Author: Jennifer Graham

The Bad Muslim Discount, by Syed M. Masood (Doubleday, 368 pages)

The Bad Muslim Discount is the second book by Syed Masood, a Sacramento attorney who grew up in Pakistan. He brings a first-person perspective to this story of two Muslim families who come to the U.S. — one from Pakistan, and one from Iraq — and how disparate lives eventually collide.

It is a deeply moving and often tragic narrative that is liberally undercut with humor and a wonderfully relatable voice. While The Bad Muslim Discount is about people heavily influenced by other cultures, in both good and horrific ways, it’s still essentially an American story. As such, the novel provides a much needed and easily digestible perspective for the many Americans who still involuntarily shudder at the words “Allahu Akbar.”

The novel opens with the killing of a goat. Yes, many Muslims still sacrifice animals, even in America, and that is yet another cultural hurdle that stands high for animal lovers. But the shock of the sacrifice, carried out by a child, is overcome in a wise and compassionate telling, as the father comforts his distraught son, explaining that most people don’t understand the point of a ritual sacrifice.

“They think their offering is the money they spend on the animal. Or they think it is the life of the animal,” the father says. “But it isn’t. You are the sacrifice. What are you feeling now? That is your sacrifice. The lives of other creatures are not yours to take.”

The weeping boy is Anvar, the Pakistani who grows into the titular “bad Muslim” and takes turns narrating the book in first person with a young woman, Safwa, who eventually moves to the U.S. from Baghdad with her rigidly orthodox father.

Anvar demonstrates the truth that people are people, no matter where they’re from, with family dynamics that are easily recognizable to anyone who has never left the U.S. He struggles to deal with a neurotic mother and the too perfect brother who casts a long shadow over everything Anvar tries to accomplish. Even when he becomes a lawyer, he is the family’s black sheep, watching as his brother seems to get everything he wants, dealing with it by cracking cynical jokes.

Meanwhile, Safwa is growing up in a family that is constantly watered with pain. She loses first her mother, then her brother, to disease, leaving her alone with an increasingly abusive father made brittle by loss and further hardened by his imprisonment and torture at the hands of American soldiers during Desert Storm.

When he is released, the father and daughter make their way to San Francisco via Mexico, and there the lives of the two families begin to intersect. Safwa, who now goes by Azza, is the opposite of Anvar’s “Bad Muslim” (he drinks and is spotted eating a ham sandwich, in addition to other, more significant lapses of piety). She is the proverbial good girl, in no small part because of the controlling, rough hand of her father, and the man to whom she is to be given in an arranged marriage. But America offers opportunity she wouldn’t have in Baghdad.

“For the first time in forever, my world began to get bigger again. How amazing a thing a book is. How wonderful a piece of paper and pen. A lot of things about religion do not make sense to me, it is true, but I understand why, in that desert mountain cave, when the history of man was about to change, God’s first command to His last prophet was one simple word. Read.”

Thomas Jefferson owned a Quran, Islam’s holy book, but few Americans today have read any of it, unless forced to in high school. Stories from the Quran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad are scattered lightly throughout the book, helping the reader to understand Muslim culture and proscriptions even as they see the Gulf war and its casualties from another perspective. The book is not sympathetic to Osama bin Laden or the murderous fundamentalists who fueled anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. but offers a cogent explanation of why, as Masood puts it, “Islam was weaponized for the Cold War.”

The relative immediacy of the story — Donald Trump is elected at the end — andAmerica’s polarization on the subject of immigration could make The Bad Muslim Discount a polarizing book in less capable hands. It isn’t. With shades of Us Weekly, Masood shows Christian Americans “Muslims! They’re just like us!” — but for the goat sacrifices and staggering costs of old wars. Look for this one in 10 months on lists of the best novels of the year. A

BOOK NOTES
I’m old enough to remember Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (which were exactly as horrible as that sounds), and also the Book of the Month club in all its variations. (You’d sign up and get a box of titles for a low, low fee, and then an exorbitantly priced one that you may or may not have wanted to read, every month going forward.)
Today, for all the dramatic changes in publishing, book-of-the-month clubs still exist. The one getting the most buzz is Literati, which recently raised $40 million in financing, not bad for an industry that’s been said to be dying for more than a decade.
Literati started sending monthly boxes of books to children in 2017; last year, the company expanded to adults, offering a printed book every month, plus access to online discussion groups run by celebrities to include NBA star Stephen Curry and businessman Richard Branson. Founder Jessica Ewing says she’s building a social network around books. It costs $25 a month, or $20 a month if you pay for a year in advance.
And by the way, there’s a more traditional Book of the Month Club online, too. You pay $14.99 a month for one title that you choose — which sounds way more complicated than just ordering from a local bookseller or Amazon. But the website says, “a subscription gets you excited to read, so you might actually do more of it,” which we tell you with no further comment.
Meanwhile, here are two books out this week that might get you excited to read, no club required:
Scratched, A Memoir of Perfectionism by Elizabeth Tallent (Harper, 240 pages) is the author’s confession of how her personal life and career has been shaped by obsessive perfectionism, how she grew up believing she was “the child whose flaws let disaster into an otherwise perfect family.” Looks heartbreaking, and riveting.
No One is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead, 224 pages) is by an author once described by The New York Times as a “modern word witch” and is billed as a provocative fictional commentary on social media in a full-immersion world where people are asking each other “Are we in hell? Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?” Sounds like a takedown of Twitter.

Books

Author events

• PAUL KRUGMAN Author presents Arguing with Zombies. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., March 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• DR. DANIEL O’NEILL Author presents Survival of the Fit. Hosted by The Toadstool Bookshops of Nashua, Peterborough and Keene. Virtual, via Zoom. Thurs., March 4, 7 p.m. Visit toadbooks.com or call 352-8815.

• NORMAN VANCOR Author presents Swift Silent Deadly. Hosted by The Toadstool Bookshops of Nashua, Peterborough and Keene. Virtual, via Zoom. Sat., March 6, 11 a.m. Visit toadbooks.com or call 352-8815.

• C. J. BOX Author presents Dark Sky. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., March 9, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• ELLIOT ACKERMAN & ADMIRAL JAMES STAVRIDIS Authors present 2034. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., March 16, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Special events

• EXETER LITFEST Literary festival will feature local authors, keynote speaker Victoria Arlen, book launches, a Saturday morning story hour for kids, and programs on various topics including publishing tips, mystery writing and homeschooling. Hosted virtually via Zoom by Exeter TV. Thurs., April 1, through Sat., April 3. Free and open to the public. Visit exeterlitfest.com.

Featured photo: Doomed Romance

Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America, by Christine Leigh Heyrman (Knopf, 304 pages)

Perform a Google search for “Martha Parker” and “Dunbarton, New Hampshire” and nothing especially interesting comes up. There’s just a smattering of obituaries and grave-marker sites related to assorted Parkers from the Merrimack County town near the intersection of Interstates 89 and 93.

What a difference a century or two makes.

Had there been Wikipedia in her day, Martha Parker would have been at the top of Google search results. For a time, she was one of the most famous young women in this part of New England, and a couple of men tried to make her one of the most scandalous. Let’s just say, if reality TV had been a thing in the early 19th century, there might have been a show called “Keeping Up with the Parkers.”

Historian Christine Leigh Heyrman discovered the story by accident, while studying correspondence to and from “pious Yankees set on saving the world,” missionaries originating in New England. In multiple letters, there were tantalizing mentions of the beautiful, young Parker, spurned suitors, broken engagements and a reputation in danger.

This was all the more interesting because Parker was no Jezebel; she was a pious, educated young woman who hoped to be a missionary’s wife in the Ottomon Empire. America may have been the promised land, but many of its 20-somethings, as it turns out, were clamoring to leave. For girls who grew up in a culture steeped in Calvinism, Heyrman writes, becoming a missionary’s wife was a prime aspiration, and these “assistant missionaries,” as they were called, were celebrities in New England villages, their adventures written up in the local newspapers.

“Years spent in the company of high-minded people have given me a taste for low gossip,” Heyrman says, and she wanted to learn more. Her investigation led to an archived box of correspondence that had been collected by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the powerful organization that controlled which pious New Englanders would be sent overseas to save the heathens.

The story was all there but in pieces, like a puzzle: letters, disaries, depositions and testimony the board had collected about Parker’s character.

That was difficult work, but then came the hardest part: convincing a publisher that all this antique correspondence would make an interesting book.

Fortunately, Heyrman succeeded, on both counts. Doomed Romance loses points for the titular spoiler, but it’s a surprisingly compelling account of a messy love triangle, examined through the mores of the time. Heyrman knits the travails of a 21-year-old who grew up in Dunbarton, bent on obtaining “assurance” of her salvation, into a tapestry of what New Hampshire was like in the early 1800s, as aspirational young women pushed back against the men who were bent on keeping them busy on the home front.

In the process, she makes clear the differences between a culture defined by religious faith and a culture defined by the lack of it, but also that despite the chasm between 1821 and 2021, a basic human nature prevails, with or without social media.

Heyrman at one point describes Parker and one of her suitors as “supremely self-absorbed, steeped in hothouse emotions and skilled at working up themselves and each other.” They had, she said, “over many years, become addicted to the drama of their relationship.”

Not that any of us would know anyone like that.

Like most of her contemporaries, Parker was in the market for a spouse, and because she was by all accounts (there are no photographs) comely and whip-smart, there were multiple men competing for her hand. The two that figure most into this story are Thomas Tenney and Elnathan Gridley, and for a time she was engaged to both.

Although Tenney, Heyrman writes, emitted an “odor of sanctity,” Gridley was richer and had better prospects on the mission field. (And, can we agree, a much better name?) So despite Tenney’s remonstrations — which included an hour-long dramatic reading of his account of their relationship to that point, delivered to Parker and her sister — Parker settled on Gridley. And then the fireworks began.

An anonymous tattletale reported to the American Board that one of their aspiring missionaries had, basically, the morals of an alley cat. Was it Tenney who filed the report? That’s one of the small mysteries that drives this story, as well as what will become of the three central parties.

Heyrman does superb work in piecing together this obscure, 200-year-old story, made even more challenging because, as she writes, “private lives were much more private then.”

“For centuries, stoicism served as the default mode for nearly everyone in the Western world, ordinary people especially. The harder life was, the more crucial to hold emotion in check: sometimes survival itself demanded restraint, even hiding the heart’s desire.”

While the book bogs down at points, weighted by the quaint language of the day and a historian’s penchant for mind-numbing detail, it is frequently enlivened by Heyrman’s light touch. She writes, for example, of the melodramatic exchanges between Parker and her suitors echoing “the purple prose of those novels evangelicals were not supposed to be reading.”

Overall, however, while this is a well-crafted history, let the buyer beware: Doomed Romance is no romance novel. It’s a serious book for the serious minded. B

BOOK NOTES
Because the federal government doesn’t understand that none of us are emotionally equipped to deal with taxes during a pandemic, the tax filing season began last week.

Maybe you’ve already filed yours and are just waiting for the check to show up. For everyone else, let this be the year you take advantage of every possible deduction. There’s a wealth of books, some newly updated, that promise to help you do that.

How to Pay Zero Taxes by Jeff Schnepper, billed as “The IRS’s Worst Nightmare” (McGraw-Hill, 928 pages), is said to be the guide to every tax break the federal government allows. Given that one chapter is on cattle-breeding programs, that appears to be true.

If 928 pages is too daunting, there’s J.K. Lasser’s 1001 Deductions and Tax Breaks 2021 by Barbara Weltman (Wiley, 464 pages).

And, if you want to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the IRS and Department of the Treasury publish their own paperback book, Tax Guide for Individuals (“Independently published,” it says; 137 pages). Infuriatingly, the IRS wants us to pay $12.99 in order to understand how to file our taxes instead of making all this information free on its website. At least it’s only 99 cents on Amazon Kindle for those inclined.

For a lighter take on the subject, take a look at Daylight Robbery: How Tax Shaped Our Past and Will Change Our Future by Dominic Frisby (Penguin Business, 288 pages). Frisby is a British comedian who apparently moonlights as a financial writer. He had me at the first page, in which he genially explains how in 1696 British monarchs William and Mary replaced the hated “hearth tax” (literally a tax on every fireplace in a home) with a tax on windows. Not surprisingly, people started building homes with fewer windows.

Daylight Robbery was published in hardcover last year, but a paperback version is out this month.

Books

Author events

• DIANE REHM Author presents When My Time Comes. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., Feb. 23, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• PAUL KRUGMAN Author presents Arguing with Zombies. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., March 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• C. J. BOX Author presents Dark Sky. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., March 9, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Special events

• EXETER LITFEST Literary festival will feature local authors, keynote speaker Victoria Arlen, book launches, a Saturday morning story hour for kids, and programs on various topics including publishing tips, mystery writing and homeschooling. Hosted virtually via Zoom by Exeter TV. Thurs., April 1, through Sat., April 3. Free and open to the public. Visit exeterlitfest.com.

Featured photo: Doomed Romance

Chatter, by Ethan Kross (Crown, 229 pages)

Ethan Kross had a problem, and not one you’d expect to plague a psychology professor with a Ph.D. and a family.

He’d gotten a threatening letter, postmarked locally, from someone who had been inexplicably enraged by his appearance on the CBS Evening News to talk about a scientific study. The letter contained violent drawings and so disturbed Kloss that he reported it to the police. Nothing happened, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. In his mind, he imagined the face of the writer — “with a little help from Dexter and the Saw movies” — and he stayed up late at night, listening for an intruder. He even considered hiring a bodyguard, an idea so silly that it caused him to speak sharply to himself, saying, “Ethan, what are you doing? This is crazy!”

With those words came a revelation: Viewing a distressing situation from another point of view, from a distance, can help people feel better. It is one of social science’s recent discoveries about how reframing can improve our outlook and mental health.

What Kross had been doing is often called rumination, the constant recycling of negative thoughts. Kross, director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, has another word for it: chatter. We all have “voices in our head,” he says; “the inner voice is a basic feature of the mind.”

“The flow of words is so inextricable from our inner lives that it persists even in the face of vocal impairments. Some people who stutter, for example, report talking more fluently in their minds than they do out loud.” Deaf people talk to themselves too, using sign language in their minds, Kross says.

But it’s the negative talk that is the focus of Chatter, the kind that derailed a promising pro-baseball pitcher and a Harvard undergrad on a track to a CIA career. Theirs are among the stories that Kross tells to illustrate the way in which destructive self-talk can ruin a career or a relationship, before telling us how to turn off the poisonous fountain, or at least slow it down to a drip.

Often all it takes is a shift in the language of how we talk to ourselves; for example, thinking about ourselves and our situations in the third person has been shown to relieve painful thoughts within seconds. (For example, imagine advising a friend with the same problem.) Conversely, the most common way of dealing with distressing situations or thoughts — talking it over with friends — can backfire and turn into “co-ruminating,” which Kross describes as “tossing fresh logs onto the fire of an already flaming inner voice.”

Star Trek fans will enjoy Kross’s explanation of how to avoid this (“When supporting each other, we need to offer the comfort of Kirk and the intellect of Spock”); in this chapter, he offers useful advice for anyone struggling to help a friend or relative in distress. But mostly the book is designed to help people struggling with chatter to help themselves in practical, evidence-based ways. One way is to organize our homes and workspaces, which “stimulates a sense of order in the world — and by extension in our own minds.”

More surprising suggestions that he offers include clutching a lucky charm of some sort or embracing a superstition. (The placebo effect is real.)

Although everyone talks to themselves, there’s wide diversity in what we think is the source of the voice. Some people sincerely think the voice comes from aliens or the government; those are deemed auditory hallucinations by mental health professionals. Kross makes clear that he believes the voice is his own; when panicking over the hate mail in the middle of the night, he tells himself, “Ethan, go to bed,” and finds comfort in the direction.

Elizabeth Gilbert also heard a similar instruction that she relays in the opening to Eat, Pray, Love (“Liz, go back to bed”) but she attributed the voice to God.

God doesn’t make the index of Chatter; a failing of the book is Kross’s unwillingness to address what (or who) many people believe to be the source of the interior voice. It also seems a little thin and anecdote-heavy for the complexity of the topic.

In both the cases of Gilbert and Kross, whatever the source, the directive worked, so if God doesn’t tell you to go to bed the next time you’re up at 3 a.m. ruminating, just tell yourself. Kross promises it works. B

BOOK NOTES
Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was ousted from her House committees for what Sen. Mitch McConnell called “loony lies and conspiracy theories.”

Meanwhile, Avi Loeb still teaches at Harvard University, which means that his theories about extraterrestrial flybys must be … true? Or at least reasonable enough to take seriously. Now we can learn more in Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 240 pages).

Loeb’s Ivy League colleagues have been dubious about his insistence that the oblong UFO that sped through our solar system in 2017, dubbed Oumuamua, was from an advanced civilization. To make his case to a more accepting public (a third of Americans tell pollsters they believe in aliens), Loeb wrote a book that, from its opening pages, looks surprisingly user-friendly. And neither Harvard nor Mitch McConnell has denounced him as loony, which seems an endorsement in itself.

For less controversial works about the universe, MIT professor Alan Lightman has a new collection of essays out this week. Probable Impossibilities, Musings on Beginning and Endings (Pantheon, 208 pages) is a physicist thinking out loud about subjects such as what came before the Big Bang and whether consciousness is greater than the neurons of an individual brain. We gave his previous collection, 2018, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (Pantheon, 210 pages) an A.

Michael Leinback and Jonathan Ward also had an eye on the heavens in Bringing Columbia Home (Arcade, 416 pages), an account of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and the efforts to recover the shuttle parts and human remains. With so much attention paid to the 1986 loss of the Challenger, with New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard, the 2003 Columbia disaster has fallen into its shadow. This book, released in paperback last year, is a poignant memorial to that crew.

And just because we love the title, check out Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson (W.W. Norton & Co., 224 pages).

Featured photo: Chatter

This Is the Voice, by John Colapinto (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages)

John Colapinto can blame his raspy voice on Jann Wenner.

Twenty years ago, he was working for Rolling Stone when Wenner, the magazine’s owner, put together a rock band composed of the magazine’s staff. “I had just turned forty-one and I jumped at the opportunity to sustain the delusion that I was not getting old,” Colapinto writes.

His performance as the group’s lead singer, however, turned out to be a bit too exuberant, and soon after, his voice turned to sandpaper. When the condition persisted, Colapinto saw doctors who found a growth, a polyp similar to the career-ending one that Julie Andrews suffered.

Faced with the loss of his voice, or at least the one he was used to, Colapinto realized how integral his voice was to his sense of self. This Is the Voice is his exploration into an aspect of humanity that gets little attention: how our ability to make sounds and connect them to thoughts is central to what makes us human.

Yes, animals have language too, but Colapinto argues that what emanates from humans is vastly different. His parakeets can emulate human speech and remember words, but they can’t figure out how to use those words to get what they want. His birds may be able to learn to say the word “seed” but they can’t translate that ability into demanding seed from within their cage.

Colapinto’s quest to learn more about the voice is a promising scaffold on which to build a book. Unfortunately, his personal story is a short one and it is soon abandoned for a more textbook-like analysis of the development of language. He begins with a deep dive into how babies learn language, a process that borders on the miraculous, given that children learn to talk by hearing “the half-mumbled, sporadic, random talk all around them (like the murky, overlapping conversations in a Robert Altman movie). It turns out, the 1999 film Baby Geniuses should have been a documentary, not a comedy.

“In one study, 2-year-olds were shown mysterious objects like an apple corer and told just once that it is a ‘dax.’ Though never again told this word, they recalled it weeks later when asked to point to a picture of the ‘dax’ on a screen,” writes.

Newborns are physically unable to talk, because the larynx and tongue aren’t yet in the right places; that takes a couple of months. It will take six to eight years before a child can articulate as deftly as an adult. And Colapinto explores other curiosities of language, such as that humans and birds must learn vocal expression from others of their species, while all other mammals can develop their distinct voices independently, without exposure to the language.

Also, human speech is unique in the animal kingdom because of its gender differences. “All other mammals are vocally monomorphic: their roars, barks, meows, and baahs sound the same whether made by a male or a female of the species.” Most human adult males, however, communicate at a pitch that is an octave lower than that of women, Colapinto writes.

The complexities of language and the mysteries of its development have been the subject of scholarly debate and study for centuries. Colapinto delves into that work by accompanying a researcher to the Brazilian village where a primitive tribe known as the Pirahã live. This is a rehash of a 2007 New Yorker article titled “The Interpreters.”

It’s interesting, but by this point the reader feels led down an overgrowth jungle path; we were promised a book about voice, not about language. He gets back on topic with a fascinating discussion of what’s known as “vocal fry,” a low-pitched, creaky way of talking that has been described elsewhere as “the way a Kardashian speaks.”

Sure enough, Colapinto says “the first reports of the vocal fry epidemic” appeared in 2010, when the reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians had the most viewers. Kim Kardashian, he says, is the “the epidemic’s Patient Zero” and the sound is essentially a human growl. As unpleasant as most people perceive the sound, it “has become a way for women to level the vocal playing field with men, who … use their more baritone voices to dominate in conversations.” (Don’t accuse Colapinto of misogyny; he also detects vocal fry in George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt.)

Also interesting is a section on how dialects and accents have evolved as sort of “territorial marking” and why so many New Englanders eschew the “r” in their words, a phenomenon he describes as “r-lessness.”

The penultimate chapter, “The Voice of Leadership and Persuasion,” looks at political rhetoric, focusing on Adolf Hitler and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Trump supporters, stay away from this one.

