Author: Jennifer Graham

Effortless, by Greg McKeown (Currency, 256 pages)

In some ways, Boxer the horse is a symbol for the American worker. One of the most memorable characters in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Boxer was the loyal draft horse whose response to any setback was “I will work harder.” In a country steeped in the Puritan work ethic, where the typical two weeks of vacation pales in comparison with Europe’s generous holidays, it’s hard to not admire Boxer’s attitude, even knowing how it turns out for him.

Hard work is good, right? It demonstrates commitment, perseverance, toughness.

Wrong, says Greg McKeown in Effortless, the followup to his Essentialism, published in 2014. Emulating Boxer gets you sent to the slaughterhouse, essentially. The better way to work is to find a way to do it more easily, not in the Tim Ferriss pie-in-the-sky model of working four hours a week (as if) but changing the long-running soundtrack that informs the belief that the harder we work, the luckier we get.

McKeown believes that this mindset creates a fog that obscures a truth: that in those moments that we actually feel inspired, when the work seems to flow, as if poured from heaven, what we are doing is not hard, but feels effortless. This is the essence of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about in Flow in 1991 — and who hasn’t heard the platitude “work smarter, not harder”? But McKeown’s take on the subject feels fresh and relevant. And interestingly, he begins by admitting to a failure of his previous book.

In Essentialism, McKeown argues that we suffer from the misuse of the word “priority,” which used to mean the singular thing that matters but has been pulled and stretched into “priorities,” which shouldn’t exist. Running around tending to priorities, as if they were errant chickens, means that the essential stuff of life doesn’t get done. To be effective, he said, we must ruthlessly cull “the trivial many from the vital few” and, intentionally and guiltlessly, build a life around them.

But as McKeown built a career as the leader of Essentialism, he realized, from what other people told him and what he saw in his own family life, that some people can peel away all the unessentials and still have too much to do. In short, for most of us, there are multiple priorities, multiple essentials. Struggling with that, he realized that people in this situation can either let priorities slide or find a way to make everything easier and take less time. He recommends the latter. And in keeping with the Effortless theme, they’re not hard to do.

McKeown believes that the transition from Boxer to Secretariat (the analogy is mine — Secretariat made everything look easy) begins with understanding the tired old template of platitudes like “It won’t be easy but it’s worth it” and replacing it with a new mantra: How can I make this task easy and sometimes even fun?

Sometimes, answers appear when we just take the time to think about the question. But McKeown has devised a series of exercises to help people make progress on their essential goals with relative ease. For example, he says that one thing that slows people down is that they don’t take time to think about what it looks like when a project, goal or idea is actually done; instead, they spend all their time thinking about the beginning and only vaguely seeing a nebulous end. Define what “done” means at the start and the steps leading there will be easier, he says. Another idea is to set goals that are malleable — low-end daily targets that represent the minimum amount of action you can take and still feel that there is momentum, high-end targets that are more ambitious but limited enough to protect you from burnout. Part of the “effortless” mindset, McKeown writes, is protective. Hard workers can sabotage themselves into paralysis by overthinking or working to exhaustion, thus needing extra time to recover and losing momentum. The effortless way is not so we can lie in hammocks in Thailand with Tim Ferriss, but so we can do our best work.

If this all sounds a bit like “work smarter, not harder,” well, it is. But McKeown is an engaging writer who peppers his own experience with research and anecdotes of achievement, from how Elon Musk got into rocket science to why Reed Hastings started Netflix. He gets extra points for never using anonymous people with only first names, like so many authors of business and self-help books do when telling anecdotes, leaving the reader to wonder if the people really exist at all. If there’s anything to criticize, it’s that the writing of this book seems a bit too effortless; at 217 pages of new material, it feels short, and including an excerpt from Essentialism at the end feels like padding. Was that really essential? B

BOOK NOTES
A few months ago, The New York Times reported that an editor at Hachette Book Group, one of the “big five” in publishing, had been fired. The editor, Kate Hartson, headed up Center Street, the conservative imprint within Hachette, and she said she’d been fired over politics. Apparently, she was open to books from Trump supporters and associates, and according to the Times, the big five are resistant to MAGA authors and themes.

This could explain why conservative media companies, sensing a profit to be made, have quietly started publishing books. Both Fox News and Newsmax have started publishing arms, respectively Fox News Books and Humanix.

You’ve probably never heard of Humanix, and most of its titles look pretty obscure and/or peculiar, but Fox, which launched its imprint in November, has already a splash. Its first book, Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes by Pete Hegseth, made the bestseller lists at the end of last year.

The second book, The Women of the Bible Speak, by Shannon Bream, has been No. 1 on the Times bestseller list under “advice, how-to and miscellaneous” for three weeks.

