Author: Jennifer Graham

Want, by Lynn Steger Strong (Henry Holt & Co., 209 pages)

Books, says the protagonist in Lynn Steger Strong’s novel Want, offer “quiet, secret temporary safety,” which is the best argument for reading one, or 10, this month. Whether you’ll want to read this one is dependent on your capacity for patience. It’s a slow burn of a story, the word “plodding” comes to mind more than once, but it’s a thoughtful meditation on American excesses and desires.

Elizabeth is, in many ways, a thoroughly modern Lizzie. A child of affluence in the 1980s, she has arrived at age 34 with a Ph.D., a husband, two children (girls, 2 and 4) and a teaching job she cares about intermittently. But she is unable to enjoy any of this because of debt that has driven the couple to bankruptcy and troubled relationships with her parents and former best friend.

The debt began with $30,000 owed to a hospital for a C-section, then grew to include emergency dental work, household expenses and $100,000 in student loans. “My body almost single-handedly bankrupted us,” Elizabeth muses. That could be one reason that she punishes it, getting up before dawn every morning for double-digit runs on icy streets in Manhattan.

Strangely, it is 2017 but Elizabeth somehow dwells in a world that is unmolested by the Trump presidency or anything political. (There’s that “quiet, secret temporary safety” perhaps.)

But otherwise, the book is, in many ways, a rumination on American culture, although it’s unclear what part of it, if any, the author seeks to indict. Elizabeth and her husband were “eighties babies, born of plenty, cloistered by our whiteness and the place we were raised in … we were both brought up to think that if we checked off certain boxes we’d be fine.”

After the Great Recession, they floundered psychologically: “We had principles or something, made up almost wholly out of things we knew we didn’t want to be or have a part in more than in any concrete plans for what we’d be instead. … We were galvanized in this way, smug and stupid. It felt athletic and exciting, this misguided, blind self-righteousness.” She wanted a life that revolved around books; he, despite the $100,000 in student loans, decides he prefers working with his hands, and so leaves finance to build custom furniture.

Elizabeth moves numbly through her days, leaving work early occasionally to wander through a museum or read in a coffee shop. She occasionally checks Twitter and Facebook, largely to stalk her former best friend, Sasha, who has vanished from her life, for reasons that are slowly unspooled. When her husband, the primary caregiver of their daughters, is away, she speaks of “watching” her children, as if she is a detached babysitter.

Meanwhile there are the sundry indignities of wheeling through a moneyed world with $72 in their checking account. One day, for example, the girls had a birthday party to attend, so Elizabeth wraps two books her daughters don’t like (plus “a toy they haven’t played with much”) in printer paper she has the children decorate. The gift is stapled shut because they are out of tape. (The 4-year-old, of course, announces as soon as they arrive, “My mom didn’t have time to get a gift so she made us wrap up our own toys.”)

Equally important to the story is Elizabeth’s fraught relationship with her mother, “the only person in the world who can say my name and make it mean.” Elizabeth has all sorts of psychological scars from her childhood, yet her parents — both attorneys — are blind to their inadvertent cruelties and genuinely don’t comprehend why their relationship is broken.

In one searing scene the parents insist that Elizabeth watch a video of her cavorting happily with family members as a child and demand that she explain why she is so angry with them. “Is this the childhood that made you do such awful things to us?” her father demands.

We are meant, of course, to side with Elizabeth, who gathers her children and leaves. But this is a novel of nuance, and Elizabeth is not always entirely likeable herself; her ennui is infectious. Maybe the parents had a point. They have wants, too, after all.

At the birthday party, Elizabeth listens as the other moms talk about the health spas where they go for self-care; she is not resentful, but her desire, and her inability to have these things, is palpable. But there are people who want the things she has; for example, the wife of her husband’s associate who has been trying for two years to have a child. “I see her want in the way her eyes dip closer to her nose; I smell it, desperate and sour, on her breath and her lips,” Elizabeth observes.

We all have currency of some kind, but not all currency involves money. For some it’s family, for others health. This is a rich, mineable theme. Want nibbles around the edges of what it could be but ultimately suffers from the narrator’s own lethargy and an ending of dubious resolution.
B

