Author: Jennifer Graham

(Little A, 413 pages)

New Hampshire native Joyce Maynard has said that she likes to write about things people don’t talk about. That can be a plus or a minus, especially in a coming-of-age story that explores uncomfortable family dynamics through the eyes of a 14-year-old on the cusp of puberty.

Literary fiction laced with suspense, In Wonderland is as sophisticated a novel as one would expect from someone who has been writing books for a half-century. Maynard knows her craft and builds tension slowly, like a tea kettle placed on low heat.

As June 1986 begins, Frances — her last name is not given — is miserable in the way all 14-year-old girls are miserable pre-social-media, with the added stress of parents who barely speak to each other or to her. Her father drinks too much, they live in a sad, dark apartment in New Jersey, and their only fun family ritual is going to visit her father’s childhood friend at his lakefront home in Maine each Labor Day.

This year, however, she gets to spend the entire summer there. Her father’s friend and his wife need a mother’s helper for the summer, and they invite Frances to fill the position, which involves little more than lightly supervising the two children (one of whom is just two years younger than Frances) and getting them to tennis lessons. Frances is thrilled just to get out of the gloomy house for the summer.

But she also has fond memories of being at the estate, named Wonderland, and her father’s friend, Forrest, is the only person in her life who treats her with respect. Even better, he is the kind of person everyone wants to be friends with — active, engaging, generous, energetic, attentive to a fault, especially to his wife, Regina, whose family’s wealth enables their lifestyle.

For Frances, Regina was a wan figure in the background on her previous trips to Wonderland. She has an unspecified medical condition that requires her to take lots of pills and lots of naps. What energy she has seems to be used up in the evening when she types instructions for everything her family needs to know and do the next day. “The thing about dealing with Regina is recognizing she’s just not a normal person,” Frances’s father tells her.

But the presence of Forrest makes up for that, and as the summer begins, Frances fits seamlessly into the family’s routines, marveling that this will be her life for a little more than three months. “It was all so beautiful,” she observes. “Outside now, a pair of loons called out to each other. Lace curtains fluttered at the window, moonlight glittering. From the other side of the lake, someone was setting off fireworks for no particular reason except that at Lake Catherine every day felt like a special occasion.”

But Forrest’s affection for Frances becomes an obsession for her, fueled by the hormones of adolescence. When Regina gives her a gift — a leather-bound journal — telling her that every girl should keep a journal, Frances starts writing about her interactions with Forrest and eventually slips from the real to the imagined. The journal, which she hides under her mattress, is a ticking time bomb throughout the novel, with all the subtlety of golden retriever. We know somebody is going to find this journal eventually; we just don’t know who or when.

Meanwhile, as Frances’s relationship with Forrest develops and changes over time, so too does her relationship with Regina, who wants to both mother the girl and also treat her as some kind of unpaid therapist. Regina begins to confide in Frances about the strengths and deficiencies of her marriage, including the couple’s sex life, not knowing that Frances is always going to be on Team Forrest. But Regina says nothing to shed light on other secrets, including her physical and mental condition, and a mysterious locked room in the house. Every story is supposed to have a villain, they say, but it’s unclear whether there is a villain here at all or just a bunch of spoiled, entitled, clueless or heartbroken people trying to play the cards they’ve been dealt.

It’s not a spoiler to say there is a pivotal death in the story since Maynard opens In Wonderland with Frances’s memory of encountering the corpse. It might be a spoiler to say I have no idea why she did this. To anyone paying close attention, the scene foreshadows a future event and diminishes the eventual shock of it.

This is not to say that there aren’t other shocks throughout the book, going right down to the final pages. The biggest surprise of all, however, is what a page-turner a novel about a 14-year-old sex-curious girl can be, even if you can do without all the cringy inner dialogue about nonexistent breasts and a menstrual cycle that refuses to start. The characters in this world may not be wholly lovable, but they are interesting, and as such, we are invested in what happens to them. Lake Catherine may be fictional, but the emotional punch Maynard delivers is real. B+

Featured Photo: In Wonderland, by Joyce Maynard.

