show. But a slow million is simply what an average middle-aged Jane and Joe today had better hope they save up in net worth before they retire. General inflation, rising health care costs, and lengthening life- spans could easily turn a million into a bare-minimum nest egg not too many years from now.

None of which is to cast aspersions on the flock of millionaire books in recent years. Several of them have contributed to a growing savvy among the general public about how to behave financially. The 1996 blockbuster The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko (Longstreet Press, $22, 1563523302) counseled old-fashioned thrift, patience, and self-denial. Those themes recur in aspirational guidebooks like last October’s How to Become a Millionaire: A Straightfor- ward Approach to Accumulating Personal Wealth by Mark L. Alch (Longstreet Press, $20, 1563526069) and Charles B. Carlson’s recently released Eight Steps to Seven Figures: The Investment Strategies of Everyday Millionaires and How You Can Become Wealthy Too (Bantam Doubleday Dell, $24.95, 0385497318).

A new crop of millionaire books, though, is more apt to seek out the psychological basis for the way people act as they pursue riches whether their actions take the form of upstanding corporate citizenship, fecklessly acquisitive materialism, or something in-between. This month’s featured titles approach the topic of wealth from different perspectives, but all four look beyond the bare behavioral facts that those in one tax bracket or another share to focus on the personality characteristics underlying economic conduct.

It’s no surprise Thomas J. Stanley’s follow-up to The Millionaire Next Door has already followed his 1996 book to the tops of bestseller lists, since The Millionaire Mind builds on the keen observations of its predecessor. Stanley’s earlier book offers the revelation that most of the rich people in our midst have unspectacular lifestyles but impressive abilities to remain focused on their goals. This new work reveals that the rich often have unspectacular minds and social orientations that their native intelligence, their educational achievements and conduct in private life generally don’t veer too far from middle-American norms.

Stanley steers clear of the you, too, can be a millionaire! school of rah-rah personal finance coaching. Yet he does drive home a similar message: that a prep-school record of straight As and a summer calendar filled with cocktail engagements in the Hamptons are not prerequisites for plutocracy. He introduces us to millionaires and decamillionaires (Stanley draws a distinction between those with millions and tens of millions, acknowledging that a mere million is not what it used to be) whose minds are distinguished not by obvious brilliance or refinement but by clarity of purpose and self-discipline.

It’s clear that Stanley’s talent for distilling complex data into very readable narrative serves as the basis for the widespread popularity of this former professor’s work. I’m sure he has plenty of readers from every age group, but this accessible and persuasive book may be best-suited as a graduation gift. Its lessons will be of most use to people who are still in a position to change how their minds work.

In The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators (Amacom, $27.95, 0814405703), Edwin A. Locke puts forth a feisty, combative, well-argued case that the egotism driving the super-rich is a good and virtuous force in society. I could not disagree more heartily with this thesis, but I don’t write this column to foist my social theories on anyone. I have to express my respect for the vigor and strength of conviction that have gone into this book. I know people who will devour it like raw meat.

Locke is an acolyte of Ayn Rand, the late author whose musings on the virtue of selfishness energized a generation of business people as an antidote to the altruism of the 1960s left. The Prime Movers is the book Rand would have written had she lived to witness the federal antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft or the prosecution of Michael Milken. Locke is militantly libertarian in his outlook, and more importantly for the credibility of his stance he is staunchly consistent in applying libertarian principles to the business world as he sees it. Country-club conservatives might applaud his opposition to capital gains taxes and his affirmation that earning money is a moral achievement, but the ballroom would fall uncomfortably silent at his skewering of fat-cat execs flying in Lear jets at shareholder expense, companies discriminating against job applicants on the basis of race, and industries lobbying for corporate welfare.

The billionaire psyche, as defined by Locke (he, too, finds millionaire a paltry goal to aim for), combines integrity and vision with ruthlessness and unrelenting self-centeredness. I have to hope that Locke won’t motivate too many readers to use his lionizing of alpha-male business behavior as an excuse to be petty tyrants in the workplace. But I have to admit: It’s refreshing to encounter a rant as coherent as this one. Whatever your point of view, this book will quicken your pulse.

So will another April release, but in a very different way. Joel Anuff, with co-writer Gary Wolf, tells the tale of his enriching and entertaining descent into financial idiocy in Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader (Random House, $23.95, 0375503889). If you have ever been tempted I confess, I have succumbed a couple of times into buying a zillion shares of something with a name like NoEarnings.com at 41/2 and selling an hour later at 43/4, this book is your chance to revisit the combination of sick thrill and crushing fear you felt as you made your money the new-fashioned way. Dumb Money amply demonstrates the craziness and stupidity of get-rich-quick day trading schemes. It also makes day trading look like a lot of fun.

Don’t blame Anuff and Wolf for sending a mixed message. This book just reflects its moment in history. Rational advisers like Thomas Stanley would extol the virtues of long-term investing to build a diversified portfolio of carefully chosen mutual funds, stocks, and bonds. Following such advice in recent years would have left you far behind the Joel Anuffs of the investing world. Virtue is not always rewarded. Vice is not always punished though the market can wield a terrible, swift sword when it comes time to mete out punishment to speculators. Just you wait.

Like this month’s other books, Dumb Money is a morality tale. The business of trading stocks is arguably an amoral activity in itself, but Anuff and Wolf keep coming back to one figure who illustrates the horrific dark side of the day-trading anti-culture: Mark Barton, the Atlanta trader who was charged with going on a suburban killing spree in the summer of 1999 after racking up six-figure losses in the market. Anuff is convinced there are many more Bartons out there, well-armed and just waiting for the market correction that will send them over the edge. The book’s parting words of financial advice: Learn how to duck. Sober up from the rollicking ride of Dumb Money with a book about the possible consequences of living in a fast-paced, high-stakes economy. Pick up The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt, by Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren and Jay Lawrence Westbrook (Yale University Press, $32.50, 0300079605), and see how the other half lives. If our country’s millionaires seem surprisingly middle-class, so do the Americans who find themselves in bankruptcy court. This carefully researched investigation paints a disturbing portrait of a broad social stratum that has fallen deeply into debt in spite of or, more intriguingly, because of the unprecedented prosperity of recent years.

Here’s where our millionaire fascination can take us. Certainly there are various misfortunes like medical bills and divorces that can lead to bankruptcy. However, an underlying reality runs through many of the sad stories in The Fragile Middle Class. People are willing to plunge deeply into credit card debt to in order to live the affluent life they think the millionaire next door is living. The irony borders on the tragic. Just as we realize how many real (and consistently debt-averse) millionaires live quietly among us in camouflage, we see that hordes of posers are ruining their financial lives as they put on millionaire airs.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is product-development director for the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture products.

I made my first million in Poland, back in 1992. All I had to do was buy a hundred dollars worth of zloty at the currency exchange. A few years later in Romania, as the leu fell victim to hyperinflation, it took not a…

NonfictionEssays

Review

Review by bookpagedev

One of the most telling parts of Larry Brown’s new book Billy Ray’s Farm comes in an essay called Goat Songs, when the author confuses a fictional story by William Faulkner with a true incident, related to him by his father, about the slaughtering of a goat in the 1930s. It’s as though, in Brown’s consciousness, fiction and reality, family and history got churned together, as though there were no division between Faulkner’s Mississippi and his own. This sort of interconnectedness of shared experience and triggered memories, of the unique inheritance that comes from being raised in a particular place lies at the heart of Billy Ray’s Farm. In these 10 essays, Brown writes about his apprenticeship as an author and about life on the family farm in Tula, Mississippi, where his son, Billy Ray, raises cattle. His voice and syntax in this volume are by turns lyrical, forceful and downright unruly ( the goat got gone; I don’t reckon bad luck ever takes a vacation. ) Unromantic, unembellished, full of humor, honesty and wisdom, the essays themselves are the stories of a man bound to the land on which he lives. The everyday activities in which Brown engages in Tula writing something or building something or cutting something down and dragging it somewhere are, needless to say, not all genteel.