BOOK NOTES
When I was a kid, the next best thing to Halloween was checking out books about Halloween at the school library. There couldn’t have been that many, but there were always histories of holidays, and sometimes I would score a book on costumes or holiday parties that would have Halloween chapters. October is a long month, even longer when you’re in third or fourth grade; reading about Halloween helped me hang on until the 31st finally arrived.
Then I grew up, and … nothing.
I can’t remember reading anything about Halloween in ages. This seems strange, given that I own two dozen Christmas-themed books. So I set out to find some Halloween books for adults — and by that I mean books specifically about the celebration of Halloween and its assorted characters, not just books that are spooky. For that, all you need is Stephen King.
There aren’t a lot. Even though adults have effectively taken over Halloween, most Halloween books are for kids. But here are a few witchy titles I found for grown-ups:
Ghostland, An American History in Haunted Places, by Colin Dickey (Penguin, 336 pages)
The History and Haunting of Salem by Rebecca Pittman (Wonderland Productions, 647 pages)
For people who loved the film Halloween, there’s a book about the making of it: Taking Shape, Developing Halloween from Script to Screen, by Dustin McNeill and Travis Mullins (Harker Press, 378 pages).
Roald Dahl compiled an anthology of ghost stories — who knew? Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 235 pages.)
This book makes me tired just reading about it, but for the creative cooks among us: Tricky Treats, Halloween Delights for Appetizers, Snacks, Dinner and Dessert, by Vincent Amiel (Skyhorse, 96 pages).
More promising: The Spell Book for New Witches, Essential Spells to Change Your Life by Ambrosia Hawthorn (Rockridge Press, 244 pages). Don’t laugh; she’s the editor of Witchology magazine and says she has been a practicing witch for 15 years.
For the thirsty: WitchCraft Cocktails: 70 Seasonal Drinks Infused with Magic and Ritual by Julia Halina Hadas (Adams Media, 224 pages).
Finally, for those of you who are obsessed with Walt Disney, there is Vault of Walt 9: Halloween Edition by Jim Korkis (Theme Park Press, 256 pages), released this month. This is not a joke. Theme Park Press exclusively publishes books about Disney parks, and Korkis found enough anecdotes about Walt Disney, the man and his theme park to fill a paperback book. (Even more incredible, he’s written 28 other books, all about Disney, including Vault of Walt, Christmas Edition.)
And of course there are plenty of Halloween coloring books for adults, something I would normally grumble about, but 2020 being what it is … sure, bring out the orange and black crayons.

Welcome to the United States of Anxiety, by Jen Lancaster (Little A, 239 pages)

Jen Lancaster, self-described reforming neurotic, is a little anxious these days. Specifically, she is “a bundle of nerves, swaddled in a blanket of panic.”

You might find this surprising, given that she is a wildly successful author (15 previous books) with TSA PreCheck and enough disposable income and time to routinely buy kale salad at a Whole Foods two towns away. Or maybe all that explains why she is so anxious.

Regardless, the author of Such a Pretty Fat and Bitter is the New Black is here to help the rest of us dissolve our pre-election nerves and be more like her father, a man so unaffected by encroaching disaster that he calmly kept reading the sports pages in the middle of a flight in which the plane lost an engine and the oxygen bags descended. (Which recalls a book by another Jen — Jen Sincero of You are a Badass fame.)

Lancaster didn’t learn about her father’s nearly catastrophic fight until decades later, in part because he’s not the sort of man to obsessively worry about things that might happen (“We had my mother for that,” she says), and in part because he didn’t live in age in which people had outsized reactions to virtually everything. By almost every measure, the world is a safer place than it’s ever been for large swaths of people. “So … why the hell does it feel like the ends of days?” Lancaster asks. “Why does it seem like it’s about to rain locusts? Why am I cuffing my pants for the coming rivers of blood?”

There is a short answer, of course: social media. But that doesn’t make for a book. And so Lancaster dusts off the late Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” to serve as a sort of intellectual scaffolding on which to hang a collection of comical riffs about the state of American culture today.

Maslow, you may recall from high school, believed that human beings have to fulfill their most elemental needs, such as shelter and safety, before advancing to first-world accomplishments like self-esteem and self-actualization. In other words, you can’t worry about safety and security if you’re starving and cold; you can’t worry about love and accomplishment until you are safe. So, yes, this kind of fits into a conversation about anxiety. And it’s useful for dividing the book into five parts. But the structure seems a bit contrived and distracts from Lancaster’s comic gifts. We are force-fed Maslow when all we really want is vintage Jen, master of the bon mot.

After establishing her neurotic credentials (she says she is “actively afraid of bread”), Lancaster embarks on a tour of America the anxious, beginning with our obsession with having ethically grown, nutritionally complete and Instagram-worthy cuisine. Her grandparents, Italian immigrants, would scoff. They ate “whatever washed up on the shore in Italy” and later, “once they settled in Boston, their culinary repertoire expanded to include weeds they picked in the yard and the small animals they trapped in their attic.”

On the subject of clothes, another of Maslow’s first-tier needs, she brings us to an improv class she took at Chicago’s famous Second City comedy school, where she was told that clothes are a nonverbal announcement of identity. “My skirted leggings, tunic sweater, and matching scarf announced ‘I had a 20 percent off coupon at the Eileen Fisher outlet.’”