(Restless Books, 292 pages)

Sofi Stambo was born in Bulgaria and now lives in New York, which is about all anybody seems to know about her, given that her website is down (as of this writing) and the biographical information about her on the internet is scant.

That said, we know from her debut collection of short stories that Stambo is a very good student of the human condition and, from the title of a forthcoming novel, This Train Has Sailed, that she has a fine sense of irony and a very good agent. Which makes her story collection, People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, very low-risk in terms of your time. In fact, some of the stories here — 34 in all — take less than 10 minutes to read but will stick in your memory much longer than that. Others read more like journal entries than fiction.

Take, for example, “”I Stepped on a Cat,” in which the narrator says, “I started learning English when I was six, and here I am in Brooklyn, and I am still faking it.” It’s a short and lyrical account of a child trying to learn English, “a language not a single Bulgarian villager spoke, that no one in the house understood.” As the only English speaker in the house, it fell to her to translate pirated English-language movies shown via videotape on a TV that was always breaking. As for the dialogue, “I made it all up, and as long as I kept talking simultaneously with the actors and in sentences of similar length, no one complained.”

Fast-moving and irritatingly illustrated with sketches by Yana Mihaylova that are serviceable but do nothing to improve the reader’s experience, the collection skips from interactions in diners to offices to parking lots, most set in the boroughs of New York with a rotating cast of immigrants or the children of immigrants.

In “Ponchicki for the Fine Ladies of Queens,” the narrator is envious of her coworker at the travel agency who “is constantly hungry and forever chewing on something” and who talks lovingly to her boyfriend at lunch about what they’re eating, in hearing range of the rest of the staff: “We don’t have boyfriends, we have husbands, and they don’t care what we eat for lunch, only about what they’ll get for dinner.”

The workers book their clients’ trips to exotic places even though they themselves hardly ever leave Queens. One day a vivacious visitor comes through the door, bearing a box of ponchicki, a type of pastry from Poland. “He shared his strong belief that you must never go anywhere empty-handed and should always bring food with you. It breaks language barriers, and people are generally nicer to you when you feed them.” The women are enchanted. The visitor, however, ultimately serves to highlight the dullness of their everyday existence, in the same way that their love-smitten colleague did.

In “Spying in Manhattan Diners,” a couple sit in a classic Greek diner, observing the clientele and the manager, who, as at virtually any New York diner, is the 20-something son of the owner, “a little bit on the short side, has been to the gym three or four times this week already, and is clearly a fan of the protein shake diet, which makes him brave enough to wear a tight red shirt. You can’t say for sure if it is the protein shake and/or the occasional line of coke, but he repeats everything he says. His name of course is George. It’s always George.”

The titular story, “People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much,” again plumbs the mind-numbing routine of office work, this time for three young women who look from their cubicle windows down on the Hudson River, as a cruise ship passes by at the same time every week. The narrator longs for the adventures experienced by the people on the ship while she slogs through her workday with one coworker obsessed with lucky numbers and another who insists that she has unlucky letters of the alphabet. (“Would you believe it if I told you that in the same year, I had problems with my Cat, and my Carpet, and my Ceiling? … Cat completely ruined my Carpet. The doctor said she had Cancer, are you following the trend? Not only did she die, but on Columbus Day.”)

The best short stories startle us or tickle us and often contain one or more threads that lead us back to our own lives. In “Goods,” Stambo reminds us of our own grandmothers, as the narrator follows an elderly Asian woman who looks like her deceased grandmother, in order to temporarily experience the illusion that her beloved Baba Borka is still alive. With a few succinct vignettes we see this grandmother grow older, her eyelids growing heavier “as if she carried too many memories there,” and eventually pass on, leaving to her granddaughter a handmade dress that she wears proudly until she realizes that it will cease to exist, like her grandmother, if she keeps washing it. (Stambo has a soft spot for grandmothers in general; in her acknowledgments, she says “this book is for the grandmothers who took care of us while our parents were working, who taught us the songs and poems we still know by heart. When we were bored, they read us a book.”)