However, the chapter lends an immediacy to the topic and helps to lead Colapinto back to his own “scarred and aging voice” that was the genesis of the book. “My voice, with its nicks and scars and telltale rasp, tells its own history of my life, just like yours does,” he writes. It’s a satisfying conclusion, though the reader might think it takes too long to get there. Recommended for New Yorker subscribers, aging singers and language buffs; not for lovers of Kardashians. B-

BOOK NOTES
Nothing says “I forgot about Valentine’s Day” like a box of drugstore candy. Nothing says “I’ve been thinking deeply about this important day in our relationship” like a box of candy plus a book.

That’s even more true now that Amazon and the USPS have apparently adopted “yeah, whenever” as their delivery slogans. But if you order quickly, you have a shot at getting one of these titles before Feb. 14. There’s something for everyone here, from lovers of music to lovers of dogs.

Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less, edited by Daniel Jones and Miya Lee (Artisan, 208 pages). These are vignettes about love compiled from The New York Times’ popular “Modern Love” column.
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi (Bloomsbury Continuum, 256 pages). This won’t be out until March, but for fans of the Russian novelist it looks worth the wait: a biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky focusing on three great loves of his life. Pre-order and print out the receipt.
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories, by Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Knopf, 256 pages). Technically, you can give this just for the title. But the stories about love and relationship are great, too, to include one about an engaged couple debating the proper number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding.
The Course of Love, by Alain de Botton (Simon & Schuster, 240 pages) A Seattle Times review of this novel called it “A living, volatile portrait of how two very different souls love, complement and aggravate each other.” An Evening Standard review said, “It may even save some marriages.” Worth a try.
The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis (HarperOne, 192 pages). The late Christian apologist and creator of Narnia analyzes four kinds of love: affection, friendship, erotic, and love of God.
Modern Love, True Stories of Love, Loss and Redemption, edited by Daniel Jones (Crown, 304 pages). This is another compilation of the “Modern Love” columns in The New York Times, these longer than 100 words.
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Cathy W. Barks (Scribner, 432 pages). American novelists in the Jazz age, the Fitzgeralds loved each other prolifically in person and on paper. They probably won’t mind if you borrow a line or two to breathe in your beloved’s ear.
Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You, by Clive D.L. Wynne (Mariner, 272 pages). Yes, you can buy this one for yourself.

Featured photo: This Is the Voice, by John Colapinto

The Listening Path, by Julia Cameron (St. Martin’s Essentials, 190 pages)

Julia Cameron is a national treasure. Part creativity coach, part spiritual guide, total inspiration, she’s been a muse to a generation of artists since the publication of The Artist’s Way in 1992.

Cameron deals in blockage: writer’s block, painter’s block, potter’s block, dancer’s block, the thwarting of any creative impulse. She promised in The Artist’s Way that she knew the tools to unblock, to help others overcome resistance born of insecurity, failure and criticism so they can summon their art into existence. She calls it creative recovery.

Elizabeth Gilbert has said Eat, Pray, Love would not have been written without Cameron’s influence. Writers Tim Ferris and Patricia Cornwall and musicians Alicia Keys and Pete Townshend are among celebrities who swear by her exercises, which include freestyle journaling upon awakening (called “morning pages”) and a weekly solo outing she calls an “artist’s date.”

The Artist’s Way is a simple, sensible and comforting guide to breaking through the resistance, both external and internal, that can prevent people from doing their life’s work. If you haven’t already read it, order it right now. It’s the book you didn’t know you needed.

Unfortunately, while many of us need one The Artist’s Way, we don’t need 12. But a dozen other Artist’s Way titles have made their way into the world because of the success of the first. There is an Artist’s Way for parents, for midlife, for work. There is The Complete Artist’s Way, The Artist’s Way Workbook, The Artist’s Way Every Day, among other titles. And now there’s a new title in the series called The Listening Path, the Creative Art of Attention. Though the title is mercifully different, most of the content is not. And what’s new is tragically boring.

Cameron begins by rehashing the steps to creative recovery that she has been teaching for a quarter century. It’s unclear who the audience is. Presumably most people eager to read The Listening Path are already Cameron devotees, so she’s preaching to the choir here. Having convinced us (again) of the value of morning pages, artist’s dates and solo walks, she then addresses the importance of deep and thoughtful listening.

Again, this is not really new ground. The Artist’s Way also talks about attention and listening. Cameron sees artists as conduits; writers do not so much write as they take dictation, she believes. She says in The Artist’s Way, “I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.”

So in encouraging people to undertake a six-week course of active listening (to the environment, to others, to our higher selves, to “beyond the veil,” to our heroes, and to silence), she is elaborating on a well-worn theme. Ponderously.

I wanted to be interested, to be rapt, as she wanders through her days in New Mexico with her lizard-eating dog, Lily, listening to thunderstorms and friends and small, still voices within. But other than occasional horror about the lizard-eating, which Cameron never tries to prevent (the dog only eats tasty gray lizards, not striped ones, so there’s that), the book meanders at the gait of a 71-year-old with nowhere to be and 180 pages to fill. The plot, such as it is, involves Cameron lunching often with friends and discussing listening over steak tacos or sushi. There’s also a storyline, ultimately resolved, about how Cameron can’t get her lizard-eating dog to stop barking. (Cameron’s neighbors are very tired of listening to that.) And there’s way too much dialogue of Cameron speaking soothingly to Lily. (“It’s just hail, sweetheart.”)

Like other books in the series, the margins are filled with pertinent quotes (“There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing” — G.K. Chesterton) and suggested exercises, some interesting, some tedious, some simply strange. (“I invite you to try woo-woo,” begins one.) Like the other books, each chapter ends with a series of questions, always asking if we’ve done our morning pages, artist dates and walks. All the accountability gets exhausting.

To be fair, I suffer from chronic tinnitus, so exhortations to listen more deeply to the shrill whine of crickets in my head cause me psychic pain. For those of you capable of experiencing quiet, Cameron’s latest may well be a welcome footnote to her earlier work, a gentle reminder of truths you already know. But for most people, The Listening Path is a duller version of Cameron’s earlier, compelling work. She’s written 40 books, plus plays, poetry and a feature-film script. Read Cameron, by all means, but put this one at the bottom of your list. C

BOOK NOTES
If you’re looking for a book by Amanda Gorman, the Harvard graduate who wowed the world with her poem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, just wait nine months. Or you can pre-order.
The 23-year-old Gorman has two books coming out in September, which has to be breaking someone at Penguin Random House’s heart, because she could have sold a few million last week alone. The forthcoming Change Sings is a children’s book; The Hill We Climb is a poetry collection.
They’re already bestsellers on Amazon, doing better than Joe Biden’s book Promise Me, Dad (Flatiron, 304 pages) and Jill Biden’s Where the Light Enters (Flatiron again, 224 pages).
Meanwhile, reports of the publishing industry’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, according to Jim Milliot, writing recently in Publisher’s Weekly. Print book sales rose 8.2 percent in 2020, Milliott reported. That translates to nearly 751 million units (we presume that means books) sold, up from nearly 694 million the previous year.
Admittedly, part of the spike was because of parents schooling kids at home. They were buying education and reference titles and also books on games and hobbies to keep kids busy. Juvenile fiction also had a boost from the new releases from Stephenie Meyer and Suzanne Collins: Midnight Sun, which sold 1.3 million copies, and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, 1.2 million.
Adults were reading anti-racism titles and political books, to include the title that sold the most copies: Barack Obama’s A Promised Land (Crown, 768 pages). Despite its daunting length, A Promised Land sold 2.5 million print copies. In comparison, the best-selling fiction title, Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 384 pages), sold 1.1 million copies last year, even though it was released in 2018.
The worst selling genre of 2020? Bueller? Bueller? Travel books, down 40 percent from 2019.

Book Clubs

Author events

• REBECCA CARROLL Author presents Surviving the White Gaze. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., Feb. 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• SUSAN CONLEY Author presents Landslide. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Thurs., Feb. 11, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DIANE REHM Author presents When My Time Comes. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., Feb. 23, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• PAUL KRUGMAN Author presents Arguing with Zombies. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., March 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Special events

• EXETER LITFEST Literary festival will feature local authors, keynote speaker Victoria Arlen, book launches, a Saturday morning story hour for kids, and programs on various topics including publishing tips, mystery writing and homeschooling. Hosted virtually via Zoom by Exeter TV. Thurs., April 1, through Sat., April 3. Free and open to the public. Visit exeterlitfest.com.

Featured photo: The Listening Path by Julia Cameron

Beginners, by Tom Vanderbilt (Knopf, 320 pages)

If you’ve ever considered learning something after the age of 8, chances are you’ve been told how difficult it would be. It’s easier to learn a language or how to ski, or start to play an instrument, with the benefit of a young brain and the absence of fear.

Tom Vanderbilt acknowledged the challenge before him when he decided in his late 40s to learn to play chess with his young daughter. One researcher told Vanderbilt that his daughter would learn the game twice as fast as he could.

But, as they say, age and treachery can overcome youth and skill. And Vanderbilt wasn’t willing to accept being consigned to the indignity of being an “adult learner,” with the expectation that he was going to learn a new skill poorly, if at all. He decided to put up a fight. And what he learned, presented in Beginners, challenges the idea that our brains are on conveyor belts headed down after we reach a certain age, and that it’s not worth the effort to learn new skills.

Vanderbilt argues that we all should be learning new things right up to the time when the hooded guy with the scythe shows up. It doesn’t matter whether we have time, or if the things we learn have any obvious connection to our jobs, he says. Learning anything new, whether a skill or fact, delights our brains, which crave novelty. And it’s not just the things that we learn that benefit our lives, but the act of learning itself. There’s evidence, in fact, Vanderbilt writes, that taking on the challenge of learning multiple things at once — for example, signing up to learn Italian in the same month you’re also taking up crocheting — is even better for the brain than undertaking one new thing. And while that may sound stressful, taking up new pursuits actually alleviates stress, research has shown.

In any new or difficult endeavor, people often advocate “baby steps,” and Vanderbilt begins by drilling down on how children actually learn to walk. It’s not a side gig. Babies spend about a third of their day practicing walking for six months, and they don’t actually get it down perfectly until several years later, he says. They don’t learn to walk by marching about in straight lines, but by wandering across different surfaces in different patterns. And, of course, they fall down a lot. Learning for adults is much like that, Vanderbilt says. “Development does not always march uniformly in one direction. Infants may learn to walk, then briefly revert to crawling. Always be on the edge of the impossible,” he writes, adding, “Remember: If it feels easy, you’re probably not learning.”

Vanderbilt’s own journey of being a beginner began with chess but then expanded to singing, surfing, swimming and jewelry making, among other things. Given that his explorations were done in pursuit of a book, he had the blessing of a supportive wife and tax deductions to support his research. He took singing lessons, for example, from a New York voice coach who also teaches famous actors, and he acknowledges that the lessons were not cheap. He later joins a chorus to enjoy the twin benefits of using his new skills and learning in a social setting (which is even better for us than learning on our own).

People who don’t have the time or resources to learn new things under the tutelage of coaches in idyllic settings (he engages in “wild swimming,” for example, off the coast of Greece) may experience Beginners as a somewhat impractical guide to what aspirational Americans do when they have too much time on their hands. But we live in a time when virtually any skill can be acquired via YouTube; in fact, one 70-year-old woman Vanderbilt met in the Bahamas had taught herself to swim by watching videos online. As such, Beginners is a useful and engaging companion to any new pursuit, validation that even if you don’t turn into an Ironman or Grandmaster, no, you’re not wasting your time learning how to swim or play chess.

As a bonus, Vanderbilt offers aid and comfort to anyone who finds their memory isn’t what it used to be. Our brains are less efficient as we age, not merely because of biological degradation but because they contain so much stuff, he writes. “You’ve no doubt found, as you’ve gotten older, that you sometimes struggle to retrieve the name of a film or person. Of course you do! It’s because you’ve seen thousands of films and met thousands of people. Try implanting five decades of raw data into a kid and let’s see how they do,” he says. B+

BOOK NOTES

People on both sides of the political divide reverently quote him, so it’s easy to forget that Martin Luther King Jr. was a controversial figure in his day.

It’s even harder to fathom how controversial he was when you read some of what King actually wrote and said, which often reaches the heights of poetry.

For anyone who has only read about the civil rights leader we honor on Monday, and not actually read what he’s written, there’s a rich library of his words that has aged especially well, beginning with Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community? (Beacon Press, 256 pages).

Another good option for the novice King reader is A Testament of Hope, The Essential Writings and Speeches, edited by James M. Washington (HarperOne, 736 pages).

Meanwhile, adding to multiple substantive biographies about King, there’s a new book out this month that looks promising. Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 Election is something of a historical thriller (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages). It’s by Paul Kendrick and Steven Kendrick, a father-son team who have collaborated on two other historical books: Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union and Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America.

Also of note in the month we honor King:

One of King’s successors at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta is Raphael Warnock, who recently won one of the hotly contested U.S. Senate seats in Georgia.
It remains to be seen if Warnock has King’s rhetorical gifts, but he’s got a book, The Divided Mind of the Black Church, which was released in paperback last month (NYU Press, 278 pages). Promotional material says it’s an exploration of what the priority of the Black church should be: saving souls or transforming the social order.

Books

Author events

• DR. JARED ROSS HARDESTY Author of Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (2019) presents a virtual lecture, “Confronting Slavery in Early New England: History, Sources and Interpetation.” Thurs., Jan. 14, 6:30 p.m. Part of The Moffatt-Ladd House and Garden’s free public winter continuing education series. Registration is required. Email education.moffatt.ladd@gmail.com to receive the link to the Zoom event.

• REBECCA CARROLL Author presents Surviving the White Gaze. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., Feb. 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• SUSAN CONLEY Author presents Landslide. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Thurs., Feb. 11, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DIANE REHM Author presents When My Time Comes. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., Feb. 23, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offering remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week winter session runs Jan. 21 through Feb. 25, with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Spring session dates TBA. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Special events

• EXETER LITFEST Literary festival will feature local authors, keynote speaker Victoria Arlen, book launches, a Saturday morning story hour for kids, and programs on various topics including publishing tips, mystery writing and homeschooling. Hosted virtually via Zoom by Exeter TV. Thurs., April 1, through Sat., April 3. Free and open to the public. Visit exeterlitfest.com.

Featured photo: Beginners, by Tom Vanderbilt

Exercised, by Daniel Lieberman(Pantheon, 464 pages)

Your resolution is to exercise. Hasn’t it always been? Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman, however, offers reasons to sit down and think about exercising before you actually do it.

Lieberman isn’t an athlete or an exercise scientist, but a professor of human evolutionary biology. In his words, “I study and teach how and why the human body looks and functions the way it does.” His Harvard lab is about skeletal biology and is well worth a visit just to see the image of a skeleton running there (projects.iq.harvard.edu/skeleton).

As such, Lieberman brings a fresh perspective to the business of exercise in his quest to understand what is normal, and what is abnormal, about contemporary human beings in motion. We all know what we’ve been told in recent years: that aerobic exercise can help stave off disease and lengthen lifespans, that too much sitting is deadly, that the slothful American lifestyle is an aberration of what the body is designed to do. Forget all that. We did not evolve to exercise, at least not in the way we think of exercise today.

Lieberman eviscerates some myths about exercise and confirms others as truths in his research of primitive societies like the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, the legendary Tamahumara long-distance runners of Mexico, and American extreme athletes, like those who participate in Ironman contests.

Along the way, he tackles the athletic compulsions (or lack thereof) of animals like gorillas and dogs, noting that unlike his dog, “I never see adults leap out of their cars … and sprint as fast as possible until they gasp for air.”

Studies of gorillas and chimpanzees — and also human beings in hunter-gatherer societies — show that they don’t go out of their way to exert themselves, much like many Americans today.

“For most of the time, our closest ape relatives are sluggards that live a sort of perpetual Sabbath,” Lieberman writes.

While demonstrably hard on the human skeleton, sitting still is “an ancient, fundamental strategy to allocate scarce energy sensibly” — and at times, long periods of sitting are good for us, as when we are able to sit quietly for a long time to focus on something important, like reading a book or playing chess. (The Germans have word for such periods of intense concentration: sitzfleisch, which crudely translates to “butt flesh,” Lieberman writes.)

In fact, there is evidence that humans might have evolved to be “especially averse” to exercise, he says, noting that even when we are sitting quietly our bodies are still at work, burning 70 or so calories an hour on internal processes such as digestion and moving blood around. Even people who are highly active burn more calories through basic body maintenance than through exercise, a man who weighs 180 pounds burning about 1,700 calories in 24 hours with no running, biking or squats.

That does not mean, however, that you can throw out the New Year’s resolution, at least not if you want to feel good, be healthy and live long.

Lieberman himself runs, albeit slowly, and admits to doing so even during research in societies that look on any uncoerced physical activity with suspicion. “Why would anyone run if they didn’t have to?” one of the Tarahumara runners asked him, incredulously. In fact, in many societies around the world, people would laugh themselves silly if confronted with the Spandexed American earnestly huffing on a city street, Peloton or treadmill. These people, while still enjoying plenty of leisure and sitting, move more than we do, whether just by walking to get to their destinations or chasing down goats on foot. In fact, most modern humans walk less than we used to, and when we walk we carry less stuff, Lieberman writes.

Having established himself as an expert on pretty much everything (even digressions into topics such as how different cultures sleep are engrossing), he goes on to weigh in on perennial questions such as can you really lose weight by walking more, is running bad for your knees, and, perhaps most importantly, how can we make ourselves exercise regularly? (Forget doing it for the endorphins; the runner’s high, Lieberman says, likely evolved to increase sensory awareness in our ancestors who ran as they hunted, and not everyone experiences it anyway.)

Federal guidelines recommend 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week, which amounts to 21 minutes a day. That’s one-sixth the amount of activity that people in non-industrial societies get.

Lieberman brings a keen wit to the subject and a seemingly limitless supply of contemporary analogies. (In memorable passages, he likens evolutionary trade-offs to the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park and notes that most superheroes come by their powers indirectly, unlike Batman, who works out). He also draws from an extraordinary well of experiences, to include dogsledding through Greenland and participating in the man-versus-horse marathon in Arizona. This is a guy you want at the head of the table at your dream dinner party. Until that happens, consider him an erudite companion on the fascinating journey that Exercised provides. A

BOOK NOTES
If you don’t want to exercise but want to be healthier, happier or lose weight, there’s only one option: change your diet. As always, there’s a fresh crop of dieting books out this month to help with the post-holiday pounds. (Eventually, let’s hope, the post-pandemic ones, too.)

Here are a few worth of attention:
The Case for Keto, by Gary Taubes (Knopf, 304 pages) — The author of The Case Against Sugar and Why We Get Fat wants us to eat fewer carbs and more fats.
The How Not To Diet Cookbook, by Dr. Michael Greger (Flatiron, 256 pages) — Seriously, you had to know this was coming when Greger’s first book, How Not To Die, was released.
Fast This Way, by Dave Asprey (Harper Wave, 288 pages) — A bullet-proof guide to becoming the high-performing human you were meant to be, the publisher promises.
Anxiety-Free With Food, by Liana Werner-Gray (Hay House, 352 pages) — On relieving stress, depression and anxiety by using food as medicine, like Hippocrates advised.
Body Love, by Kelly LeVeque (Morrow, 384 pages) — Journal your way to a healthy lifestyle in 12 weeks by focusing on “the fab four” — protein, fat, fiber and greens.
Finally, just in case 2021 is not, in fact, better than 2020, there’s The Meateater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival by Steven Rinella (Random House, 464 pages). If nothing else, you’ll want to read the introduction, titled “The Surprising Danger of S’Mores.”

Books

Author events

• K WOODMAN-MAYNARD Author presents graphic novel adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Thurs., Jan. 7, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• REBECCA CARROLL Author presents Surviving the White Gaze. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., Feb. 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• DIANE REHM Author presents When My Time Comes. Virtual livestream hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., Feb. 23, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Call 436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.

• SUSAN CONLEY Author presents Landslide. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Thurs., Feb. 11, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offering remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week winter session runs Jan. 21 through Feb. 25, with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Spring session dates TBA. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Featured photo: Exercised, by Daniel Lieberman

The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans (Riverhead, 288 pages)

The late science fiction writer Harlan Ellison once said that he went to bed angry every night and woke up every morning angrier. Like-minded scribes have said that should be true of all writers, and there has been plenty of anger vented in books this year, particularly on the subject of race and injustice.

So it’s a pleasure to come across a collection that makes its points in a quiet and even understated tone, in language that reads like prose but feels like poetry.

Danielle Evans is that good. Her second book, The Office of Historical Corrections, comprises a titular novella and six short stories that swirl around race, poverty, family and culture. The plots are riveting; the characters, so real they try to escape the page. Within the stories are subtle commentary on issues of the day. The only thing that’s missing is a pandemic, and that’s a good thing.

Evans is a graduate of the storied Iowa Writers Workshop, but hers is the sort of talent that isn’t taught but bestowed. Take, for example, the descriptions in “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a story about a college student, Claire, who becomes embroiled in controversy after a date posts a picture of her wearing a bikini emblazoned with Confederate flags on social media.

The present drama is entwined with a story from the girl’s past, during which she grew up best friends with a Black girl whose family came from South Carolina. “The whole family,” Evans writes, “talks with drowsy vowels and an occasional drag that gives some words— her name, for example— a comforting dip in the middle. In Mrs. Hall’s mouth, Claire’s name is a tunnel from which a person can emerge on the other side.”

At first Claire is bewildered by the reaction to a swimsuit that she didn’t buy, made public by a post she didn’t make, but then increasingly she becomes angry at the dorm mate who brought attention to it. In short order, she is championed by libertarians defending free speech and by supporters of the Confederacy, who urge her to defend her “southern” heritage, even though she was only in the South to visit her father and her relatives had never lived south of northern Virginia.

There are comic undertones to this potent story, even as it becomes more disturbing and complex.

Similarly, in “Alcatraz,” Evans mines family history for poignant exploration of injustice and loss.

The narrator has recently moved near the infamous prison, where her great-grandfather was confined when Alcatraz was a military prison used to house people for crimes such as desertion during the Civil War.

The narrator’s mother has spent much of her life trying to clear the name of her grandfather, who had been ultimately cleared of the accusations against him but was unable to escape the stigma and trauma of having been at Alcatraz.

She invites her mother, and some other family members, to take a tour of the facility, hoping it will provide some sort of closure for the family. When the mother arrived, Evans writes, she “was dressed like an actress auditioning for the part of my mother in a movie.”

“A different daughter might have been reassured, but I looked at my mother and saw a person directing all of her energy toward being outwardly composed because the inside was a lost cause,” Evans writes.

The novella, “The Office of Historical Corrections,” like the short stories, punches above its weight in Orwellian form.

It’s about an America that has put into place a federal agency charged with ferreting out truth, and sending government workers to issue “corrections stickers” when they come across statements or claims that are counter to the official truths.

The narrator, Cassie, was a college history professor before she joined the agency, whose origins are explained this way:

“An ambitious freshman congresswoman demanded funding to put a public historian in every zip code in the country, a correction for what she called the contemporary crisis of truth. It was pitched as a new public works project for the intellectual class, so many of us lately busy driving cars and delivering groceries and completing tasks on demand to make ends meet. Government jobs would put all those degrees to work and be comparatively lucrative.”

Sometimes the corrections are relatively small and easily proven, such as the origin of Juneteenth, which a cake shop has gotten wrong in one of its promotions. But she is ultimately drawn into a more serious case that involves the purported death of a Black man who started a business in an all-white town in Wisconsin. The business had been set on fire one night, and the owner was said to have died in the blaze. But the accuracy of the plaque outside the site came to the attention of another agency official who had issued a correction, beginning a series of events that Cassie is called upon to unravel.

Perhaps the most memorable of the collection is the story that precedes the novella. “Anything Could Disappear” reflects the sub-surburbia desperation that is often evident on a Greyhound bus. The main character, Vera, is traveling from Missouri to New York when another traveler deposits a 2-year-old on the seat next to Vera, saying “Keep an eye on him, will ya, hon?”

The woman then disappears, leaving Vera — who for unrelated reasons has a desire not to be near police — unsure of what to do when the bus reaches its destination. She winds up keeping the child with her for a few days, which turns into a few months, as Vera builds a life much different than she expected. Eventually, however, she learns that the child’s father is looking for him, and has to make an agonizing decision about what to do, not just with the child but with her life.

Mark Twain famously said he could have written a shorter letter to a friend if he’d had more time; it can be difficult for even the most celebrated writers to pack profundities in a small space. Evans does so beautifully here. A

BOOK NOTES
The Great Reset, according to the World Economic Forum, is the opportunity afforded by Covid-19 to recalibrate the world economy. While conservatives aren’t happy with the initiative, “the great reset” is a catchy phrase that holds more appeal than the tired old “new year’s resolution.”
If you’re looking to launch your own great reset in January, the publishing industry is here to help. Here are a couple of recent and forthcoming titles intended to make you be a better version of yourself in 2021:
Badass Habits, by Jen Sincero (Penguin Life, 256 pages): Here in the fourth book in Sincero’s “badass” series, she promises to help you “cultivate the awareness, boundaries, and daily upgrades you need to make [badass habits] stick.”
The Dry Challenge, by Hilary Sheinbaum (Harper Design, 224 pages): For anyone considering Sober January, as is the rage, Sheinbaum makes the case for going alcohol-free for a month and provides tips on how to effectively “lose the booze.”
Clean Mama’s Guide to a Peaceful Home, by Becky Rapinchuk (HarperOne, 240 pages): “How to establish systems and rituals to transform your home into a clean, organized, and comfortable space for you and your family,” the publisher says.
Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age, by Dr. Sanjay Gupta (Simon & Schuster, 336 pages): CNN’s chief medical correspondent, a neurosurgeon, provides a shape-up plan for your brain.
And, for the obligatory “lose weight” resolution, pandemic version: Fast This Way, by Dave Asprey (Harper Wave, 288 pages), notes on losing weight, getting smarter and living “your longest, healthiest life,” from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and “professional biohacker.

Books

Author events

• KJ DELL’ANTONIA Author presents The Chicken Sisters. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Wed., Jan. 6, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• K WOODMAN-MAYNARD Author presents graphic novel adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Thurs., Jan. 7, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SUSAN CONLEY Author presents Landslide. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Thurs., Feb. 11, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

Writing

• POSTCARD POETRY CONTEST Peterborough Poetry Project seeks submissions of original poems written on picture postcards for an upcoming anthology. Deadline is Dec. 31. Visit peterboroughpoetryproject.org/contests for more information.

• CALL FOR BLACK WRITERS New Hampshire-based theater company and playwright collective New World Theatre announces an open call to Black writers to submit monologues that reflect their personal experience of living while black, to be published in an anthology titled “08:46.” The deadline for submissions is Jan. 1, 2021. Visit newworldtheatre.org/08m46s.

Perestroika in Paris, by Jane Smiley (Knopf, 288 pages)

My daughter asked what I was reading this week, and I struggled to explain. “It’s a novel about a racehorse who escapes from her stall” — eyebrows raised — “and wanders around Paris” — slight smirk — “and becomes friends with other animals.”

By this point, my daughter’s face could’ve been an all-out meme, the expression people post on Twitter when they hear something utterly ridiculous. And I hadn’t even gotten to the part where the animals befriend a young boy.

But hear me out. It would also be difficult to describe Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web to people who haven’t read them without eliciting the same reaction. Jane Smiley’s Perestroika in Paris may not rise to that level of classic, but Perestroika, the racehorse who goes by Para, is as charming as Wilbur the pig and as memorable as Boxer the horse. It’s a surprising and delightful diversion for the gloom of post-Christmas winter.

Para is a filly who idly pushes up against her stall one day after a race and it unexpectedly opens. Although she is well-treated and loved, she is a curious horse and takes advantage of the opportunity to explore. Before leaving, she investigates a pile of her groom’s belongings and is interested to find a leather purse. She had heard people talk of purses — in fact, she has won many and figures this was probably her own — and so she picks up the purse with her mouth and carries it with her.

The droll scene conveys two things to the reader: that Smiley has a smart and understated wit, and that she knows horses and horse racing. In fact, she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner (for the novel A Thousand Acres, published in 1991) and many of her books for young readers involve horses. But Perestroika in Paris isn’t a horse book; it’s an animal story rich with subtle commentary on the human condition.

The first of Para’s new friends is Frida, a homeless hound — or, as Smiley puts it, “free dog” — who has been on her own and lonely since her human companion died. Intrigued by the sight of a horse on its own, carrying a purse, Frida befriends Para and helps her find a place where she can sleep at night, undetected. Then comes a world-wise raven, and two ducks which Frida, though hungry, manages with Edward Cullen-style self-control not to eat. Instead, she befriends the proprietor of a local market and offers him money she pilfers from Para’s purse in exchange for a bag of bread, beans, carrots and lettuce. (She is a very smart dog, having figured out that she can get humans to do what she wants when she performs some sort of trick.)

The animals encamp for a while in the Champ de Mars, with the occasional foray into Paris when it’s dark. There is some necessary suspension of disbelief in all of this, not only for the talking animals but for the fact that they are not quickly hauled off by Animal Control. Smiley deals deftly with this problem. For example, when Para goes out on her own one morning, she encounters a kindly baker who offers her oats and sugar. “She knew so little about horses that at first it didn’t occur to her to report the animal. If a horse lived in Paris, and could stroll down the street gazing into shop windows, Anais thought, then that was the horse’s business.” And the shop owner who gives Frida food in exchange for the money she continues to bring him assumes that she’s a very smart dog who has been sent by someone who is housebound.

The commentary by the animals is refreshing and may well accurately reflect what they think. One day, Frida reflects on runners she comes across, “Running humans never looked at a thing. … Perhaps they could not do two things at once, which was why she had never seen even the fastest ones catch a pigeon.”

But the most astute observer might be the raven, Raoul, who notes “there is nothing quite as amusing as observing humans in their own habitats.” (He also later reveals that many human beings are reincarnated as avians; he suspects he was once an ineffective government official. But then again, he also believes that Christmas, for humans, is a “mass breeding ritual.”

The story builds slowly, with the animals gradually building bonds with friendly humans who do not deem it necessary to intervene in their lives. We also look in occasionally on Para’s former trainer, who has assumed the horse was stolen or is dead. The most central human, however, is Etienne, an 8-year-old orphan who lives with his great-grandmother, who has known much loss. The animals, which now include a rat, are all bonded with Etienne and come to his aid when he experiences a tragedy

In this year of Covid and closed theaters, there wasn’t a “feel-good movie of the year,” but there is a feel-good book of the year, and this is it. It’s the happy ending we’ve all been waiting for. If only Smiley could write 2021. A

BOOK NOTES
They say you can’t tell a book by its cover, but you can tell a lot by its title. Books can go through several — the author’s choice isn’t necessarily the final decision, and the publisher’s isn’t necessarily the best. In fact, book titles can change even after a book has been published, for a paperback edition or second printing.
As such, it’s a pleasure to come across book titles that are so punchy, so perfect, that they make you want to read the book. Here are some of the best titles of 2020, a year that for some people has been one of the worst.

Block, Paper, Chisels by Kim Cunningham (Bauhan Publishing, 128 pages) — A collection of images depicting nature in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire, with information on the artist’s influences and techniques, plus some haiku.
Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st Century Memoir, by Madeleine Albright (Harper, 384 pages) — Recollections of the former secretary of state, the first woman to hold the office in the U.S.
You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington, by Alexis Coe (Viking, 304 pages) — Described by The New York Times as a “historiographical intervention in the form of a sometimes cheeky presidential biography.”
Good Morning, Monster, by Catherine Gildiner (St. Martin’s, 368 pages) — The subtitle, “A therapist shares five stories of emotional recovery,” isn’t nearly as catchy, but with the type set atop a fried egg, it’s a world-class cover.
Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last, by Wright Thompson (Penguin, 256 pages) — You don’t have to drink bourbon to be seduced by the title of this look at the family business whose motto is “We make fine bourbon at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must.”

Books

Author events

• KJ DELL’ANTONIA Author presents The Chicken Sisters. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Wed., Jan. 6, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SUSAN CONLEY Author presents Landslide. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Thurs., Feb. 11, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

Writing

• POSTCARD POETRY CONTEST Peterborough Poetry Project seeks submissions of original poems written on picture postcards for an upcoming anthology. Deadline is Dec. 31. Visit peterboroughpoetryproject.org/contests for more information.

• CALL FOR BLACK WRITERS New Hampshire-based theater company and playwright collective New World Theatre announces an open call to Black writers to submit monologues that reflect their personal experience of living while black, to be published in an anthology titled “08:46.” The deadline for submissions is Jan. 1, 2021. Visit newworldtheatre.org/08m46s.

The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Delacorte Press, 253 pages)

As I settled down in a chair with this book, my husband asked what I was reading.
“It’s the newest Jack Reacher novel,” I replied.
“Jack Reacher?”
“Yeah, he’s kind of like a scruffy James Bond. He always knows what to say and how to get out of a jam. He’s actually pretty cool.”
“Huh,” was his reply.
My husband said this because thrillers are usually not my go-to kind of book, but give me a Jack Reacher story any day of the week and I will stop what I’m doing and start reading.
Reacher is ex-military. He’s a bit of a lost soul and travels with only some cash and a toothbrush (when he needs to change his clothes he buys new ones). He is clever and he always outsmarts the bad guys. Sometimes that’s what you need.
The fight scenes are the absolute best because we can read his thought process as he analyzes his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses and then goes in for the kill. It’s why he wins when he’s faced with five opponents at the same time. A Reacher fight scene is pretty much scripted for the big screen.
Reacher helps people in trouble and in this book he’s helping a young man who has been accused of orchestrating a ransomware demand on his town. The town has turned against him, making his life miserable. An elite bad organization (Russian) is after him because they believe he has some files that they need for election interference (and when I say bad, these guys have a basement where you go in whole and come out in several suitcases).
The storyline is a little predictable and seems to be “ripped from the headlines.” That didn’t bother me as it might others.
The pace in a Reacher novel is quick. Each chapter has plenty of action propelling the reader to the next scene. Reacher likes precision and much of his dialogue is about calling people on what they actually mean when they speak.
“Leave town. This morning. Right now, in fact. He has a car waiting outside to take you to the highway. And he wants your word you won’t come back.”
“Well what if I don’t want to leave town?”
“Come on, Reacher. Work with me here. Yesterday you asked him for a ride.”
“That was yesterday. The town has grown on me since then.”
All this is what makes a Reacher novel so desirable right now. We need a hero. We need someone who will kick the bad guys’ butts and who will emerge victorious. We need hope even if it only comes from a fictional character in a book.
The Sentinel is co-written by Lee Child’s brother, Andrew Child — it’s the first collaboration and those who have read the Reacher books will notice some slight differences. Reacher is a little chattier now, a little more emotional. I didn’t mind the evolution but purists might be put off by these subtle changes. I anticipate some growing pains before the new Reacher finds his sweet spot.
And I guess we need to talk about the love interest. Reacher always gets the girl in each of his books. In The Sentinel he does get the girl, but not with his usual panache. This time it seems a little forced.
With all of these comments you would think that I might not have liked this book. Nope. Although it wasn’t my favorite Reacher novel, I did enjoy it. I liked seeing the bad guys get what is coming to them. I liked seeing Reacher come to the aid of people who need help.
And I liked reading about a character who has integrity (the first chapter cements that personality trait).
For these reasons, I’ll be giving this book a solid grade. Who knows, if I had not read it during a pandemic I might have been more critical; however, in times like this when we could use a tough, smart guy, this Reacher book, even with a few bumps, gives us a little bit of much-needed escapism and is worth the read. B
— Wendy E. N. Thomas

Books

Author events
• KJ DELL’ANTONIA Author presents The Chicken Sisters. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Wed., Jan. 6, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book Clubs
• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.
• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.
• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

Writing
• POSTCARD POETRY CONTEST Peterborough Poetry Project seeks submissions of original poems written on picture postcards for an upcoming anthology. Deadline is Dec. 31. Visit peterboroughpoetryproject.org.
• CALL FOR BLACK WRITERS New Hampshire-based theater company New World Theatre announces an open call to Black writers to submit monologues that reflect their experience of living while black, to be published in an anthology titled “08:46.” The deadline for submissions is Jan. 1, 2021. Visit newworldtheatre.org/08m46s.

Featured photo: The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child