Category: Books

Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly (Atria, 241 pages)

Spotify is in the news this month, having recently reported that 2024 was its first profitable year, with 675 million monthly active users and climbing. That made investors happy, but what are the costs? That’s the subject of music journalist Liz Pelly’s timely examination into the rise of the music streaming company, founded nearly 20 years ago in Sweden.

Spotify, of course, is the Godzilla of streaming services, eating the lunch of most of its competitors, although Apple and Amazon also have strong shares of the market. The business model sprang vaguely formed from the forehead of Napster, the digital music-sharing platform — notably illegal — that freed consumers from actually paying for music.

While today’s streaming services, of course, are not free, they remain a mind-boggling value. As Hua Hsu wrote for The New Yorker, “Adjusted for inflation, a monthly subscription to an audio streaming service, allowing convenient access to a sizable chunk of the history of recorded music, costs much less than a single album once did.”

Musical artists and their associated companies, however, have contended that the change has come at their expense, and it’s been a slog to get to the point where most everyone is satisfied. Count Pelly among those who are still pushing back against the changes that streaming has wrought.

Spotify’s goals, apart from making money, are ostensibly to make what Pelly calls “self-driving music” — the ability for a subscriber to “simply open the app, press ‘play,’ and instantaneously get the perfect soundtrack for any given moment or context, without having to search, click, or think.”

But in achieving this on-demand nirvana, Pelly argues that Spotify and other streaming services have helped give rise to a “dynamic of passivity” among consumers, who are spoon-fed what algorithms have determined they will like. Spotify playlists “worked as a flattening, making a scene that was previously sprawling and complicated into something commodified and palatable, cutting out many original voices along the way.”

At the same time, music has become background noise in modern life, and “it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little financial remuneration,” Pelly writes.

These are all interesting cultural changes worthy of reflection, but Pelly comes to this book as a nuts-and-bolts journalist, not as a philosopher. She tracks the minutiae of Spotify’s ascent, which she was covering in real time, and reports with detail on the inner workings of the company, aided by both named and anonymous employees, some of whom have since left.

That sourcing adds, of course, to pervasive cynicism about Spotify throughout the book. Pelly and her sources are not dispassionate observers, but people with a take, and that take is that streaming, while great for consumers, is not great for artists, who are paid fractions of a cent per stream. And how big the fraction is is virtually impossible to figure out, given the many variants possible, which include the type of streaming plan (free, standard or family?) and even what country the consumer lives in.

“This is all to say: the digit on an artist’s royalty statement is much more complicated than a per-stream rate. And artists are almost always systematically shut out of any sort of transparency around the calculations creating their livelihoods,” Pelly writes, explaining how the digital age has led to a music labor movement.

To be fair, she notes, with every change in technology, the industry has had to adapt. In the 1920s the rise of the phonograph was seen with the same sort of concern that musicians have had about digital music. Musicians went on strike in the 1940s over LP records; they feared unemployment, believing that people were less likely to go see a live performance if they could hear the music in their living rooms. Of course, that’s proved not to be the case; witness Taylor Swift’s proceeds from her Eras tour.

Still, Pelly sees the problem of artist compensation as something all of us should worry about, even arguing that music, like libraries, should be seen as a “public good,” with public funding and protections. Some people in Europe are even arguing for what amounts to a universal basic income for musicians. In fact, that’s even been tried in Ireland, which experimented with a “Basic Income for the Arts” that gave 325 euro each week to 2,000 artists for three years. France has also experimented with a system that gave artists their own unemployment system, in order to make up for the irregularity of their work.

In her conclusion, Pelly asks, “What’s the ethical alternative to Spotify?,” which is not a question the average American consumer will want to entertain, and Pelly admits there are no easy answers. For those who are not inclined to worry about artist pay — or to consider that “our shared music cultures would be so much more compelling and diverse if so many [musicians] did not need to abandon the arts for jobs with health insurance” — Mood Machine may seem like so much hand-wringing, interspersed with sometimes mind-numbing detail on things like hyperpop and Discovery Mode.

Ultimately, while well-reported, Mood Machine is more a book for insiders than the general public. But insiders and struggling musicians will love it.

B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly

The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison (Dutton, 368 pages)

A 70-year marriage is unfathomable to most. After all, approximately half of all marriages end in divorce (not a myth, according to a recent Forbes article), and, logistically, you’d have to marry young and you’d both have to live beyond the average life expectancy to hit that 70-year mark. But if a marriage were to endure for 70 years — how?

The Heart of Winter by Jonathan Evison sheds some light on this as it follows Abe and Ruth Winter’s journey from college-age courting (very reluctantly on Ruth’s part) to 90th birthdays and end-of-life planning.

The book gets off to a slow start as Abe unenthusiastically allows his family to celebrate his 90th birthday. Evison does the reader no favors by naming dozens of characters up front: the Winters’ living children — Anne, Kyle and Maddie — plus their significant others and their kids and their kids and their pets, plus family friends.

It seems trivial to point this out now that I’ve finished the book and mostly enjoyed it, but the fact is that it almost made me put it down and not pick it up again — too many people to try to remember, plus dialogue that makes their grown children sound like teenagers, which adds to the confusion around who’s who. Meanwhile, Abe is lamenting that he’s still alive, making for a depressing start.

But get past the beginning and you’ll find the answers to that “how” question, laid out by Evison in shifting perspectives between Ruth and Abe, and shifting timelines between present day and various impactful years in their marriage.

The answers, it seems, are resilience, patience, perseverance and tolerance, a recipe of big words mixed with steadfast love.

From the moment they meet in college, it’s clear that Abe and Ruth are very different people, and Ruth does her best to avoid him at all costs. But Abe is enamored by her spirit and free will and eventually wears her down. They date, and before she can graduate Ruth gets pregnant. They get married, and Ruth is suddenly a stay-at-home mom with little use for her books of poetry and lofty ideals.

Ruth is not unhappy, but she isn’t exactly happy either. And so Abe, without Ruth’s knowledge, accepts a job and buys a farmhouse on Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride away from the hustle and bustle of Seattle and not exactly the kind of life Ruth thought she’d be living when she was deep into her studies of the liberal arts. But Abe is convinced she will love life on the farm, where she can garden and raise chickens and take care of the kids. She’s mad, really mad, at his presumptuousness but ultimately acquiesces, and another chapter of their life together begins.

Ruth does like living on the farm, as it turns out, at least for a while. But as Abe focuses on his growing business and ensuring his family is financially set, Ruth has moments of restlessness. Keep in mind that we’re exploring 70 years of life together, so of course life doesn’t always go smoothly. They experience a number of situations that could have ended another couple: Abe’s unilateral decision to move the family, the tragic loss of a child, a brief infidelity (Ruth), an even briefer exploration of sexuality (also Ruth), absentee parenting (Abe) and differing political views (Ruth’s views being “pseudocommunist malarkey” and “unreasonable optimism,” as far as Abe is concerned).

And through it all, Evison keeps bringing us back to present day, where they squabble like the old married couple they are.

“‘Minor inconvenience?’” Abe says to Ruth about the CPAP machine she insists he use. “‘You try strapping that contraption on! Every time I open my mouth, I’m like a human leaf blower.’

‘One of these mornings, you’re just not gonna wake up, you know?’

“Good,’ he said. ‘Then I won’t have to hear about it anymore.’”

They can joke at times, but they also have to face some harsh truths about old age. Ruth thinks, at one point while worrying about Abe falling in the driveway, “Everything was a high-risk proposition after eighty. To rage against the dying of the light sometimes meant shoveling the walkway or driving after dark.” (I love how Evison deftly references Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” here, subtly showing that Ruth’s love of poetry never fully dies.)

And, as Ruth undergoes an invasive procedure to save her life, she questions whether it’s worth it to keep fighting. “While she wasn’t without use, the world was hardly dependent on her participation.”

But Abe is not ready to try life without her, and his 90th-birthday thoughts of preparing for death turn into a steadfast need to be Ruth’s caretaker, despite their children’s misgivings. He drives through snow on city roads that terrify him to be with her at the hospital, and, with the deepest sense of love and commitment, brings her back to their farmhouse and tries his best to take care of her.

Like Abe and Ruth, I’m glad I made it past the beginning of their story. The Heart of Winter reminded me that love can last even through the darkest of times if your heart is in it. B+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Image: The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison

All the Water in the World, by Eiren Caffall (St. Martin’s Press, 294 pages)

“Storms always came. They took things,” the young narrator of All the Water in the World says matter-of-factly, explaining what life was like before melting polar ice caps drowned New York City.