But the real surprise in conservative publishing has to be how well former Speaker of the House John Boehner’s book is performing. In On the House, A Washington Memoir (St. Martin’s, 288 pages) Boehner promises a story of how a “regular guy” went from working in a bar to “holding a pretty big job,” and says that Congress didn’t change him: “I walked out of the Capitol the same jackass I was when I walked in 25 years earlier.” In early reviews, it looks like a slash-and-burn, which may be why it’s doing so well.

Released April 13, Boehner’s memoir was No. 1 in nonfiction last week but now has competition.

Susan Page’s Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power (Twelve, 448 pages) seems like a conflict of interest for the author, given that she is the Washington bureau chief for USA Today, but it’s getting good reviews.

Interestingly, the Washington Post review notes that Pelosi felt slighted because Time magazine never put her on the cover during her first term as speaker but put Boehner on the cover shortly after the 2010 midterms. Booting him off the bestseller list would probably help resolve some of that sting.

Books

Author events

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

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 [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] 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.

Poetry

• JENNIFER MILITELLO Poet presents her newest volume of verse, The Pact. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Thurs., April 29, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Featured photo: Effortless

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami (Knopf, 256 pages)

Type “Haruki Murakami” into the Google search engine, and one of the questions that comes up is “Why is Harukami Murakami so popular?,” which elicits a laugh. Sometimes, wading through his matter-of-fact, beige-to-gray prose, one does have to ask.

Murakami’s characters often seem aimless, their wanderings pointless, and in his longer works, such as 2017’s Killing Commendatore, so can his writing. One scornful critic has called him “the Forrest Gump of global literature.” But it’s not hyperbole to call the Japanese writer a sensation, so for people who would like to sample Murakami without a month-long commitment, there’s an opportunity in First Person Singular, a collection of eight stories that coalesce around love, death, aging and reality.

I think.

Murakami reminds me of the children’s book Nothing Ever Happens on My Block (by Ellen Raskin), in which a glum child sits on a stoop and complains about how boring his life is, while fire trucks zoom by and witches pop up in windows. Surely there’s more going on here than I’m seeing?

But then Murakami has one of his characters, a writer, say to an editor: “Theme? Can’t say there is one,” which seems like a sly confession befitting the owner of a jazz bar who famously decided he would become a novelist one day while watching a baseball game.

I digress, but so does he. That said, after a slow start, First Person Singular is a wonderfully quirky foray into the world of Murakami, the strongest stories being “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” and “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey.”

In “Charlie Parker,” the narrator begins by recounting a story he wrote in college about the American jazz legend experimenting with bossa nova, a type of music that is an alchemy of jazz and samba. The thing is, Parker died before bossa nova was invented, so the narrator envisions a recording that is fantasy. But one day, browsing through a music store, he comes across a crudely produced recording called “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” that lists exactly the same tracks that he had invented. Instead of buying the album ($35 seems a bit much), he leaves the store, but then regrets the decision and returns to the store the next day. What happens next is equally fanciful but compelling, and as with much of Murakami’s work, instructive in music.

“Confessions” is a story that could come from the pen of Stephen King, had King grown up in Japan instead of Maine.

The narrator, yet another trademark Murakami wanderer, checks into a ramshackle inn, where everything is old and decrepit, to include the cat sleeping in the foyer. The inn does have one nice feature, two if you count the vending machine that dispenses beer. (Who knew that such things existed?) It has a glorious hot-springs bath, in which the narrator soaks blissfully for a while. This is where he meets the titular monkey, a grizzled creature that shows up and, in perfect English (actually Japanese, as this, like Murakami’s other work, is a translation), offers to scrub the narrator’s back. Naturally, the narrator wants to learn more, so he invites the monkey to come to his room later for conversation and beer.

There, he learns how the monkey came to learn to speak more eloquently than many human beings and to appreciate opera. He also learned that it’s hard being an educated monkey — one is not accepted by his own kind, nor by the humans that he more closely resembles. And one has a particularly hard time finding love.

So the monkey, over time, developed an oddly touching way of experiencing love without having physical contact with the human women he desired. The method did, however, take something from the women, making it unethical. And when the narrator later meets a woman that he suspects had encountered the monkey, he has his own ethical test, of whether to tell her what had transpired. If, of course, it transpired at all and wasn’t just the fevered imagination of a tired man soaking in a hot spring.

This story was published last year in The New Yorker,as was “With the Beatles,” a rambling recollection of a man remembering his first girlfriend and her older brother, whom he had only met once while he was dating the girl, but then encountered decades later by chance. He had broken up with the girl, who did not “ring my bell,” and both had married someone else, and he was unaware of the shocking turn her life had taken until running into the brother.

