Author: Jennifer Graham

Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper (Random House, 282 pages)

“Writing a memoir is akin to taking off one’s clothes in public” is how Christian Cooper begins his acknowledgments, wherein he thanks everyone who made his memoir possible, with one extremely notable exception: the Central Park “Karen” who vaulted him to fame.

Cooper is the bird enthusiast who was out early on Memorial Day 2020 looking at birds when an unleashed dog came running in his direction. He politely asked the dog’s owner to leash her dog, as the law requires in the part of the park called the Ramble. When she said she wouldn’t — that her dog needed exercise — he started filming their exchange, which later went viral because the woman called the police, falsely reporting that Cooper, who is Black, was threatening her.

The incident was bad enough on its own, but was magnified because of something else that happened that day — the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And within days Cooper had become something of a folk hero, an example of the ordinary dangers of being Black while driving, while jogging, while birding or doing any number of ordinary activities. He became famous while the dog walker, Amy Cooper, became infamous. And he has leveraged that fame into an enchanting memoir that has surprisingly little to do with what happened that day, but instead is an ode to the natural world and an account of growing up Black, gay and intellectual in 1970s America.

The first sign of how well-crafted this memoir is comes in the first chapter, “An Incident in Central Park.” He describes running through the park alone and says, “I know what this looks like.”

“My sneakers are old and muddy, my jeans in need of a good washing, and my shirt, though collared, could at best be described as unkempt. I am a Black man on the run. And I have binoculars.” As it turns out, the “incident” is not what we think, but something entirely different, related to birding. It is a smart, charming entry into Cooper’s story, which has a mystery at its heart: How, exactly, does an otherwise normal person get so rabidly obsessed with birds?

In Cooper’s case, birds were, like science fiction and comic books, a mental sanctuary as he was growing up on Long Island in a lower-middle class family where intellectual pursuits were prized. When he was 9 he attended a summer woodworking class, where he was given a choice of making a footstool or a bird feeder. He picked the bird feeder, and the first bird to come to that feeder, a red-winged blackbird, became his “spark bird,” the creature that began his birding obsession.

After carefully navigating high school while keeping his sexuality secret, Cooper went to Harvard on a scholarship, where he finally was able to come out as gay. (When he told his father, the father asked if he wanted to see a psychiatrist, he said.) But it wasn’t until he spent time in South America, on a post-graduation fellowship funded by Harvard, that he really began to embrace his sexuality and see that being a Black man in other countries was a vastly different experience from being a Black man in America. “In Buenos Aires,” he writes, “I had found myself in a city full of white folks who desire me because of my Blackness, not in spite of it. … I’d spent my whole life being told that as Black person I was not quite as worthy as a white person, and on an unconscious level, I had internalized that proposition.”

Even then, there were the birds, and Cooper writes beautifully about their migrations, their habitats and his searches for them, from the Blackburnian warbler to the alarmingly named Ovenbird. This man is really, really into birds, and he wants us all to be. While the narrative meanders through Cooper’s work and relationships, it is interspersed with birding tips and interludes about the “pleasures of birding” — for example, “the joy of hunting, without the bloodshed.”

Eventually he returns to the other “incident in Central Park” and offers a much fuller understanding of what happened that day.

To his everlasting credit, Cooper has been remarkably chill about the exchange that enraged millions of Americans and effectively canceled the dog walker for life. He wasn’t even responsible for the video going viral; he had shared it with a small group of friends on Facebook, where he normally shared what notable bird he had just sighted, and his sister asked permission to post it on Twitter. He agreed — “after all, how much attention could it get?”

The tweet landed in the feed of comedian Kathy Griffin, who retweeted it, and within hours the media were calling. (Interestingly, he found out about the George Floyd video during an interview with “Inside Edition.”)