But in the early days of the climate apocalypse, the girl named Nonie explains, there was always a sense that things could be fixed, that the world could adjust to a new reality without cars, reliable electricity, airplanes, bananas — whatever disappeared next.

“Every year, the storms were bigger — moving the ocean up into the streets” and eventually moving Nonie and her family onto the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, where her parents had worked before the world shut down.

That living arrangement was safe until it wasn’t, when a “hypercane” — a monstrous hurricane with winds up to 200 mph — made even a rooftop in Manhattan unsafe, and Nonie and her people had to relocate even though it seemed that the whole world was under water. It wasn’t just their few belongings that they had to worry about, but the whole of history that had been contained within the museum and has now been painstakingly described in a handwritten logbook for future generations, if they exist.

Eiren Caffail’s debut novel was inspired by actual events: the struggle to save museum collections from the devastation of war.

During the siege of Leningrad in the second World War, Caffail writes, curators stayed in the Hermitage museum, eating paste to stay alive and caring for the art. “They belonged to the art and the art belonged to them and it was a sacred duty. But so was the vision of what it would be one day when the siege was over and the windows repaired and the museum alive again for everyone, for the world that mattered, the one they wanted.”

In All the Water in the World, Nonie’s parents work to save what they can of the museum’s collections, wrapping and hiding artifacts, hoping that they will one day again be treasured and displayed. Nonie herself contributes, making a “water logbook” and writing descriptions of the storms as they get bigger and bolder.

Unlike her sister, Bix, who is terrified of water, Nonie has “water love,” a gift from her mother, now dead. And so it’s Nonie who has to comfort Box as they climb into a birchbark canoe, once part of an exhibit of an indigenous civilization and now their only means of transportation as the water rises in the museum.

Four people — the sisters, their father and an entomologist from the museum — launch the canoe in terrifying conditions hoping to follow the Hudson River to a family farm they know used to exist to the north. Their journey at times is Walking Dead-esque — “Sometimes what looks like shelter is only menace,” Caffall writes — except the horror comes from the water, not zombies. Through it all, Caffall’s prose is gorgeous:

“The new sea coursed with lost things. Debris swirled and rose in the water — headphones, water bottles, flotillas of paper, broken birds, photographs. In the mud of the Park after a storm, photographs surfaced, bleached and peeling, evidence of lives in The World As It Was, lives that included trips in planes, cake with candles, people in fresh clothing with white teeth and no idea what was coming, a child on a three-wheeled bicycle, a newborn screaming with a red face faded pink, a man holding it, on the edge of laughter, eyes slapped wide, joy pouring out of his smiling mouth.”

As they progress through New England, the group meets sickness and death and new people, with more about the past revealed in flashbacks. In this landscape of sorrow and misery, it is an accomplishment for Caffall to close the story in a way that doesn’t end with utter destruction, like the movie Don’t Look Up. But she does so, like the parents kept Nonie and Bix going: “with hope thrown hard at the darkness.”

Caffall has published one other book, a memoir called The Mourner’s Bestiary, which weaves together her family’s struggle with a genetic kidney disease and the plight of animals affected by ecological change in the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound. Dystopian climate fiction is all the rage right now, but Caffall brings a thoughtful voice to the genre and is writing books that have value as books and not just as storylines for disaster movies.

The only part that didn’t work for me were the occasional excerpts from Nonie’s logbook, which, frankly, just aren’t that interesting, compared to the rest of the narrative, because the writer is 13. (Example: “Keller told me that ‘nor’easter isn’t a real weather word, and that at some point, there were so many storms that you could hardly call anything nor’easters anymore.”)

Caffall said it took her 11 years to write this book, and it shows. While some readers might wish for more of a disaster-movie plot, it was clearly not her intent to write that kind of a book. It’s not so much a climate novel as it is a climate meditation that just happens to have a submerged Empire State Building in it. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: All the Water in the World, by Eiren Caffall

Aflame, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, 222 pages)

Pico Iyer is widely known as a travel writer, and he has traveled the globe for his books and essays, but some of his most meaningful experiences have been in a tiny room with a single bed, a chair and a desk and no distractions save an ocean view, nothing but “silence and emptiness and light.”