And so she goes, spinning through her own world and current events with a caustic tongue and just enough winsome deprecation to soften the edges.

One of her stories is one she’s told before, in another, shorter version in HuffPost eight years ago.

She was waiting in line for that kale salad at Whole Foods when a mother and child “cut in front of me with such grace and sense of purpose that I felt compelled to apologize for having arrived first.”

The girl, Margot, was about 6 and was wearing $300 jeans and carrying a Burberry purse. The mother was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots, “coated with a thin sheen of dust after she’d doubtless whiled away the day jumping rails in an indoor arena.” The child then proceeded to whisper questions that the mother relayed to the chef as if she was interpreting for a queen … about the quality of the sushi. Lancaster tells the story not with a keyboard, but a machete, and it is just perfect.

Less perfect are her many entreaties for us to live better, to reduce our paralyzing anxiety via platitude. Worst offense: “If your closet’s too overloaded to make choices, be ruthless. Purge and donate.” (May I suggest: if your editor lets you publish sentences like this when you’re a brilliant cultural critic, be ruthless. Find another.)

Toward the end, Lancaster pivots to an unexpected place: her fraught relationship with her mother, which has resulted in her having no contact with either parent. To use one of Lancaster’s own favorite terms, “spoiler alert” — at one point her mother threatened to sue her for libel. It is an unexpected airing of dirty laundry that, like David Sedaris writing about his sister’s suicide, is shocking and seems out of place, even as she explains, “While I was growing up, my mother’s behavior was so mercurial, I never knew what to expect, thus setting me on a course for a lifetime of anxiety.”

So, maybe it isn’t social media to blame after all. Maybe it’s our mothers.

Welcome to the United States of Anxiety is the perfect title for 2020, just not the perfect book. But it’s still a much better investment of your time than two hours on Twitter or another presidential debate. B

BOOK NOTES
Much is made of Amazon’s impact on bookstores, less of the company’s impact on publishing itself. But of course, Jeff Bezos would eventually get into publishing; he was married to a novelist, after all, and before it sold everything, Amazon sold only books.

Still, it’s a little surprising to learn that Amazon has been in publishing for more than a decade, not self-publishing as in CreateSpace or BookBaby, but publishing to compete with legacy players like Hatchette or HarperCollins. And it landed a big name in Jen Lancaster (United States of Anxiety, reviewed above.)
Lancaster’s new book, curiously billed as “observational comedy,” is published by Little A, one of 16 imprints that Amazon has established since starting a publishing arm in 2009. Its other imprints include Montlake, Thomas & Mercer, Lake Union, 47North and Grand Harbor Press.

Even more surprising, so far, the reach of Amazon Publishing seems relatively modest, at least compared to its outsized influence in so many other parts of American life. On its website, the company touts a handful of awards and says it has helped 36 authors reach more than one million readers. Note the word “readers.” It doesn’t say 36 authors sold more than 1 million books. One reviewer of Lancaster’s book on Amazon, that is marked a “verified purchase,” said she’d read it because she accidentally downloaded it as a free book she got through her Prime membership.

All this is to say, Amazon may be the largest seller of books in the U.S., but it’s clearly not decimating legacy publishers as it did bookstores. Not yet, anyway. But its website does one thing pretty cool: Each imprint, when listing current books, credits the title’s agent, agency and editor. For example, Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men by Harold Schechter (you know you want to read this) was sold by David Patterson of the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency and its editor was Vivian Lee (334 pages, Little A). That’s wonky publishing tea that is usually reserved for subscribers to Publishers Weekly, but it’s nice to see credit given, since so many people besides the author are responsible for bringing us books.

The biggest Amazon Publishing successes so far, at least when it comes to literary prizes, appear to be a collection of stories, Godforsaken Idaho by Shawn Vestal (210 pages, Little A), and the children’s book You Are (Not) Small by Ann Kang and illustrator Christopher Weyant (32 pages, Two Lions).

Billion Dollar Burger, by Chase Purdy (Portfolio/Penguin, 236 pages)

You don’t have to be vegan, or an animal-rights zealot, to be deeply uncomfortable about what is required to keep the meat shelves at your local supermarket stocked with ground beef and pork tenderloins.

In about the time it took to read the previous paragraph, about 10,000 animals in the U.S. were slaughtered to meet the insatiable demands of a population that is already dangerously obese. (Statistic via the website Animalclock.org, which tracks slaughter numbers in the U.S.) Obscenely, many of the animals died so their flesh could be thrown away; an estimated one-quarter of meat produced is discarded.