Through- out the book, Brown makes no bones about his gritty, hands-on existence, and the end effect is a tone of raw authenticity that endears the writer to his audience. In a trio of wonderful essays Billy Ray’s Farm, Goat Songs and Shack, all of which deal with farm life, with the vicissitudes and brutality of nature Brown seems to delight in defying the writerly stereotype, the polite image of an author as a helpless intellectual lacking in practical skills. In The Whore in Me, a brief, humorous account of a book tour, he appears to be more interested in a gun show taking place in the convention center where he is reading than in literary affairs. An author without airs whose work is as unflinching as nature itself, Brown is what he is, and for that the reader is grateful.

Of the critical link between geography and writing, he says, You take what you’re given, whether it’s the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It’s all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough. In Larry Brown’s case, it most certainly is.

One of the most telling parts of Larry Brown's new book Billy Ray's Farm comes in an essay called Goat Songs, when the author confuses a fictional story by William Faulkner with a true incident, related to him by his father, about the slaughtering of…
LiteratureArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

For years, we have been told there is a crisis in our libraries, that books and newspapers will soon be turning to dust, that we should microfilm virtually everything as soon as possible, while discarding many of the originals. Have we been told the truth? An emphatic no is the conclusion reached by best-selling novelist and acclaimed essayist Nicholson Baker in his certain to be controversial new book, Double Fold. Baker has done extensive research, interviewing many prominent librarians, as well as the buyers and sellers of unique library holdings. He admits that his study is not an impartial piece of reporting. While he does not misrepresent the views of others, we are always aware of his own position. For example, he asserts that librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper’s fragility, and they continue to lie about it. For over fifty years they have disparaged paper’s residual strength, while remaining ‘blind as lovers’ to the failings and infirmities of film. He says the main reason microfilm (and its rectangular, lower-resolution cousin, microfiche) has always fascinated library administrators is, of course, that it gives them a way to clear the shelves. Baker argues that key decisions on this subject made at the Library of Congress strongly influenced decision-makers at other libraries. In his words, such is the prestige of our biggest library that whatever its in-house theoreticians come to believe, libraries will soon believe as well. Baker documents how well-intentioned librarians and their boards worked with such government agencies as NASA, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the microfilm industry to perpetuate the destroy to preserve approach. He explains in detail how seriously flawed tests failed to slow down the almost unanimous acceptance of the approach that led to the destruction of countless original books and newspapers. One such test, widely used, provides the title for his book. It is a simple experiment how kindergartners are taught to divide a piece of paper without scissors that determines the brittleness of books. Baker says it is often an instrument of deception, almost always of self-deception which creates a uniform class of condemnable objects ‘brittle material’ . . . whose population can be adjusted up or down to suit rhetorical needs simply by altering the number of repetitions demanded in the procedure. The author is careful to point out that not all librarians and libraries have been swept up in the movement toward microfilm and the discarding of originals. In particular, he notes, the only major research library in the country that still has no full-time or part-time preservation administrator is the Boston Public Library. They are also the only large library in the country that has kept all of its post-1870 bound newspaper collection. And he applauds the efforts of G. Thomas Tanselle, a Melville scholar, who has often recommended that we store somewhere all the casualties books, journals, or newspapers; bound, disbound, or never bound in the first place of mass microfilming or preservation photocopying. Baker is so passionately committed to preserving the original runs of significant newspapers that he established the American Newspaper Repository to buy some of them for public use. He writes, We’re at a bizarre moment in history, when you can have the real thing for considerably less than it would cost to buy a set of crummy black-and-white snapshots of it which you can’t read without the help of a machine. The author’s remarkable skill with language, linked with his obvious concern for the many aspects of his subject, enables him to share his curiosity and insight in a compelling way. Double Fold should appeal to anyone interested in our shared cultural heritage. It might also provoke some well-informed person who disagrees with Baker to write a book in response.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

For years, we have been told there is a crisis in our libraries, that books and newspapers will soon be turning to dust, that we should microfilm virtually everything as soon as possible, while discarding many of the originals. Have we been told the truth?…

NonfictionNatureEssaysEnvironment

The World as We Knew It

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Climate change is now ingrained in our daily lives. Newscasts almost always have a climate-related segment, whether it’s about a new science report on the status of the world’s temperatures or about natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and droughts. Most of today’s children will not know what life was like before the world began to change so drastically, but for now, many still remember the world as it used to be.

