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The Icon and the Idealist

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
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Review

Review by bookpagedev

The eyes have it Mother’s birthday? Nephew’s graduation? Second cousin twice removed’s wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you’ve come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books, of course! Do you know someone who is so trendy that when they go shopping, they think their clothes are out of style before they can get them to the cash register? Laugh and learn with Holly Brubach’s A Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Phaidon, $29.95, 071483887X). A collection of 27 essays published during the past two decades, Brubach’s writings offer insight on trends, designers, models, and photographers. There are chapters dedicated to men, shoes, visionaries, and plus-sizes. Luckily, the photographs featured were carefully selected, so some of fashion’s . . . er, more outrageous phases are kept within the text. It is a witty, educated observation that isn’t muddled into tedium or grandiosity. Brubach takes a scenic route from Paris to New York, with plenty of stops along the way.

One hundred and five years ago, a subtitle reading An Illustrated Monthly was added to the masthead of National Geographic. Since then, photographs featured in the magazine have told stories that reflect our world and the times in which we live. Beginning with those early photographs, six authors have compiled an era-by-era account of the 20th century in National Geographic Photographs: The Milestones. Often working in rigorous or rudimentary settings, many of the photographers featured are true pioneers of photojournalism. Look on the wedding portrait of a late 19th-century Zulu couple; observe the conditions of an early 20th-century Mexican cigarette factory; visit Lappland, New York, the Arctic, and scores of other places and events that were hallmarks of the past century. Very often, photographers would return to a previous site with mixed results; progress is evident in many of these revisits, while other photographs reflect areas that remain untouched by time.

If breathtaking scenery and colorful history excites someone on your gift list, you can’t do much better than Scotland. Checkmark Books has captured the majesty and mystery of this gorgeous country in Heritage of Scotland: A Cultural History of Scotland and Its People ($29.95, 06003552609). Author Nathaniel Harris’s enormous undertaking covers everything from Scotland’s landscape to its literary offerings. Beautiful artwork and photographs are featured alongside an abundance of information about Scottish people and their traditions. And yes, clans, kilts, and bagpipes are included, but readers will soon discover there is so much more! Visit the Highland Games, look at priceless works of art, learn the complex linguistic history of the Scottish people, observe the country’s most famous structures, many dating back to prehistoric times. Heritage of Scotland is a great item for history buffs and anyone with Scottish roots.

It’s a classic dilemma: You’re standing in the video store, thinking, What’s that movie from the 1940s, the one where John Wayne plays a naval officer and has an affair with a nurse, played by Donna Reed? This dilemma is easily resolved with VideoHound’s War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film (Visible Ink, $19.95, 1578590892). Mike Mayo has compiled and arranged over 200 war movies according to the war depicted. This guide includes many documentaries and overlooked films, like The Fighting Sullivans and Come and See. There are sidebars profiling famous actors, listings of full movie credits, and 200 photographs to peruse. Mayo provides commentary and synopsis for each film, mentioning the controversies and histories surrounding some of Hollywood’s most powerful movies. Amid trivia and quotes, Mayo is kind enough to include a See Also section for each film, for moviewatchers who are interested in other films that are similar in content, direction, or have the same stars . . . just in case your first choice has been rented out!

The eyes have it Mother's birthday? Nephew's graduation? Second cousin twice removed's wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you've come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books,…

HistoryBlack History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate look at the life of a multifaceted figure. Told in graphic black and white, King’s story unfolds in a series of photographs, some of which have never been seen before, and the result is a visual retrospective almost as mighty as the man himself.

Photographer Bob Adelman assembled the starkly beautiful, sobering images that comprise this volume, and it’s a detailed compilation that spans more than a decade. With authoritative text written by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, this in-depth look at one of our most revered leaders is organized around the major events in King’s life, from the 1957 prayer pilgrimage in Washington, D.

C., to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo in 1964. But most touching are the simple moments in which the great man seems mortal: King dozing in a chair in an airport; struggling over the composition of a sermon; having a strained moment at home with his wife Coretta. While documenting the life of King, the book also captures the essence of a violent epoch, presenting the triumphs and trials that characterized the civil rights movement and doing so with an intensity that makes the events of the ’50s and ’60s feel strangely immediate. Most importantly, King penetrates the surface of its subject, presenting both the public and the private sides of an icon, a superman of sorts who was, after all, human.

Black history is at the reader’s fingertips with Velma Maia Thomas’ ingenious three-dimensional book Freedom’s Children: The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration. The second volume in a series chronicling black history and the sequel to Thomas’ best-selling Lest We Forget, Freedom’s Children addresses the years following the Civil War, examining the challenges faced by slaves tasting liberty for the first time. With illustrations, photographs and one-of-a-kind interactive elements, this intriguing book requires reader participation. A letter from a Freedmen’s Bureau agent is tucked into an envelope. A miniature version of The Freedmen’s Third Reader a primer studied by illiterate slaves invites perusal. A ticket for the Colorado and Southern Railway, which bore freedmen and freedwomen west in search of better lives, and script money folded into pockets lend an air of authenticity to Thomas’ narrative, making Freedom’s Children something of a fold-out museum, a mini-archive. Thomas’ illuminating text, which follows the lives of former slaves, along with the replicas of documents and artifacts that illustrate the era, make Freedom’s Children both an invaluable work of scholarship and a beautiful gift volume.

A book that delivers the nobility, beauty and dignity of the world’s most mysterious continent, Sensual Africa by photographer Joe Wuerfel captures the essence of a place and its people in pictures that are sheer poetry. Wuerfel visited the Cape Verde Islands, Tanzania and Namibia, where he lived among a nomadic tribe of herdsmen called the Himba, and the results are images tempered by a golden tint, photographs that have the warm haze of yellowed lace, of something aged. Dressed in calfskin loincloths and beaded belts, the bodies of the Himba seem burnished. At times, in this light, Africa itself appears apocalyptic a landscape yellow-white, barren and bone-dry in which zebras look otherworldly, and black baobab trees stand like supplicants beneath an unyielding sky. In his travels through Africa, Wuerfel captured archetypal images of the masculine and the feminine, of youth and age. Young Himba girls flirty yet demure seem to be sharing a secret; Tanzanian women mourn, their heads shaven in honor of the dead; a bare-chested Himba boy runs with a bow and arrow. Foreign yet familiar, the postures of these isolated people transcend language and culture and remind us of what it means to be human. In their gestures, we can see ourselves.

An interview with photographer Peter Beard, who has spent 25 years on the continent, is also included in Sensual Africa. A remarkable visual experience, this is a stunning volume that Africaphiles will love.

Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate…

Lifestyles

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The eyes have it Mother’s birthday? Nephew’s graduation? Second cousin twice removed’s wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you’ve come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books, of course! Do you know someone who is so trendy that when they go shopping, they think their clothes are out of style before they can get them to the cash register? Laugh and learn with Holly Brubach’s A Dedicated Follower of Fashion. A collection of 27 essays published during the past two decades, Brubach’s writings offer insight on trends, designers, models, and photographers. There are chapters dedicated to men, shoes, visionaries, and plus-sizes. Luckily, the photographs featured were carefully selected, so some of fashion’s . . . er, more outrageous phases are kept within the text. It is a witty, educated observation that isn’t muddled into tedium or grandiosity. Brubach takes a scenic route from Paris to New York, with plenty of stops along the way.

One hundred and five years ago, a subtitle reading An Illustrated Monthly was added to the masthead of National Geographic. Since then, photographs featured in the magazine have told stories that reflect our world and the times in which we live. Beginning with those early photographs, six authors have compiled an era-by-era account of the 20th century in National Geographic Photographs: The Milestones (National Geographic Society, $50, 0792275209). Often working in rigorous or rudimentary settings, many of the photographers featured are true pioneers of photojournalism. Look on the wedding portrait of a late 19th-century Zulu couple; observe the conditions of an early 20th-century Mexican cigarette factory; visit Lappland, New York, the Arctic, and scores of other places and events that were hallmarks of the past century. Very often, photographers would return to a previous site with mixed results; progress is evident in many of these revisits, while other photographs reflect areas that remain untouched by time.

If breathtaking scenery and colorful history excites someone on your gift list, you can’t do much better than Scotland. Checkmark Books has captured the majesty and mystery of this gorgeous country in Heritage of Scotland: A Cultural History of Scotland and Its People ($29.95, 06003552609). Author Nathaniel Harris’s enormous undertaking covers everything from Scotland’s landscape to its literary offerings. Beautiful artwork and photographs are featured alongside an abundance of information about Scottish people and their traditions. And yes, clans, kilts, and bagpipes are included, but readers will soon discover there is so much more! Visit the Highland Games, look at priceless works of art, learn the complex linguistic history of the Scottish people, observe the country’s most famous structures, many dating back to prehistoric times. Heritage of Scotland is a great item for history buffs and anyone with Scottish roots.

It’s a classic dilemma: You’re standing in the video store, thinking, What’s that movie from the 1940s, the one where John Wayne plays a naval officer and has an affair with a nurse, played by Donna Reed? This dilemma is easily resolved with VideoHound’s War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film (Visible Ink, $19.95, 1578590892). Mike Mayo has compiled and arranged over 200 war movies according to the war depicted. This guide includes many documentaries and overlooked films, like The Fighting Sullivans and Come and See. There are sidebars profiling famous actors, listings of full movie credits, and 200 photographs to peruse. Mayo provides commentary and synopsis for each film, mentioning the controversies and histories surrounding some of Hollywood’s most powerful movies. Amid trivia and quotes, Mayo is kind enough to include a See Also section for each film, for moviewatchers who are interested in other films that are similar in content, direction, or have the same stars . . . just in case your first choice has been rented out!

The eyes have it Mother's birthday? Nephew's graduation? Second cousin twice removed's wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you've come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books,…

Travel

Review

Review by bookpagedev

No man is an island, goes the prose; but with this charming, subtly premonitory and often disarming book, we are un-Donne. According to Thurston Clarke, author of Searching for Crusoe: A Journey Among the Last Real Islands, there are those among us who have an innate affinity for islands as refuges from personal or material intrusions, as Gaugin-like paradises of sex and simplicity, or as boundary-free spiritual kingdoms.

Clarke calls it "islomania," and his own interest in the phenomenon, one that he has sympathized with since his childhood, is both objective and subjective. He wants "to account for a passion for islands that transcends cultures and centuries . . . why Chinese mythology places heaven on an archipelago of rocky islands, Green and Roman heroes inhabit the Islands of the Blessed, Christians built some of the holiest churches and monasteries on islands, and the reed islets of Lake Titicaca were sacred to the Incas." But he also feels a growing urgency to understand the phenomenon because "islands, like tropical rain forests, are an endangered geographical feature," threatened as much by the Global Village of mass culture as by global warming. "The longer I waited to discover why islands are so intoxicating, the greater the chance that their undefined and mysterious charms might vanish." He has plenty of cases in point: Key West, where Clarke spent three summers in the ’70s when it was "North America’s answer to the Foreign Legion" and which is now a Hooters headquarters; Anguilla, where the best hotel "resemble[s] a Moroccan village and offered California cuisine"; Majuro in the Marshall Islands, which Robert Louis Stevenson once called "the Pearl of the Pacific," but which 40 years of American trusteeship has turned into a "Pacific Appalachia of rusty pickups, plywood shacks and outhouses"; and Bainbridge Island, which Snow Falling on Cedars author David Guterson says has become "a neurotic place like anywhere else in the world." So Clarke finally settles on visiting three groups of islands: those that fulfill certain roles (a holy place, a prison, a utopia, etc.), those that have personal resonance (Campobello, the Scots Isle of Jura), and famous islands, including Bali-ha’i (or at least, the one believed to have inspired Michener’s special island), Atlantis (for which he travels to the Maldives, thought by scientists to be in imminent danger of drowning in the rising oceans), and Isla Robinson Crusoe, 400 miles off the coast of Chile.

The Crusoe Island, actually Mas a Tierra, is where a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk was marooned from 1704 to 1709; it is generally accepted that Defoe read the resulting stories about Selkirk and used them in the creation of his book. It is home to only about 200 residents, and Selkirk’s cave is a major tourist attraction (the natives usually call him "Crusoe" the fiction has overtaken the fact.) It’s a good introduction to Clarke’s search for the paradox of islands. Here he finds residents who consider its harsh outcroppings and wild birds beautiful, who value its "safety" from the wicked world and love the fact that they can only see water all around. And there are also the ones who come seeking perfect isolation and then find it awful and disturbing.

One of the most peculiar episodes retells Clarke’s sojourn on Banda Neira in the Spice Islands, those once golden isles that lured traders and navies from around the globe. Here he surrenders to the considerable charms of the ebullient Des Alwi, a sometime freedom fighter and political operative turned filmmaker, developer, philanthropist and cultural messiah. Des Alwi’s peculiar movie-idol hold over his countrymen is played against the memory of a 17th century Dutch massacre of thousands of Bandanese. Clarke’s portrait of one of the last Dutch plantation owners, a virtual Miss Havesham dependent on Des Alwi’s handouts, seems a cheap form of revenge. Still, the avaricious consumption of small countries by larger interests is a real and vital thread in the history and the mystery of islands.

Chilean connection Although Isla Robinson Crusoe is 400 miles west of Chile’s wine region, it’s impossible not to think of that country’s muscular and increasingly accomplished vintages when considering the myth of the marooned man. Miguel Torres’ 1997 Manso de Velasco cab ($24) is just like an old copy of Crusoe brought down from the attic: leather and must and a hint of fading and browning as you ease it open, but then layers of fruit and tobacco and wild berry resins come pouring out, defiant and then smoothed and with a final flourish of roasted coffee. Don’t wait for Friday.

Eve Zibart, who is the restaurant critic of the Weekend section of the Washington Post, has her own special island off the coast of South Carolina.

No man is an island, goes the prose; but with this charming, subtly premonitory and often disarming book, we are un-Donne. According to Thurston Clarke, author of Searching for Crusoe: A Journey Among the Last Real Islands, there are those among us who have…

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

One of my favorite characters in fiction is the Storekeeper in Phil Stong’s 1932 novel, State Fair. The Storekeeper is a cautious, skeptical fellow who believes that “Heaven ordains all things for the worst but more mischievously than tragically.” So don’t get too cocky: Don’t take the chains off your tires (it’s 1932 rural America, remember) just because it’s spring. Heaven may have plenty of mud in store and definitely will if you do take them off.

I’ve probably spent too much of my allotted span reading second and third-rate fiction, but I thought of the Storekeeper while reading Calvin Trillin’s Family Man. In these ruminations/memoirs about family life, Trillin holds, perhaps only half-jocularly, to a similar belief, the Evil Eye: “People who treat the Evil Eye with some respect can tell you that anyone handing out advice about family and thus implying that he and his family are so blessed, so close to perfection that it behooves them to share with others the secret of their success is asking for trouble.” Trillin skirts trouble with humor and dispenses only one really solid bit of advice to prospective parents: “Try to get one that doesn’t spit up.” Beyond that, he says, “your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.” The rest is indeed commentary on the obvious fact that his two daughters, Abigail and Sarah, have been the center of his and his wife Alice’s life and exceedingly funny commentary it is. Though this book will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates humor above the level of the hotfoot (not such a huge crowd, at that, in Adam Sandler’s America), it will be especially appreciated by anyone who happens to share Trillin’s prejudices and outlook.

For instance, in commenting on his family’s viewing and marching in the free-form, amateurish Halloween parades in their neighborhood of Greenwich Village, he says, “My interest in parades is usually limited by my failure to appreciate floats,” which rigidly separate paraders and spectators.

Exactly! Why, with such an attitude, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him say that clowns are not funny. He doesn’t, but he comes close in disparaging most children’s theater, in which “children would shrink into the corner of their seats as foolishly dressed people on-stage favored them with stupid pratfalls or double entendres that would make ,musicals, like Pippin and West Side Story, that trigger both laughs and a child’s sense of awe.

Though he might not be charmed by the comparison, as a humorist Trillin is a lot like H. Allen Smith, of blessed memory and such titles as Low Man on a Totem Pole. His approach, it might be said, is one thing leads to another. A chapter that starts out discussing changes in wedding conventions leads to the time he didn’t have a spare hand with which to comfort his wife in the delivery room because one hand was holding the wallet he was advised not to leave in the locker while the other was holding up the scrub pants with played-out elastic he was given to wear.

Throughout, there is a noticeable strain of the amusing old duffer (even when younger) whom the daughters have to keep in line, of every sitcom sappy pappy from Chester A. Riley to Archie Bunker. But then, he admits that he tends toward the sitcom tone of voice when writing about domestic matters.

Behind it, though, is a definite bedrock of sophisticated common sense, revealed in the remark that both he and Alice “had upbringings whose essential squareness we valued.” It’s no accident that their daughters, though born in that era, did not end up with names like Moon Unit.

Though Trillin has lived all his adult life in New York City, “Alice and I both found something off-putting in New York kids we heard about who seemed not just overprivileged but oversavvy,” and so from time to time they would take the girls “back home” for a “booster shot” of his native Kansas City, which he concedes has never left him.

Because, he writes, “I believe that the only time parents are absolutely relaxed about the safety and well-being of their child, of any age, is when that child is under the parents’ own roof, fast asleep.” That’s one truism that all parents whose children are the center of their life can say “amen” to, regardless of the state of their sense of humor. Reviewed by Roger Miller.