Marry atrocity and capitalism, and you get cell-cultured burgers. Or you would get them, if the companies racing to produce lab-grown meat could figure out how to produce them economically. Quartz reporter Chase Purdy has been following the companies’ quest for two years and brings a skeptical eye to how the products will be received on America’s dinner tables, if they ever get to America’s dinner tables. Or he does so for part of the book, anyway. He also seems a fanboy of Josh Tetrick, cofounder of the cell-cultured meat venture JUST, one of nine that Purdy has studied.

First, a primer: Cell-cultured meat (which has also been dubbed Frankenmeat) is meat grown from animal cells, not the pseudo-meat that is plant based, such as Burger King’s Impossible Burger.

Entrepreneurs like Tetrick envision a future barbecue in which people can honestly say “no animals were harmed” because the “donor cells” are taken from living animals, then grown in a lab into something called “clean meat.” The few people who have eaten it, to include Purdy, say that it’s decent and point out that everything we eat is a collection of cells. Plus, people who protest that it’s unnatural are forgetting what’s already on supermarket shelves.

“Just look at margarine, frozen pizza, Big Macs and deli meats; potato chips, soda, and every other now ubiquitous food product that is packaged for our convenience and enveloped in a carnival of sugar, salt, fats, and a laundry list of unpronounceable ingredients. They are objectively bad for us,” Purdy writes. And they are unnatural.

More people have gone into space than have eaten clean meat, a JUST worker tells Purdy as he sits down to sample a pate made of cell-cultured duck at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. He later goes on to eat chicken tenders at Memphis Meats and thin-sliced steak at Aleph Farms, and to to interview a range of people with a dog in this fight, to include Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute and Peter Singer, the renowned philosopher and champion of animal rights.

All downplay the “unnatural” factor, which is a huge hurdle the industry faces in a time in which consumers are newly enthralled with farm-to-table restaurants and humanely produced meat and eggs. Singer said, “I don’t think nature is in any way a gold standard.” Similarly, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, a former Nestle executive, told him, “The reason why Homo sapiens have become what we are is because we learned to overcome nature.”

And even the “real” meat we see in supermarkets is divorced from its origin, pounded as it is into unrecognizable forms, and whatever else is done to it before we buy it. Purdy’s grandmother, who lives in Kentucky, told him that she has noticed that the smell of ground beef has changed over the years. “It smells like chemicals,” she said. She’s started buying bison instead.

Some people who are vegans because of animal suffering have said they would consider eating meat again when cell-cultured meat can be mass produced. Don’t look for it in the bins at Walmart anytime soon, though. The billion-dollar burger isn’t hyperbole. When one lab-grown burger was unveiled in London in 2013, it was said that the five-ounce patty cost $330,000 to produce, Purdy wrote. That year, cell-cultured meat amounted to $1.2 million a pound. By last year, it had dropped to a mere $1,000 a pound. In other words, one JUST chicken nugget cost $50.

In writing Billion Dollar Burger, Purdy is not the first to take on the topic. Paul Shapiro, co-founder of The Better Meat Co., wrote Clean Meat two years ago, and Kathy Freston and Bruce Friedrich addressed the subject that same year in Clean Protein.

Purdy’s take is a little more updated, albeit rather thin. Billion Dollar Burger has the feel of a Quartz article on steroids; one gets the sense that it took every line in Purdy’s notebooks to expand the manuscript to book length. And given his apparent regard for Tetrick, and his concern about factory farming and its effect on climate change, he is not an impartial observer. Nor does he delve deeply into the ethical issues of factory farming and cell-cultured meat; his style is observation and musing. As such, Billion Dollar Burger is an easy read on a complex subject and will likely need updating in a year. B-

Book notes
Now that the Emmys are over, we can move on to the awards that really matter: book awards.

Two big ones are coming up: the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, both announced in November.

If you’re like me and always bewildered that some books deemed the best of the year escaped your radar screen, there’s still time. The finalists for the National Book Award will be announced Oct. 6, giving you six weeks to read them before the awards ceremony Nov. 18.

The short list for the Booker Prize is out, and it includes three American authors: Diane Cook, Brandon Taylor and Maaza Mengiste. A fourth, Douglas Stuart, is a citizen of both Scotland and America. (A widely expected nomination for Anne Tyler for Redhead by the Side of the Road, given a B+ here, did not materialize.)

The Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, used to be given exclusively to an author writing in English from the U.K. The Man Booker Foundation expanded its reach in 2014, allowing writers of any nationality to be included, so long as the books are written in English and published in the U.K. There has been much howling and gnashing of teeth in certain quarters over this.