The repurposing of previously published stories into a book seems vaguely like cheating, although it is done frequently by authors of stature. So, pro tip: You can find some of these stories by searching the table of contents on Amazon and then searching for them online.

“Carnaval” is built around the composition by Robert Schumann and involves a music-centered relationship with the ugliest woman the narrator has ever known, “the result of a unique force that compressed unattractive elements of all shape and sizes and assembled them together in one place.”

“The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection,” which appears to be pure memoir (but who knows?), is a man reflecting on his love for baseball, and how he scribbles poetry in a notebook in between action. (“Let’s face it — baseball is a sport done at a leisurely pace.”)

Reading Murakami is also best done at a leisurely pace, lest you feel out of touch with an author who is never in a hurry to get where he is going, and often seems not to know where he is going, which may be the truth. (Theme? What theme?) But it is a singular experience, which is sometimes rewarded with an unexpected jolt of humor, as when Murakami (or his narrator, hard to tell the difference), reflecting on his habits of dressing, says that when looking in his closet of unworn dress shirts, still in the dry-cleaner’s plastic, starts to feel apologetic toward the clothes and tries them on out of kindness. Or when a character flatly intones, “Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance.”

Murakami could be one of the greatest writers of understatement the modern world has known or, equally plausible, an imaginative jazz bar owner who stumbled into literary acclaim. Either way, Murakami fans will thrill to this collection, even though they’ve likely already read much of it. Others will Google “Why is Haruki Murakami so popular?” B-

BOOK NOTES
The demise of physical books was supposed to be e-books; the end of physical bookstores, Amazon. But what if the extinction-level event turned out to be vending machines?

Probably not, but I did do a double take upon learning this week about a nonprofit called Short Edition, which has installed more than 300 “Short Story Dispensers” at locations around the world. Users can choose the length of what they want to read —one minute, three minutes or five — and the machine prints it out, looking scarily like a CVS receipt. (See a demonstration at short-edition.com.)

There don’t appear to be any in New Hampshire, but a map of locations shows a variety of locations, to include airports, universities, wineries and, somewhat disturbingly, libraries. There’s lots to unpack here, including the shrinking American attention span, but this could be an interesting way to expose people to new writers.

Meanwhile, for short reads that don’t come on a receipt, check out:

Spilt Milk by Courtney Zoffness, a two-time resident of Peterborough’s MacDowell Colony, (McSweeney’s, 211 pages) offers essays on motherhood, family connections and Judaism.

Of Color, by Jaswinder Bolina (McSweeney’s, 129 pages), poignant essays on race and identity from a poet who writes that he looks more like the 9/11 hijackers than the firefighters who responded that day.

Love Like That by Emma Duffy-Comparone (Henry Holt and Co., 224 pages). The publisher says these stories are about “brilliant, broken women that are just the right amount of wrong.”

The Glorious American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate (Pantheon, 928 pages), collects 100 classic essays from colonial America to the present, including luminaries such as E.B. White, Rachel Carson, David Foster Wallace, Lewis Thomas and James Thurber.

Books

Author events

• ERIN BOWMAN Author presents Dustborn. Outside Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord). Sat., April 24, 1 to 2:30 p.m. Call 224-0562 or visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• PADDY DONNELLY Author presents The Vanishing Lake. Presented by The Toadstool Bookshop of Nashua, Peterborough and Keene. Virtual, via Zoom. Sat., April 24, 1 p.m. Call 352-8815 or visit toadbooks.com

• LITERARY COCKTAIL HOUR Presented by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Featuring authors Kat Howard, Kelly Braffet, Cat Valente, and Freya Marskem in conversation with bookstore staff. Virtual, via Zoom. Sat., April 24, 5 p.m. Call 224-0562 or visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• BILL BUFORD Author presents Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Virtual. Wed., April 28, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

Featured photo: First Person Singular

The Blizzard Party, by Jack Livings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages)

If you have a pulse and live in New England, you’ve likely heard stories about the blizzard of 1978, the historic Nor’easter that paralyzed states from Pennsylvania to Maine. As powerful as that storm was, so is a new novel about it, or rather, about a party that was held during it, and lives forever changed.

Astonishingly, it is the first novel by Jack Livings, a New York City resident who has won acclaim for short fiction (his short story collection is The Dog) and, in this, makes the transition to long form look as easy as picking up a pen. Yet this panoramic novel is a marvel of complexity, the antithesis of NaNoWriMo, the national spewing of tortured fiction that recurs like a bad cold every November. If it is overwritten in a few parts, it is only to drag you deeper into a corn maze of a story that ends with a boulder dropped on your head. Buckle up.

