Author: Jennifer Graham

(Simon & Schuster, 372 pages)

“A tree is not just a thing made up of bark and leaves and sap and wood. At its core, a tree is not even really a noun. It is more like a verb.”

With that musing, journalist Robert Moor puts readers on notice that In Trees aspires to be a combination of qualities he ascribes to trees: “something inventive, exacting and long-lasting. Something wise.” He largely succeeds. In Trees entwines a decade of hands-on research — to include climbing trees, sleeping in them and protesting in them — with lyrical philosophy. The result is an exploration of everything even remotely related to trees.

If, Moor writes, “we could watch the full life cycle of an oak play out in a few seconds, it would look as violent as a fireworks display.” He delves into the three simultaneous processes that result in a mature tree — branching, pruning and gnarling — and proposes that all of life follows much the same pattern. “In one sense, they are nothing more than very big plants,” he writes, but they take hold of the human imagination in a way that other plants don’t, almost god-like in the way that they outlive human beings and provide for us.”

Moor has been interested in trees and their significance ever since he spent time at a monastery in India and visited the site of the Bodhi tree, where the Buddha is believed to have achieved enlightenment. (Moor describes the tree as “a huge ficus with low crooked pale arms propped up by metal crutches, like some kind of decrepit extraterrestrial.”)

But mild interest turned to fascination when he, like Thoreau, went to the woods to live, moving from a New York City apartment to a cabin in British Columbia. For a while it was enough to sit under trees and think about them, but one day Moor felt the urge to climb one, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid.

The urge, however, was thwarted by fear, and so he sought out an instructor, a British man who sees tree climbing as a lost human skill. Under the guidance of this man (who never wears shoes, except when rock climbing, and sees the destruction of a tree as similar to the harpooning of a whale), he comes to see tree climbing as a form of “rewilding” — rewiring the brain in healthy ways.

Later he travels to the World Bonsai Convention near Tokyo, where he considers the question “What is a tree?” in the company of people who snip and trim them into myriad shapes, and later he attempts to nurture a bonsai himself with fairly disastrous results. (After he failed to water it for a while, he writes, “it had taken on a raw-spined, mangey look, like a former show poodle gone feral.”) There was, it seems, no limit to his travel budget. He goes to Papua, in Indonesia, where a tribe called the Korowai lives in treehouses deep in a jungle and mysteriously open themselves up to anthropologists and writers gaping at their way of life; getting there requires more than four hours of walking. With his husband, he goes to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, searching for the “very stem of the human family tree,” in the form of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old fossilized remains, weirdly named after a Beatles song. Then on to Tanzania, searching for wild apes, another component in the human family tree. This is a serious amount of branching out from the core topic.

Nowhere, however, does he stray so far from the Joyce Kilmer vision of trees, however, as when, mid-book, he departs on a story we don’t see coming: how, on a genealogical project with his father, they are confronted with the knowledge that they are descended from a southern physician who owned enslaved people and had children with at least one of them. This leads Moor to track down a cousin he had never known about, a woman who has Black heritage and is a family physician in California. They get to know each other and ultimately take a road trip to Alabama together to visit various civil rights monuments and even try to track down the grave of the enslaved woman who was the genesis of their shared history.

The story fits within the theme of the book in two ways: Moor’s exploration of family trees, and, in a more sinister way, the horrific lynchings of the Jim Crow era in which “Southerners deliberately refashioned trees into murder weapons — murder weapons that lived on for hundreds of years, often in places like the town square — to remind the town’s Black residents to remain subservient.”

It is a dark and poignant chapter that is a startling departure from the rest of the book, although Moor does do a fair bit of preaching about what’s been called the “Great Uprooting” — the abandonment of close-to-the-land lifestyles caused by industrialization and other forces. It was, he says, a change in both the soil and the soul.

