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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Consider all the universal mundanities of caregiving: the endless feedings, diaper changes, cleanups, sleepless nights and confining days, not to mention all the laundry. What if, with the help of journalist, activist and mother Angela Garbes, we could radically reconsider the incredible value of this work? In Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Garbes swoops from the universal to the personal to the downright intimate, offering an all-encompassing vision of a more socially and economically just way of caring for one another that, de facto, would improve our individual and collective lives.

The author of the hybrid memoir Like a Mother, a 2018 NPR best book of the year, Garbes serves up her own experiences as a first-generation Filipina, daughter, wife and mother in her second book. She calls Part I of Essential Labor “A Personal History of Mothering in America” and uses it to delineate her social relationship to motherhood, including her own family’s complicated origins in the U.S., beginning when her parents emigrated from the Philippines in 1970. Part II, “Exploring Mothering as Social Change,” expands into the kinds of activism that mothering can and should inspire to create a more equitable world.

Garbes wants so much more for her mixed-race children than the racialized, gendered immigrant experience that her parents endured—yet there is more to mothering than personal circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic, Garbes says, changed how we care for each other, revealing that “mothering is some of the only truly essential work humans do.” She also identifies child care as a political issue—a kind of infrastructure for families that needs bipartisan government support.

At the same time that workplaces gave way to home “offices” during the pandemic, nursing homes became off-limits, schools and child care centers closed, and families were left with the work of finding other ways of caring for young people, elderly people and themselves. The myth of a self-sustaining family was no longer viable, Garbes observes; mothering needed the support of communities and multiple generations. The work of mothering, taking care of ourselves and others, became more essential than ever.

There is a great deal to digest here, and Garbes’ analyses will certainly resonate with people whose caregiving responsibilities increased during the pandemic. Yet by identifying the inherent power of mothering as a force for change, Garbes makes her message relevant to a broader audience. Indeed, as Essential Labor makes clear, all our fates are intertwined.

Angela Garbes swoops from the universal to the intimate as she offers a vision of mothering that would improve our individual and collective lives.
Brian Morton’s hilarious yet tender memoir of caring for his aging mother takes a difficult topic and transforms it into the soulful tale of a spirited woman.

Much of Kim Stanley Robinson’s prodigious science fiction has ecological underpinnings—so it comes as no surprise that the oft-decorated writer has a real-life passion for wilderness. More specifically, Robinson loves the Sierra Nevada, the geological backbone of California, where he has lived most of his life. In The High Sierra, a capacious and truly original work of nonfiction, Robinson expresses his enduring appreciation for these mountains and the time he has spent there. A mashup of travelogue, geology lesson, hiking guide, history and meditation, all wrapped in a revealing and personal memoir (and illustrated with scores of gorgeous color photographs and illustrations), the book is, in essence, an exuberant celebration of finding purpose in nature.

The Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-winning writer first visited the Sierra as a college student almost 50 years ago, and since then he has made more than a hundred return visits, spending untold hours in its eternal landscape. There have been group excursions and solo treks in every season. In his hippie days, he even enhanced the mountain high by dropping acid. Accounts of these experiences, sometimes risky, sometimes funny, but always deeply meaningful, give shape to Robinson’s larger narrative. The memories are intercut and augmented by chapters delineated by categories such as geology, Sierra people, routes and moments of being. These disparate chapters coalesce into a surprisingly seamless narrative that conveys the full measure of Robinson’s deep affection for the place and its past, as well as its significance to him personally.

Robinson’s writing is companionable and welcoming, never dry or preachy, as any field guide worth its salt should be. There is unconventional humor—he classifies place names as the good, the bad and the ugly, for instance, and his chapters on fish, frogs and bighorn sheep are all grouped under “Sierra People”—but cases of appalling human behaviors, past and present, are never glossed over.

Robinson introduces the usual suspects in the history of the Sierra—John Muir, Clarence King—but devotes equal attention to less familiar faces. He taps into the work of other Sierra-loving writers, too, including early feminist Mary Austin and the poet Gary Snyder, who is Robinson’s friend and mentor. He even shares some of his own youthful, heartfelt poetry, composed amid the elation of the mountain terrain.

Although Robinson’s mountaineering focus is the Sierra, he does take readers on brief forays into the Swiss Alps (including an account of his ascent of the Matterhorn). But The High Sierra should not be narrowly viewed as a book only for the die-hard outdoorsperson. Robinson’s greater project, at which he succeeds splendidly, is to share the magic of his personal happy place, to promote not only its admiration but also its preservation. When asked why this is a lifelong project of his, Robinson says there is no satisfactory answer, except to pose a question of his own: Why live?