The narrator is Hazel Saltwater: “… known to be a Halloween enthusiast, known to my dry cleaner Tio as a generous December tipper, to my acquaintances a person of pleasant demeanor, to my lenders an exemplary credit risk, to my friends, a music, a crazy woman, a apopheniac, a rationalist, an open wound.”

Hazel is a widow whose husband, Vik, died in the 9/11 terror attacks. But that’s not what defines her life. What does is the events that transpired in 1978, when she was 6 years old and the blizzard of ’78 hit.

Young Hazel lived with her parents in an elegant apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As the blizzard howled outside, she found herself asleep in a spare bedroom of a neighbor’s penthouse where an increasingly wild party was taking place. “This party had motivation,” Livings writes. The party, “an intimate gathering for 500,” was “a sweeping, pulsing organism that had oozed into every room of the penthouse, consuming whatever lay in its path, vacuuming up all the drugs, all the food, all the liquor.” It was a party so memorable that her father, a writer, wrote a book about it, which he called The Blizzard Party. (Yes, there is a book within the book, which must be forgiven.)

As often happens, Erwin Saltwater took some liberties with his story, and Livings’ book is Hazel’s retelling of what really happened that night. Because what happened to a young girl who fell asleep in a spare bedroom into which an old, sick man was suddenly thrust is far different from the telling of a story by a man who wasn’t even at the party and who, in fact, had little instinct for parenting and knew his failings in that department.

The old man who came to be with the sleeping child in that bedroom was Albert Caldwell, “partner emeritus and former head of litigation, at Swank, Brady & Plescher; (Harvard) class of ’26;, father of three, widower, atheist, fiscal conservative, moralist.”

Caldwell was, it appeared, suffering some sort of medical emergency. He had been found outside in the blizzard, “shivering with such violence that he appeared to be vibrating,” by a kind-hearted boy who would one day be Hazel’s husband. Overwhelmed by the chaos of the party, 13-year-old Vik parked the mute Caldwell in the only open space he could find. (Most crevices of the penthouse were occupied by people doing drugs or having sex).

What happened then? Well, that will take nearly 400 pages to get to, a journey leavened with wit and profundities but ultimately sodden with pain. At the heart of the story is the human capacity to keep secrets, despite their desire to be told. “Our secrets shape us,” Caldwell says at one point. “They give us form. Without them, we’d be perfect, smooth creatures. Angels, or something like them. But it’s by these distensions that we identify ourselves.”

Caldwell, as it turns out, was not the mute, disabled man that he seemed when led into the party, “shuffling along like a trained seal.” Desperate to preserve his own devastating secret, he had devised a plan to to fake his own death by drowning in the Hudson River during the blizzard; the appearance of having had a stroke was part of that plan. (I am not spoiling anything by revealing this; the book jacket says as much.)

Hazel’s father, too, has debilitating secrets that are manifest in his inability to cross a street without other people present. The two men’s traumas collide, bringing the young Hazel along and catapulting the adult Hazel, who has perpetually carried Caldwell in a “snug little slot in [her] head,” to her own momentous resolution of trauma.

Like the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who said he preferred not to mess up a page with “weird little marks,” Livings shuns quotation marks, as if the novel has no time for such trivial things even though it meanders to its conclusion. The punctuation is not missed, although the meandering at times is maddeningly slow. But with a conclusion you won’t see coming, The Blizzard Party achieves the holy grail of any long book: When it’s over, you’ll want — nay, need — to read it again. It would be a remarkable novel for any writer; it’s extraordinary as a debut. A

BOOK NOTES
There’s no reliable accounting of the most popular topics for self-published books, but in nonfiction, arguments against vaccines are surely near the top.

On Amazon, two anti-vaccine titles are overwhelmingly rated 5 stars, despite the likelihood that their accounts would be suspended if these were not self-published books but posts on Twitter or Facebook.

Traditional publishing, for all its faults, is still a reliable gatekeeper on controversial topics, with its phalanx of editors and fact-checkers. So if you’re still mulling whether to get a Covid-19 vaccine, here are a few books that can help inform your decision.

Vaccine Hesitancy by Maya J. Goldenberg (University of Pittsburgh Press, 264 pages) covers public reluctance over getting vaccines going back to smallpox in 1796.

Much of the energy in the anti-vax movement comes from belief that vaccines are responsible for the rise in autism. Pediatrician Peter Hotez took that on in Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 240 pages), an account of his own research after his daughter was diagnosed with autism. The book was published in 2018 but released this year in paperback.

Hotez also has a new book on the topic: Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-Science (Johns Hopkins, 208 pages).

A few years older but still relevant is Meredith Wadman’s engrossing The Vaccine Race, Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease (Penguin, 464 pages), which is nonfiction that reads like a novel and is honest about the historic costs of today’s vaccines.

For much lighter fare, check out the new memoir from the reliably funny Jenny Lawson: Broken (In the Best Possible Way), (Henry Holt and Co., 304 pages).

Books

Author events

• SCOTT WEIDENSAUL Author presents A World on the Wing. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. The Music Hall, Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Tickets cost $46. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• ERIN BOWMAN Author presents Dustborn. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SARA DYKMAN Author presents Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Wed., April 21, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BILL BUFORD Author presents Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Virtual. Wed., April 28, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

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 [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] 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.

Poetry

• READINGS AND CONVERSATIONS WITH GRANITE STATE POETS Part of National Poetry Month in New Hampshire. Virtual. Weekly, Monday, 7 p.m., through April. Featuring Rodger Martin and Henry Walters, April 19; and New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary and Margot Douaihy, April 26. Registration required. Visit newhampshirepoetlaureate.blogspot.com and hobblebush.com/national-poetry-month.

Featured photo: The Blizzard Party, by Jack Living

Fears of a Setting Sun, by Dennis C. Rasmussen (Princeton University Press, 232 pages)

Until recently, many Americans looked at the founding fathers with the misty eyes of lovers, believing that they were good and upright men who linked arms and created a Constitutional Eden. It was John Adams, after all, who wrote that the Fourth of July should be a “great anniversary festival … solemnized with pomp and parade, shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”

Which raises two questions. First: shews? (It was how they spelled “shows” back then.) And second: What happened to that enthusiasm in the ensuing decades?

The eventual disillusionment of the founders has been hinted at but not fully examined before now, according to Dennis C. Rasmussen, a political scientist at Syracuse University (formerly of Tufts, Brown and Bowdoin) who takes on the task in Fears of a Setting Sun.

Drawing on the work of other scholars, as well as the writings of the founders themselves, Rasmussen discovered that George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and even the pomp- and parade-loving Adams were deeply pessimistic about the republic surviving more than a generation or two. In fact, Rasmussen writes, some deemed the political system they engineered an “utter failure.”

This is disturbing enough on its face, but their loss of faith was made worse by the fact that these men and their peers saw the American experiment as something of import for the world, not just 13 ragtag colonies. In his first inaugural address, Washington said that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of government” depended on what the American people did with their representative democracy.

Of all the founders, Washington perhaps can most easily be forgiven a sour attitude. He wasn’t a particularly enthusiastic participant at the Constitutional Convention, where he sat for six hours a day for four months in a mahogany chair engraved with half a sunburst. He didn’t particularly want to be president either, not for one term, and definitely not for two. (The shortness of his second inaugural address — 135 words — was evidence that, at that point, he just wanted to finish the job and go home to his farm.)

It is surprising, however, to learn why he was so convinced America would fail. The republic was doomed, Washington believed, because of partisanship. That’s not an unusual position to take today; more so for 1792. Blame Jefferson and Hamilton, who Rasmussen says had never met before they accepted positions in Washington’s administration, but who quickly became the Pelosi-Trump of their day, with animosity that was “deep-seated and distinctly personal.”

“Hamilton was (and is) often regarded as champion of the economic elite while Jefferson self-consciously cast himself as the apostle of humble farmers, yet Jefferson was a rich, well-connected slaveholder who looked down on Hamilton — a self-made immigrant — as a presumptuous upstart seeing to exalt himself above his proper station,” Rasmussen writes.

Jefferson, alas, has not had a Broadway musical made of his life to curry popular favor, and he’s in the process of being canceled. A Virginia school has changed its name; for now, his memorial in Washington still stands, amid some calls for its removal because he owned slaves and opposed immediate emancipation, although he considered slavery a moral evil, Rasmussen says.

Washington, Hamilton, Adams and Jefferson all had different reasons for this gloomy outlook on America’s future. Hamilton, who championed a central bank and a strong federal government, thought the Constitution did not give enough power to federal institutions. Adams came to believe that the American people were not virtuous enough to live up to the responsibilities of self-governance. And the initial enthusiasm of Jefferson was dimmed by growing conflict between the Northern and Southern states.

And they weren’t the only ones, Rasmussen writes, calling the list of disillusioned founders “startling” in size, to include Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Jay, John Marshall, George Mason, James Monroe , Benjamin Rush and Thomas Paine.

But Rasmussen concludes on a happy note: James Madison. The fourth president, who was the first high-profile party switcher (going from an arch-Federalist in the 1780s to an arch-Republican a decade later), was bullish on the fledgling nation’s prospects. This was, in part, because he was by nature a sunny optimist, not prone to fits of despair when confronted by challenges. Moreover, Rasmussen writes in an unintentionally funny line, Madison had “lower expectations than most of the other founders regarding what was politically possible, and he pointedly refused to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

In other words, when trouble looms, lower your standards. Sounds like a prescription for some of our politicians today.

Ben Franklin took note of the half-sun emblazoned on the mahogany chair in which George Washington sat at the Constitutional Convention, and mused that for much of the deliberation, he couldn’t tell whether it was rising or setting. Eventually, he said, “I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

Rasmussen chose a fitting image to build his story around, and in light of America today, still grappling with many of the issues that troubled the founders, the question of whether the sun is rising or setting on America is still up for debate. His book, while a bit too erudite for the average American reader, is a compelling addition to scholarship on the nation’s founding, as well as prescient comment on the political climate of today. B

BOOK NOTES
It’s April. Do you know where your new year’s resolutions are?

Behavioral scientists say most of us abandoned them in February, which may be why spring brings forth a fresh crop of advice books so we can begin anew the Sisyphean task of self-improvement.

Notable this month in the genre are new titles from people who have previously given advice: Jordan Peterson and Dana Perino.

Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who gave us 12 Rules for Life(Penguin Random House, 370 pages) in 2018, is back with Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life (Portfolio, 432 pages). Although his first book was successful to the point of parody, Peterson has become so controversial that it was reported that Penguin Random House employees in Canada were literally weeping when they learned their employer would publish his next book. Reviews on this one seem to be split along party lines. The Guardian calls it a “ragbag of self-help dictums.” The Daily Signal says the new book “could not be more relevant today.”

Another somewhat partisan offering is Perino’s Everything Will Be Okay: Life Lessons for Young Women (From a Former Young Woman) (Twelve, 240 pages). Although nowhere near as controversial as Peterson, Perino is a Fox News personality who came to fame as former President George W. Bush’s press secretary. This is her third book and expands on life advice she offered in her first book, 2015’s And the Good News Is … (Twelve, 256 pages). While it’s currently No. 1 in women’s studies on Amazon, there is no dog on the cover this time, so it may not get the attention that her second book got. That one was Let Me Tell You About Jasper, and it was a book entirely about her dogs and dog-related advice. In another generation, that might be comical, but who among us could not write 200 pages onLet Me Tell You About (Fill in the name of your pet)?

Also of note in books of advice:
Self-help guru Nicole LePera, known to her Instagram followers as the holistic psychologist, is selling a lot of How to Do the Work (Harper Wave, 320 pages), despite eye-rolling reviews from detractors who consider her a quack.

And I’m personally excited for Greg McKeown’s Effortless, due out the last week of the month (Currency, 272 pages). McKeown was widely praised for Essentialism, which came out in 2014 (and was re-released in paperback in December). In the first book (which we gave an A), McKeown helped us define the essential work of our life; in the new one, he promises to make its execution a breeze.

Books

Author events

• SCOTT WEIDENSAUL Author presents A World on the Wing. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. The Music Hall, Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Tickets cost $46. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• ERIN BOWMAN Author presents Dustborn. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SARA DYKMAN Author presents Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Wed., April 21, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BILL BUFORD Author presents Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Virtual. Wed., April 28, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

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 [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

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

Poetry

• READINGS AND CONVERSATIONS WITH GRANITE STATE POETS Part of National Poetry Month in New Hampshire. Virtual. Weekly, Monday, 7 p.m., through April. Featuring Martha Carlson-Bradley and Liz Ahl, April 12; Rodger Martin and Henry Walters, April 19; and New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary and Margot Douaihy, April 26. Registration required. Visit newhampshirepoetlaureate.blogspot.com and hobblebush.com/national-poetry-month.

Featured photo: Fears of a Setting Sun

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, 303 pages)

If you tell Alexa to turn on your lights, have named a Roomba or asked Siri to navigate around the Suez Canal, you already have a sense of what it’s like to have an “artificial friend.”

However, while we readily embraced using artificial intelligence to do work for us, we’ve been more hesitant to rush along the path where this ultimately leads, where “social robots”— robots that serve primarily as companions — await. Social robots already exist, of course, but they mostly look like toys, even ones like ElliQ that have been designed to serve as companions to the elderly. But in his eighth novel, Kazuo Ishiguro leaps ahead to a time in which artificial friends (or AFs) are commonplace in our homes, not for seniors, but for children and teens.

The world of Klara and the Sun is not quite a dystopia but feels like one, as children have been divided into groups of “lifted” and “unlifted,” learn from home on devices called “oblongs” and get together sporadically in formal “interaction meetings” so they can learn to get along with their peers.

In this world exists Klara, an AF who narrates the story, first from the store where she waits to be purchased, where she is already a generation behind the newest models. Although as a B2, fourth series, model, Klara is not as technologically advanced as the latest B3s, she is extraordinarily sensitive and observant and the store manager considers her to have the most “sophisticated understanding” of any of the AFs in the store.

She is, in a way, like Good Janet from the TV show The Good Place — human looking, or at least human enough, yet robotically “off,” speaking as if English was a third or fourth language, while constantly processing new information. After brief interactions with a teen who is interested in her, Klara can give the girl’s eye color (gray), the pitch of her voice (a “range between A-flat above Middle C to C octave”) and identify a weakness she notes in the girl’s left hip.

She can not only “think” but also feel and philosophize, as when she says this of a bull she spots in a field: “Its face, its horns, its cold eyes watching me all brought fear into my mind, but I felt something more, something stranger and deeper. At that moment it felt to me some great error had been made that the creature should be allowed to stand in the Sun’s pattern at all, that this bull belonged somewhere deep in the ground far within the mud and darkness.”

The girl with the weak hip is Josie, and she feels a bond to Klara and after several visits convinces her mother to buy Klara. Klara is happy, inasmuch as AFs can be happy — indeed, that is one of the intriguing questions that runs through the novel — how much, if at all, AI can acquire of the human heart and its emotions. But soon, she realizes that there is more wrong with Josie than the physical weakness she detected in the girl’s hip and shoulder.

Josie, it is gradually revealed, is suffering from a worsening illness that appears to have been caused by something her mother did when deciding whether to “lift” her daughter through some sort of genetic editing. She is desperate to help Josie, as she has already lost another daughter to illness and a husband to divorce. Josie’s father is among the “Post-Employed” (presumably displaced by all the robots in a radical reshuffling of society) and now lives in a community enamoured of fascism.

Klara is not Josie’s only friend; she is also close to a teenage boy named Rick, who lives nearby with his mother. When Klara, who runs on solar power, decides to help Josie by asking the sun for his help, Rick helps Klara, as much as she will allow him. But to Klara, the sun is essentially God, a mysterious but occasionally benevolent being whose “nourishment” bestows energy and healing. She makes a short pilgrimage to where she believes the sun goes to rest, to strike a deal with him in order to ask for Josie’s healing.

This simple act of faith sets into motion a series of events that are not overtly religious but still evoke ancient stories of sacrifice and redemption. (Also, it’s hard not to puzzle over Ishiguro’s intentions when the conversation involves “the Father” and “the Sun.”) But that is but one layer of many in this fine-grained examination of what could well be a realistic future for many people who are alive today. It’s much easier to imagine a Klara than it was a time-traveling Delorean. The Klaras are not here, but they are unnervingly near. What will become of them, and of us, is worth contemplation, maybe while taking in the nourishment of the sun. A

Books

Events

• 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.

• MICHAEL TOUGIAS Author of The Waters Between Us presents. Virtual, via Zoom. Part of Concord’s Walker Lecture Series. Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Free. Call 333-0035 or visit walkerlecture.org.

• SCOTT WEIDENSAUL Author presents A World on the Wing. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. The Music Hall, Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Tickets cost $46. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• ERIN BOWMAN Author presents Dustborn. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562

Featured photo: Klara and the Sun

Life’s Edge: the Search for What It Means to Be Alive, by Carl Zimmer (Dutton, 336 pages)

In his 14th book, New York Times science columnist Carl Zimmer had me at abortion.

It was something he had to address, of course, in a book called Life’s Edge, which explores the surprisingly difficult question of whether things are alive, dead or something else. In fact, for many people, the only time they will think about the question is when they are considering the legality of abortion, or are asked by a Senate panel “When does life begin?”

Abortion so rules this debate in America that it’s easy to think that it began with Roe v. Wade. But, as Zimmer explains in the elegantly titled chapter “The Way the Spirit Comes to the Bones” — a variation of a line from Ecclesiastes — people of faith have been grappling with the ethics of abortion for millenia, and some deeply religious people have had views you might not expect.

Thomas Aquinas, for example, said that human beings acquired souls in a process that he called “ensoulment,” and that in the first phase the embryo was basically vegetative, “with the same faculties for growth as plants.” In one culture in South Africa, people believed that babies weren’t fully human until their umbilical cord stump detached, which can take up to three weeks after a baby is born. Some early Jewish scholars taught that embryos were “mere water” before the 40th day after conception. And in England in 1765, a judge ruled life does not begin until what is known as “quickening” — the first fetal kick. And so forth. There has never been consensus that life begins at conception, as today’s abortion opponents fervently believe.

Zimmer doesn’t wade into this subject to alienate his readers, but to engage them through the most contemporary (and understandable) example of the ethical morass that increasingly confronts scientists as they work with gene-editing tools and three-dimensional clumps of cells that weren’t in their laboratories two decades ago.

Science has answered many complex questions with certainty, but what distinguishes life, and how it arose from nothing, remains a mystery. There have been times when we appeared to be on the brink of a breakthrough. Zimmer tells the story of the Englishman John Butler Burke, who, for a time in the early 20th century, was hailed as a hero for apparently growing life from a fluid made of beef both, salt, gelatin and radium salt. The microscopic spheres that emerged seemed to divide and to flower, like cells.

Burke announced that his “radiobes” should be classified as living things, and for a while his work was celebrated, his accomplishment comparable to Darwin’s. Other scientists, however, could not replicate Burke’s work, and eventually he fell into disrepute.

Zimmer was intrigued when he came across the little-known story, because, as he puts it, we tend to remember the heroes of science, the Darwins and the Pasteurs, not the also-rans. But the failures, to include the British scientists who once believed the ocean floor was alive, are fascinating in their own right and help to explain the head-banging frustration over why something that seems so simple is so difficult to define. Even chimpanzees know when another of their species is dead; why are human beings, who can now grow brain tissue in dishes, unable to find the precise recipe for life?

About that tissue — Zimmer does a superb job of explaining organoids, the three-dimensional clumps grown from stem cells, that are the new frontier in research on disease. (And in ethics, especially when it comes to brain organoids, and at what point does potential consciousness become a concern.) Just this month researchers reported in a medical journal that they had induced organoids made of tear-gland cells to “cry,” a finding that they hope may result in better treatments for dry eyes. On a cringe scale, weeping cells in petri dishes are just below conscious brains in buckets, so organoids are something we all should better understand.

So what is life? NASA has an 11-word definition, which is “life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Not something you would want to put on a “congratulations on your new baby” card. But another definition, “self-reproduction with variations,” could also describe a computer virus.

So not only can we not create life in a lab, but we can’t even elegantly define it. Zimmer comes as close to poetry as the science-minded get, however, and Life’s Edge is an accessible, engrossing examination of questions that have stumped the smartest people on the planet for thousands of years. A

BOOK NOTES
Fans of the novelist Ann Patchett will be interested in her recent essay in Harper’s magazine. Called “These Precious Days,” the essay is about “Tom Hanks, tornadoes, running bookstores, taking mushrooms, making art in quarantine, stories without endings and an unlikely friendship,” according to the magazine cover.

It’s slated to become a book, set for release the week of Thanksgiving. The 320-page book, also called These Precious Days, will be published by Harper, proving that despite all the talk about how slow the publishing process is, even the legacy publishers can move fast when they sense opportunity.

This was also demonstrated in the speed with which books on the pandemic arrived last year. Writer’s Digest says it can take from nine months to two years for a book to go from contract to shelves, but books about the novel coronavirus were showing up on Amazon within months of the first lockdowns.

With the first anniversary of the pandemic observed this month, here’s a look at what’s out there to consider:

Apollo’s Arrow by Nicholas Christakis (Little, Brown, 384 pages) examines “the profound and enduring impact of the coronavirus on the way we live.” It’s hardcover and Kindle only for now, but will be out in paperback in October.

COVID-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next Oneis by science journalist Debora MacKenzie (Hachette, 304 pages). Interestingly, it’s been rebranded for the paperback release in September and will be released then as Stopping the Next Pandemic: How COVID-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity.

Richard Horton, the British editor of the renowned medical journal The Lancet, weighed in with The COVID-19 Catastrophe (Polity, 140 pages), which is already out in paperback with no title change.

Out this month is Dr. Peter Hotez’s Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 208 pages).

And for a totally different vibe, check out Kitty O’Meara’s children’s book And the People Stayed Home (Tra Publishing, 32 pages), a beautifully illustrated rendition of O’Meara’s prose poem that went viral on social media last year

Books

Author events

PAULA MUNIER Author presents The Hiding Place. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., March 30, 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).

• MICHAEL TOUGIAS Author of The Waters Between Us presents. Virtual, via Zoom. Part of Concord’s Walker Lecture Series. Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Free. Call 333-0035 or visit walkerlecture.org.

• SCOTT WEIDENSAUL Author presents A World on the Wing. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. The Music Hall, Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Tickets cost $46. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• ERIN BOWMAN Author presents Dustborn. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

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 [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

Featured photo: Life’s Edge: the Search for What It Means to Be Alive