Author: Jennifer Graham

Sandwich, by Catherine Newman (Harper, 229 pages)

Since it’s set in an idyllic village at Cape Cod, Catherine Newman’s novel Sandwich could refer to the town of that name, the oldest on the Cape. It’s more of a nod, however, to the “sandwich generation,” the term for adults who are caring for their aging parents and their own children.

That’s the life stage of the protagonist, Rachel, who (somewhat bewilderingly) goes by the name Rocky, and who, at 54, is “halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents.” Rocky has been married nearly 30 years to Nick, “a beautiful man who understands between twenty and sixty-five percent of everything she says.”

I will confess right now that I love her, and did by the beginning of the second chapter, when she dubbed a toilet malfunction “Plungergate.”

Rocky and her husband have been renting the same modest cottage for a week every summer since the children were young, and as the novel begins, they are headed there again, as Rocky muses on how time whitewashes our perception of experiences, and how a beach vacation is often filled with things that have little to do with the actual beach.

“You might picture the wild stretches of beach backed by rugged dunes or quaintly shingled houses with clouds of blue hydrangea blossoming all over the place. … Which is funny because most of the time you’re actually at the surf shop or the weird little supermarket that smells like raw meat, or in line at the claim shack, the good bakery, the port-a-potty, the mini-golf place. You’re buying twenty-dollar sunscreen at the gas station.”

On this particular trip, Rocky and her husband are accompanied by their daughter, Willa, who is a junior in college; their son Jamie, who works for a start-up in New York, and his girlfriend, Mya. (Also, the family cat, named Chicken — which was the only deeply unrelatable part of the book for me — taking a cat on vacation.) Rocky’s parents are due to arrive later in the week.

Rocky and Nick, who bicker constantly, are glad to have their children with them in this familiar space, as they are still navigating their almost empty nest, having to “make nervous small talk over our early dinners, as if we’re on an awkward zillionth date at a retirement home.”

Their quarreling is obvious to all; at one point, their daughter asks Rocky if something is wrong, but there is also clearly a deep affection between husband and wife that is tested as the week unfolds and a couple of secrets from Rocky’s past are slowly revealed. These revelations are related tangentially to a storyline involving Jamie’s girlfriend and a health issue she is having. There is a plot here that is thoughtfully crafted, but honestly, it doesn’t matter.

Newman is the kind of writer who could write 200 pages about paint drying and keep the reader entranced throughout. She has a gift for taking ordinary experiences and draping them in gorgeous language, the kind that stays with you, as when Rocky reminisces that when her kids were young they would “vibrate with excitement” at the mere mention of a visit to a Cape candy store.

She also has a sharp wit and bestows Rocky with a self-deprecatory wryness that stays at the ready whether she’s trying on a swimsuit (“One big wave and my boobs will definitely be celebrating their dangly freedom”; smelling zero SPF tanning oil (“the scent of my future squamous cell carcinomas”); or revisiting memories (“ … Jamie at four, Willa a baby in the sling, me with my permanently trashed perineum”).

The joy of Sandwich, in other words, isn’t about the plot, but instead about Newman’s charming and funny musings about decades of family vacations at the beach. Much of this book could have been a memoir, and we suspect some of it is, at least the parts about parents and children vacationing together at the beach: the small happiness of rubbing sunscreen on the backs of grown children whose bodies used to be so familiar but are now off limits to you; the weird time warp that takes over at the beach (“It is always one o’clock when we leave for the beach, regardless of when we start readying ourselves”); the constant scanning for shark fins, ticks and other dangers that never stops no matter how old your children are; and the relative ease of going to be beach with older children as opposed to the physical labor of going to be beach with young ones and their paraphernalia, everyone “breaded with sand.”

People who also rent the same beach house every year will also enjoy the observations relative to that — such as Rocky mourning that the old coffee maker has been replaced with something shiny and new, and the family assessing the changes to the house since they’d last been there. (Willa says, “Is it weird that I’m kind of offended when they replace stuff? Like, they didn’t even consult with us!”)

At the beginning of Sandwich, the novel felt physically thin to me, which sometimes feels foreboding, as if the book didn’t ripen and the author didn’t take the time to develop it fully. But Sandwich turned out to be short for the same reason that A Christmas Carol is short — the author said exactly what needed to be said, in the ordained time frame, and didn’t waste words or the reader’s time on the superfluous. Sandwich is a lovely and disciplined novel that accomplishes something remarkable: It’s a book about the beach that is too good to be considered a beach read. A

Pets and the City, by Dr. Amy Attas (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 311 pages)

The rich are different from you and me, except when their dog gets diarrhea or starts limping, and then they panic just like the rest of us do and call a vet.

Well, since they’re rich, they summon a vet to their brownstones and summer homes, and a lot of the time, when they do that in Manhattan, it’s Dr. Amy Attas who shows up.

Whether you’re wealthy or just-gettin’-by, Attas is the kind of vet you want: a person who was pretending to give injections to her stuffed animals as a child, who started working as an assistant at an animal clinic and age 13 and considers James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small as holy writ. She was born for this profession. It turns out, she can write, too.

Attas’s first book is a memoir that moonlights as a tell-all gabfest, spilling the tea on her most interesting clients and former bosses, albeit in a way that won’t get her sued. She has a lot of stories to choose from, having worked in New York City for more than three decades. The official tally is 7,000 families and more than 14,000 pets, most of which were house calls and which included celebrity clients like Joan Rivers, Billy Joel, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Steve Martin.

Mattas started her business, City Pets, after getting let go by an Upper East Side practice run by a man who promised to make her a partner but then abruptly fired her, apparently because he was jealous that his VIP clients were asking for Attas instead of him. (Every story needs a villain, and this guy, identified only as Dr. B, certainly qualifies.)

The day after Attas was let go, when she was still mulling what to do, two of her former clients tracked her down and asked for house calls. The day after that, she had four more homes to visit, even though this was before house-call practices were common in veterinary medicine. She kept at it, and placed a few ads, and eventually worked up the nerve to call Joan Rivers, who’d been a client at Dr. B’s business, and to tell the comedian she was available for house calls for Spike, the Yorkie who traveled with Rivers everywhere.

“What happened?” Rivers asked, and Attas answered, “Do you want the long story or the short version.” To which Rivers replied, “I want every single detail, and I promise you every single person on the Upper East Side is going to know every single detail, too.”

And with that, City Pets was off and running; no word on what happened to the notorious Dr. B.

For an Ivy League-educated veterinarian who serves a largely privileged clientele, Attas is surprisingly down-to-Earth and willing to dish on humiliating moments, like the time the urine of a male cat soaked her during an exam just before a date, and her genuine, child-like excitement every time a new client turned out to be a celebrity. When she went to a hotel to treat the pug of a yet-unknown VIP — she was told to ask for John Smith at the front desk — Billy Joel answered the door and said, “Hi, I’m Bill.”

While she replied calmly, Attas writes that “Inside, my thoughts were screaming Holy moly! It’s Billy Joel! BILL-Y JOEL! Looking and sounding like … Billy Joel!!!”

She also confesses that, in her scramble to get to the hotel, she forgot her stethoscope and instead of admitting to it, pretended to check the dog’s heartbeat with blood pressure headphones.

It is this kind of vulnerable disclosure that makes Pets and the City quirky and charming; the book’s subtitle is “true tales of a Manhattan house call veterinarian” and we don’t doubt the true part since, in addition to animal stories, Mattas is also telling us how she pretty much badgered her future husband into dating her after they met when his puppy took ill, how she fainted while watching another veterinarian draw blood, and how she once removed dew claws off a litter of 12 two-day-old puppies after letting them suck on Q-tips soaked in sweet wine.

Many of these tales are not so much stories as they are confessions.

The celebrities’ pets are interesting enough, as are the friendships that Mattas forms with some of their famous owners. But the stories I found most interesting were just ordinary cases — the Siamese cat named Itchy undergoing chemotherapy for intestinal lymphoma, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Chowder with heart disease — the lengths to which people will go to keep a pet alive for a few more months or a few more years.

And the owners themselves, of course, are a large part of the story, like the woman who, after her terminally ill cat was euthanized, threw herself on the floor and started screaming that she didn’t want to live anymore. (Mattas searched the house until she found prescriptions, and then called the woman’s psychiatrist for help.) A much more touching story of euthanasia comes when Mattas unexpectedly goes to the house of the late Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author of Night, among other books, while the family is agonizing over whether to put a beloved cat to sleep.

The Wiesel encounter is poignant, but for the most part, Pets and the City, like its author, doesn’t take itself too seriously. Mattas did not try to build a lofty narrative arc in which she and the people in her life undergo great and meaningful changes. She just tells entertaining stories, as if sitting around the dinner table with her readers, sharing what happened that day at work.

As such, there are no real lessons to learn here, other than that there are people who are even crazier about their pets than we are. And if you ever have a pet emergency while visiting Manhattan, don’t call Dr. B. B

The Summer Pact, by Emily Giffin (Ballantine, 352 pages)

For the Love of Summer, by Susan Mallery (MIRA, 400 pages)

Neither The Summer Pact nor For the Love of Summer — despite their titles’ insinuations and their beach-vibe covers — is about summer, the season. The titles both refer to a character named Summer. So cute. Because both authors had this clever idea, and because I read them one after the other and felt equally annoyed by their bait-and-switch covers, I figured I would share their other downfalls.

Emily Giffin’s The Summer Pacthas a trigger warning before the novel begins announcing that difficult themes, including suicide, are present. If you read the jacket cover carefully, it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going to happen — and it does, in the first 10 pages of the book, so this is not a spoiler but rather the basis of the story. After their college friend Summer dies by suicide, Hannah, Lainey and Tyson make a pact to be there for each other if they are ever in crisis. A decade later, Hannah’s engagement ends abruptly, and she finds herself reaching out to Lainey and Tyson for support.

They each agree that they should embark on a trip together, a journey meant for healing and self-discovery. Instead, it seemed like a messy, depressing coming-together of three people who do not make sense as friends — and not in the quirky, we’re-so-different-it’s-funny kind of way, but in a forced, uncomfortable way.

It might have helped if Giffin had spent more than a few pages at the very beginning on the origins of their friendship, the solid foursome that existed before Summer died. But 10 years post-college, they seemingly have nothing in common other than this pact that they made.

It’s hard to even like or care about most of the characters, especially Lainey, who seems to be on a mission of self-destruction and generally comes across as selfish and immature.

The way Lainey reacts when she meets her half-sister for the first time is just childish. She was wronged by her dad, yes, but she confronts them as if she’s an angry 13-year-old with absolutely no filter or ability to communicate like an adult. When her other half-sister later tries to connect with her, Lainey refuses to have anything to do with her.

Hannah is the meek one of the group. The way she reacts to her fiance’s infidelity is pitiful. It’s infuriating to watch a main character not stand up for herself — and when she finally does, it’s at the prompting of her friends, in their presence, under false pretenses, because she couldn’t confront her cheating fiance on her own.

I didn’t have a problem with Tyson, other than he seemed to be Giffin’s attempt at racial inclusivity, with a lot of focus on the fact that he’s a Black man and not much other character development. That makes it hard to believe the romance subplot that Giffin throws in toward the tail end of the story.

I’ve been an Emily Giffin fan for years and have read all of her previous novels, so this was a disappointment for me.

I wish I had read For the Love of Summer first, because I probably would have appreciated Giffin’s writing a bit more – she, at the very least, does not repeat the same messages over and over again, the way Susan Mallery does in her “summer” novel.

The plot of Mallery’s book is cute: Allison’s husband gets sent to jail, and her stepdaughter — Summer — feels bad for her because she’s got a toddler and a baby on the way and no money, so Summer begs her mom, Erica, to let them move in. New wife living with ex-wife — could be fun, right?

Sadly, somehow, most of the book comes across as depressing and negative, with the exception of Summer, who is so positive and hopeful and empathetic that she’s actually unbelievable. This is another example of a cover that’s made for marketing and not representative of what the book is actually about.

The amount of repetition is maddening — the book easily could have been 100 pages shorter (yes, we know Allison is broke, pregnant and raising a toddler alone – we don’t need every character to think and say this over and over). There’s also at least one significant editing issue, where Mallery uses the wrong character’s name. Both of these issues may be the result of Mallery churning out multiple books a year, because it certainly felt hastily written.

With both of these books, I obviously cared enough to finish reading and find out what happened, which is something (honestly, though, I almost gave up on For the Love of Summer because I was so tired of so many words when so little was happening). If you want to give one of them a try, my vote is for The Summer Pact. But if you’re looking for light, fun, well-written beach reads, don’t let these covers fool you. The Summer Pact, B-; For the Love of Summer, C

This Ordinary Stardust, by Alan Townsend (Grand Central Publishing, 261 pages)

The most nourishing soil in the world, Alan Townsend writes, starts with disaster:

“Pyroclastic explosions of ash and lava slam into hillsides and streams, obliterating trees and boiling fish alive in their water. Or massive glaciers suddenly pulverize everything in their path … then unleash a catastrophic flood for good measure. The aftermath is a horror — a moonscape of ruin. It is also a beginning.”

That’s all well and good when talking about geological processes, but what of more personal kinds of disasters, the kind that explode your life, as when both your wife and your 4-year-old daughter get diagnosed with brain cancer within the same year?

Townsend, a tattooed scientist and dean of the college of forestry and conservation at the University of Montana, is much too intelligent to offer platitudes in such a situation. This Ordinary Stardust is no ordinary memoir of a health crisis, as Townsend and his wife, Diana, are no ordinary people.

They are both brilliant scientists who have traveled extensively doing interesting work — when we meet Townsend he’s doing research in the Amazon on how to prevent deforestation, Diana is planning an excursion to collect bacterial samples in Antarctica when she gets sick.

But with the twin diagnoses, the couple is thrust into the strangest world yet, going from the world of the healthy to the world of the sick with frightening speed.

Little Neva’s diagnosis came first, and Townsend writes movingly of how hard it is to watch your child endure MRIs and IVs and CT scans at Colorado Children’s Hospital. At one point, her parents take Neva to a hospital cafe for ice cream, and the child asks if she can have more. “Hell yes, I thought,” Townsend writes. The child, like her parents, is stoic and tough, and a scene where Diana takes a team of residents and medical students to task for their callous treatment of Neva is a Tiger Mother master class in assertiveness.

Diana brings the same defiance to her own treatment. We already know the kind of woman she is from a story Townsend tells about how she badly injured her ankle while the two of them were running on a trail together in Costa Rica, where they were working. The next evening, though her ankle was still badly swollen, Townsend found her wrapping the ankle with strips of an old T-shirt and duct tape. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Going running,” she replied. He writes, “She had a look that challenged me to say more.”

This is also a woman, as Townsend says, who “couldn’t stop talking about bacteria,” who loved science so much that it was all she wanted to talk about on their runs.

When Diana starts having strange symptoms and is ultimately diagnosed with two tumors in her brain, she grumbles that they’d better not stop her going on her expedition to Antarctica the next year. She continues to run throughout her treatment, and even wins her age division in a road race. But glioblastoma is almost always deadly; just 5 percent of patients survive five years. It is not a spoiler to say that Diana is not among the 5 percent since the book jacket blurb reveals that she dies. By this point, we love her as much as her husband does, and the story of her passing is gut-wrenching, but also oddly beautiful.

Townsend writes the book at his wife’s request — she wanted others to learn from their story — and although he confesses up front that he is not a Christian or a church-goer, the story is wrapped in spiritual themes. Science, he writes, can nurture the soul; it offers hope “that life on earth can make its way through the eye of any needle, that our individual choices matter, and that love can bring us back from the brink of annihilation.”

He does not address any issues related to the possibility of an afterlife except in terms related to the title. It’s said that our physical bodies are composed of primordial atoms, elements formed in stars and possibly dating to the Big Bang. Townsend has been fascinated with this idea since he heard a professor talk about how we exchange this “stardust” with each other continually.

“When viewed in our most elemental form, people are trillions of outer-space atoms, moving around temporarily as one, sensing and seeing and falling in love. Then those atoms scatter, joining one new team for a bit, then another. Far from depressing,” he writes. In other words, we might only exist in this form for a short time, but “No matter what happens, we’re still here. And we will always be.”

That’s a far cry from the eternal life promised by some religions, but is still, as he writes, “profoundly comforting.” Grief can co-exist with wonder, Townsend finds on his family’s journey, and his memoir is both poignant and thought-provoking. B+

The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard, by Michael Callahan (Mariner Books, 293 pages)

The quintessential beach read doesn’t have to have a beach in the title or cover art, but it helps. Just ask Elin Hilderbrand, the queen of beach reads, who recently announced she’s retiring from the genre because she has “run out of really good ideas.” Maybe Michael Callahan can step into the void.

Callahan, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, seems an unlikely author to produce a beach read, but that’s what The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard is, despite its aspiring to be a Gone Girl-like thriller. It checks all the boxes: Island in the title. A beach on the cover. Plucky heroine, “roguish” love interest. Chowdah. Plus dueling timelines that go back and forth between the 1950s and 2018, just to make sure we’re paying attention.

The premise is intriguing enough: Kit O’Neill is a single woman who works for a TV star in Manhattan. After her parents died, she and her older sister were raised by the grandmother they called Nan in a roomy suburban colonial in Westchester County. The young women adored their grandmother and were devastated when she died, but it has fallen to them to clean out her house and ready it for sale, which they are reluctantly doing.

Cleaning out the attic, Kit works through the usual stuff of attics — dusty boxes filled with Christmas ornaments, old curtains and bills, yellowed photographs, all familiar. And then she finds a box full of curious things: a playbill from a 1959 production at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse featuring an actress called Mercy Welles, a couple of matching shells, a prize ribbon, and a photo of her grandmother with her arm around a man that Kit doesn’t recognize.

Intrigued, Kit takes the box downstairs and does a Google search for Mercy Welles — and among the results, she finds an article called “The Strange and Curious Case of Mercy Welles,” which detailed the mysterious disappearance of a Hollywood actress at the start of a promising career. There was a photo of this Mercy Welles: It was Kit’s grandmother, Nan.

Before Kit can recover from the shock, the author swoops us back to May 1959 to meet Mercy, a winsome young woman from the Midwest whose real name was Edith. “She was twenty-six but feared she looked 30. The industry did that to you. With her green eyes, pale skin, and wavy, honey-blond hair, she knew she was objectively pretty. It did little to assuage the paranoia.”

For all her insecurities, Mercy had gone to Los Angeles seeking a career and quickly became a success, getting engaged to a film producer and nominated for an Oscar as a best supporting actress within three years. But things weren’t good with the fiance, and at the suggestion of a friend, she made plans for the two of them to take a short vacation in New England. Mercy knew nothing about Martha’s Vineyard but imagined a week there in spring to be something like a travel brochure: “a fireplace, steaming mugs of cider, soft cashmere sweaters, a walk hand in hand by the water.”

Then she found her fiance at a hotel with another woman. The romantic vacation was off, but Mercy went to Martha’s Vineyard anyway to figure out her next steps. And within days, she had rented a cottage on the island for the entire summer and was befriending the locals.

Back to the future, in 2018, Kit turns investigator, thanks in part to the celebrity journalist she works for, who is intrigued by the story and is fine with Kit taking off to Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Massachusetts to try to unravel the mystery of how her grandmother sneaked out of fame’s glare and took to raising kids in anonymity in Rye, New York.

With some lucky breaks, she tracks down an old roommate of her grandmother’s, with whom Mercy had corresponded while she was in Martha’s Vineyard. (Not only was there no internet, but there was also not even an analogue telephone in her cottage, leading Mercy to write to the friend, “we’ll have to communicate the old-fashioned way, via correspondence. How very Jane Austen it all will be!”)

Then we’re back to Mercy, who was not quite as anonymous as she thought she would be on Martha’s Vineyard, as many of the islanders had seen the film for which she’d earned an Oscar nomination. As her summer unfolds, we learn about those mementos that her granddaughter will eventually find, as she becomes friendly with a gruff oysterman and with a young Black musician and playwright, and eventually becomes entangled in a crime involving the most famous family on the island.

And on it goes, back and forth between young Mercy and young Kit, as the riddles of the story are somewhat blandly unspooled. The author spent time at a writers’ colony on the island, and knows it well — perhaps too well, as at times he seems driven to mention every village and restaurant. Perhaps he plans to do for the Vineyard what Hilderbrand has done for Nantucket.

As beach reads go, The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard does not disappoint, but it does in the places where striving to be something more. B- —Jennifer Graham

There Was Nothing You Could Do, by Steven Hyden (Hatchett, 272 pages)

When Steven Hyden was 6 years old, he found a cassette tape in the glove box of his parents’ car and asked his dad to play it. When the sound came through, after precisely nine seconds of silence, it was “my personal ‘big bang’ moment,” Hyden writes. “All these years later, I am still chasing the rush of hearing that titanic BOOM! in my father’s car.”

The artist was Bruce Springsteen; the album Born in The U.S.A., issued 40 years ago this year.

There Was Nothing You Could Do is Hyden’s exegesis of Springsteen’s impact — in Hyden’s own life and in the country, focusing on Springsteen’s best-selling album, released in 1984. The title is a line from the song “My Hometown,” the last single released from “Born in the U.S.A.” The subtitle references “the end of the heartland.” But don’t be scared off by that. While there is some politically tinged commentary, as has always accompanied Springsteen’s work, it’s mostly a book about music.

First and foremost, Hyden is a fan, although his fandom had an inauspicious beginning, coming as it did in childhood. Kids loved Born in the U.S.A. “for the dumbest possible reason — because we heard the songs constantly. That’s all it takes to appeal to little kids,” he writes. “Kids my age weren’t brainwashed, exactly. We were Boss-washed.”

It wasn’t as if that’s all he listened to, however; Hyden’s examination of the Boss-washing of America detours into other culturally significant pop musicians: Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna (all of whom comprise “the big four” of the 1980s); as well as Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. Springsteen, he writes, was something of a combination of the latter two: “… he could move like Elvis and write like Dylan. The pelvis and the brain had been fused into one.”

A critic for the entertainment website Uproxx and the author of previous books on music (Twilight of the Gods and Your Favorite Band is Killing Me), Hyden brings encyclopedic knowledge to the topic, and as such, There Was Nothing You Could Do sometimes reads like an encyclopedia, as when he lists the various iterations of songs that were proposed for Born in the U.S.A. when the album was under development. Herein he runs into a problem: For the Springsteen fanatic — and they are legion — much of this material might induce a yawn.

There’s a lot of material that seems better fit for a blog, such as digressions into the author’s fantasies: what would have happened, say, if Springsteen had drifted from the lane of heartland rock to straight-up country music, or had put out another album in 1985 when Springsteen mania was at its peak. (He even proposes a playlist for this.) And Gen Z might raise a collective eyebrow to Hyden pronouncing Springsteen more of a “national monument than a pop star” at the age of 75. For all of their success, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band never had a No. 1 hit.

Still, despite some vaguely silly asides, Hyden does a good job of explaining the Springsteen phenomenon as he delves into stories that relate specifically to Born in the U.S.A., such as how the “Dancing in the Dark” music video was made, and how it was received.

The video, directed by filmmaker Brian De Palma, shows Springstreen awkwardly dancing at a concert with Friends actress Courteney Cox (relatively unknown at the time). It “undeniably made him more famous in the short run, and it unquestionably made him easier to make fun of in the long run,” Hyden writes. The video has become a popular GIF and “personifies everything that is corny about Bruce Springstreen and almost nothing that is cool about him.”

But it could have been worse, Hyden reveals. In another video that was made and ultimately abandoned, Springsteen “looks like a mime attending a Jazzercise class,” he writes.

Hyden is at his best when he strings together snapshots from Springsteen’s life, from his troubled relationship to his father to the existential struggles that inform so many of his lyrics, and connects them to the singer’s appeal. “If you want to see the emotionally repressed man in your life cry — a stoic father, an unflappable granddad, a weird uncle, an immature brother — send him to a Bruce Springsteen concert,” Hyden writes.

Toward the end, he examines the controversy that erupted from the Super Bowl Jeep commercial that angered both conservatives and liberals in 2021. It was indicative of America’s deep political divide that a commercial inviting Americans to “meet here in the middle” irritated so many people. “‘The Middle’ was designed to please exactly no one,” Hyden writes. “In that way, Bruce did manage to unite red and blue America, ironically, their condemnation of him.”

Hyden did not interview the Boss for this book, although he’s been within 50 feet of him, at a concert where he obtained special press seating. His reporting comes from previously published articles, Springsteen’s autobiography and other books. and so much of this information is already out in the world; this is just an artful rearrangement of music history. For the casual fan, the minutiae might be too much. But Hyden is a skilled wordsmith, and There Was Nothing You Could Do is a surprisingly breezy read, despite the ominous title. It’s a sort of love letter we all might write to our favorite pop star if we had the time and skill. B-