It is here, at a monastery in Big Sur, California, called the Hermitage, that Iyer has returned to repeatedly over the past three decades, once driving nearly four hours after his father died to sit in the stillness for two hours before driving back home again.

In Aflame, an unnerving title given the recent devastation in Los Angeles, Iyer writes lyrically and movingly about the gifts of solitude and quiet and why they matter, especially in a culture that seems determined to deprive us of them. And yes, he also writes about wildfires, inevitable because the setting is California, and death and suffering. But the title is a metaphor for burning in the heart, as well.

When Iyer tells one friend about his experiences at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, the friend replies, “You sound like you’re in love.” He answers, “Exalted, at the very least.”

The friend cautions him, “A love like that can’t last,” to which Iyer responds, “But it can leave you a different person, not always for the worst.”

This was an unlikely love story for Iyer, who is not a Christian or a member of any organized religious group and says he has an “aversion to all crosses and hymnals” because of having to attend chapel for 12 years in school.

But at the Hermitage he found transformative peace similar to what Admiral Richard Byrd found in the Antarctic, where the explorer made friends with stars and ice crystals, and the playwright Henry Miller, who happily lived alone in a rude cabin with no electricity or phone for three years.

But, as Iyer writes, “The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable.”

Although the website of the Big Sur hermitage is contemplation.com, the monks have work to do — when they are driven out by wildfires that threaten their home, they find similar jobs to do at the places where they evacuate.

Iyer himself is too much acquainted with fire: “I can still feel myself inside that oven, my mother’s cat panting and struggling to breathe in my lap. One minute we had been sitting in our family home, the next we were surrounded by walls of flame five stories high.”

That home was in Santa Barbara, and his mother was in Florida at the time, so Iyer had to call her to tell her that everything she owned was now ash. There are many such heartbreaking stories coming out of Los Angeles right now, but Iyer, having lived through such a fire and recovered, brings to the subject a stoic’s view: As painful as it was, the fire “did clear the way for many things,” he tells a friend. He recounts a Japanese poem:

My house burned down

I can now see better

The rising moon

True hermits are rare, and even those famous for time spent alone, like Henry David Thoreau, weren’t alone as people think. Even while living at Walden Pond, Thoreau visited his mother every Sunday, and “The title of his first talk at the Concord Lyceum was not ‘Solitude’ but ‘Society’,” Iyer writes. Being alone is not an end unto itself, but “the means to becoming a more useful member of society.”

But a little aloneness doesn’t cut it. As one monk tells Iyer, “You have to learn how to enjoy leisure. … But you can’t be leisurely for just half an hour. It’s only in the sixth half hour that things start developing inside you — and then you know you have another three hours to go.”

While not every day is bliss in stays that sometimes last for a month — there is rain, and there are rattlesnakes and occasional bouts of boredom — Iyer comes to understand that it is the learnings of silence, not the busy work of his career or any money in his bank account, that would be useful as his father came to the end of his life.
Still, a friend says to him, “I can’t believe you’re spending all this time with these old guys in hoods.” But those old guys in hoods are quite the sages. Once, Iyer walks in on one working in the kitchen, who says to him, “This bloody peeling of onions, it never stops!” Iyer assumes he is talking literally, but no: “It’s the inner onion I’m talking about. The invisible stuff!”

There is, as there always is, another fire, threatening the Hermitage. And then another.

“The sacred is not a sanctuary, I’m moved to remember; it’s a force field. In many ways a forest fire. You can try controlled burns or back burnings, you can walk towards the heat, but its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled or anticipated.”

Aflame, released the week after the Santa Ana winds blew embers across the Pacific Palisades, is beauty amid those ashes, and those yet to come. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Aflame, by Pico Iyer

Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

Check any list of the greatest American novelists and F. Scott Fitzgerald is likely in the top 10. Few of us escape high school without reading The Great Gatsby, but not all of us go on to read Fitzgerald’s next novel, Tender is the Night, published in 1934.

That puts Tender-illiterates like me at a bit of a disadvantage going into Sweet Fury, a debut novel by Sash Bischoff that revolves around a modern, feminist interpretation of Tender.

The disadvantage is not prohibitive — you can still follow the storyline, and might even emerge with a desire to visit (or revisit) all things Fitzgerald. But a fear of missing out might hang over your reading, since Bischoff admits she embedded Easter eggs — inside jokes or references — nodding to Fitzgerald and his work throughout the book.