Some of the stories with the best titles don’t rise to their promise: “How to Blow Your Nose in English,” for example. Conversely, the curtly named “Lists” is a delight, particularly for anyone who frequently makes shopping lists but arrives home missing several things that were critically needed but somehow didn’t make the list. (“On the bright side, we are out of bread but we have pasta. We are out of toothpaste but we are really good on toilet paper. We are actually great on toilet paper.”)

Overall, it’s an uneven collection that is charming in places; the more affection you have for New York and its eccentricities, the more charmed you will be. B

Featured Photo: People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, by Sofi Stambo

(Atria, 230 pages)

In 2021, Ann Larson published a first-person article in The New Republic, describing what it was like to work as a supermarket cashier — a challenging and low-paying job under usual circumstances, but even more so in the surreal early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Larson had gone to college in Utah and graduate school in New York, planning to work in academia before discovering how few opportunities were there. She’d helped found a group called the Debt Collective that lobbied for the abolishment of student loans. But as the pandemic hit, needing money and wanting to get out the house, Larson applied to work at a local supermarket she liked, thinking it might even be a kind of public service, under the circumstances.

It may well have been — we all needed groceries in 2020 — but the experience was grueling and dehumanizing, as Larson writes in Cleanup on Aisle Five, the nonfiction book that grew out of her essay in The New Republic.

Working long days and unpredictable schedules (sometimes she’d get home at 11 p.m. and have to be back at work at 7 the next morning), Larson writes that she turned into a “walking peanut butter sandwich” because “Being perpetually too tired to cook was one of the ironies of working at the supermarket.” Despite her struggles to complete the most complicated transactions, she was soon promoted to a supervisory role, which came with even more absurdly difficult tasks to master, and frequent opportunities for customers to take out their frustrations on Larson and her coworkers.

Their frustrations surely stemmed in part from the ubiquitousness of self-checkout stands, which have turned all of us into cashiers and made it seem like being a cashier is the easiest of jobs: scan, swipe and go.

But besides the human jobs lost to this convenience, self-checkouts come with a plethora of problems that all have to be solved by a human being (machines that refuse to print the receipt, for example) along with the myriad other unseen jobs that supermarket employees must perform. Larson describes her struggles to learn things such as resetting a broken sensor at a check-stand while angry customers verbally abuse her. (“Can someone come and help this idiot?” one man yelled as she worked to repair a machine.)

Frequently, the problems had been caused by the customers, as when they put cash into the slot marked for coupons.

Staffing is another headache that goes unseen by impatient customers; the supermarket employees call in sick for a variety of reasons (once, a worker confessed to Larson that she wasn’t sick but was too broken up by the loss of her dog to work for a few days), disrupting operations storewide, as others have to fill in. At one point, bathroom breaks have to be limited, and one worker vows to wear an adult diaper.

Larson describes a workplace where people are constantly interrupted from the work that they are doing to do other work: As one person said on an online forum, “Today, no fewer than ten shoppers asked for help while I was on the sales floor. I happily assisted them.” But when the worker returned to his regular job restocking products, he was criticized by a manager for taking too long for that primary work.

Customers can be problematic in other ways that make the lives of supermarket workers harder, as when they wait until they get to the front of the store to decide if they’re buying something, and then leave what they’ve decided not to buy — in supermarket parlance, “gobacks” — for someone else to put back. “Gobacks regenerated like bacterial spores. A worker could spend hours in the aisles and never get to the bottom of the cart,” Larson writes.

Larson weaves her day-to-day experiences, and those of her coworkers, with interesting stories of how the modern American supermarket came into being. Most people consider grocery shopping a chore, and yet the first store where shoppers “got to” pick out their groceries themselves — a store called Piggly Wiggly, in Memphis, in 1916 — was hailed as a boon for busy people, since they no longer had to wait for a store employee to gather their goods. “Every customer will be her own clerk,” one advertisement for the store said.

The Piggly Wiggly model became a trend, as we’re now seeing with self-checkout stands. These vignettes also include the story of a Massachusetts factory worker who designed the machine that gave us flat-bottomed paper bags, and the first robotic grocery store, an “endlessly glitchy” debacle called the Keedoozle, which started — and ended — in the 1940s.

Larson’s account is most sympathetic when she is talking about her coworkers, who labor in the same circumstances as she does without the hope of getting out of them by writing a book.

There is, for example, Whitney, who was making ends meet by selling plasma to supplement her income; George, the security guard who worked full-time but had never been able to save up enough money to take a vacation; a 52-year-old cashier who had been planning to celebrate her 20th wedding anniversary by driving to another state to buy lottery tickets, but then couldn’t afford the gas and so stayed home and worked in the garden instead.

Almost all seem one unexpected expense away from bankruptcy. One 25-year-old cashier needed a root canal and was in pain so bad she could only eat soft food, but she didn’t have dental insurance or the means to pay for the procedure herself, so she was on a waiting list at a local dental school where you could get treatment from students learning how to do procedures.

Some of the employees had come to the supermarket after burning out at Amazon; one person had worked in a warehouse and was required to box 90 items every minute. Not that this grocery store didn’t have quotas — at one point, cashiers were told they needed to scan at least 21 items per minute so that customers didn’t get impatient. They held a contest to encourage the cashiers to scan even faster: The winner would receive a $5 gift card to the deli.

Cleanup on Aisle Five challenges the assumption that checking out groceries is so easy that anyone can do it, and adds to a growing body of work about the indignities borne by unseen workers who make the lives of everyone else more liveable, for little pay. Simon Paré-Poupart’s new release Trash! A Garbageman’s Story does much the same.

These books may not belong on the same shelf as the working-class portraits offered by Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Harrington and George Orwell, as a blurb on the cover of Cleanup on Aisle Five says, but they offer voices often dismissed or ignored in the conversations about wealth and poverty, and I, for one, will never leave an unwanted item with a supermarket cashier again.

B

Featured Photo: Cleanup on Aisle Five, by Ann Larson

(Spiegel & Grau, 638 pages)

When your debut novel sells more than 15 million copies, spends nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list and becomes an Oscar-winning movie with a star-studded cast, what do you do for an encore?

Take your time, and go stay for a while in Peterborough.

That’s how Kathryn Stockett finally finished The Calamity Club, her second novel, which was stalled out when she went to the renowned MacDowell artist retreat in 2016 after five years of working on the book. Ten years after that stay, the novel is vexing reviewers across the country with its sheer heft. At a daunting 638 pages, this is not a book picked up lightly — some readers have gone so far as to weigh it. (It’s 2.2 pounds, according to The New York Times.)

But Stockett, and her publisher, are betting that the people who loved her first book, The Help, will be willing to invest a not-insignificant portion of their time on this new story, which revolves around an orphanage in Oxford, Mississippi, during the Great Depression. For those willing to do so, there is, indeed, a payoff. It’s a satisfyingly complex and well-plotted novel that grows more enjoyable after the first couple of hundred pages, if you can stick with it that long.

There are two central characters in this story, both immensely likeable. Meg is a spunky 11-year-old who was brought to the orphanage two years earlier after her mother disappeared and is being mistreated by a malevolent director. Birdie is a 24-year-old spinster, “churchy and chinless,” who lives with her mother and grandmother in circumstances that are fast dissolving into insolvency.

At first Meg and Birdie have nothing in common except their status as first-person narrators, but their lives will intersect when Birdie travels to Oxford for the uncomfortable task of asking her younger, prettier sister (who’d married a wealthy banker) to give her money so the family won’t lose their house for having not paid the taxes on it for nearly two years.