Regardless, the diligent reader can read one nominated book each week and be finished in time to complain about the winner, which will be announced Nov. 17. Here they are:
The New Wilderness, Diane Cook (Harper, 416 pages)
This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber, 304 pages)
Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi (The Overlook Press, 240 pages)
The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste (W.W. Norton, 448 pages)
Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart (Grove Press, 448 pages)
Real Life, Brandon Taylor (Riverhead, 336 pages)
But while making your pick, don’t assume that just one will win. Last year the Bookman judges threw a curveball, choosing two winners: Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernadine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.

Featured photo: Billion Dollar Burger, by Chase Purdy

The Dynasty, by Jeff Benedict (Avid Reader Press, 528 pages)

To hell with Tom Brady. The real GOAT is Robert Kraft. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from The Dynasty, Jeff Benedict’s exhaustive examination of the Kraft-Belichick-Brady era. There is nothing more to be written, at least not about things that happened in Foxborough before the Dumpster fire that is 2020.

I came to the book as a skeptic, wondering if the world really needed another 500 pages about the Patriots, even by as accomplished a writer as Benedict, whose 2018 biography of Tiger Woods was achingly good.

But yes, of course we did.

Tiger Woods was a compelling portrait of a complicated figure (we gave it an A-) and read like an insider account of the famed golfer’s life even though Benedict and his co-author Armen Keteyian were unable to interview the principals of the story: Woods, his mother and his former wife, and his late father.

In The Dynasty, however, Benedict had access to many of his subjects, to include Robert and Jonathan Kraft, Brady, Rob Gronkowski, Roger Goodell, and Brady’s predecessor, Drew Bledsoe. Notably absent from the acknowledgements is Belichick, but Benedict, as it turned out, didn’t need no gruff, reticent Belichick. He began work on the book two years before Brady obscenely said “I’m not going anywhere” in a Super Bowl commercial, and then a month later, announced that he was going somewhere after all. (Not that I’m bitter.)

It turned out to be exquisite timing for an explain-all book, which poignantly concludes with Brady’s socially distanced visit to Kraft’s home in which he tells the Patriots owner he’s leaving, and then makes the call to Belichick, with Kraft standing over him like a parent insistent that a child call the grandparent to say thank you for the birthday gift.

That scene, while no doubt fundamentally true, raises my only complaint about this sort of book, which attempts to wed the narrative grace of a novel with the rude reality of events long since past. That said, Benedict’s narrative, ably blended with sportswriter-styled quotes from his myriad sources, carries the reader comfortably through 20 years of dynasty building and earlier than that, to the roots of Robert Kraft’s obsession with the team that was then called the Boston Patriots.

In fact, this book could have honestly borne the title Robert Kraft, as it is an ode to the businessman who used to take his young sons to see the Boston Patriots play, over his wife’s objections. (“The games are on Sunday. The boys have to go to Hebrew school on Sunday.”) Kraft would dutifully deliver his sons to Hebrew school, but handwrite notes to the teachers each week, asking that they be dismissed for a “family commitment.” Then he’d pick them up in a dark green Porsche (his paper-production business already doing well by then), with a brown paper bag full of sub sandwiches: “two corned beef and two roast beef with mustard.” Excellent parenting, that, and also excellent attention to detail, the hallmark of Benedict writing.

He goes on to walk us, courtside, through Kraft’s astonishing quest to acquire the team, which was not a snap decision or mere privilege of wealth, but an obsessive, strategic hunt that wasn’t so much a plan but a scheme. The story of how he acquired rights to the parking lots and to the stadium, putting the team under his control when he didn’t own the team, is fascinating, as is his patience. Pats fans are now accustomed to seeing Kraft and son Jonathan sitting in the owners’ box at Gillette, looking like models for GQ, but it’s doubtful that many understand what it took for them to get there.

Benedict clearly has enormous respect for the Krafts and the organization they built, but he doesn’t shy away from the generous supply of controversies that have accumulated over the years, from the locker-room scandal involving Boston Herald writer Lisa Olson in 1990, to Robert Kraft’s arrest for soliciting prostitution in 2019. (A court recently ruled that the prosecution’s video was inadmissible as evidence, so this will likely go away.) That said, he doesn’t dwell on it. The charges are mentioned in a seven-page epilogue in which Benedict neatly summarizes the events of the past year. The book’s real conclusion is the celebration after the Patriots trounced the Rams in Super Bowl LIII, when Robert and Jonathan Kraft, Brady, Belichick and Goodell all stood on the stage. “When they met in 2000, Belichick was a young father and Brady was fresh out of college. Now Belichick was a grandfather and Brady was a middle-aged dad. The sports world had watched them grow old together through the prism of football. ‘We’re still here,’ Belichick told Jim Nantz,” Benedict writes.