The story begins with the clinical notes of a psychiatrist, Jonah Gabriel, who has agreed to take on a new client, a Hollywood star named Lila Crane who is about to play the role of Nicole Diver in a modern adaptation of Tender is the Night, directed by her lover. The star and the therapist have an immediate rapport once they discover that they both went to Princeton and were both fans of Fitzgerald.

Crane had decided to see therapy because of trauma she suffered in childhood. Her father was abusive and had an alcohol addiction, and he was driving drunk, with Crane and her mother in the car, when they collided with another car, killing the father.

“I want your honest opinion,” she says to Gabriel in their first session. “If someone has done something terrible to you, can you ever truly heal? Or will you always have a scar? Is there a way to erase the scar itself — and more importantly, erase that person’s power to hurt you again?”

Since Tender also involves alcohol abuse and a car wreck, Crane believes she might benefit from working out her own issues, which also, it turns out, include a past sexual assault. She enters therapy just as she becomes engaged to the man she’s living with, an A-list director named Kurt Royall, who is a powerful, attention-seeking man 18 years her senior. Her mother, not surprisingly, has concerns, even if Lila does not.

The story swivels back and forth between the therapist’s notes, Crane’s journaling and what is happening in real time as production begins on this new, empowering version of Tender. Crane is excited about the production because, as she tells Gabriel, “Our version of Tender isn’t another tragedy of the tortured white man. It’s a feminist story of healing, of reparations.”

From the first page, we’re swimming in a story within a story within a story — Tender is about a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient, and much of that book derived from Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife, Zelda, who had mental health issues that required psychiatric care.

But if you haven’t read the Fitzgerald novel, don’t go down the CliffsNotes rabbit hole like I did, as it will just leave your head spinning. Better to just read Sweet Fury on its own merits. That is, if you can get past the title and cover art — a silhouette of a nude woman’s body — that makes the book look like some sort of cringe bodice-ripper. (Honestly, if I’d been reading on public transportation, I would have hidden the cover, and I’m not sure if that makes me a prude or a literary snob.)

The publicity for Sweet Fury promises Gone Girl-like pivots and twists, and after a slow start these come fast and furious, making it difficult to talk about the last half of the book without significant spoilers. Let’s just say that more than one character is not the person they are set up to be; in fact, hardly anybody is.

Bischoff knows how to turn a phrase — my mind keeps returning to her description of an opulent wrap-around porch stretching into a “single, satisfied grin.” And she does an excellent job concealing the twists until their reveal; the story is well plotted and foreshadowing is light. She unpacks everything with sufficient depth at the story’s end.

If there’s a fault in these stars, it’s that Bischoff does not adequately convince us to love any of them as the story unfolds.

I never felt an emotional attachment to Lila, her mother, the scriptwriter, the therapist, the gay best friend or any of the myriad other characters. I read Sweet Fury as one watches the second season of a TV show you’ve never seen before, with clinical detachment. This is, no doubt, partly because I knew little about the book that was incessantly being referenced (even a cat is named Zelda — everything is Fitzgeraldized) but it’s also partly because, as I found out at the story’s end, much of what I thought I knew about these people wasn’t true. And you can’t love characters if you don’t know them.

That said, will I re-read it now to connect the dots I missed the first time? Yes, of course — somewhat grudgingly. And if I’d loved Lila Crane like I want to love protagonists, I’d probably read Tender is the Night, too. But at this point, that’s more time and energy than I want to invest in this particular fictional actress. At least until the movie comes out. B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff

The Cure for Women, by Lydia Reeder (St. Martin’s Press, 286 pages)

Given some of the past practices of medicine, bloodletting and leeches and such, it’s a wonder any of us are alive today. What’s even more disturbing is how recent some of these strange medical practices are.

Take, for example, the “rest cure for women,” a protocol of the 19th century in which women suffering from a raft of maladies — but mainly being thin and “short of blood” — were told to take to their beds, sometimes for months, where they were fed milk and raw eggs, and forbidden social interaction and “brain work.”

While many women were actively harmed by such treatments, there were far worse things done to women under the guise of medicine in that era, even by physicians ostensibly devoted to women’s health. The doctor credited with inventing the speculum, for example, once wrote, “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” This physician was a showman in the vein of P.T. Barnum, performing operations in front of an enthralled audience, sometimes with the patients (often enslaved women) awake and screaming.

