Writing teacher Goldberg (Three Simple Lines) recalls how she clawed her way out of writer’s block—a term she’s loath to use because of its “long history connected with fear”—during the first two years of the pandemic. Without a writing project in mind for the first time in as long as she could remember, Goldberg found structure in weekly meetups with a writer friend, and even confessed her struggles at Ernest Hemingway’s grave site (“I dried up after fifteen books.... One came out after the other, crowded to get in line. Then nothing...”). She also wryly contemplated a new passion (“race car driving?”) and indulged in good-natured self-pity. Solace came in the form of reading and spending time in nature, though the cure turned out to be more mysterious. After two years with little creative drive, and apropos of nothing in particular—leading workshops energized her, but didn’t provide a creative spark—Goldberg felt “a shift inside me... of inspiration actually breath[ing] in me again.” The book concludes with a writing “roadmap” that contains prompts based on each chapter, but much of the author’s wisdom is indirectly conveyed through her anxious musings on the writing process. Though these can slide into self-indulgence (“Shouldn’t I shut up and make way for writing by people of color? What use do I have?”), they often provide a refreshingly honest look at the struggles of the creative mind. Writers waiting for the muse to strike will find comfort and plenty of useful tips. (July)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pop This! podcaster Warner (Rise Up and Sing!) presents an animated ode to the 1987 film Dirty Dancing. Using her personal connection with the movie as a springboard to explore its themes and appeal, Warner recounts how watching Dirty Dancing on VHS the year of its release, when she was nine, spurred her sexual awakening and “helped shape my burgeoning feminism.” It’s the film’s feminist sensibility that Warner celebrates the most, lauding the movie’s refusal “to moralize sex as bad” in its depiction of protagonist Baby Houseman’s lust for her dance partner Johnny Castle. According to Warner, the subplot revolving around Baby’s friend Penny’s need for an abortion is similarly forward-thinking, portraying the procedure as “necessary, life-saving healthcare.” Elsewhere, Warner details how Eleanor Bergstein drew on her memories of learning to mambo on vacation in the Catskills as a teenager while writing the screenplay, and offers a song-by-song breakdown of the soundtrack (she calls “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes “flawless” and finds Tom Johnston’s “Where Are You Tonight?” “unexceptional and inoffensive”). Though Warner faults Dirty Dancing for lacking Black and Hispanic characters while heavily featuring Black and Latin music and dance, her tone is mostly laudatory, electrified by the enthusiasm and admiration of a true fan. It’s a fun commentary on an enduring pop culture touchstone. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

The lukewarm debut from business consultant Griffith trots out familiar advice on how women can get in touch with their “authentic self” while starting their own company. The lifestyle guidance is enthusiastic if trite. For instance, Griffith encourages resilience in the face of adversity by telling how Frida Kahlo took up painting while recovering from a near-fatal streetcar accident. The suggestions are often bogged down by hollow self-help lingo, as when Griffith urges readers to “design a life that is a total reflection of you” without elaborating on how to do so, and declares “amplification is the path to authentic power,” by which she apparently means to be confident in oneself. The guidance on setting up a business is thankfully more specific, weighing in on how to spot trends, select a business model, and market one’s company (she recommends blasting a consistent message across promotional channels for maximum effect). There are a handful of curveballs, such as the suggestion to practice salesmanship by making “outrageous asks” meant to inspire others’ admiration of one’s chutzpah, but most of the advice is overly familiar or vague. Heavy on cheerleading and light on originality, this doesn’t make much of an impression. Agent: Abby Walters, CAA. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Science journalist Jabr debuts with an enlightening examination of how living organisms have influenced their environments. According to Jabr, mammoths likely helped permafrost, and the carbon sequestered therein, stay frozen by digging it out from under “heat-trapping layers of snow” while rummaging for food. The arrival of land plants produced enough oxygen to thicken the ozone, which provided protection from ultraviolet radiation and enabled the emergence of the first terrestrial animals. Microbes have had a massive impact on the planet, Jabr contends, describing how ocean-dwelling microorganisms possibly “helped create the continents” by producing wet clay that “effectively lubricat[ed]” the ocean crust, promoting the process by which rock slips into the Earth’s mantle, melts into magma, gets expelled by volcanoes, and then solidifies as new land. Lamenting humanity’s outsized ecological footprint, Jabr notes how homo sapiens have acidified the oceans, stymied fire’s role in regulating forest ecosystems, and generated vast amounts of plastics that are killing wildlife. The science highlights the complex ways in which the planet has been shaped by its inhabitants, and Jabr’s sobering look at the harm wrought by humans finds some hope amid the gloom, suggesting that innovating carbon capture technology and cultivating oceanic kelp forests constitute promising strategies for sequestering atmospheric carbon. The result is an edifying and holistic view of life on Earth. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Millions of acres of rural land have been systematically taken from African Americans since the end of Reconstruction, reports essayist Baker in her vigorous debut history, which argues emphatically for this land to be restored to Black ownership. Her narrative comprises three parallel threads: emotional stories of her own grandparents, who persevered in maintaining their beloved rural lifestyle on 100 acres of North Carolina land throughout her childhood; accounts of other families whose access to the land was chipped away or lost over the course of the 20th century; and a chronology of anti-Black government policies, such as eminent domain seizures and inequitable loan terms. These policies, according to Baker, formed the mechanism by which land was transferred en masse from Black ownership and into the hands of the government, corporations, and wealthy white people, a historical and ongoing process undergirding today’s racial wealth gap. She writes evocatively about Black farmers’ relationship with the land and argues passionately for Black Americans to return to family farms (she’s unabashedly utopian on this point, and her frustration with Black people uninterested in rural life is palpable). Baker keeps tightly focused on the topic and writes in a conversational prose that casually draws on a wide range of thinkers. Educators in particular will find this invaluable. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

The rich and famous are just as obsessed with their pets as everyone else, according to this charming debut memoir from Attas, a veterinarian whose practice, City Pets, has been making house calls in New York City since 1992. Born in Queens, Attas was hired by an Upper East Side “Vet to the Stars” in 1987, but claims she was fired in a fit of jealousy after VIP client Joan Rivers specifically requested her services. Rivers went on to become a loyal supporter of Attas’s private practice, the client roster of which ballooned with celebrities. Chronicling her encounters with notable New Yorkers, Attas portrays them as by turns endearingly vulnerable and incomprehensibly weird: a bighearted but clueless Cher asks for a midnight appointment for a dog with a contagious case of mange that she’d found in Italy and flown all the way back to New York; an eye-contact avoidant Ivana Trump never takes Attas’s advice, and instead goes diagnosis shopping when she doesn’t like what she hears. Attas also recounts her mirror-opposite experiences with that other class of New Yorkers in need of house calls: the homebound and disabled (“I am pretty sure I was the only health care professional she had any contact with,” Attas writes of one such client). This bubbly tell-all has fascinating depths. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

This upbeat survey from New School historian Bellows (American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination) profiles 10 American explorers, from the 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition’s guide, translator, and canoe pilot Sacagawea—a new mother and teenage war captive at the start of the journey—to astronaut Sally Ride, who in 1983 was the first American woman to go to space. While Bellows says she aims to move past a “limited definition of exploration which emphasizes the acquisition of land” and highlight the achievements of Black and Native explorers, she still makes room for fairly forgiving looks at white frontier figures who have received more scrutiny in recent years. For example, she characterizes homesteader Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family as “unwitting” participants in the theft of Native land, and when it comes to conservationist John Muir, she does not address how his influential ideas about “preservation” erased ways in which Native peoples were active caretakers of the land. Most captivating is a chapter on African American missionary William Sheppard, who publicized evidence of Belgium’s colonial genocide in the Congo, sparking international outrage and intervention. Some strikingly luminous moments shine through, like when Sacagawea refuses to be left behind for the final 20-mile trek to the Pacific because she wants to see whales. Empathetic yet lacking some up-to-date critical perspective, this is a mixed bag. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Disturbed by a rise of xenophobic extremism in her home state of Texas, journalist Goudeau (After the Last Border) sets out in this ruminative account to investigate whether her family has always been as welcoming toward strangers as they were during her childhood. She is shocked to discover that her ancestors tore a destructive path across America that included owning slaves and participating in lynchings and feuds. Tracing her family’s migration from Virginia—where in the late 18th century her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Slowman Reese was a plantation overseer—to Tennessee and then Texas, Goudeau unspools a narrative in which the family’s early entrenchment in slavery festered as white supremacist beliefs and a penchant for violence in Slowman’s descendants—whom, in Goudeau’s telling, went on to play surpisingly pivotal yet below-the-radar roles in Texas history. Among them are Robert Leftwich, a land grant agent involved in early 19th-century schemes to get Anglo Texans to rebel against Mexico; Sam Houston Reese, a sheriff who waged a deadly feud with his political rivals in the 1890s; and the author’s great-uncle Frank Probst, a Texas Ranger implicated in the 1945 murder of a Latino migrant worker family. Introspective and detailed, Goudeau’s questing narrative, which strikes out in many directions in search of answers, at times feels circuitous. Still, it’s a valuable contribution to Texas history. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Atlantic staff writer Parker (Turned On) gathers gemlike tributes to “the essence... the quality worth exploring and if possible exalting” in childhood memories, day-to-day irritations, internet videos, fictional heroes, and anything else “that gets me through the next five minutes.” Entries celebrate a squirrel’s wild “pouncing runs”; fictional spy Jason Bourne as an exemplar of the “absurd condition of man”; and, in a decidedly unsentimental poem, meditation as an experience that can feel like being enclosed in “a warehouse of mental din/ pursued by a grinning zilch, with two ravens tugging at your intestines.” Prizing linguistic particularity over sentimentality, Parker offers some loose advice for living (give money to panhandlers whole-heartedly, because doing so means participating in “the same divine economy that big-banged you into being”), but is at his best when poring over life’s strange resonances. For instance, his wistful ode to crying babies recalls the “bitter clarion” of his infant son’s voice (“In the night, it would rouse me like an electric shock”) and ends with a reflection on the shortcomings of speech: “Soon you’ll be talking, and language will betray you.... But right now your voice is very direct, very effective. It’s going right through my head.” This pays vivid homage to the beauty of the mundane. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Harvard law professor Lessig (The Future of Ideas) and Stanford legal scholar Seligman investigate in this labyrinthine study several pathways by which a “MAGA Republican” candidate might narrowly lose the electoral college vote, but triumph through legal chicanery. Included are several scenarios that hinge on the byzantine Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which governs how Congress counts electoral college votes from states. In one such scheme, a rogue Republican governor alleges nonexistent election fraud to certify a bogus slate of electors, and a Republican House majority votes to accept it. Other scenarios include faithless Democratic electors coerced by right-wing threats; the passage of state laws declaring the state legislature the judge of election results; and state legislatures simply canceling a presidential election and choosing the state’s electors themselves, a procedure that the authors worry could be interpreted as constitutional. Lessig and Seligman explain these strategies in intricate detail while keeping their arguments lucid and comprehensible for laypeople. They recommend legal tweaks to make subversion harder, but warn that no law can protect election integrity if politicians won’t defend it. Though the authors’ forecasts sometimes seem far-fetched, for the most part, this is a sobering look at how a coup might proceed through the courts. It’s worth checking out for legal observers and those involved with electoral law. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink