Author: Jennifer Graham

The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson (Crown, 497 pages)

It may be an egregious conflict of interest for a native South Carolinian to review any book about the onset of the Civil War, given the Palmetto state’s outsized role in that conflict. So take everything I say here with a grain of grits.

But Erik Larson has produced a masterful work in The Demon of Unrest, his narrative history of one of the most consequential five months this country has seen: the time period bookended by the election of Abraham Lincoln on Nov. 7, 1860, and the shots fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. We all know generally how the story began and ended. Larson fills in the details, by presenting the stories behind the stories, in rich detail. Incredibly, he manages to make the story suspenseful.

Not that this hasn’t been done before — the Titanic movie was suspenseful, and we knew how that ended, too. But Jack and Rose were fictional characters, their travails invented by James Cameron. For The Demon of Unrest, Larsen combed through realms of historical documents and journals and reconstructed the minutiae of the lives of leading figures in the Civil War, some of whom, like Abraham Lincoln and Mary Boykin Chestnut, are well-known; and others, who may not be quite as familiar.

He then artfully assembled the information and, instead of trying to write history, he just told stories — stories that explain the onset of the Civil War better than any AP history course ever could.

Thousands of books have been written about Lincoln; NPR once reported that Lincoln is only second to Jesus of Nazareth in the number of books written about him. So for serious Lincoln fans, The Demon of Unrest may not bring much new information to their table in this deeply sympathetic portrait of the 16th president. And I would be remiss to not point out that this book is not kind to the South, focusing as it does on letters and speeches that make clear that the conflict hung on slavery, not states’ rights. (Although there was a Confederate officer in South Carolina who was literally named States Rights Gist — mercifully, the man only went by “States” and the name seems to have died on the battlefield with him.)

Even Mary Boykin Chesnut, the Civil War diarist who was the wife of a wealthy planter, does not come off looking great, though her writing is generally acclaimed and was the basis of a book that won a Pulitzer Prize for history. We may not cheer when her Mulberry plantation is desecrated by Union soldiers, but neither do we weep.

That said, Chesnut is not presented as abjectly villainous, as are Edmund Ruffin and James Hammond, two pro-slavery and pro-secession Confederates whose beliefs did not age well and whose deeds were abhorrent even for their time.

Hammond, for example, sexually abused people he enslaved and also four under-aged nieces; he wrote unashamedly about his exploits in his journals. There was a great scandal when the relationship with the nieces came to light and Hammond retreated from public life for a while but later, incredibly, was returned to public office in South Carolina. Ruffin, a Virginian, was famously assigned to fire the first shot on Fort Sumter. He did so after dining the night before on cheese and crackers, and sleeping on “a pallet under two thick blankets,” still dressed in his clothes, because he was so excited for the war to start.

There are heroes in The Demon of Unrest, however, apart from Abraham Lincoln; most notable is Major Robert Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, the small island in Charleston Harbor where the first shots of the war were fired. Anderson is heroic, despite having once been a slaveholder, not only because he was on the right side of history, but also because he remained loyal to the Union despite his deeply conflicted feelings about the impending war.

He was, for example, sympathetic to various complaints of the South, and he was friends with General P.G.T. Beauregard, South Carolina’s military commander. The two men had to navigate the increasing military hostilities amid a friendship that began at West Point. They were unfailingly solicitous to each other in their correspondence, even as they were making preparations for their respective forces to do battle.

One of the starkest takeaways of the book is how vitriolic the South had become not only to the union but to everyone in the North. And they especially hated people who lived in New England. William Russell, a war correspondent for the London Times, was reporting in the colonies and wrote, “Whether it be in consequence of some secret influence which slavery has upon the minds of men or that the aggression of the North upon their institutions … certain it is there is a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind toward New England which exceeds belief.”

One might say a vestige of that remains in the South’s animosity toward certain New England sports teams.

Larson ends his story on April 18, 1861, but includes an epilogue that gives the post-war outcomes of all his major players. The Demon of Unrest adds to his compendium of lengthy narrative histories that include his treatment of Winston Churchill and the London Blitz, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and the build-up to World War II under Hitler’s Germany.

His books are exhaustive, and as such, some consider them exhausting, but he performs a kindness for the reader by formatting the stories in short chapters, some only four or five pages. They are the sort of books best read over the course of a year, not over the course of a vacation, and require a high degree of interest in the subject matter. But nobody does it better when it comes to putting readers in the trenches of history, in this case with cannonballs whizzing over our heads. A —Jennifer Graham

God’s Ghostwriters, by Candida Moss (Little, Brown & Co., 303 pages)

In the first centuries of the Common Era, literacy was rare. Even when people knew how to read and write, they didn’t want to do it since scratching out letters and symbols on papyrus with no desks or ergonomic chairs was physically taxing. The solution for many elites of the time was to have enslaved people do it.

While most of the early leaders of the fledgling movement that would one day be known as Christianity weren’t men of means, they still had people accompanying them on their travels, and these people — not necessarily Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — were the people who would write down the stories about Jesus of Nazareth, Many of them were enslaved, posits theologian Candida Moss in God’s Ghostwriters.

Formerly a professor at Notre Dame, now at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., Moss is attempting to bring biblical scholarship surrounding the New Testament to a broader audience. In doing so, she may upset some apple carts of belief, specifically for those who perceive Christianity as a religion of the learned built on the writings of Aquinas, Augustine and other intellectual heavyweights. In fact, Moss points out, in its first centuries, the emerging religion was often derided as the fantastical beliefs of women, the lower classes and, most of all, enslaved people.

Some of these ideas are already well-known, chief among them the fact that crucifixion was a form of execution used primarily to punish the enslaved and the worst kinds of criminals, and a threat to keep other people of low status in line. But Moss goes much further out on this limb, arguing that the involvement of the enslaved in the production and dissemination of Christian Bible influenced its content, through the inclusion (and exclusion) of certain things, and descriptions that would more easily flow from the mind of a servile person than from an elite. Descriptions of a netherworld, for example, are often disturbingly similar to conditions of prisons in ancient Rome, she says.

While conceding at the start that much of what she writes in God’s Ghostwriters is inferred from what is uncontested about this period of history, Moss makes a compelling, if provocative, case. She is used to controversy, having previously published a book that questioned the number of early Christians who were killed for their faith. Moss’s 2013 The Myth of Persecution, for some, seemed an attack on Christianity itself, given that the martyrdom of early Christians is often used as an argument for the validity of Christianity’s claims. God’s Ghostwriters presents a similar problem, she acknowledges, writing, “If the New Testament is not the work of Jesus’ disciples, can it be trusted?”

Moss does not answer that question outright, but she is reportedly Catholic, so she must think there’s something of value in the Christian Bible. But she likens its “invisible” authors to delivery workers during the pandemic, writing “We speak of Amazon ‘delivering things,’ as if an abstract multinational company brought purchases to our home,” rather than low-wage workers.

For many readers, Moss might dance too close to the edge of blasphemy when she refers to certain biblical descriptions of Jesus as “slavish” and says that the narrative of Mark’s gospel, in particular, leaves room for interpretation that Mary was either enslaved or a sex worker. Some early critics of the fledgling Jesus movement argued that Jesus’s father was a Roman soldier named Pantera. This is not new information to scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity; just as there were people eager to advance the deity of Jesus, there were many people eager to stamp it out.

But Moss’s excavation provides an engrossing history of Roman life and how slavery was part and parcel of the time, and she offers a rudimentary and accessible snapshot of biblical scholarship that is rarely, if ever, delivered from a pulpit. She shows, for example, that the story of the adulterous woman about to be stoned that Jesus forgave — which she calls “something of a fan favorite” — was not in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John, where it resides today, and speculates on how it came to be there. Her descriptions of life in ancient Rome do not give it the romantic overtones held by the many people on social media who say they think about ancient Rome daily — as much as Rome is marked by military conquest, roads and aqueducts, it was also a place where animal feces was used as mortar, and dogs, as well as humans, were crucified. Perhaps modernity isn’t as bad as we make it out to be.

Does it matter that the Gospel of Mark was not written by a disciple called Mark, but dictated by Peter to Mark or even to an unnamed, enslaved person? Does it matter if the letters of Paul were not physically composed by Paul, but by a person who was enslaved or formerly enslaved? For some, Moss acknowledges, yes, this would present “an insurmountable problem” to their faith. But it seems that for most people who see the Bible as the inspired word of God, it would not matter who actually held the stylus or reed. For those who are willing to have their preconceptions challenged, God’s Ghostwriters will do just that. B —Jennifer Graham

The Guncle Abroad, by Steven Rowley (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 320 pages)

It took me a minute to get back into the world of Patrick O’Hara, also known as GUP (Gay Uncle Patrick) to Maisie and Grant, Patrick’s now 14- and 11-year-old niece and nephew, respectively. The last time we saw these characters, in Rowley’s The Guncle, they were five years younger. Maisie and Grant had just lost their mom, and their dad, Greg, was struggling with addiction, so a very unprepared Patrick stepped in as their temporary guardian while his brother checked himself into rehab. Hilarity, along with a good dose of all the emotions that come with family, love and loss, ensued.

Now GUP is back in charge as he leads Maisie and Grant on a journey to understand love ahead of their dad’s impending wedding to Livia; meanwhile, Maisie and Grant are on a mission to get Patrick to get their dad to call off the wedding. They’re not fans of Livia (although they seem to like their soon-to-be Launt — Lesbian aunt — much to Patrick’s annoyance).

“The key was not so much for the kids to understand their own [love] languages … but for Patrick to open their eyes to the ways in which Greg and Livia might be a good match, and ways in which Livia might be expressing love for the two of them that they were currently missing. Guncle Love Languages.”

The wedding is set to take place in Lake Como, Italy. As Greg and Livia prepare for their big day, Patrick takes Maisie and Grant to some pretty amazing places that he believes exemplify love: Salzburg, Austria (where they all joyfully revive some famous The Sound of Music moments), Paris and Venice. The locations make for beautiful backdrops for this quest of Patrick’s, even while his message is largely unheard and his niece and nephew dig their heels in.

Patrick’s conversations with the kids are often hilarious — he doesn’t coddle or hold back his opinions in the way most adults might. The kids aren’t quite as fun as they were in the first book, which makes sense because they’re older and not as amused by Patrick. Grant has lost his adorable lisp, but he hasn’t lost his unintentional wit.

“‘Careful, your mug might be hot,’” Patrick tells Grant when they’re in Paris drinking fancy hot chocolate. “‘This hot chocolate is for sipping, not gulping like a pelican.’ ‘I wish I was a pelican,’ came Grant’s reply. ‘Then I could store more of this in my throat pouch.’ Patrick shuddered. ‘Don’t say throat pouch in a chocolaterie.’”

What Rowley does really well here is explore how grief can still take a hold of us even as the years pass and our lives move forward. Moments big and small — a wedding or a memory of watching The Sound of Music — can evoke all kinds of emotions, from acute sadness to a sense of peace in knowing that the person you loved and lost would be proud of the people she left behind.

While Patrick is mainly focused on getting Grant and Maisie to accept Greg and Livia’s relationship, he’s nursing his own heartbreak while struggling to come to terms with hitting the half-century mark in age. Patrick broke up with Emory because he felt like he was too old for him, so even while he’s found renewed success in his acting career, he’s feeling lonely and missing Emory. It’s the kids who pick up on the missing-Emory part and ultimately force Patrick to acknowledge his fears.

All in all, there’s a good mix here of lighthearted fun and emotional depth. When things start to get heavy, it’s a good bet that there’s going to be a laugh-out-loud moment or a clever quip that maintains the levity. Launt Palmina is especially good for a laugh (at one point she “mistakenly” mistranslates Patrick’s new role in Grease, to which an annoyed Patrick quickly clarifies that his role is to teach the boys the hand jive).

If you’re looking for a not-too-serious-but-not-too-fluffy summer read, The Guncle Abroad delivers. Definitely start with the first book, though, if you haven’t had the pleasure of reading it yet. B
—Meghan Siegler

Worry, by Alexandra Tanner (Scribner, 290 pages)

If there’s a twentysomething in your life, or if you are one, you will love Jules and Poppy, the anxious and squabbly sisters in Alexandra’s Tanner’s debut novel, Worry.

And also, at some point, you’ll just want to throttle them.

Tanner has bottled the nervous essence of youthful TikTok and spilled it out on the page in a quirky, pre-Covid novel that is dialogue-driven and plot-deprived but somehow manages to be fun to read.

It begins — and ends — in 2019. Poppy Gold, the younger of the two sisters and ostensibly the least emotionally stable, arrives at Jules’ rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

She takes over her sister’s home office and plans just to stay for a short while until she can find her own place.

Poppy has tried to kill herself and has picked up shoplifting for fun, but she seems to be on the mend emotionally. She, like much of her generation, is highly socially conscious, refusing to let her sister buy a SodaStream because she “doesn’t want to support Israeli apartheid.” She doesn’t have a job but is convinced she can get one and afford the rent on her own place, or else get their parents to subsidize it.

Jules, the narrator, knows better. Jules is somewhat stably employed as an editor for a publishing company that produces study guides similar to SparkNotes, and has a boyfriend with “an MFA in poetry and half a Ph.D. in poetry.”

“He pretends he knows things about wine and I let him. I pretend I know things about Russian literature and he lets me. It’s all very tentative,” Jules says. In her spare time, Jules obsesses over Mormon mommy blogs and picks fights with them in the comments. She calls them her mommies.

Her real mother, and Poppy’s, practices Messianic Judaism, just started an Instagram account (zero followers) and argues with her daughters about whether police are bad or good and is prone to texting them a thumbs-down emoji when they say something she doesn’t like.

“I don’t understand why the three of us can’t ever just have, like, a nice conversation,” Jules says to Poppy, discussing their mother. “Not even a conversation, just a moment even. What’s her deal with us? Why doesn’t she like us?”

“Oh,” Poppy says without looking up, “it’s because she’s a narcissist and we’re her appendages. It says so in the trauma book.”

Soon it becomes clear that Poppy will not be moving out anytime soon, and to the delight of their father, a dermatologist who is always telling his daughters what cosmetic work they need to have done (and does it free), they settle down to housekeeping together. They even adopt a three-legged rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar.

This is the point where there should be some rising story arc, some crisis, some Thelma-and-Louise-esque trip. Astonishingly, there is not. Worry is essentially a book full of snappy dialogue and stream-of-consciousness observations of one millennial and one zoomer. Poppy and Jules are an Algonquin Round Table that seats two.

While they both have dreams — Jules has an MFA and still aspires to be a “real” writer — they are locked in anxiety, self-consciousness and a never-ending loop of videos on the internet that end badly, from 9/11 to a zoo panda’s death. This leads to a conversation about whether watching videos like that changes a person.

Poppy argues yes: “There is a before and after of me watching this video, you know? There’s the me who hadn’t chosen to watch the video, and there’s the me who did. And I’m not the old me anymore.”

To which Jules replies: “The Internet isn’t real, it isn’t experience. It’s moving dots.”

But when Jules ventures out into the real world to watch a writer lecture at a museum, and another young woman tries to befriend her, she refuses to engage and spirals into self-pity. “There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer. I’m a Floridian. I’m a consumer,” she says to herself.

Tanner disguises the seriousness underlying the women’s unhappiness with her light, comic touch. When, for example, a high-school drama friend reaches out to Jules, Jules admits, “It thrills me to see that she is not working as an actress, that she’s working in nonprofits — the fate of the unremarkable — and that she’s the annoying kind of married where she has her wedding date, bookended with hearts, in her little bio box.”

But Tanner throws the readers under a bus with an emotionally challenging ending that is a sharp and unexpected departure from her modus operandi up to that point. It’s as if she’d been serving cotton candy, and then suddenly left the room and came back with fried alligator. But by that point, it’s too late for the reader to bail.

Worry is, in essence, an anxious monologue that will resonate most with young, under-employed, over-educated Americans who live in large cities on the coasts. B

Daniel Lewis is a tree nerd, and I say that affectionately, from one tree nerd to another. By this, I mean my house is filled with odd pieces of wood collected in forests and on beaches for no reason other than the beauty I see in their gnarled and twisty forms. Lewis, however, is the guy who could probably identify the type of tree these bits of wood come from and then launch into a lecture on the genus of the tree and its prospects for survival on a warming planet.

An environmental historian and college professor who lives in Southern California, Lewis has built his latest book around 12 trees he finds most interesting and important. Disappointingly, although New Hampshire is the second most forested state in the U.S. according to the New Hampshire Division of Forests and Lands, the 12 do not include the sugar maple, Eastern hemlock or any other of the most prevalent trees in New England.

Lewis’s picks are a disparate tribe flung around the planet — in some cases, literally, by seed dispersal. They include the bristlecone pine, the coast redwood, the East Indian sandalwood tree, the African baobab, the blue gum eucalyptus and the olive tree. Each tree gets its own chapter, in which Lewis tells stories about the tree’s history, its uses and abuses by humans, and its outlook. Along the way, he ventures merrily off the beaten path in order to share nuggets of information he has gleaned during his research.

As an example, Lewis wanted to confirm that products of the olive tree, which mainly grows in the Mediterranean and in California, are found on all the continents. So he tracked down the person in charge of supplying food to the largest year-round encampment in the Antarctic, and we subsequently learn how the 150 to 900 people at the McMurdo Station are fed. Food is delivered there just once a year, in January or February, and it sounds like they eat better there than many of us do. “When you’re stuck in a vast, tree-free tract of wind-driven snow and ice, you need good olives and their oil. Green, black, and Kalamata olives are the three varieties usually on hand. Olive oil and olives are also a staple for their pizza station, which bakes up sixteen thousand to eighteen thousand pizzas annually,” Lewis writes.

Due to the popularity of its drupe — that is the new word we learn for pitted fruits like the olive, peach or apricot — the actual olive tree doesn’t get as much attention in its chapter as the other 11 trees, as Lewis delves mainly into the production of olive oil. The demand for olive oil is so great that just 10 percent of harvested olives are consumed as olives; the rest is pressed into oil in a mind-bogglingly complex and regulated process that explains why the product is so expensive.

More focus on the tree itself is given in chapters of two threatened species of trees: the African baobab (you might not recognize the name, but Google it, and you will most likely recognize the tree) and the toromiro tree, once common on a Pacific island.

The African baobab is a source of water to elephants during times of drought, which is interesting, because the baobab, for reasons scientists can’t explain, stores much more water than an individual tree needs for itself. But as tempting as it is to think that the tree is, on some level, being helpful to elephants or other living things with its excess hydration, it is the elephants’ violent assault on the trees to obtain water that is contributing to the trees’ demise.

Equally interesting is the story of what Lewis calls “the nearly lost tree of Rapa Nui.”

Rapa Nui is the Pacific island more commonly known as Easter Island. It was once resplendent with the Sophora toromiro, which doesn’t have a common name or nickname like other trees and is simply known (by the tree nerds who pay attention to it) as the toromiro.

The toromiro is a small flowering tree that was part of a “painful drop in biodiversity” after humans arrived there around the 12th century. In the case of the toromiro, however, its gradual decline wasn’t all human-driven; Lewis explains how other factors were likely at play, including dozens of devastating tsunamis that have hit the island over time. But the trees were harvested too, for firewood and building material. By the 1600s wood was so scarce on the island that it became the most valuable commodity there, Lewis writes. Even driftwood was “precious.”

Today, more than six decades after the last toromiro tree mysteriously disappeared from the island, attempts are being made to re-introduce the tree to the island from toromiros found growing elsewhere, the seeds carried by birds or ocean currents. It’s not as easy as just planting seedlings. The soil composition has changed so much that cultivated trees have not yet taken root.

These are the sorts of stories that make Twelve Trees an unexpectedly fascinating read, although it’s not necessarily the sort of book that you’d recommend, for example, to your Bruins-obsessed neighborhood. It’s a book to be read slowly and thoughtfully, and would appeal most to those who think businesses should close for Arbor Day. (April 26 this year, in case you didn’t know.)

While Twelve Trees has its “Bueller? Bueller?” moments — most notably when Lewis delivers what is best described as a rapturous ode to lichens — it will make you think that maybe you care more about trees than you know. B

& How to End a Love Story, by Yulin Kuang

Funny Story, by Emily Henry (Berkley, 400 pages)

How to End a Love Story, by Yulin Kuang (Avon, 384 pages)

I was interested in reading Yulin Kuang’s debut novel, How to End a Love Story, after finding out that Kuang is the adapting screenwriter for People We Meet on Vacation and the writer/director for Beach Read, both upcoming movies based on novels by Emily Henry. And since it was released just weeks before Henry’s latest, Funny Story (already on my must-read list), I decided to read them both and compare these purportedly funny love stories.

How to End a Love Story is a solid debut — but I could see it being better as a movie (which makes sense given Kuang’s experience as a film writer). I have to wonder if perhaps some solid acting could make me believe the whole premise of the book.

Because here’s my biggest hang-up: The reason that main characters Helen and Grant “can’t” be together is stupid. I could not, at any point, wrap my head around this “enemies to lovers” plot when there was absolutely no reason for them to be enemies in the first place.

Helen’s sister was killed in a tragic accident 13 years ago. Grant was behind the wheel of the car that killed her. (No spoiler here — this is explained on page 2). The fact is, no one was at fault, no one was to blame, and it’s just not OK that Helen hates Grant for this thing he had no control over. I get that being around him might be difficult, but to straight up despise his existence and make him feel like he did something wrong really made me dislike her. And it’s hard to be invested in, let alone root for, a character you don’t like.

Also, she’s pretty uptight, and it was hard to reconcile that with the setting and other characters in the book. Helen is a popular YA author and has just started working in the writers’ room of the book series’ TV adaptation (clearly Kuang took the “write what you know” notion and ran with it). The writers’ room environment is rowdy and raunchy, and Helen doesn’t fit in.

It’s almost uncomfortable to see Helen’s interactions with these fun, indelicate people — and then watch her slowly become “one of them.” It seems disingenuous and awkward (again, maybe onscreen an actor could portray this transformation more naturally than my imagination was allowing for).

Meanwhile, Grant is an experienced film writer, well-respected and confident in the room but less so outside of it, as he still struggles with the anxieties that have plagued him since the aforementioned tragic accident.

Alas, Helen and Grant must work together, and of course it’s so hard at first, but then it’s not so much, and then there are some unfortunate moments of passion that can’t go any further because it’s just not OK, fundamentally, because of this thing that happened 13 years ago that was no one’s fault.

If you can wrap your head around all of that in a way that I couldn’t, you’ll probably enjoy this book. Certainly a lot of romance novels have their fair share of disbelievable elements — it’s just that they’re usually more eye-roll-inducing (just tell him how you feel already!) and less emotionally upsetting. But the writing is solid, particularly the dialogue, and it’s an interesting look at what goes on in a writers’ room and on a film set, knowing that Kuang has real-life experience there. C+

Funny Story was even better than I expected it to be. Henry had already proven that she is a master of women’s literature, with fun, real characters, unique but believable storylines, and just the right amount of heat. And in Funny Story, her dialogue shines, sharp and witty as always.

One of many random examples (the context doesn’t even matter):

“‘I thought you were bringing a date,’ I say to Jules. ‘That guy you just went to Chicago with?’

‘Ryan.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘He cut his fingernails on the bus ride.’

‘Ew,’ Ashleigh and I say in unison.

Julia nods solemnly. ‘Flags so red, they veered toward maroon.’”

The “I” in the above example is Daphne, who is engaged to Peter, who decides just before the wedding that he actually loves Petra, his childhood best friend, who was engaged to Miles, who becomes Daphne’s new roommate and fake boyfriend after the respective breakups. Got that? (Jules, in case you’re wondering, is Miles’s sister, and Ashleigh is Daphne’s co-worker and, once Daphne lightens up a bit at work, her new best friend. Both add a well-balanced mix of fun and emotional complexity to the plot.)

And there is emotional complexity here; this isn’t all fluff and love, and I don’t think I rolled my eyes once. Funny Story is definitely funny, but it’s so much more than that, too: It’s a story of human relationships and all of the messiness and intensity that come along with them, how they can start and end in the most unpredictable ways, and how we all have the capacity to overcome heartbreak and learn to love again. A