All this was occurring in a century in which smart and capable women were being denied entry to medical school because of the belief that they were not intellectually or psychologically equipped for the work, even though female midwives had been delivering babies for millennia.

The first woman to graduate from an American medical school, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, was admitted by mistake — her male classmates thought they were voting on her enrollment as a joke. Blackwell and her younger sister Emily, who also became a physician, are fairly well known today for their pioneering work improving the prospects of both patients and female doctors.

But Lydia Reeder argues that a lesser-known physician, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, also deserves history’s acclaim. In The Cure for Women, Reeder explains how Jacobi, a contemporary of the Blackwells, took on the established beliefs about women’s monthly cycles, which had been used as “evidence” of women’s inferiority, and refuted them with data.

The daughter of the New York publishing scion George Palmer Putnam, Mary showed her capacity for medicine at age 9 when, after discovering a dead rat in their barn, she asked her mother if she could dissect it. Her mother said no, and her father did not think medicine was a proper career for women, but he had published a book by Elizabeth Blackwell and so consented to let his precocious daughter work at Blackwell’s clinic.

Eventually Mary enrolled at one of the few educational opportunities available to her, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, but she left “after she discovered she knew more about medicine than most of her instructors” and went on to graduate from a medical school in Paris. In one funny anecdote, her father sent her money there for a dress — she had to plead with him for permission to use the money to buy a microscope instead.

Upon returning to the States with a medical degree, Mary found work teaching at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary and dedicated herself to evangelizing “a scientific spirit” among women. Unfortunately for modern sensibilities, that scientific spirit also included justification of vivisection, the dissection of live animals, which Jacobi would defend. It is, perhaps, the one area in which her thinking was not visionary, although it might have helped establish her as a serious medical mind at the time.

She went on to marry a widower, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, a leading pediatrician in New York, and shortly thereafter became pregnant and worked throughout her pregnancy — refuting in real time the prevailing thought that women were suited for domestic life and reproduction solely. She began conducting research to test and challenge views about women’s capabilities during menstruation, and also to counter prescriptions of “the rest cure” as well as other medical practices of the time. She was also an advocate of sports and physical activity — as opposed to rest — to improve women’s health.

Perhaps the best story about her is that she submitted a paper arguing that menstruation does not constitute “any temporary predisposition to either hysteria or insanity” to a prestigious Harvard University competition: the Boylston Medical Prize. Per the competition’s instructions, the entry was submitted anonymously. She won, beating out hundreds of men. The work was later published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons as “The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation” and was widely praised.

Even as Mary advanced professionally, she was lauded publicly for being an excellent housekeeper, and she had three children, and suffered the loss of two — a daughter who died at birth and a son who died at age 7 from diphtheria — a terrible loss for any parent, but especially for two doctors who could not help their child and who wound up blaming each other. The death, Reeder wrote, created a “fault line between Mary and Abraham that would, ultimately, never heal.”

Almost 20 years later, Mary Putnam Jacobi would diagnose a brain tumor in herself, and spent the last years of her life writing a case study on it titled “Description of the Early Symptoms of the Meningeal Tumor Compressing the Cerebellum, from Which the Author Died.”

Her life was clearly extraordinary and worthy of a biography, and Reeder’s treatment is more than comprehensive — to a fault, at times.

Going back and forth between history and inventive narrative, in which Reeder imagines what might have happened in a scene, was the wrong approach for a book about women devoted to science. Their imagined thoughts and actions — such as, “Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., paced back and forth in her drab Lower West Side apartment, stopping occasionally to glance through her parlor window at the blizzard swirling outside” — are simply unnecessary. The occasional asides into this literary construction serve no purpose other than befuddling the reader.

It is also a little odd that the central character of the book is not introduced in any substantial way until chapter 3.

The author is the great-granddaughter of a midwife who cared for women and children in rural Missouri early in the 20th century, at one point plunging her fingers down a child’s throat to remove a safety pin. That midwife, Ellen Babb, no doubt had as many fascinating stories to tell as Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, despite the vast differences in their economic circumstances and training. The Cure for Women is a tribute to both of them — and a thumb in the eye to the 19th-century male doctor who wrote, “I said I did not believe it was best either for the sick or for society for women to be doctors.”

B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison