Author: Jennifer Graham

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

No Time Like the Future, by Michael J. Fox (Flatiron, 238 pages)

If Michael J. Fox hasn’t been on your radar screen since the 1980s, you’ve missed a lot. You probably know that he has Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he announced in 1998, and started a foundation to fund research, and that he continued to work, acting and writing.

But because he appears eternally youthful, it’s still jarring to learn that Marty McFly, that Alex P. Keaton, is the father of four adult children and sits around mourning his empty nest. Children are time machines, he writes in his latest memoir No Time Like the Future, describing the “cruel velocity” with which our offspring catapult us into a future where, he says, “I wish away my time while I wait for my children to come and visit.”

Well. Didn’t see that coming when Fox was zipping around in Doc Brown’s DeLorean.

But Fox is now 59 and while that is young as Boomers go, he has been suffering the effects of a progressive neurological disease for 30 years, so the subtitle of this memoir is “an optimist considers mortality.” Optimism has been part of his brand since the diagnosis — his previous books were titled Lucky Man and Always Looking Up, the latter of which became a documentary called “Adventures of an Incurable Optimist.”

Lately, however, Fox says, there are days in which he wonders if he is out of the lemonade business, if it’s time to succumb to the lemons. He writes of possessing a body that has been weaponized — even with medication and regular physical therapy, his mobility and balance is so unpredictable that he is nervous about getting too close to his 90-year-old mother, for fear of knocking her over. “I love my mother too much to give her a hug,” he writes.

It’s not just Parkinson’s that’s the problem, but the chaos caused by the disease. He frequently suffers from injuries caused by falling, a finger swollen so badly that doctors feared they might have to amputate; a pinched sciatic nerve that renders him unable to go on the beach during a family vacation to the Caribbean; a broken arm that required a stainless-steel plate and 19 screws to fix. And he also suffered a tumor on his spinal cord that required a dangerous surgery two years ago.

The recounting of all these woes may seem like a proposal for the world’s worst book. Who, save the schadenfreudeans among us, wants to read 238 pages of a likeable person’s suffering? But Fox pulls it off, because the book is well-crafted, beginning and ending with a catastrophic fall, and the existential crisis that it represents, and it reveals an admirable mind, one that can fire off smart comic lines (“If Mike fell in the kitchen and no one was there to see him, would he still break his arm?”) while admitting despair.

It is the broken arm, not the disease, that pushes Fox to question whether his half-full philosophy of life is useful, to question whether being a “hopeaholic” (a term coined by artist Anna Deavere Smith) is actually harmful, both to him and to his fans.

“Have I oversold optimism as a panacea, commodified hope? Have I been an honest broker with the Parkinson’s community?” he wonders in anguish. “The understanding I’ve reached with Parkinson’s is sincere, but the expression of it risks being glib. … In telling other patients, ‘Chin up! It will be okay!’ did I look to them to validate my optimism? Is it because I needed to believe it myself?”

This is particularly relevant, because Fox’s reminiscing makes it clear that, despite his harsh trials, he dwells on a plane distant from most suffering mortals. When he drinks pina coladas in the Caribbean, he does so with Keith Richards; he is wealthy, able to afford the best of care and exotic vacations. It’s easier to view the glass as half full when it contains Dom Perignon, not vinegar.

But Fox is markedly self-aware and comes to believe that his attitude has become too cavalier, that he has spent too much time focusing on his body and its assorted travails, and that he needs to spend more time examining his mindset. He notes that while Franklin D. Roosevelt is known for saying, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” in the same speech Roosevelt said, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

I’ll not spoil the ending by revealing Fox’s conclusion, only say that No Time Like the Future is occasionally disjointed but assembles itself nicely by the end and is a surprisingly thoughtful memoir by one of America’s most beloved celebrities. Michael J. Fox is not Alex P. Keaton but for the earnestness; he is not Marty McFly, but for the zeal; but he is the rare enduring celebrity who deserves a platform, and continued applause. (His foundation has funded $1 billion in Parkinson’s research.) Still, this memoir, his fourth, is gritty and maybe not the inspiration that people newly diagnosed with Parkinson’s might want. Gift carefully. B

BOOK NOTES
Books can be the best gift — or the worst.

On the plus side they are easy to wrap and relatively cheap to mail. You have literally millions of choices and are not limited to books published recently. Vintage signed copies of an author someone loves makes a wonderful gift (even if it’s inscribed to someone else), which leads to another plus: Books endure and are a tangible sign of your affection.

And a gift book can easily be made to pop with a few thoughtful additions, such as a book light to attach for night reading. (Note to my mother: I am all about the fingerless gloves imprinted with passages from A Christmas Carol on the literati website Storiarts.)

But a book is only a good gift if chosen with a high degree of sensitivity. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (One World, 320 pages), is popular this year, but it’s difficult to give because of the implication. Same with Joel Osteen’s Empty Out the Negative (Faithwords, 160 pages) or any kind of self-improvement book. Novels, too, tough. For a few years, I tried giving friends a copy of the best book I’d read that year but found they don’t always share my enthusiasm. And J.K. Rowling has a new children’s book out, but we have to tiptoe around her this year.

That said, there are some books that are pretty much guaranteed to please people in certain categories. Below is a roundup of suggestions from a serial book giver.
For Democrats: A Promised Land, by Barack Obama (Crown, 768 pages) or My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages)
For Trumpy Republicans: Liberal Privilege by Donald Trump Jr. (self-published, no word count available) or Live Free or Die by Sean Hannity (Threshold, 352 pages)
For Never-Trump Republicans: It Was All a Lie, How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens (Knopf, 256 pages) or Reaganland: America’s Turn Right, by Rick Perlstein (Simon & Schuster, 1,120 pages, not a typo)
For Health Geeks: Clean, the New Science of Skin by James Hamblin (Riverhead, 288 pages)
For Nature Lovers: What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley (Knopf, 240 pages) or The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, (Greystone, 288 pages)
For Shakespeare Buffs: Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro (Penguin, 320 pages)
For Beatles Buffs: 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, by Craig Brown (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 592 pages)
For Young Children (and Their Parents): No More Naps! by Chris Grabenstein (Random House Books for Young Readers, 40 pages)
For Animal Lovers: Dog Songs by Mary Oliver (Penguin, 144 pages) or Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 128 pages)
For Anyone Who Loves Christmas: Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean (Penguin, 272 pages) or A Literary Holiday Cookbook by Alison Walsh (Skyhorse, 272 pages)

Featured photo:No Time Like the Future, by Michael J. Fox

A User’s Guide to Democracy, by Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy (Celadon, 349 pages)

If there’s anything we can take away from the 2020 election, it’s that everyone’s an expert on American democracy. In their own minds, anyway.

Your third cousin twice removed, the guy who comments on everything you post on Facebook or Twitter, and your father (especially your father) know exactly how this republic is supposed to work, and how we should keep it. This is because for many of us an alarming amount of time has transpired since we last took an American history class, and we weren’t paying that much attention anyway.

Enter Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy, hosts of NHPR’s Civics 101 radio show and podcast, who propose to correct this widespread trend of pontification without facts. Their A User’s Guide to Democracy: How America Works may not be the best book for holiday gift giving, as any recipient might perceive it as an insult, but it’s a delightful handbook of everything you used to know and largely forgot, plus a generous serving of interesting trivia about politics and players. An added bonus is that the book is a paperback, as any kind of user’s guide should be so you can highlight without guilt.

A User’s Guide to Democracy is basically a civics class, designed to equally inform and amuse. The authors are aided in this quest by Tom Toro, a cartoonist for the New Yorker, who puts a wry spin on the information. (Example: the cartoon illustrating a section on who can be a U.S. senator — which notes that only 10 Black Americans have served in the Senate — shows a white guy carrying a briefcase confronting a metal detector and melanin detector.)

It begins with an exploration of what the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government do, how they came to have these powers, and what they actually achieve. (Not as much as you might think. “Of all the bills and resolutions proposed in the House, about 3 to 5 percent become law. And that low percentage has been pretty standard ever since we got on this merry-go-round in 1789,” the authors write.)

From there, they explore federalism and the eternal tug-of-war for power between the federal government and the states. The authors see it as fraught co-parenting and understand that despite its fractious history this is the sort of subject that makes readers’ eyes glaze over. “We know you skimmed this section,” they write at the end of the chapter.

The reward for getting through it, however, is a base of understanding that is useful for exploring the stuff that is most relevant right now: elections and how they work. “The nation’s myriad voting systems and mechanisms are a source of perpetual confusion, fury, and mistakes. Methods vary from town to town, state to state. And then there’s that ‘wait, what?’ known as the electoral college — a last-minute additional to the Constitution that has tormented us ever since.”

Capodice and McCarthy do a fine job of explaining why 270 electoral votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December decide the presidential election and why the founders thought this so necessary. (It was essentially because although they believed the people — the ‘people’ being white landowners, of course — should make that choice, they feared America devolving into some sort of “mob-ocracy.”)

“These electors were to be men of high virtue, men who could see the high virtue and moral integrity in a candidate, and cast their vote for him regardless of how the proles voted.”

The authors then escort the reader through an entertaining tour of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its amendments, and Supreme Court cases they believe everyone should know. The most critical reader will have to hunt hard for anything that smacks of political bias; Capodice and McCarthy may show their hands ever so slightly in their interpretation of Citizens United v. FEC and a few other places, but never worryingly so; the reader emerges with a sense that A User’s Guide to Democracy is a solidly nonpartisan read, a relief.

Even an appendix, in which they offer presidential fun facts, intends to amuse, not enrage, although I suppose supporters of President Donald Trump could perceive bias in the fact that they choose to include about him: “He is the first president since Polk not to have a pet.”

Overall, the book is a fresh take on an old subject, and wildly relevant. It won’t elevate the authors to the ranks of storied historians such as Doris Kearns Goodwin or Jon Meacham, but will appeal to people who don’t even know who Goodwin and Meacham are, which is to say the vast number of Americans who participate in its democracy. Or talk about it from their armchairs, anyway. B

BOOK NOTES
In normal years, a good use of national book prizes is to arm yourself with a bit of knowledge in advance of holiday parties.
This gives you an arsenal of small talk that goes beyond the weather, even if you haven’t read the books in question, since probably no one you will encounter has read them either. If nothing else, you can amuse yourself by conducting a small poll of how many people even know of the existence of the books atop the elite lists, such as the New York Times’ list of the most notable books of the year, or the Booker Prize.
This not being a normal year, you may not have this opportunity, but it’s still good to know what the elites consider the best books of the year, if only to snicker at the lists. Cheryl Strayed did this on Twitter recently, when she noted that her bestseller Wild (Vintage, 336 pages) was left off the Times list in 2012, as was Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Crown, 422 pages). Given the long legs of those titles, among the most successful books that year, year-end lists deserve our skepticism.
That said, here are the big-name winners announced in November; all work cited here is the paperback version, if available.
The Booker Prize: Douglas Stewart forShuggie Bain, a novel based on the author’s childhood in Glasgow, Scotland, with a mother battling an alcohol addiction (Grove Press, 448 pages).
National Book Award for fiction: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Vintage, 288 pages): “Generic Asian man” discovers secret history of Chinatown and his own family history.
National Book Award for nonfiction: The Dead Are Arising, the Life of Malcom X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright, 640 pages): Thirty years of research inform this biography on a controversial civil-rights leader.
The New York Times chooses 100 notable books of the year (making it even more perplexing that they missed Wild and Gone Girl), and they’re not ranked. You can see them all at nytimes.com/interactive/2020/books/notable-books.html but be forewarned: Even if you read a book a week like Bill Gates, this list will make you feel like the most uninformed person on the planet.

Books

Author events

• TY GAGNE Author presents The Last Traverse. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Wed., Dec. 9, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ALKA JOSHI & SARAH MCCRAW Joshi presents The Henna Artist and McCraw presents The Wrong Kind of Woman. Hosted by Bookery in Manchester. Online. Tues., Dec. 8, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• 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.

Featured photo: A User’s Guide to Democracy

The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco, 307 pages)

Despite a vague discomfort with what it says about me, there’s never been an apocalypse I didn’t like. In 1998, when everyone was asking why America needed two asteroid disaster movies released within two months of each other (Deep Impact and Armageddon), I was wondering why we couldn’t have three.
So I was stoked for Jonathan Lethem’s latest, The Arrest, even more because it’s set in New England. Its premise seems the perfect antidote to 2020: a world in which all modern technology has stopped working. No more planes, trains and automobiles, no laptops, no electric blankets, no Googling, no doomscrolling. The doom is already here, and it’s not as bad as predicted. In fact, if you are the type who thinks wistfully about living off the grid on an organic farm one day, this is not the apocalypse, but paradise.
The disappearance of technology, which unfolded slowly, as opposed to one catastrophic event, has been dubbed “The Arrest.” The citizens aren’t sure what happened, but it appears the apex event in a long line of losses to include biodiversity, the melting of polar ice and the drowning of Miami. There were apparently no riots and mass human deaths, however, just a pervasive sadness at the loss of our cellphones. Some built shrines to them; others “needed eventually to be given a mug of herbal tea while someone else hid their inert former playthings.”
Our escort through this world is one Sandy Duplessis, a Hollywood screenwriter whose primary job, pre-Arrest, was to rewrite the work of others, and to enjoy whatever scrap-work was tossed to him by a longtime friend who has been much more successful than he was.
Sandy’s world is much different now. For one thing, he goes by the quaint moniker Journeyman, and his job is to deliver food and other necessities of life around the town in rural Maine where he has settled. He also assists the local butcher and has acquired an unsettling amount of knowledge about how to slaughter ducks.
He has settled in this town because it’s where his sister, Maddy, lives on an organic farm; he had come to visit her when the Arrest occurred. Now, for reasons that are unclear, New England has dealt with its collective loss of smartphones by organizing itself into Walking Dead-esque communities, taking care of their own but keeping their distance from other, threatening communities. Mostly, this works; life has essentially reverted to the 19th century, where all communities need is one everything: one butcher, one fisherman, one seamstress, one mediocre former screenwriter who ferries around homemade sausage.
People may miss their former lives; they certainly miss coffee. They nurse deep sorrow about the relationships they have lost. But they still have hot mulled cider and there’s currently no trauma, no drama, until Journeyman’s old friend, the smooth-talking mogul, shows up in a monstrous, futuristic rocket-ship of a car: a supercar that could decapitate intruders, run on nuclear fuel and make espresso.
The friend, Peter Todbaum, said he’d spent 10 months driving across what was left of the country to find Journeyman, and Journeyman’s sister, with whom he had a complicated history. (When Maddy visited the two men when they were newbies in Hollywood, she and Todbaum shared a weekend together that had apparently shattered her, although he doesn’t know the details. She only told her brother, cryptically, “He didn’t do anything to me that he doesn’t do to you.”)
Todbaum’s arrival sets up the mystery: What is he doing here? Is the supercar real? Is any of this real? In Malibu the friends had been working on a script called Yet Another World, with Maddy’s help. And when Todbaum arrives and Journeyman hoists himself into the vehicle, Lethem writes, “He climbed into surely that most abhorrent of things, a mixed metaphor.”
The unspooling of the answers provides only limited satisfaction, in part because the novel is so strange, and no single character endearing. There is also the matter of Lethem’s self-indulgent musings, which seem like observations he’s jotted in his journal over a lifetime and wants to put to use. Example: his recurring mention of “time averaging,” which he defines as the mental gymnastics in which we reconcile the younger version of people we know with the aged version confronting us today.
Another example: his introductory aside into a quirk of the wintry Northeast, frost heaves, which Lethem describes as “a verb itself frozen.”
“Maybe Frost is in fact a person, that poet we studied in high school. Frost heaves into the mind. His road diverged; ours doesn’t. Thought, really, isn’t any road you could follow in either of two directions divergent enough to begin with?” he writes, losing a third of potential readers from the get-go.
But Lethem, the author of 11 well-regarded novels including Motherless Brooklyn and several collections of short stories, is at the stage of his career where he can write what he wants, unmolested. His latest is not a bad book, just a meandering one that ultimately fails to, well, arrest. C — Jennifer Graham

BOOK NOTES
If the No.1 measure of success in America is the amount of money you make, No. 2 might be that people want to know what you read. Consider Oprah. A longstanding feature of her magazine (which ends next month, at least in paper form) is what she’s reading.
But after Oprah, Americans care passionately about what Bill Gates reads.
It seems there’s always some new breathless recommendation emanating from the Microsoft founder, the latest of which I came across on Medium under the headline “Bill Gates Just Declared This Optimistic Read His New Favorite Book of All Time.”
Gates declared this his “new” favorite book of all time in 2018. But if you are wondering, it was Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (Penguin, 576 pages), which replaced Gates’ previous favorite book, also by Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin, 832 pages).
For something more recent, Gates recommended a handful of other books on his blog earlier this year. (Why has no one started Bill’s Book Club? He is said to read 50 books a year, by reading a minimum of an hour at a sitting.) A sampling of his recommendations this year:
Good Economics for Hard Times, by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee (Public Affairs, 432 pages), the case for “intelligent interventionism” in public policy to solve inequality.
The Ride of a Lifetime, Lessons Learned from 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, by Robert Iger (Random House, 272 pages). “One of the best business books I’ve read in several years,” Gates says.
The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, by Andy Puddicombe (St. Martin’s Griffin, 224 pages). Gates says he started to meditate after reading this book.
The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a memoir and guide to processing trauma (Scribner, 320 pages). Added bonus for this title: It’s also endorsed by Winfrey, who has said, “I’ll be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story.”

Featured photo: The Arrest