Well, two of them still are. (Not that I’m bitter.) As a Boston sportscaster wisely said earlier this year after Brady signed with the Bucs, “If it doesn’t end badly, it doesn’t end.” In spring it looked as “the dynasty” was over, and Benedict writes with a sense of finality. In fact, the dynasty could thunder on without Brady, depending on how Cam Newton performs. Regardless, The Dynasty will stand as the definitive account of an extraordinary era, and it’s a pleasure to read. A

BOOK NOTES
Amid the mounds of words that will be written about Ruth Bader Ginsburg this week, those most worthy of our time are the words written by the late Supreme Court justice herself.
My Own Words, released in 2016, is a compilation of writing and speeches by Ginsburg, assembled by Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages; also paperback released in 2018).
It’s a whimsical selection including an editorial Ginsburg wrote for her high school newspaper and a letter to the editor on the subject of wiretapping, published in the Cornell Daily Sun, as well as her Rose Garden acceptance speech and her dissenting opinions. For other good RBG titles, see supremecourtgifts.org, run by the Supreme Court Historical Society.
For those weary of politics, blessedly, there are sports — all of them, concurrently: baseball, football, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf. For those listless moments between games, publishing has us covered with these titles:
Three-Ring Circus by Jeff Pearlman, out this week, is a look at another dynasty, the L.A. Lakers from 1996 to 2004, with emphasis on the fight club that was Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant with Phil Jackson as the man in the middle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 448 pages).
Pass It On by Deshaun Watson appears to be an inspirational book from the Houston Texans quarterback (its subtitle: Work Hard, Serve Others, Repeat) because, of course, nothing qualifies a person to write books as does being an NFL quarterback. Cue The TB12 Method. (Thomas Nelson, 224 pages.)
The Captain is a new memoir from former Mets player Dave Wright (Dutton, 368 pages).
New in paperback for those of you who aren’t bitter: 12: Tom Brady and His Battle for Redemption by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge. This was originally published in hardcover in 2018 but has been updated with recent events for the paperback release (Back Bay Books, 352 pages).
Tales from the Seattle Seahawks Sideline by Steve Raible and Mike Sando — no, never mind. That one hurts.

Featured photo: The Dynasty by Jeff Benedict

Here She Is, by Hilary Levey Friedman (Beacon Press, 225 pages)

Mark Zuckerberg, as it turns out, wasn’t the first entrepreneur to gather pictures of women and ask people to rate them. That distinction belongs to P.T. Barnum, the 19th-century showman.

In 1854, not long after he started his National Poultry Show, Barnum proposed a contest that would judge America’s “Handsomest Lady.” That didn’t get much traction, so the next year he launched the “American Gallery of Female Beauty,” a collection of daguerreotypes (the first, crude forms of photographs) that he believed would show that “specimens of American beauty will compare favorably with any that the Old World can produce.” The pictures would be displayed at Barnum’s New York museum and visitors would vote to decide who was the most beautiful.

Alas, we will never know the winner, since the images were destroyed by a fire that viewers of the movie The Greatest Showman will remember. But as Hilary Levey Friedman writes in Here She Is, a history of the Miss America Pageant, Barnum had a sizable hand in what would evolve to be pageant culture in America (if not “The Facebook”).

Friedman, a sociologist at Brown University, comes naturally to the topic, having grown up steeped in pageant culture. Her mother, Pamela Eldred, was Miss America in 1970, and shelves in their home contained not just books but crowns. She remembers reading books in the audience as a child while her mother was emceeing pageants or judging them. Friedman, however, was not a contestant; she writes frankly of not being “pageant material.”

“Like most nine-year-olds in the 1980s, I was in desperate need of orthodontia and perhaps some better corrective eyewear. But I would have been able to overcome these (temporary) impediments had I been physically beautiful — which I am not.”

Still, she says “sequins and rhinestones were in my DNA” and she loved pageantry, and especially the Miss America Pageant, which celebrates its 100th anniversary next year. Rather than being a wholesale denigration of women, beauty pageants, she argues “trace the arc of feminism.” It’s easy to heap criticism upon pageants and the women and girls who compete in them. “Yet, winning means something,” Friedman says. “Many dismiss beauty pageant contestants, until someone they know wins.”

Few, of course, do. Just 92 women and girls have been Miss America (the first two winners were 16); it is said that parents are more likely to have a son win the Super Bowl than to have a daughter become Miss America. But pageants are intimately entwined with American history in the past 100 years, in surprising ways.

Take the “Miss Whatever” sash, for example. Friedman explains that sashes were borrowed from parades advocating for women’s suffrage, which in turn borrowed them from the military. They may seem silly today, but they have noble origins. And “Miss America” itself is a much more respectable title than some of the earliest pageants; be grateful we no longer have an International Pageant of Pulchritude or baby parades, which later gave way to a “Juvenile Review,” judging of specimens of children over the age of 5. In 1932 the Pennsylvania State Board of Health had to condemn this “deplorable exploitation of childhood,” but baby pageants and parades continued in force until a polio outbreak in 1950 slowed them down.

You can’t talk about child pageants without thinking of JonBenet Ramsey, the Colorado child found murdered in her basement in 1996 just weeks after having been crowned “Little Miss Christmas.” Although child pageants had existed throughout the century, it was this child’s death that made the nation horrified by them. JonBenet became a “reverse ambassador” for child beauty pageants (even though she herself had just participated in 10 pageants). Though an admitted fan of pageants in general, Friedman also describes herself a third-wave feminist, and she is sober in her assessments, writing, “I have found, like most parents, child beauty pageant moms seem to have the best intentions for their daughters’ long-term success in life. But those intentions come with a high price tag and lasting implications.”

Friedman also casts a skeptical eye on the promotion of pageants as launching pads for professional success. While it’s true that the Miss America organization has been the largest provider of scholarship money for young women since the 1940s, the winners have not (yet) become neurosurgeons, jet pilots, investigative journalists, coders and CEOs, as promotional material for the 2020 pageant (canceled, of course) imply. “No recent Miss America winners have done any of those things professionally,” Friedman writes, adding that “this brings into stark reality that it is unclear how Miss America is preparing the world for great women.”

Hers is a refreshing take on a surprisingly complicated story, and Friedman is an engaging writer and serious thinker who frames the history of Miss America in a portrait that even people uninterested in beauty pageants can enjoy. A

BOOK NOTES
A new children’s book called Yorick and Bones (HarperAlley, 144 pages) stirs thought about how many books have been published under the influence of Shakespeare, and also about the phenomenon of parent authors who write books with their children.
Yorick and Bones, comically billed as “The Lost Graphic Novel by William Shakespeare,” is written and illustrated by Jeremy Tankard (author of the Grumpy Birds series) with his daughter Hermione. It’s about a dog that digs up a skeleton, Yorick, that has been animated by a spilled magic potion that seeped underground.
Yorick, Shakespeare fans might recall, is the court jester in “Hamlet” whose skull is exhumed in Act 5. (“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy!”)

At first the skeleton is thrilled about being freed from the earth; he has been longing for friends, and for a sausage. But there is a potential problem: the dog, of course, wants bones to eat. It is a delicious story made even more appetizing by the fact that it is written — because all genius has a touch of madness — in iambic pentameter, because why not? Not being age 8 through 12, and not having children this age, I’m not the target audience for this book, but I still want to read it and many sequels. Here’s hoping the dog finds other skeletons to dig up.

As for other Shakespeare-inspired books, there are at least three others this year: Christopher Moore’s Shakespeare for Squirrels, reviewed here last month (William Morrow, 288 pages), James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Penguin, 320 pages), and Kathryn Harkup’s Death by Shakespeare, Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts (Bloomsbury Sigma, 368 pages).

For parent-child collaborations, what comes first to mind is Stephen King and Joe Hill’s short story “Throttle,” and novelist Lisa Scottoline and her daughter Francesca Serritella, who have written five humorous books together.

There is, of course, also Mary Higgins Clark, who writes with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, and closer to home, New Hampshire’s Jodi Picoult, who has written two books with her daughter Samantha van Leer.

As for Shakespeare, he reportedly had three children, none of whom authored any books of which we know.

Fathoms, The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs (Simon & Schuster, 284 pages)

In July rescuers worked three days to free a humpback whale that had become entangled in 4,000 pounds of junk near the entrance to New York Harbor. This story had a happy ending; many do not, like the sperm whale found on the coast of Maine with a greenhouse in its stomach.

Yes, a greenhouse, full of tarps, ropes, flower pots and other necessities for growing tomatoes. Also found in the belly of the beast: a coat hanger, an ice cream tub and parts of a mattress. Suddenly the Book of Jonah doesn’t seem quite so fanciful.

“Like a chamber furnished for a prophet or castaway, these stomach contents recalled stories of people surviving inside whales,” writes Rebecca Giggs in her journey to “the world in the whale,” Fathoms.

This is the first book by Giggs, a nature writer in Perth, Australia, who has been compared to Rebecca Solnit (Drowned River) and Annie Dillard (The Abundance) but most reminds me of Diane Ackerman, the American poet and naturalist whose books include The Moon by Whale Light.

Like Ackerman, Giggs writes with a pen dipped in awe and approaches the natural world with reverence and curiosity. They also share an ability to say ordinary things in extraordinary ways, as when Giggs described a tired man with “fatigue pleated around his eyes” or says of a wet boat, “seawater griddles the windows.” In other words, they are not so much authors as poets.