The venerable sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson shares his lifelong devotion to hiking the high Sierra in a kaleidoscopic love letter to a majestic landscape.
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The greatest pleasures of Reason for Hope are found in the passages about the chimpanzees of Gombe, Africa, to which Goodall is passionately devoted, and in her insights into spirituality and human moral evolution. Her stories are so brimming with emotion and her philosophical views so unpretentious and calming that one has the impression of sitting cozily with a friend.

Dr. Goodall portrays the events of her life as building upon each other and pointing her directly toward Africa, chimpanzees, and her work in environmental preservation. Early on she felt a deep empathy for animals and a desire to study them unobtrusively in their natural habitats. She relates a delightful memory of hiding out in the straw of a henhouse at the age of four to experience first-hand how a chicken lays an egg.

When Dr. Louis Leakey offered her a job studying the chimpanzees of Gombe, she began her life’s work. Her chimpanzee observations are captivating, as are the comparisons between them and humans. The chimpanzees have tender, caring relationships, but can also be ruthless toward members of the outgroup. She sees human precursors to both altruism and savage brutality in the chimpanzees.

Religion and spirituality factor greatly in Goodall’s life. She feels God (the same God all religions share) all around her, but especially in the jungles of Africa. What makes her book such a delight is her unbridled, intelligent optimism.

Although deeply affected by the genocide, terrorism, animal cruelty, deforestation, and other horrors of our age, she has faith in the potential goodness of the human race, and in the benevolence of God. Her strong views are delivered so rationally, and in such a serene way, that not a trace of condescension or bitterness shows through. She is a beautiful role model for these sometimes ugly days. ¦ Julie Anderson writes and stays home with her two sons.

The greatest pleasures of Reason for Hope are found in the passages about the chimpanzees of Gombe, Africa, to which Goodall is passionately devoted, and in her insights into spirituality and human moral evolution. Her stories are so brimming with emotion and her philosophical views…

You don’t need to know anything about the titular subject of Courtney Maum’s The Year of the Horses to appreciate this candid and engaging memoir of how rediscovering a long-abandoned passion helped lift her out of a crisis.

Four years after the birth of her daughter, Nina, novelist Maum found herself drowning in a whirlpool of insomnia-fueled depression, creative stasis and dissatisfaction in her marriage to Leo, a French filmmaker. “I am a blob,” she writes, “struggling through the hours with eyes that will not close.” In search of the relief that even medication and a wise-beyond-his-young-years therapist couldn’t provide, Maum turned to one of her childhood pursuits: horseback riding.

It had been 29 years since Maum abandoned riding lessons at age 9, but she never lost her love for these majestic creatures. Her first lesson as an adult—when “the heat of that beast underneath me, the breadth of his body and the pump of his great heart, had touched something primitive inside”—instantly rekindled her affection. That encounter eventually led her into the “weird sport” of polo, where she learned that putting aside the futile quest for mastery in favor of simply having fun was the path to finding joy.

Through flashbacks to her privileged childhood in Greenwich, Connecticut, Maum also explores some of the roots of her adult angst. Her parents divorced when she was 9, and her younger brother, Brendan, developed some rare and serious medical problems that added to the family’s stress. She traces how some of her more troublesome personality traits from that period—notably a perfectionism that eventually expressed itself as anorexia—continued to manifest in adulthood.

Maum emerged from finding her footing in the world of horses “clearer and braver regarding what I needed in my marriage,” simultaneously discovering a focus and patience that allowed her “to reconnect with the daughter I’d lost track of.” While Maum’s prescription isn’t for everyone, her story reveals how “what pulls us out of darkness can be surprising.” The Year of the Horses shows how the willingness to put aside fear and take on a new challenge in adulthood can unlock a happier life.

You don’t need to know anything about horses to appreciate Courtney Maum’s engaging memoir of rediscovering this long-abandoned passion at a moment of crisis.

Jessi Klein’s second essay collection, I’ll Show Myself Out, finds Klein in her 40s, parenting a toddler and trying to regroup in unfamiliar Los Angeles, a world away from her beloved New York City. “I constantly feel like I’m a leaky raft in open water,” she writes in “Listening to Beyoncé in the Parking Lot of Party City.” It’s a thoughtful essay that laments the changes of midlife and motherhood; it also had me laughing out loud, wishing I could share it with a friend.