One of my favorite characters in fiction is the Storekeeper in Phil Stong's 1932 novel, State Fair. The Storekeeper is a cautious, skeptical fellow who believes that "Heaven ordains all things for the worst but more mischievously than tragically." So don't get too cocky: Don't…

NonfictionMemoir

Florence Williams: Queen of (broken) hearts

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Everyone has experienced some form of heartbreak—in love, at home, on the job or in the star-crossed universe. When this happens, many of us kick-start our recovery by eating a solo pint of ice cream, lolling on the couch in tatty pajamas, shout-singing to newly cruel love songs or taking long, tearful walks in the rain.

These familiar remedies do help temper our emotions, as well as add hits of humor to romantic comedies. But what about new bodily pain that lingers? Unusual aches that confound? After all, heartbreak affects us physically, too. We cannot truly separate mind from body, head from heart.

Florence Williams knows this all too well. As she writes in her fascinating, frequently funny and altogether life-affirming new book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, when her husband of 25 years informed her that their marriage was over, “I felt like I’d been axed in the heart, like I was missing a limb, set adrift in an ocean, loosed in a terrifying wood.”

Read our starred review of ‘Heartbreak’ by Florence Williams

Post-romance ruination wasn’t something Williams had previously encountered, having met her husband on her first day of college. “I was drawn to him,” she said in a call to her home in Washington, D.C. When their marriage ended, since she’d spent her entire adulthood side by side with him, “I had to learn lessons in my 50s that people normally learn from dating in their 20s and 30s.”

Williams is the author of two previous popular science books, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (2012) and The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (2017), as well as a contributing editor for Outside magazine and a science writer for the New York Times. So when heartbreak engulfed her personal life, she became an assiduous and motivated student of the science of devastation. “It’s my mode of trying to understand what’s going on,” Williams says. “I’m the sort of person who wants to know what my body is doing; I want to know test results. I believe knowledge is power.”

In pursuit of that knowledge, Williams traveled across America and overseas to numerous laboratories, scrutinizing her very cells, analyzing the changes in her health and spelunking the hallucinatory hollows of her own mind. (Indeed, the supervised use of MDMA was involved.) She even interviewed the U.K.’s Minister of Loneliness and took a moving and illuminating tour of the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia.

“There’s something about heartbreak and meeting people from this vulnerable place that makes people want to help.”

As scientists, researchers and other intellectually curious sorts gave Williams access to their work, they shared not only their findings on the risks of chronic loneliness (it increases the risk of early death by 26%) but also the fallout from their own painful romantic experiences. “There’s something about heartbreak and meeting people from this vulnerable place that makes people want to help,” Williams says. “A lot of barriers come down when you’re real with people, and that felt true when I talked to the scientists. I was really moved by how many of them shared their own vulnerabilities.”

In particular, a rather poetic comment from a genomics researcher bore out Williams’ persistent sense of urgency. “When Steve Cole said to me that heartbreak is one of the hidden land mines of human existence, and that it can put us on a path to early death, that was so arresting!” she says. “It made me want to drop everything and focus on getting better.” It also made her want to share what she had discovered with others. “Everyone else needs to know this, too. This is important.”

It was also vitally important for Williams, who says she “grew up spending summers living in a van with my dad, driving out West and canoeing every day,” to recenter herself in nature. Her husband had been a similarly adventurous partner, taking regular wilderness treks with Williams and their two children, who are now 18 and 20. But running rivers and hiking through forests on her own was something she’d never considered doing.

“A sense of curiosity is really helpful for emotional resilience.”

Williams explains, “When you live your life with a certain set of expectations, and all of a sudden the ground falls away . . . it challenges everything you think you know about yourself and the world, but it’s ultimately this wonderful opportunity to figure out who you are.” Williams has now completed a solo whitewater rafting trip.

Time and time again, Williams’ research makes the case “that a sense of curiosity is really helpful for emotional resilience. Learning to be more open, to cultivate beauty even when emotions are difficult, that kind of self-understanding is really helpful.”

When it comes to heartbreak (and Heartbreak), Williams adds, “Grief is a very human emotion, and sometimes we’re not very good at paying attention to our emotional state. . . . We’re so good at glossing over and distracting ourselves—at saying, ‘Everything’s fine here.’ But when life forces us to put down that delusion, it enriches our capacity to connect with other people. Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about, you know?”

Florence Williams author photo credit: Sue Barr

For a sunnier view of love and connection, try one of these four perceptive nonfiction reads.

When the science writer's marriage ended, she looked to lab technicians and researchers to help soothe her heartache.

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