Birdie’s sister, Frances, is neither villain nor ally. She’s a woman who’s been told she’s beautiful so much that she has come to occupy another, ethereal plain of existence, and she is oblivious to the problems that Birdie can see in her marriage, problems that soon threaten her luxurious existence and that of her distinguished widowed mother-in-law, with whom Frances and her husband live. (In shades of The Help, the Tartt family employs two Black women who run the household, Picador and Polly.)

Getting money out of Frances and her husband is no small task, and Birdie has to move into the house for a while. It’s during this stay that she encounters and befriends Meg, while helping the orphanage balance its books. Although the time they spend together is brief, this connection spins the narrative in unexpected ways, as the young girl and the young woman seek to escape the difficult circumstances of their lives.

For Meg, it’s not just the mistreatment that she is suffering at the orphanage, where she is banished each day to a dank room where mold is blooming. She’s also haunted by the sudden disappearance of her mother, who, as we learn from her memories, had been a devoted and joyful parent right up to the day when she never came home. She dreams of reuniting with her mother, even as she dreams of being adopted. But Meg’s circumstances are more complicated than the child knows, and there are people conspiring to keep her from the happy ending of which she dreams.

Meanwhile, a devastating sequence of events causes Birdie to stay with her sister months longer than she anticipated, and in a major plot twist, she winds up conspiring with the unlikeliest of characters in order to keep Frances and Mrs. Tartt in their house as financial ruin threatens to overtake them.
Like The Help, Stockett’s second novel is threaded with history, much of it disturbing, such as the practice at the time for states to sterilize people, mostly women, that they have declared “feeble minded,” a criterion that included not only disabled people but those addicted to alcohol and those deemed promiscuous. “Feeble-mindedness” was considered hereditary, and sterilization was the solution, according to Mississippi and more than two dozen other states with such laws on the books.

Stockett also writes realistically of what it was like to live during the Depression years in the deep South, and in Mississippi specifically, where in one year, more than a quarter of homes were seized for nonpayment of taxes. Few were exempt from hardship, and Birdie’s struggle to retain hope and dignity in light of odds stacked overwhelmingly against her reflect the situation of many other families, both then and now.

Did this novel need to be 600 pages? Definitely not, and The Calamity Club reminds me of a favorite saying of my mother: Work expands to fill the time. And Stockett had a lot of time to write this novel.

More debatable is whether Stockett needed to give Birdie a love interest, which felt formulaic from the moment this person was introduced. It may be what Hollywood wanted, but it’s not what this character needed. But that’s a quibble, and the fact is that Stockett kept me interested in what happens to these characters throughout all 2.2 pounds of this book, which was no small task. But I finished it thinking of Apollo Creed’s immortal words to Rocky Balboa, “Ain’t gonna be no rematch.”

Ain’t gonna be no sequel. Six hundred-plus pages is plenty, thank you very much. A

Featured Photo: The Calamity Club, by Kathryn Stockett

(W.W. Norton & Co., 326 pages)

Other than Rome, is there any ancient civilization that commands more attention than Sparta?

Sparta remains front and center in the popular imagination in part because of the Spartan Race franchise, headquartered in Vermont, as well as the many books and films about the culture, to include Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire. And most everyone who is well-read knows the adjective “Spartan” and has an opinion about whether it should be capitalized.

But the popular view of Sparta is largely informed by myth, which is why historians talk about “the Spartan mirage.” British historian Andrew Bayliss proposes to correct the record in Sparta, The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower.

Although Sparta’s glory days began two centuries earlier, the first surviving history was written in the fifth century BCE. Little was written by actual citizens of Sparta, and even then, that’s “a few hundred lines of verse,” Bayliss writes. How then, did Sparta become so important that it was seen as aspirational by a diverse collection of thinkers, including Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Robespierre and even Samuel Adams, who wanted the United States to become “the Christian Sparta”?