Moor, who for the most part nicely blends humor and serious reflection, previously won praise for a similar book, On Trails, which won the National Outdoor Book Award in 2017. In Trees seems a sequel of sorts, fortuitously timed for your celebration of Arbor Day, April 24. You are celebrating Arbor Day, aren’t you? It would surely please Moor, who confesses that he hopes to “arborize humanity” with this book. This is his core advice: “Learn to branch out like a tree, to let go like a tree, to weather hardship like a tree, to rise above like a tree, to set down roots like a tree.” And maybe go climb a tree, as well, spider monkey. B+

Featured Photo: In Trees by Robert Moor

(The Dial Press, 241 pages)

After Belle Burden and her husband bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard, they became interested in ospreys. Raptors that mate for life, the birds live near water, and a pair nested on Burden’s property, to the family’s delight.

The ospreys are a motif threaded through Burden’s new memoir, Strangers, born of a viral New York Times essay titled “Was I Married to a Stranger?” about how Burden’s husband abruptly moved out when she learned he was having an affair, leaving her to question whether she ever knew the man she’d been married to for two decades.

After the essay was published, Burden received shaming emails, some calling her a bad mother for casting the father of her children as a weapons-grade jerk. But she also got notes from people who said her story helped them get through their divorce. And she had always wanted to be a writer, a dream cast aside by early harsh feedback and a law degree.

Throw in Burden’s lofty pedigree — John Jay and the Vanderbilts are in her family lineage — and of course, publishers wanted her to tell more. The memoir has gotten widespread publicity, from People magazine to Town & Country.

But this isn’t so much a book about a celebrity divorce as it is a book about ordinary heartbreak. Burden begins by recounting the details of the evening when she listened to a voicemail from a man who said her husband was having an affair with his wife. She confronts James — the useless pseudonym she gives her husband (his real name is a click away on Google) — and he assures her the relationship is meaningless and will end. But the next morning he tells her he wants a divorce. “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it,” he says. Burden was leveled. As she tried to get answers from James, he grew colder.

As she wades into legal machinations of divorce, she reflects on their courtship and the life she had enjoyed until that point.

To the reader there are many red flags. James has a bad-boy history and a controlling nature: Three weeks after they started a romantic relationship, he said, “Tell me you love me” to her. When, after having three children and staying home to care for them, she gets a job offer, he decides the answer is no. He becomes increasingly obsessed with his work; she, increasingly obsessed with family life.

After James left, everything about Burden’s life was cast in a different light, even her custom of sending Christmas cards every year. When holiday cards began to arrive from married friends, she tore them up; they seemed boastful, she writes, and a painful reminder of what she no longer had. She vowed to never send Christmas cards again.

There is little in the way of mystery here, but for how the court case turns out — whether Burden gets to keep the two homes she bought with the entirety of her trust funds, or whether her husband, a hedge-fund manager, gets half of them. It’s important to note that James has told The New York Times that his recollections of some events are different from hers, as is his assessment of what kind of father he is to their children.

The real-time action in Strangers spans just the timeline of the divorce, from her husband telling her he was done to the finalization of the courts, the ospreys accompanying us all the way. This is a bit predictable, as is the self-actualization Burden reaches. No memoir of misery is complete without the realization that all the pain was somehow worth it. Strangers is well-written but also well-trod. B+

Featured Photo: Strangers by Belle Burden

(W.W. Norton, 291 pages)

Not long after Bee Wilson’s marriage of 23 years dissolved, a heart-shaped cake tin clattered to the floor at her feet. It was the tin she had used to bake her wedding cake, and later to bake birthday cakes for her children. Now she was unsure what to do with the tin and all the complicated feelings it evoked.

Wilson started to think about all the other items that filled her kitchen cabinets and cupboards, and the sentimental attachment that so many held. Many had been passed down to her from family members or arrived as gifts. It is notable, she writes in The Heart-Shaped Tin, that “kitchenware seems to be one of the main forms of currency between grown-up family members, whether given by a child to a parent or the other way around. What is really being exchanged is an idealised memory of the family dinner table.”

We all have the equivalent of Wilson’s heart-shaped tin, some item that, whether used or not, is absurdly precious. Mine is an antique Coca-Cola-branded bottle opener that was attached to the wall of my late grandmother’s home and now hangs in my kitchen. It is rarely used since I hardly ever buy bottled drinks, but I would fight to the death anyone who tried to take it from me.

In her book — part memoir, part history — Wilson delves into the reasons for these attachments, looking at her own family’s treasures as well as the treasures of other people around the world. She explores the psychological and societal factors that influence what we consider priceless or worthless, from a relatively cheap melon baller that her sons fight over, to an iron pan that a South American woman is so attached to that she sometimes takes it with her on vacation.

“We like to think that love is a natural phenomenon that happens all by itself, springing directly from our hearts. But to live in the modern commercial world is to have thousands of desires and longings inside us without our say-so. You wake up with an urge to buy a giant coffee in a paper cup decorated with a green mermaid and you have no idea why,” Wilson writes.

Wilson is an English writer whose previous nonfiction books have also involved kitchenware and food (see 2012’s Consider the Fork and 2010’s Sandwich: A Global History). Her latest is a surprisingly engaging tour de kitchenware that takes us from an ancient ceramic container found in Ecuador that challenged what we thought we knew about the history of chocolate consumption to the mysterious kitchen sieve that Queen Elizabeth I is holding in a 1583 portrait of her. The vast range of items discussed goes from vegetable corers to canisters, from glory boxes (a kind of hope chest or dowry) to burial plates, the blue and white ceramic plates sometimes buried with corpses in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. All together, it is a cornucopia of fascinating historical anecdotes.

Wilson also helps to explain why fine china has been so important throughout human history, to the point where even people of modest means would work to obtain a full setting, one piece at a time, in order to honor their guests. She writes of the legacy of guilt that such household items like this leave when you realize the china either never appealed to you or has outlived its purpose.

“Every time I opened the cupboard that contained the Kutani Crane vegetable tureens they made me feel faintly strangled,” she writes. “These dishes had been handed down to me not just by my own father but by his father. When I looked at them, I felt weighed down by two generations of filial obligation.”

Wilson is a master of the interesting aside, as when she explores the control that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre believed is at the center of gift-giving. Nowhere is this a greater problem than in Japan, she writes, “which has a culture of gift-giving more extensive than any other advanced capitalist society.” The Japanese not only give lavishly to each other but are expected to give a gift after being presented with a gift. Moreover, next time you complain about the preponderance of “Hallmark holidays” in America, remember that Japan also celebrates Girl’s Day, Boy’s Day and Old People’s Day — all of which come with gifts.

Wilson also writes poignantly about the difficulty of getting rid of sentimental objects, even when you are psychologically ready to do so, and sometimes even when they are broken. She had finally packed up an expensive set of china, having decided to donate it to a thrift shop, when one of her sons protested her giving away those pieces of his childhood. She had better luck when she finally decided to give away the “Elmer the Elephant” plate her sons had eaten on as toddlers, but it wasn’t without pain.

It is possible “to hanker deeply after something which is neither pretty nor useful, just because of the person who once used it,” she writes. “The fact that no one needs it anymore is exactly what makes the wanting so fierce, because it reminds you of a time when you were needed too.”

I approached The Heart-Shaped Tin with some skepticism about whether Wilson’s premise could hold my attention for nearly 300 pages, but it did. Readers will continue to think about not only the stories the author tells but the stories contained in their own kitchens. B+

Featured Photo: The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects by Bee Wilson

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 171 pages)

Anyone with a passing knowledge of poetry knows of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet who composed “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” (the latter said to have been written under the influence of opium).

Far fewer know of his firstborn son, David Hartley Coleridge, frequently referred to by friends and family as “Poor Hartley.” Essayist Anne Fadiman plucks the lesser Coleridge out of popular obscurity in Frog (And Other Essays), a collection that offers an eclectic assortment of subjects, from the titular frog, a family pet that wound up in the freezer, to the men on a doomed polar expedition who produced a newspaper/literary magazine to help them endure the long and depressing Antarctic winters.

All are, in a word, a delight.

“Frog” is the first of seven. It chronicles the life and death of Bunky, who entered the Fadiman household as a tadpole shipped in a Styrofoam container. The brand was called “Grow-a-Frog” and it wasn’t until later that Fadiman learned of Bucky’s heritage: He was an African clawed frog who looked “as if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press.” Bunky lived, more or less happily, with the family for about 17 years, although Fadiman notes that she would sometimes “hear him softly calling for a mate he would never meet” when she got up for a middle-of-the-night snack.

Bunky’s story meanders. Fadiman leads us through short discussions of various family pets and varied anecdotes of Bunky’s limited life, some of which, she admits, now cause her regret. When he died, “I mourned for all frogs in too small-aquariums. All the fish brought home from fairs in plastic bags. All the turtles bought on impulse, vegetating in plastic lagoons. All the baby alligators flushed down toilets.” Her attempt to honor him in death, however, doesn’t go as intended, and he winds up spending an extended time in the refrigerator, because “It’s easy to forget you have a frog in your freezer when he’s behind the frozen tamales.”

“The Oakling and the Oak” is the surprisingly riveting tale of “Poor Hartley,” which shows that the travails of a child growing up in the shadow of a larger-than-life parent is a story that has existed since Adam and Cain.

Hartley didn’t kill anyone, but he was a disappointment to his father, even though he was not without talent himself, and his father was enamoured of him when he was a child. (“By the time he was seven, it is no exaggeration to say he had inspired some of the greatest poems ever written in English,” Fadiman writes.

In fact, it was that early outpouring of love that could have been a problem: “A penumbra of impossible expectation began to settle around Hartley’s head” and the poems his father wrote about him described the boy “as more spirit than mortal, a child who did not walk so much as levitate.” But STC turned out to be an absentee father, and Hartley turned out to be something of an irresponsible young adult; despite a strong intellect, he lost a coveted fellowship, in part because, as the college dean wrote, “he was often guilty of intemperance and came home in a state in which it was not safe to trust him with a candle.” It wasn’t long before father and son were not on speaking terms. He never married, and Fadiman describes a poignant deathbed scene where Poor Hartley, who loved babies but never had children, asked to hold a neighbor’s infant as he was dying. As is her wont, Fadiman leaves us wanting to learn even more about the various subjects she writes about.

In “South Polar Times” she offers evidence that “the value of a periodical cannot be judged by the size of its circulation.” Case in point: the newspaper/literary magazine produced by Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team. “There was only one copy of each of its twelve issues, to be shared (depending on the year) by between thirteen and forty-seven readers.” Because the sun in Antarctica set in April and rose in August, depression was as much a problem as the cold. A publication featuring the work of the crew, all submitted anonymously, was one of Scott’s antidotes to misery (along with brandy and theatrical shows); contributors deposited their poems, essays and other articles into a mahogany box for consideration.

The originals still exist; Fadiman, having long held interest in arctic expeditions, once reviewed a compilation of them, marveling at the illustrations done by Dr. Edward Wilson, the Discovery’s assistant surgeon, who also happened to be a zoologist and artist. (Wilson was among the men who perished alongside Scott after discovering that Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the South Pole.)

Again, more books will have to be read, for having read Frog.

Not all of Fadiman’s topics are so poignant. In “My Old Printer,” she rues her unwillingness to part with old printers. (“Why couldn’t I treat my printer the same way I’d treat an elderly relative who, if spared the indignity of intubation, would succumb to a painless bout of pneumonia? Why couldn’t I just let nature take its course? It’s because I and most other people my age are cumbersome ourselves. We are hard to upgrade. We are not adaptable. Our memories are short on disk space. … We are all HP LaserJet II printers.”)

In “All My Pronouns,” she takes us through a brief history of pronoun controversies, from her Yale students adapting they/them to the Quakers who insisted on addressing everyone as “thou” even though the usage demoted in social standing some of the people who were addressed.

(In 16th-century Europe, she writes, “there were few more efficient ways to dishonor a man than to ‘thou’ him.”)

In “Screen Share,” she tells her pandemic story, which while interesting is no more or less interesting than yours — pretty much everyone over the age of 15 has an interesting pandemic story to tell these days.

She finishes with “Yes to Everything,” a tribute to one of her students (“Thin. Beautiful. Long reddish-brown hair. Long legs. Flagrantly short skirt. Nimbus of angry energy.”) who had been told by a visiting novelist “that making it as a writer today was virtually impossible.” It will punch you in the gut, is all I’ll say. Read with tissues. And don’t buy your kids frogs. A

Featured Photo: Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman

(Harvest, 203 pages)

If you are a woman of a certain age who spends any time on social media, you’ve likely encountered Melani Sanders, glasses on her head, glasses on her face, glasses on a lanyard around her neck, speaking deadpan to the camera about the things she doesn’t care about.

Sometimes she’s wearing a shower cap, too, or has a travel pillow around her neck. The more ridiculous the get-up, the better. It’s comedy gold, born in a Whole Foods parking lot.

“Hello, and welcome to all new and existing members of the We Do Not Care Club,” she says. “This is a club for all women going through perimenopause, menopause and beyond. We are putting the world on notice that we simply just do not care much anymore.”

With dramatic effect, she opens a notebook and takes out a pen, which she uncaps with her mouth. “Let’s go ahead and get started with today’s announcements.”

The announcements are the punchlines — the things Sanders doesn’t care about anymore:

We Do Not Care if we are wearing leggings and a graphic tee. We are dressed for the day. We’re ready for bed and possibly dressed for tomorrow.

We Do Not Care if we excel at work. We will be meeting expectations.

We Do Not Care if you have no interest in true-crime stories. Celebrity gossip does not interest us; we need to know why Ann in Toledo offed her husband in 1983.

After the announcements, she invites her audience to send her things they don’t care about anymore. Couldn’t be simpler. Also couldn’t be more viral.

Not even a year after her first “Do Not Care” video hit the internet, Sanders is out with a book, the idea of which will surely thrill her followers. Just the idea — not the book.

What makes Sanders so funny on Instagram — her deadpan delivery — is absent on the printed page, and even the same jokes aren’t as funny when you’re reading them yourself. Moreover, trying to make her short-form persona become long-form in a book, Sanders has produced a book that is part menopause primer, part autobiography, part social media posts and part fourth-grade diary. These things do not go together. The wise crone has no use, truly, for any book whose resources include an Official We Do Not Care Club Membership Card, with dotted lines so you can cut it out.

The clippable Letter to Coworkers is probably a joke? Not so the templates for the letters she suggests we send elected representatives supporting menopause care and research. Peak ridiculousness comes with the lyrics to a song — two full pages of lyrics — that begin:

We’re the We Do Not Care Club / She’s Melani, the fierce leader / Where peri and menopause / Will not ever defeat us.

There were Barney the Purple Dinosaur songs that were more thoughtful and intelligent than this.

A married mom of three, Sanders had a modest social media following with whom she shared household tips and snippets of family life before she went viral pretty much by accident. It is that story, summarized in a few opening pages, that holds narrative promise, promise snuffed out with the “handbook” format, with its club songs and club patches (like Scouting patches).

The only tolerable parts of this book are the occasional “Real Talk with Melani” pages, where she gives tidbits of her life with her husband and their three sons, before ripping us away for a list of things club members have forgotten (“vaccuum cleaner attachments / books we were just reading / sanity”) and all manner of trite self-love exercises. Brief bios of honorary members of the Club add no heft, nor do “Challenges of the Day” such as silencing your inner critic.

Sanders’s appeal is more than comedy. But the deeper issues she speaks to are not plumbed here.

The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook is evidence that there are many things worse than social media, and one of them is books born of social media. By all means, if you enjoy cutting dotted lines with safety scissors, there is fun to be had with this book. If not, just find Sanders on social media. She’s a queen there, deservedly. Not in this book. D

Featured Photo: The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook, by Melani Sanders

(Roxane Gay Books, 291 pages)

“You don’t realize how small your life has become until something wreaks havoc, until the pin is removed on which the threads of reality hang.”

That’s Rose Cutler musing on the havoc in her spare bedroom, where her 6-year-old nephew is barking and playing with chew toys, having been inhabited by the soul of a dead corgi.

This is the improbable premise of The Hitch, Sara Levine’s comic novel about a young woman whose world is thrown into chaos by an otherworldly event. Single and childless by choice, Rose lives alone — very comfortably, thanks to the success of her artisanal yogurt business. She’s a vegan, sharing recipes throughout. She’s also a moral scold who can’t get through a meal or a conversation without a lecture about the environmental problems caused by this, that or the other, and yet seems bewildered at the effect this has on other people. (“Chat rooms, social media platforms, electronic bulletin boards — people routinely misunderstand my tone,” she says.)

Rose has a younger brother, Victor, to whom she became a de facto mom after their parents died. Now that Victor is married and has a child, Rose is overly invested in the life of her nephew; spending two hours with Nathan every Saturday is the highlight of her week.

When Rose’s brother and sister-in-law announce they are visiting Mexico for a week to reconnect as a couple, she is thrilled to have Nathan stay with her. But she does not have a contingency plan for the dark turn the week takes when her dog, a massive Newfoundland, accidentally kills a corgi in a park and her nephew insists the soul of the corgi entered him.

This is a ludicrous premise, but Levine is known for absurdity. One of her previous books has three exclamation points in the title (Treasure Island!!!); I’ve not read it but am informed by the internet that it’s a cult classic. The internet also informs that she writes in the style of Kevin Wilson, who has an enormously appealing dry wit. And even though Levine’s muse appears to be slightly unhinged and The Hitch dangles on the precipice of lunacy, it works.

It works because (a) Levine is funny and (b) Rose, despite her circumstances, is achingly familiar; we all know someone like her, or perhaps we are her, if we’re willing to admit it. Rose describes herself as a “scientifically literate person with ethical standards,” and she is struggling to live in a world that violates these standards at every turn. Her own company, the Cultured Cow, violates them, adding to her inner turmoil.

Her comic foil is her sister-in-law, Astrid — Nathan’s mother — who “isn’t a dog person. Or a cat person. Or a people person.”

As much as Victor and Astrid love Nathan, they draw the line on their animal-loving son getting a dog, and so when the soul of the corgi enters him, Nathan is enthusiastic — he sees it as getting an “inner dog.” Rose, however, sees it as her nephew becoming possessed by a corgi, a turn of events made worse by the fact that she doesn’t like corgis: “The bat ears and the stubby legs, the huge head and the black-rimmed prostitute eyes; the length of the body, the absence of a tail! The breed is engineered to make people smile, specifically those people who need to patronize an animal in order to love it.” She is desperate to exorcise the corgi from her nephew before her brother and sister-in-law return from vacation. Hilarity ensues. And some sadness, too, as we begin to understand what motivates Rose, and how lonely she is.

The Hitch is by no means the great American novel, nor does it aspire to be. It’s more like a single episode of a sitcom contained in a book. Humorless vegans and corgi lovers best stay away, but for everyone else Levine offers a light-hearted diversion from the more reality-based cares of the world. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: The Hitch, by Sara Levine