Although Cooper was pressured by the district attorney’s office, and many people in the public, he declined to participate in any charges related to the incident. He said what the dog walker did and said was “incredibly racist” but passes no judgment on Amy Cooper herself. But he has also made clear that he had no interest in any sort of kumbaya-esque reunion with her and says she never reached out to him personally to apologize for that day. “It’s not about Amy Cooper,” he writes. “What’s important is what her actions revealed: how deeply and widely racial bias runs in the United States. (Ironically, she was born in Canada, yet she still tapped into that dark vein that carries its poison to every part of this land.)”

Fame that erupts on social media is often fleeting and unearned. Christian Cooper is the rare exception — his is a story worth telling, and in this memoir he does so exceptionally well. A

The In-Between, by Hadley Vlahos (Ballantine, 259 pages)

For much of the past 50 years, most Americans died in a hospital. That was a change from the first part of the 20th century, when most people died at home. Since 2017, more people are dying at home again, in large part because of the expansion of hospice care.

Hospice provides in-home support for a dying person and their caregivers, administering pain medication to the patient and providing other services. A new memoir from a hospice nurse provides a surprisingly upbeat look into hospice care and what people can expect at the end of life.

Hadley Vlahos was a single mom in her early 20s when she became a registered nurse, and then began working in hospice. She looked so young that families sometimes mistook her for a nurse’s assistant (and in one funny case, a stripper), but her youthfulness was also an asset, as when a dying man decided his new purpose in life was teaching this young woman everything she didn’t know about sports and current events.

But the main thing that Vlahos learned from her patients is that there is a liminal state between being alive and being dead, a state she calls “the in-between.” Her memoir is built around a series of stories about what past patients experienced during this time, from seemingly interacting with long-dead relatives to having a premonition about a future event.

She tells these stories matter-of-factly; there is no mysticism or religious proselytizing in the book; in fact, Vlahos was raised in a religious home, but turned away from her childhood faith after the death of a friend. And she doesn’t speculate on anything that happens after she pronounces the time of death of the patient aloud (which is part of her job). She is simply relating the “in-between” experiences of dying people, to which her work makes her a witness. And those experiences are, put simply, rather riveting.

There was, for example, Carl, a bed-ridden patient whom one day Vllahos found walking around his house with a flashlight, looking under furniture and behind curtains. When asked what he was doing, he said that he was playing hide-and-seek with Anna, his 2-year-old daughter who had drowned decades before. Vlahos, who had been trained to “meet patients where they are,” accepted this calmly.

“But where was Carl?” she wondered. “It seemed as if he was in two places at once. Physically, he was in the room with Mary and me; emotionally and mentally, he seemed very much to be somewhere else, with Anna.” Carl also said to Vlahos that he’d had a conversation with his mother. He seemed otherwise rational and consented to go back to bed.

Consulting with a physician, Vlahos learned it wasn’t unusual for dying people to have a spurt of physical energy, similar to the flash of cognition called terminal lucidity that sometimes occurs shortly before death. The phenomenon that caused Carl to get out of bed is called “the surge” by medical professionals, and it often fools family members into thinking their loved one is recovering, when actually it’s a sign that they will likely die within a few days. And indeed, Carl went downhill the next day.

This is the sort of practical information that is useful for any family considering hospice, especially since so many of us have been far removed from the physical processes of death as it was relegated to hospitals and nursing homes. But the book is also surprisingly hopeful, given that it involves the last day of the terminally ill, some of whom are dying in what should have been their prime.

There is, for example, the story of Elizabeth, a 40-year-old woman who is dying of lung cancer despite having never smoked and having no family history, and Reggie, the 58-year-old who is dying from advanced liver disease brought on by alcoholism. (Reggie’s story has additional poignancy from the reaction of his devoted dog to his death.) Elizabeth is a beautiful woman who had clearly been athletic before she got sick; in one of her conversations with Vlahos, she tells her that she regrets she had spent so much of her life working on a treadmill and confides that she avoided being with friends on her birthday because she didn’t want to eat cake. “I wish I’d just eaten the damn cake,” Elizabeth said.

Vlahos, who has struggled with disordered eating because of something her father said in her childhood, takes Elizabeth’s advice to heart. In fact it is because of the wisdom that so many of these patients impart in their final day that she sincerely enjoys her work, despite the reaction she gets from others when they learn what she does. (That revulsion clearly doesn’t carry over to the general public; she has more than a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she goes by NurseHadley.)

The work takes Vlahos everywhere from elegant homes in beach communities to a homeless camp, and she interperses the stories of her patients with the timeline of her own life — growing up with a father who appears to have been emotionally abusive, having a child out of wedlock at age 20, finding love with a physical therapist and navigating the terminal illness of her new mother-in-law.

While her writing is best described as workmanlike — there are no soaring passages of prose — the book is memorable for the stories and the remarkable pattern of dying people reporting conversations with loved ones (who sometimes tell them — accurately, as it turns out — when they are going to pass). These experiences take place whether people are religious or staunch atheists. These are usually people on morphine, of course, and the experiences can easily be written off hallucinations or delusions caused by the medicine or the body gradually shutting down. And most of us know of the dying experiences of people who didn’t experience anything quite so dreamy.

While Vlahos (very carefully) does seem to eventually side with those who believe in an afterlife, she clearly is open to anything as an explanation for what she has witnessed. “I don’t think we can explain everything that happens here on Earth, much less after we physically leave our bodies,” she writes. The observations of the living can neither predict or confirm the experience of the dead, but this memoir offers hope that dying may not be as terrifying as many people think — at least not with hospice care. B

How to Survive History, by Cody Cassidy (Penguin, 224 pages)

Until this week I never knew there was a category on Amazon called “humor history,” but I’m here for it. So is Cody Cassidy, who created for himself a cheeky publishing niche by imagining the improbable and then figuring out (with the help of experts) the answer to the question “What if…?”.

He did that first in 2017’s And Then You’re Dead, in which he wondered what would really happen if you, say, got swallowed by a whale, got caught in a stampede, went over Niagara Falls in a barrel or had sundry other unpleasant adventures. Now he’s back with How to Survive History, in which he offers (hopefully not useful) advice on how we can survive extinction-level events such as asteroids or volcano explosions should some time-traveling event send us back to one. It’s fanciful, of course, and a tad silly, but Cassidy comes to the task with a surprising gravitas and the right mix of “yes, this is kind of crazy” but also “this is serious stuff, pay attention.”

The serious stuff is the history behind the events, which include the strike of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the sinking of the Titanic and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Most of us learned in childhood about the asteroid that hit Earth some 66 million years ago, and we may have even retained some specifics about the planet-altering event, such as the size of the rock, believed to be between 8 and 9 miles wide.

But reading Cassidy’s description of what happened in the aftermath was the first time I really understood the scope of the destruction and the chain of events it triggered. “If this asteroid hit in the same spot today, the blast wave would kill you in Texas, deafen you in New York and blow out your window panes in Buenos Aires,” he writes. “The rock rang Earth like a bell.”

And there were so many ways that it could have killed you, had humans been around then, from the skyscraper-high tsunamis, to raining debris the size of school buses, to the fires caused by thermal radiation, to raging snowstorms in which 10 feet of snow fell each day. Unless you were a turtle or other aquatic creature that could take relative shelter under water, it seems impossible to survive this sort of destruction, but in talking to experts Cassidy comes up with a plan — it just involves getting to Madagascar or Indonesia. (As I said previously, this is fanciful stuff.)

Similarly, Cassidy has suggestions on how we can survive the sack of Rome, a voyage with the pirate Blackbeard, the stranding of the Donner party on their doomed trek to California, and the devastating San Francisco earthquake in 1906. In these and other catastrophes, he colorfully provides the history while breezily inserting the reader into the event. An example from his chapter on Titanic: “you’re a frugal time traveler, so you elect to travel third class … That buys you a bunk on F deck, six levels below the top. It’s about the size of a prison cell, only it’s occupied by four people rather than just two. But who cares! All you do is sleep in it anyway, and this ship offers world-class amenities to its third-class passengers, who in this era would typically have to stuff themselves into one large, poorly ventilated and inadequately converted cargo hold.”

Cassidy’s survival plan when the ship hits the iceberg (with only enough lifeboats for a third of its passengers) involves calmly dressing in finery (to make it seem that you are a first-class passenger), using ladders that you’re not supposed to access, and going to the starboard side instead of port. Stay out of the water if you can — it’s 27 degrees Fahrenheit — but if you have to enter it, slip in rather than jumping, to give your body time to absorb the shock. Then swim hard for 10 to 15 minutes to build body heat. That could buy you time for passengers on a lifeboat to take pity and pull you in.

Yes, we’ve all seen the movie, but Cassidy gives us a wholly different experience with fascinating detail that James Cameron didn’t provide.

When he takes us to the port of Pompeii, 6 miles from Mount Vesuvius, he describes our plight as challenging but not hopeless. The Pompeiians who survived were the ones who took off immediately instead of taking shelter as the ash fell. The volcano erupted on Aug. 24, but it wasn’t until the next day that the entire village was wiped out, meaning that many people went to sleep that night thinking wrongly that they had survived. Where to go? Cassidy says there were two options: running north toward Naples or south toward Stabiae — fast. Both routes presented danger, but none that involved being consumed by a river of lava.

Will any of this information help you navigate life in the 21st century? Probably not. But is it more useful than anything you will find in the typical summer beach read? Absolutely.

That’s why anything by Cassidy is the perfect book for summer. It’s airy enough to not feel dreadfully important (you don’t have to retain information about how to survive the fall of Constantinople) but engaging enough that you will constantly want to quote from the book to people sitting beside you at the lake or beach. Plus, How to Survive History solves a problem of beach reads that has always irritated me — most often they’re romance novels written for women, a la Elin Hilderbrand.

It’s paperback and won’t be shortlisted for any elite prize, but Cassidy owns “humor history” and it’s top-notch for the genre. A

Drowning, by T.J. Newman (Avid Reader Press, 293 pages)

If you haven’t read T.J. Newman yet, best get started. She is one of the hottest names in publishing right now, having seemingly emerged out of nowhere to sign multi-million deals that will put her two novels on the big screen. The first was 2021’s Falling; her new book is Drowning. Both are fast-paced thrillers set on a plane, drawing from Newman’s experience as a flight attendant, a job she took after failing to capitalize on her musical theater degree on Broadway. Both are best read on terra firma, not in the air.

In Falling, Newman gave us a Coastal Airlines pilot who learns midflight that his family has been kidnapped by terrorists who will kill his family if he doesn’t intentionally crash the plane. Coastal Airlines — the most cursed fictional airline since the TV show Lost gave us Oceanic — is back in Drowning, in which a plane with 99 souls on board has a catastrophic engine failure less than two minutes into a flight out of Honolulu and has to “ditch” — airline lingo for the dreaded “water landing.”

It’s unclear why Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger could land an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River without fatalities in 2009, while Coastal Flight 1421 — an Airbus A321 — could not, but ours is not to wonder why. Ours is to sit nervously in the grips of a book that author Don Winslow described in his jacket blurb as “Apollo 13 underwater.” The squeamish and claustrophobic will never make it through the movie when it comes out, but can probably suffer through the book just fine.

Probably.

The story revolves around a family of three which used to be a family of four — an engineer named Will, his estranged wife Chris, and their 11-year-old daughter Shannon. The couple had another daughter who died in an accident, and the relationship had broken from the weight of the tragedy.

Shannon is spending two weeks away from home, and Will is accompanying her on the flight because he is so anxious about something happening to his only surviving child. That setup seems unnecessarily campy given that the stakes are already so high, but Newman employs every trick to keep her readers engaged.

The entire family is brainy — Will had designed their Honolulu home so that even the position of the sun works to make it comfortable, and Chris is an industrial diver who — conveniently, as it turns out — owns an underwater salvage company. One criticism of Newman’s first book is that the circumstances so much require the suspension of disbelief, and that is certainly true here. (What are the odds that the mother of one of the children trapped on an underwater plane is an industrial diver? One hundred percent in a T.J. Newman book.)

There is no lengthy build-up to the disaster: Will notices the engine on fire on the first page, and we are rocketed into assorted passengers’ lives as they frantically try to come to grips with what is happening. We meet the flight attendants Molly and Kaholo, the co-captain Kit, the elderly couple who had traveled to Hawaii to celebrate their anniversary, the newlyweds, the newly divorced woman taking her first solo vacation, the unaccompanied minor, the requisite jerk whose death we won’t mind. When the plane goes into the water, some passengers die right away; others make the ill-fated decision to exit and take their chances in the water.

Only 12 stay behind — some following the advice of Will, who realized the risks of exiting the plane as a fire raged and fuel spilled into the sea — others because they just can’t get out in time. Not long afterward, the plane starts to sink and eventually comes to a precarious stop on the point of a cliff. Water is seeping into the cabin, but there is enough air that Will, Shannon and the other passengers can function normally, at least for the time being. Each new section of the book ominously gives an update on how much oxygen they have left: “2:48 p.m. 2 hours and 47 minutes after impact. Approximately 2.5 hours of oxygen inside plane.”

Meanwhile, on land, the military-led rescue operation somewhat improbably grows to involve a certain industrial diver whose estranged spouse and child happen to be on the plane. There is conflict over which of the severely limited rescue options has the least chance of killing the people inside the plane and those who are trying to rescue them.

The language is sparse to the point of comical when viewed with a critical eye: “A baby started to wait. The mother held her tight and sang a soft song into her ear. No one had a clue what was going to happen. Uncertainty brought fear. Fear created anxiety. They prayed. They cried. They texted goodbye to their loved ones.”

So you already know where this is going. And you probably have a decent idea how this will end. But that’s OK, because Newman, who looks to be her generation’s James Patterson, is a master at the carrot-and-stick formula that builds tension into every bite-sized chapter. A lot can go wrong even after a commercial jet lands in the ocean, let’s put it that way. And things are going wrong long past the point at which you’d think things should be starting to resolve.

There was a full-scale bidding war over the film rights, even before the book was released May 30. The excessively campy video trailer for Drowning says “the best film of the summer is a book.” It’s not wrong. The book reads like a screenplay, and therefore must be judged like one. No one will swoon over Newman’s prose, but in the summer thriller genre, in which literary standards relax quite a bit (like office dress codes on Casual Friday), she’s at the head of her class. B

The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer (St. Martin’s Press, 314 pages)

Clover Brooks is 36, single and surrounded by death — not the thing you’d want to put on a Tinder profile. The lifetime New Yorker lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment she shared with her grandfather growing up and she works as a death doula — the opposite of a birth doula. She sits with dying people, ensuring that they don’t die alone and helping them to process their pain and other complicated emotions they are experiencing. She keeps three notebooks in which she records notes; they are labeled “Regrets,” “Advice” and “Confessions.”

That’s what you need to know to understand the title of The Collected Regrets of Clover, a debut novel from Mikki Brammer, an Australian transplant who has a remarkable level of knowledge of New York City, where she lives now. It is a surprisingly upbeat novel, given the subject matter. The protagonist is a lonely young woman who has been hobbled by grief, having lost both parents as a child and, later, more traumatically, the grandfather who raised her. You might call her death-haunted; the first line of the novel is, “The first time I watched someone die, I was five.” (It was her kindergarten teacher.)

Clover does not have much of a life outside her work, caring for her two cats and a low-maintenance dog and keeping up with her neighbors. The only thing she does with any regularity is attend an occasional death cafe — a group where people gather to talk about death and enjoy refreshments (yes, this is a thing) — and every weekend have breakfast out and visit the bookstore she used to frequent with her grandfather before he passed more than a decade ago.

The few friends she has are old, and they include the 70-something bookstore owner and an elderly man who lives in her building and has known her since childhood. An only child who never learned to be social, she sees no reason to make friends and finds all the companionship and solace she needs in her structured life and in her books. Or so she thinks.

You probably see where this is going. Which is the only problem with this generally engaging book.

From the moment Brammer introduces a character named Sebastian, an overly enthusiastic visitor to a death cafe who tries to befriend Clover, there is a likely trajectory of this story. Our heroine will resist Sebastion’s overtures for only so long, and eventually he will bring her the companionship and love that she has long resisted. (She has never, she reveals, uttered the words “I love you” nor had them said to her — although her grandfather, a biology professor at Columbia University, clearly loved Clover deeply, he wasn’t one to say it, and her parents, whom she only vaguely remembers, had been more interested in each other than their child before they died in an accident while visiting China.)

To her credit, Brammer doesn’t follow that well-trampled plot, at least not completely. Instead, the story takes a sharp detour when Clover takes on a new client who, at 91, is dying of pancreatic cancer and has two months to live. Although she had a good marriage and a fulfilling life, she has long wondered if her life would have been better if she had married another man, someone she fell in love with when she was young and living in France. Clover does some research and finds the man seems to be living in Maine, so she sets off on a New England road trip to find him to fulfill the dying woman’s last wish.

In many ways The Collected Regrets of Clover is a literary death cafe — it is populated with millennials who grew up in families uncomfortable with talking about life’s end and who therefore are eager to explore the subject — everything from the legality of burial at sea to burial suits made out of compostable mushrooms. From Clover’s work to her memories to the visits to death cafes, the novel is one long conversation about grief and death. It’s a subject that the author seems to know something about.

One character says, “Someone told me once that [grief is like] a bag that you always carry — it starts out as a large suitcase, and as the years go by, it might reduce to the size of a purse, but you carry it forever.”

Clover has been carrying her own grief for reasons that unfold throughout the novel, and while it’s not an especially complicated story, it’s competently told and has enough light twists to keep readers engaged. The squeamish need not worry; death is largely a concept here; there are no unsettling depictions of the stages of decomposition or other things that happen to the body after we die. Nor does Brammer take up any discussion about the existence (or not) of an afterlife.

In a writing group she joined while she was working on the book, Brammer told others that she was trying to write a book about death “that’s fun and uplifting.” Strange as that sounds, she succeeded. B

Soul Boom, by Rainn Wilson (Hachette Go, 275 pages)

The shelf life of The Office and its cast seems eternal, even though it’s been 18 years since the sitcom’s debut. The actors keep turning up in other roles, in podcasts and in a surprising number of books, the latest from Rainn Wilson, who played the quirky paper salesman Dwight Schrute on the long-running NBC series.

It was the kind of iconic role that is hard to escape later in one’s career. Like Bob Odenkirk will always be Saul Goodman to fans of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, Rainn Wilson will always be Dwight Schrute, which is a bit of a problem for someone who is now selling spirituality. As great as that character was, he would not be my first choice for discussing the mysteries of the universe, human consciousness, God and death.

But following his passion, Wilson founded a media company that he, perplexingly, called “Soul Pancake” and currently stars in a streaming travel show called The Geography of Bliss. It’s hard to see his third book, Soul Boom, as anything but other than a marketing vehicle for the show, given its timing and its promotion of The Geography of Bliss. But maybe it would at least be funny, I thought.

Sadly, not, at least not in the smart, sly way that The Office is funny. It’s lighthearted and at times amusing, but Wilson’s folksy style of writing often deteriorates into words that really should not be on the printed page, as in this cringy sentence from the preface: “So … OK to move forward on the old booky-wook?”

Really, it was not — he lost me at booky-wook — but I soldiered on, hoping for improvement.

Wilson grew up in a family of Baha’is, members of a monotheistic faith that teaches progressive revelation — the idea that God is so far beyond our comprehension that existential truths must be revealed to humans gradually through holy teachers like Jesus, Mohammed and the Buddha. Its founder and prophet, Baha’u’llah, was, to the mind of young Wilson, “loving and reasonable” with “absolutely no fire-and-brimstone qualities.” Although he left the faith for a time in his 20s (“For a couple of years, I even tried on atheism like some jaunty, rebellious cap!”), he eventually returned to it.

But Soul Boom is not a come-to-Baha’u’llah book. Wilson does not seem particularly interested in recruiting people to his faith, but just in expanding our spiritual consciousness generally. He believes that nothing less than a spiritual revolution can solve the problems the world faces. And although he’s not hard-line preachy about it, he does want us to believe in God and the continuation of consciousness after death. You can’t have a “soul boom” without belief in a “soul,” after all.

Wilson’s own belief in an afterlife solidified at the time of his father’s death of heart disease when, after life support was removed, he recognized that “This body, this vessel was not my father. … The still, vacant body on that hospital bed in the ICU was simply a suit he once wore.”

That leads into a discussion of consciousness that is informed by Wilson’s deep reading in philosophy and disparate religious traditions. He notes that for all our scientific advances, human consciousness is largely a mystery. He then invites us to think about death, a topic that he tried to address in a reality-type TV show called My Last Days. (The studios passed.)

Again, he was failed by an editor, who left intact sentences like this one: “But what, exactly, does death put into perspective? Why, the preciousness of life, you big silly willy.”

This is the problem with celebrities writing books. Editors are so star-struck that they obsequiously leave in sentences — indeed, sometimes whole paragraphs and chapters — that should never have survived the first draft. It is this sort of silly-willyness sprinkled throughout that drags Soul Boom to a literary nether level. It’s unfortunate, because there are some moving passages in the book and Wilson, despite admitting that he hasn’t read some of the books from which he quotes, has clearly thought deeply about the material.

In one chapter, he writes about the importance of pilgrimages and describes his family’s trip to visit the Shrine of Bahji in Israel, where the founder of the Baha’i faith is buried. After sitting on the floor and praying there for over an hour, Wilson writes, he found that his world had shifted. “It’s like when you hit your windshield wipers and spritz the glass in front of you and all of a sudden you realize just how dirty it had been. Just like that, you can see everything outside your car with a renewed clarity. It was like that. Only in my heart,” he writes.

Without proselytizing, Wilson rues the way in which our culture has turned away from words like “sacred,” “holy” and “reverence” and is losing touch with religious traditions of all kinds, to include those practiced by Native Americans. “In fact, my life in 2023 Los Angeles is pretty much lacking in anything remotely sacred or spiritually connected. It’s all iPhones, quickly devoured sandwiches and leaf blowers. It’s texts and podcasts and emails. It’s pressured phone calls, calendars, and a nonstop newsfeed.” But he points out that the problem is not capitalism, per se. While our society is losing touch with the sacred, even businesses created for profit can be meaningful places — he gives as an example the Seattle restaurant where he and his wife had their first date, before taking up the question “What makes something sacred?”

Ultimately Wilson proposes seven pillars of a spiritual revolution, which, while not terrible, are disappointingly platitudinal and sound more political than spiritual. (They include “Celebrate joy and fight cynicism,” “Build something new; don’t just protest” and “systematize grassroots movements.” It’s all fine, in the way that fast-casual restaurants are fine, and I’ll admit to being impressed that he’s friends with noted theologian David Bentley Hart and quotes from a wide range of poetry and scholarly books. (He also includes a list of recommended reading, which is also admirably diverse.)

As celebrity books go, it’s a pleasure to find one that takes on life’s biggest questions, but there’s nothing here that seems especially revolutionary. C