Part of the answer appears to be selective memory because, as Bayliss explains, we have cherry-picked the good of Spartan culture and conveniently excised the abhorrent, such as the practice of throwing prisoners and babies deemed inferior off a cliff and the violent enslavement of “helots” in order to enable the lifestyle of the citizens of Sparta — who were called Spartiates, by the way, not Spartans. (Bayliss uses the terms interchangeably, however.)

Slavery was common at the time, even in Athens, where historians believe there were about 80,000 enslaved people in the fifth century BCE.

“What singled the Spartans out was the ruthlessness with which they conquered and enslaved their fellow Greeks, in order to ensure that each of their own citizens possessed a captive, self-producing human workforce,” Bayliss writes.

The official citizenry of Sparta, determined by their land holdings, did not work at all, at least not in order to sustain themselves and their families. They worked on their bodies, readying themselves for battle and for their famed athletic games. The women, too, participated in athletic games and were required to maintain a high level of fitness, although they were not required to serve in the military. (Women were also allowed to inherit and own land in Sparta, unusual for their time; Bayliss points out that this wasn’t allowed in Britain until 1870.)

Theirs was a communal lifestyle, with everyone required to gather together for meals in the evening, in which the main feature was “unbaked barley burgers” and something called “black broth,” which scholars believe was a liquid derived by boiling pork in salt and blood. “The broth was so unpleasant that a visitor … remarked that he no longer considered the Spartans to be brave after trying their food, because ‘anyone in their right mind would prefer to die ten thousand times than share such a poor living.’”

For the Spartiates, death on the battlefield was considered a privilege, an idea that was inculcated from childhood, and one that enabled the battles that have become legendary, including the “Battle of the Champions” in which 300 elite warriors of Sparta fought an equal number of warriors from the region of Argos. All but three died — two from Argos and one Spartiate; the Spartan warrior later committed suicide because he was ashamed for having survived.

Interestingly, Spartan men who died in battle were the only citizens permitted gravestones, and the ones that have been found are reminiscent of the uniform graves at Arlington National Cemetery: small, identical markers engraved with the name of the warrior and the words en polemoi, “in war.”

In their ideals and practices, Spartan culture lingers in modernity; “Come and take them,” the popular retort of gun enthusiasts, is said to have originated with Leonidas, the Spartan king who died with his men at Battle of Thermopylae, depicted in the 2006 film 300.

Despite their fierceness, the Spartiates were a superstitious people who thought that the devastating earthquake in the fourth century BCE was punishment sent by the god Poseidon. “A tremor at the wrong time would halt a Spartan army in its tracks, in the belief that the god was expressing his displeasure at the mission.”

And yet their government was oddly predictive of modern democracies. Sparta had two kings, from separate families, and a ruling council of elders composed of 28 citizens over the age of 60. The system, Bayliss writes, provided stability and worked to cancel out “the excesses” of the leaders, much like the American system of government is supposed to do. Citizens of Sparta could vote on bills the council had put worth, although the value of this seems dubious since the Sparta constitution said, “If the people choose crookedly, the kings and elders shall set it aside.”

The Spartan Race philosophy is that people become “unbreakable” by doing hard things. Unfortunately, the Spartans proved not to be unbreakable themselves; like Rome, they had a rise and fall, and the fall of Sparta came relatively fast, in less than three months. Their power, too, proved to be “illustory,” Bayliss writes. “Their alliance system gave the impression — both to insiders and onlookers — that Sparta could dominate the Greek-speaking world for generations, and even allowed them to think that they might be capable of taking on and conquering the Persians. In fact, none of this was really possible, because there were simply too few Spartans.”

In short, they overextended themselves, and not for a noble cause.

“The only freedom the Spartans were interested in was their own — and particularly the freedom to treat anyone they thought beneath them as they pleased,” Bayliss says.

Although Sparta is superbly researched, it often feels like required reading for a history class. One must be very interested in Sparta, its enemies and the Peloponnesian War to remain engrossed throughout. Fortunately for Bayliss, a good many people are. For everyone else, there is a lasting takeaway: Choose your heroes wisely. B-

Featured Photo: Sparta, by Andrew Bayliss

(Simon Six, 226 pages)

Aliens are having a moment.