Some of Klein’s essays are light—the one about her love for designer Nate Berkus, for instance, or learning to live with her ugly feet—while others dig a little deeper. She builds one essay around the “underwear sandwich,” a contraption postpartum moms wear to cope with bleeding and birth injuries, somehow managing to make fresh, feminist points in the process (and, yes, making me laugh out loud again). These voicey, funny essays give unexpected dimension to familiar topics, such as how widowers remarry faster than widows or that the mommy wine-drinking trend is out of hand.

One of the collection’s themes is anxiety—Klein’s, her partner’s and her child’s—and how it can rear up in the most innocuous-seeming moments. Another is Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, which Klein muses on to marvelous effect throughout the book. She turns the narrative template on its head, positing that pregnancy, birth and early motherhood are full of rigors and pitfalls, as difficult and life-altering as any masculine adventure. “We just feel the guilt of being terrible monsters, ironically, at the exact moments that we actually, as mothers, become the most heroic,” she writes.

Klein, who has produced and written for TV shows such as “Saturday Night Live,” “Inside Amy Schumer” and “Big Mouth,” fills in the picture of a woman at midlife who’s beginning to make sense of it all. This collection is as entertaining and heartfelt, personal and comic as they come.

Jessi Klein’s second essay collection is full of voicey, funny pieces that give unexpected dimension to the familiar topics of motherhood and midlife.
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As a person growing old more rapidly than he cares to contemplate, I can tell you that no one in his youth or even early middle age thinks he will ever get old. It is a beneficial trick life plays on us, because if we comprehended then what awaits us, we would abandon everything out of shock. Once we get there, or close to there, however, it doesn’t matter; it is all right; the intervening years have cushioned the shock.

Even the sight of friends and relatives in their old age does not convince us. To help us understand this realm that we think we will never inhabit, Mary Pipher, a clinical psychologist and author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, has written Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders (Simon ∧ Schuster Audio, $18, 0671044753).

Another Country is an exceptionally helpful and instructive book, written in a matching workmanlike style. Stories of people confronting old age, either their own or others’, form its heart, though one that at times tends to bleed. The stories come from interviews and therapy sessions that Pipher, who is 50 and lives in Nebraska, held with mostly rural Midwesterners, both black and white, in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, and in all stages and conditions of life poor, healthy, sick, wealthy.

I wanted to learn about our community-based country that has almost vanished, and also to understand the country of old age, Pipher writes. Because, she says a few pages later, as a nation, we are not organized in a way that makes aging easy. Indeed we are not. The twin topics of Pipher’s book are the segregation of the young from the old and the consequent difficulties this segregation makes for the elderly and those who care for them.

The young, of course, have always done things differently from the old, but Pipher suggests, and I think rightly, that perhaps never before have the two generations been so far removed in body, mind, and spirit, as they are in America today, to the immeasurable detriment of both.

The author and the people she talks to have many examples of the generational differences, but to me the most telling remark is made early on in the book.

Our parents’ generation was pre-irony, Pipher writes. Irony implies a distance between one’s words and one’s world, a cool remove that is a late-century phenomenon . . . [Freud] gave my generation the notion that underneath one idea is another, that behind our surface behavior is a different motive . . . But many people older than a certain age grew up believing that the surface is all there is. This may make it sound as if the young are clever and the elderly gullible, but her implication seems to be rather that irony has introduced a slickness inimical to plain and forthright dealing. People born early in the century, she writes, are the last Americans to grow up in a world in which all behavior mattered. Her great concern is that we get together ( communities keep people healthy; without community there is no morality ), and in her suggestions for achieving this, the advantage falls to the practices of our elders (a word she prefers to elderly ). In nothing is this more true than in the matter of physical closeness.

The book discusses many other significant subjects: the importance of the grandparent/grandchild relationship; the profound differences between the young-old (in their sixties and seventies) and the old-old (eighties and nineties); the assertion that rest homes are the concrete embodiment of failed social and cultural policies toward the old. As for the elders themselves, I could have composed a column of their comments alone and produced a review of this book at least as good as the dithyramb above. But for a parting shot I’ll limit myself to this, from Bette Davis, because it captures both the central difficulty of the aged the waning of powers and the qualities, like resiliency and fortitude, they summon to deal with it: Old age, La Belle Davis said, isn’t for sissies. Roger Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger@bookpage.com.

As a person growing old more rapidly than he cares to contemplate, I can tell you that no one in his youth or even early middle age thinks he will ever get old. It is a beneficial trick life plays on us, because if we…

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