Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend
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Rebecca Romney. S&S/Rucci, $29.99 (400p) ISBN 978-1-9821-9024-8
In this astute inquiry, rare books dealer Romney (coauthor of Printer’s Error) profiles the largely forgotten women writers who influenced Jane Austen. Romney suggests that Austen’s ambiguous endings that feature villains who escape their comeuppance reflect the imprint of Charlotte Smith, who wrote such feminist novels as Desmond to support herself and her children after separating from her husband left her destitute. Sexist double standards were a constant in the Georgian writers’ lives, Romney notes, describing how the kind of brash literary criticism that earned Samuel Johnson fame brought mainly scorn for his contemporary, novelist Charlotte Lennox (“Women could be witty—but not too witty”). Incisively dissecting how Austen’s forebears got written out of the English canon, Romney shows how late-19th-century male critics unfavorably compared them with Austen despite rarely pitting the era’s male authors against her or each other, implying that the critics were only willing to recognize a single, token woman author. Romney also makes a vehement case that Austen’s influences are major talents in their own right, as when she argues that Frances Burney’s “straight talk” style enabled her to directly tackle such topics as catcalling that Austen’s subtler approach handled only incidentally. This is a must for Janeites. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary. (Feb.)
Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future
Neil Shubin. Dutton, $32 (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-18652-7
In this dazzling report, Shubin (Some Assembly Required), a biology professor at the University of Chicago, examines what the Earth’s poles reveal about the planet and the universe. Describing how a team led by Australian explorer Douglas Mawson became the first to find a meteorite in Antarctica during a 1912 excursion that Mawson only narrowly survived after his companion and supplies disappeared down a crevasse, Shubin points out that subsequent study of space rocks preserved in ice there showed many were over a million years older than Earth and offered clues about what material “swirled around the sun prior to the formation of the planets.” Antarctica had vibrant rain forests 90 million years ago, Shubin notes, discussing how ice overtook the continent after atmospheric carbon bonding with rock from the newly formed Himalayan Mountains triggered worldwide cooling. Elsewhere, Shubin offers hair-raising accounts of his own polar voyages, including a 2002 trip to Canada’s Ellesmere Island during which 70 mph winds shredded his tent, and fascinating trivia on the adaptations of Arctic fauna (the Arctic woolly bear caterpillar spends 11 months of the year frozen solid, emerging every July for several years to feast until it stores enough energy to metamorphose into a moth). This enlightens and amazes. Photos. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman, Inc. (Feb.)
The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering
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Daniel Light. Norton, $32.50 (496p) ISBN 978-1-324-06621-7
Mountain climber Light debuts with a high-octane history of mountaineering. Beginning the account in 1802, with explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s 19,286-foot ascent of Chimborazo, a volcano in Ecuador—the first climb by a European on record—Light describes how Humboldt, even though he did not reach the summit (he and his ill-equipped party were stymied by a “giant crevasse”), afterward embarked on a sold-out lecture tour that sparked the “Golden Age of Alpinism” by inspiring a heated competition for “the world altitude record.” Light vividly narrates some of the era’s most famous climbs—including Edward Whymper’s summiting of the Matterhorn in 1865 and George Dixon Longstaff’s ascent of India’s Nanda Devi in 1905—while making clear that these white expedition leaders were not the first or most impressive climbers to top the world’s most daunting peaks. He notes, for example, that 15th-century Incan priests ascended Llulliallaco, a 22,110-foot volcano, and also devotes much of his narrative to the feats of Indigenous guides who routinely outperformed early European climbers. Mountaineering quickly took on a bitter and competitive edge that, as Light amusingly recounts, sometimes led to sniping and slander, like an anonymous article that cast doubt on mountaineer William Woodman Graham’s 1883 ascent of the Himalayan peak Kabru by claiming that, based on his descriptions, he must have climbed the wrong mountain. It’s a spirited, adventuresome chronicle. (Nov.)
The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens
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Nicola Clark. Pegasus, $32 (384p) ISBN 978-1-63936-809-9
Historian Clark (Six Lives) paints a captivating group portrait of the “phalanx of pretty faces” who served as ladies-in-waiting to the six wives of Henry VIII from 1501 to 1547. As royal retinue, they routinely shared a room with the queen and, occasionally, with the king, Clark explains. Among them is Bessie Blount, who gave birth to the king’s son Henry Fitzroy while his first wife Catherine of Aragon, mother of Princess Mary, struggled through a series of stillbirths—a fact that contributed, Clark notes, to Henry’s relentless pursuit of a legitimate son by churning through five additional queens. Other subjects include the “immovably loyal” Maria de Salinas, who spied on Anne Boleyn for a soon-to-be-sidelined Catherine; and Jane Parker, who married Anne Boleyn’s brother and then turned on him during Anne’s downfall (she likely gave evidence that led to his execution). Throughout, Clark highlights how the queen’s privy chamber served as a staging ground for plots and schemes involving marriage, sex, and high-profile gifts that were carefully designed to impact the affairs of state. It’s an astute study of how the personal and political were deeply intertwined at Tudor courts. (Jan.)
The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture
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Karen Lemmey, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura. Princeton Univ, $65 (292p) ISBN 978-0-691-26149-2
Curators Lemmey and Yasumura team up with Wofford, an art professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, to scrupulously trace the way race has been depicted in American sculpture. For example, the authors explore how white sculptors in the early 20th century reinforced narratives of power with public monuments of Confederate generals. At the same time, they also racially “othered” nonwhite peoples by using crude stereotypes in statues and everyday objects (see the “Indian Head” nickel, which circulated between 1913 and 1938 and ironically sets a “romanticized” profile of an Native person alongside the word “Liberty”). The book’s second half comprises essays from contributors including art historian Renée Ater, who unpacks the ways sculptors have highlighted the horrors of lynching. Elsewhere, curator Claudia E. Zapata investigates how Chicano artists have reclaimed the racist trope of the “sleeping Mexican” with works like Judith Baca’s Big Pancho, which covers such a figure with photos taken of the 2006 Day Without an Immigrant protest. Throughout, the contributors’ fine-grained analysis supports broader insights into how the medium—often seen as a record of literal historical truth—has given white sculptors undue leeway to render racial or ethnic “truths” while also inspiring nonwhite artists to push back. The result is a stimulating study of the intersection between race and art. Photos. (Nov.)
Bibliophobia: A Memoir
Sarah Chihaya. Random House, $29 (224p) ISBN 978-0-593-59472-8
Passionate reading entwines with madness in essayist and NYU English instructor Chihaya’s plaintive debut. The author recaps her history of mental illness, including three suicide attempts, which culminated in a 2019 nervous breakdown provoked by “bibliophobia,” or the intense fear of writing and reading. Along the way, she interprets her autobiography through critical appreciations of books that shaped her and her scholarly vocation. The Anne of Green Gables series, in which Chihaya immersed herself during childhood, provided a refuge from her abusive dad and her shyness. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye awakened her to issues of social justice and racism and shed light on her feelings of marginalization as a Japanese American. A.S. Byatt’s Possession, about two scholars who fall in love as they study Victorian poets who might have fallen in love, illuminated Chihaya’s destructive pattern of treating her own lovers and friends as if they were characters in her life story. Chihaya’s depictions of her depression are evocative and astute (“I was accustomed, then addicted, to what little pain there was,” she writes of her cutting habit), and her literary analysis is thought-provoking and graceful (Possession ignites “a pleasurably futile search for complete knowledge of the other that can never be attained—and yet—we cannot stop trying”). The result is a revelatory meditation on the unsettling resonances between life and literature. Agent: Hafizah Geter, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)
Mainline Mama: A Memoir
Keeonna Harris. Amistad, $26.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-06-320569-7
In this stunning debut account, Harris, a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, discusses raising a child while her husband was incarcerated. Growing up in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood in the 1980s, Harris harbored dreams of becoming an obstetrician. She got pregnant in ninth grade, however, and shortly after her son’s birth, the father, Jason, was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for gang-related crimes. Harris regularly visited and wrote to Jason, and the couple got married while he was still behind bars. In evocative prose, Harris illuminates the experience of coming to “know prisons like a close relative,” bonding with other women whose partners were imprisoned, and learning how to maintain her connection with Jason while building a meaningful life apart from him and completing a degree in women’s studies. Harris frames her narrative with revealing letters to herself (“To the outside world, you look good.... People assume you’re some magical Negro because you don’t look crazy, your kids aren’t locked up, and Jason got out of prison and now works a regular job”) that provide unflinching insight into the plight of women in her position. This affecting dispatch from inside the carceral state is not to be missed. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)
Band of Sisters: Madeleine Pauliac, the Women of the Blue Squadron, and Their Daring Rescue Missions in the Last Days of World War II
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Philippe Maynial, trans. from French by Richard Bernstein. Rowman & Littlefield, $27.95 (144p) ISBN 978-1-5381-9879-7
Madeline Pauliac, the intrepid leader of the Blue Squadron, a task force of nurses who in the final year of WWII crisscrossed newly liberated Europe in search of French citizens freed from Nazi camps, takes center stage in this evocative debut history from her nephew. As a medical doctor, Pauliac had run a refugee orphanage in Paris during the war (the basis for the 2016 film Les Innocentes) while working secretly for the Resistance; she was eventually made a doctor-lieutenant in the French Army. In 1944, de Gaulle commissioned her to find French citizens who had been caught in the Nazi camp system, and she took command of the Blue Squadron—11 young women with a few ambulances. After scouring American-occupied Germany, the group made a more fraught crossing into Soviet-occupied territory and the U.S.S.R. (where some POWs had been relocated). Conditions on the Soviet side were more grueling due to scarce resources and Soviet suspicion of the French, who they viewed as Nazi collaborators. The women faced threats of rape and had to rely on their wits and wiles to reclaim French citizens. Pauliac, who cuts a dashing figure in Maynial’s reverent account, returned to Poland in 1946 to found a care home for nuns who had been raped and impregnated by Soviet soldiers. She died in Poland that year, in a car accident during her honeymoon. Readers will be engrossed by this stylishly written and winsome portrait in fortitude. (Feb.)
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
Katherine Stewart. Bloomsbury, $29.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-63557-854-6
The “antidemocratic” movement behind Donald Trump’s political ascendancy comprises “people and ideas that in ordinary circumstances would not dream of sharing a bed,” according to this illuminating account. Drawing on 15 years of reporting, journalist Stewart (The Power Worshippers) profiles figures central to what she describes as an organized political project of “reactionary nihilism”—a motley collection of “atheist billionaires... Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hat[ers], high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists... COVID truthers, and ‘spirit warriors.’ ” She asserts that they have coalesced around “a new and distinctly American variant of authoritarianism or fascism,” which predated Trump’s political rise, propelled by growing income disparities over the past half-century that have fueled “anger and resentment” among those “who perceive, more or less accurately, that they are falling behind.” Stewart’s fine-grained and eye-opening investigation meticulously outlines the loose organizational structure that keeps these strange bedfellows banded together—with a focus on the lines of connections between the movement’s funders, intellectuals, and foot-soldiers, three groups that do not always share the same priorities—and optimistically concludes that as a “disproportionately mobilized minority,” the movement could be countered by a better organized majority able to exploit the movement’s internal ideological fissures. This offers urgently needed background on the 2024 election results. (Feb.)
Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health
Adam Ratner. Avery, $30 (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-33086-9
“Measles is a biological agent that preys on human inequity,” according to this penetrating debut analysis. Ratner, a professor of pediatrics at NYU, contends that the virus’s history illustrates how social factors determine who gets sick. For example, he describes how in the late 19th century, poor children in England died from measles at significantly higher rates than their wealthier peers because malnutrition and cramped tenements increased their vulnerability. Protection from viruses depends on much more than vaccine efficacy, Ratner argues, discussing how the rollout of the first measles vaccines in the early 1960s was hampered by the lack of a centralized distribution plan, confusion over which of the two options was better for which patients, and inadequate messaging from health experts on the vaccines’ benefits. Elsewhere, Ratner covers how a recall of a 1992 measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine in England and a fraudulent 1998 scientific article positing a link between MMR vaccines and autism spurred an anti-vaccine movement that contributed to measles outbreaks in California and New York in the 2010s. Ratner provides fascinating scientific insight into measles, explaining how the virus induces a kind of immunological amnesia by targeting immune cells responsible for remembering how to counteract previously encountered viruses, and he makes a strong case that health depends on much more than biology. This will open readers’ eyes. Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Agency. (Feb.)