Of course, it could be argued that they’ve been having a moment since 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill, a Portsmouth couple on their way home after visiting Canada, said they encountered a mysterious disc-shaped aircraft near Franconia. Their story is among the most famous of so-called alien abductions.

The Hills, however, appear only briefly in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Take Me To Your Leader, a semi-serious handbook of alien adventures. Capitalizing on the current interest in all things extraterrestrial, driven in part by the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day and the slow drip of formerly classified UAP [formerly known as UFO] videos coming from the government, the book proposes to tell us how to interact with our new alien friends (or overlords) when they come.

Tyson, according to his publisher, is America’s favorite astrophysicist, so you might think he would bring a serious, scholarly bent to the subject. You would be wrong. The book, at times, is more like a BuzzFeed reporter ran a couple of questions about aliens through Claude, and out came this manuscript.

Tyson begins by talking about aliens in popular culture. There have been a lot of aliens in movies and TV shows, probably more than you recall. And as he recounts them, Tyson wonders why they are always so human-looking and predictable, with a few exceptions, like Project Hail Mary.

“Once, just once, I want to see a gray Alien portrayed with a full head of coiffed hair,” he writes.

Humans pride ourselves on our intelligence and imagination, but we probably shouldn’t. Voltaire conceived of aliens 23 miles tall, and astronomer Frank Drake of aliens the size of a pinhead, and Tyson offers 12 archetypes of aliens, but few of us go beyond little green men.

That may be because, as Tyson points out, there is just 2 percent of DNA that separates us from the chimpanzee. He invites us to consider the differences in capabilities between humans and chimps, and then to consider aliens that are 2 percent more advanced than us — or 20 percent. “For all we know, they created Earth as a literal aquarium-terrarium for their own amusement,” as we do with fish, turtles and ants. “Do they know we built their domicile? Do they know we are looking in on them through transparent walls? Do they care?”

And of course, building a world like ours, or the one in The Matrix, is “nothing that a smart Alien couldn’t accomplish in an afternoon.”

Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, brings a wrecking ball to every commonly held notion about extraterrestrials. In a chapter on what alien technology would look like, he concludes that “smooth, rotating flying saucers are not a thing,” because the staid, steady laws of physics are literally universal. He goes on to explore what’s known as Fermi’s Paradox (named for the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi), the conundrum presented by the probability that life exists outside our planet and the lack of actual evidence for it. That lack of evidence should relieve us, given our vast vulnerabilities. As Tyson notes, “The world’s fastest human, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, would be easily caught and eaten by a half dozen different species of mammal predators.” That said, it could also be the case that the evidence for aliens is just not apparent to mere mortals: “We are three-dimensional creatures. Nothing to stop an Alien from living in four or five or more dimensions. If they never deigned to pass through our measly three dimensions, we would never know they were there,” Tyson writes.

So where does America’s favorite astrophysicist stand on all of this? Do aliens exist or not? In his conclusion, Tyson offers his response to an invitation he received to inspect purportedly alien mummies recovered in Peru. In declining, he encouraged the team to publish their research in a peer-reviewed journal and offer samples of the specimens to scientists for analysis. “We do this for findings much less extraordinary than what you have presented. … So it will never be about what I think, it’s about the quality of the data and its verification.” (Reviewer’s note: Scientists later said the “mummies” were dolls made with human bones.)

So until there is a peer-reviewed study of alien remains, he says, “Alien visitations will remain a belief system like any other.”

It’s notable that throughout Take Me To Your Leader Tyson says things like, “Nobody knows how or why that happened.” I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or disturbing that astrophysicists still know so little about the universe, but rest assured, Tyson knows much more than most of us.

Regardless, when it comes to aliens and alien culture, this is a thin and often frothy take on the subject. You can do better with Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s The Ghost Lab, published last year. C —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Take Me To Your Leader, by Neil deGrasse Tyson