Giggs begins with a riveting experience of attending the death of a whale on Australia’s coast, in her hometown. In nature, the death of a whale is called “whalefall,” a beautiful euphemism that describes how the whale’s body descends to the ocean floor, where it is food for a hidden ecosystem. “A whale in the wild goes on enriching our planet, ticktocking with animate energy, long after its demise,” she writes. “So the death of a whale proves meaningful to a vibrant host of dependent creatures, even as it may look senseless from the shore.”

The whale dying on the beach was not so beautiful, although Giggs manages to make it so, with her descriptions of a community that gathers around the whale in empathy.

As the whale wheezes and gasps over several days, surfers kneel, families take pictures, a woman tries to crown the whale with a wreath made of seagrass and flowers. (“It took three wildlife officers to pull her off the side of the whale, kicking.”) Giggs herself passes the time interviewing wildlife officers about why they can’t humanely euthanize the whale and why, when it dies, its body will be carted to a landfill. “The whale as landfill,” she writes. “It was a metaphor, and then it wasn’t.” She touches the whale and discerns its heartbeat, and then when it passes, launches an exploration of why whales, whose genetic ancestors go back 50 million years, elicit such emotion in humans and what is happening to them in a time of ecological change.

As made evident from her opening story about the greenhouse, Giggs is disturbed about how the detritus of capitalism is filling the ocean and its inhabitants. At least this cruelty to whales is unintentional, unlike in generations in past when we hunted the animals to near extinction. (As late as 1960 whales were the planet’s most economically valuable animal, commanding $30,000 per carcass, which amounts to about $260,000 today, Giggs says.)

She writes in unemotional detail of the boatside flaying of whales and how the whale, especially in the 19th century, was shockingly present in almost every aspect of life — from candles to oil to hair brushes to eyeglass frames to piano keys to the stuffing in sofas. Whales are not fish — they are mammals — but for a time, the Roman Catholic Church sanctioned their meat on Fridays during Lent. And during World War II, Americans were encouraged to eat whale meat in order to save beef for troops.

Fathoms is filled with interesting detail like this, and although she is not a journalist Giggs does a good job of separating myth from fact, while leaving open the prospect of mystery, as when a whale-watch captain explains the leaping of whales as nothing more than a grooming ritual, trying to get barnacles and lice off their skin. (Whales, it turns out, are lice-ridden, which you might want to remember if you ever come across one stranded on a beach.) Actually, some scientists believe that the leaping that so thrills whale watchers may enable communication with distant whales, and Giggs is not willing to discount the idea of play.

In all, Fathoms is a book of wonder, and although the American reader may occasionally tire of its focus on Australian events, Griggs is an accomplished tour guide to their complex world. B+

BOOK NOTES
If you haven’t already taken a side, it’s time to choose: Team Dan or Team Blythe?
Dan, of course, is Dan Brown, one of New Hampshire’s most famous writers, and his former wife was said to have been a great part of his success. The pair that The Guardian once called a “formidable literary team” divorced last year, however, and recent headlines show that a “finalized” divorce is not necessarily final.
Blythe Brown, according to The Boston Globe and other news sources, is suing the The Da Vinci Code author saying that he withheld information about new projects, among other unethical behavior she alleges.
Those new projects, it’s been reported, include a TV series based on Brown’s popular character Robert Langdon, and a children’s book released recently.
It’s a pity that the scandal has eclipsed the publication of the children’s book, which looks simply delightful. Wild Symphony (Rodale, 44 pages), illustrated by freelance artist Susan Batori of Hungary, is the story of an all-animal symphony conducted by Maestro Mouse. It’s not just a book but an interactive experience, with a website (wildsymphony.com), app and accompanying songs composed by Brown, who was an aspiring musician before he became an author.
Brown is not the first author of adult books to later publish a children’s book. Others include Carson McCullers (Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig), William Faulkner (The Wishing Tree), Aldous Huxley (The Crows of Pearblossom), Ian Fleming, creator of the James Bond books, who also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and of course C.S. Lewis, equally famous for his Christian apologetics like Mere Christianity and his children’s books set in Narnia (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, among them).
There’s also E.B. White, who was a staff writer for The New Yorker and co-authored a classic book on writing, The Elements of Style, before going on to write children’s classics like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.
Another already famous writer has a children’s picture book in the works: J.K. Rowling’s The Ickabog, set for publication in November. Rowling and Brown will have to sell a lot of books, however, to compete with the best-selling children’s book of this week, also by an unexpected author: I Promise by LeBron James, the NBA superstar, is an aspirational book for preschoolers up to grade 3, illustrated by Nina Mata.