There are a huge number of books on the scientific aspects of global warming, from pleading calls to action to sustainability guidebooks. But what about essays and memoirs from everyday people? Stories about how climate change is personally affecting us and about its emotional impact on our lives? In their new book, The World As We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate, editors Amy Brady (executive director of Orion) and Tajja Isen (editor of Catapult magazine and author of Some of My Best Friends) have pulled together a diverse, impactful set of essays that explore the climate crisis from these more intimate angles. Kim Stanley Robinson, Melissa Febos, Lacy M. Johnson, Omar El Akkad and 15 other writers from around the world share how familiar landscapes are becoming unrecognizable and how the rhythms of their daily lives are being forever altered.

Each author brings a unique style and focus to their topic, with prose that is in varying degrees lyrical, reflective and urgent. Some relay extreme weather events, such as Mary Annaïse Heglar in “After the Storm,” about the blatant systemic racism that emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “Structural racism and inequality collide with fearsome extreme weather to reveal the grotesque unnaturalness of disaster,” she writes. This concept is continued in Rachel Riederer’s “Walking on Water,” which covers the displacement of people, usually people of color, that’s happening more and more as sea levels rise.

It’s not only deadly weather events that are highlighted in The World As We Knew It. Chronicling the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, “How Do You Live With Displacement” by author Emily Raboteau discusses the parallels between COVID and climate change. In “Leap,” journalist Meera Subramanian writes wistfully about how the nature she loves most keeps changing, especially as ticks carrying Lyme disease keep multiplying in the Northeast as temperatures and carbon dioxide levels climb.

As Subramanian writes in her essay, “We used to be a story in nature. Now we are the story.” This statement reverberates throughout all the essays in The World As We Knew It, providing one example after another of the ways climate change has affected every region of the Earth. It is a warning that commands the full attention of every reader.

The 19 lyrical, reflective and urgent essays in The World As We Knew It command the full attention of every reader.

Under the Skin

Linda Villarosa’s wonderfully written book makes stunning points about the health risks of racism amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences.
NonfictionTrue CrimeMemoir

Unmasked

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Why are some people drawn to darkness? It’s understandable why some people seek it out as entertainment; to some, grisly murder is no more real than a sweet romance or an exciting adventure. But what about the people who choose to interact with darkness as part of their livelihoods? What makes someone say, “Serial killers—I want to hunt them down for a living”?

The best explanation readers might get is in Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases by Paul Holes, a retired detective from Contra Costa County in California. The region is where Laci Peterson was murdered, where Jaycee Dugard was held in captivity and where the Golden State Killer terrorized communities for decades. Holes spent his entire career in the county, with a particular focus on cold cases, and he devoted 24 years to investigating and ultimately finding the Golden State Killer.

Paul Holes, the cold case investigator who found the Golden State Killer, reveals the personal toll of his onerous career.

Holes’ memoir, co-written with journalist Robin Gaby Fisher, unpacks one man’s bruised brain. Unmasked is more about Holes’ mental health journey than other “how I caught the killer” tales in the true crime genre (although, of course, there is some of that, too). Holes’ blessing and curse was being gifted at a career that required him to think like a murderer, torturer, kidnapper or rapist. His book looks at what staring into that darkness does to a husband and father.

Unmasked is not for squeamish readers; investigations into many, many murders and rapes are described in detail. Additionally, Holes’ honesty about how police use macabre jokes and gallows humor to cope with their difficult jobs may disturb some readers.

But for readers who would like to see a different side of the true crime genre—the lifelong impact that catching twisted individuals has on one man—Unmasked is a must-read.

Retired cold case investigator Paul Holes’ memoir looks at what catching murderers, kidnappers and rapists does to a husband and father.

The Divorce Colony

In April White’s hands, this slice of Gilded Age history about women who headed west to states with more lenient divorce laws is entertaining and enlightening.

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