Books – Page 12

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari (Crown, 345 pages)

The late Harvard professor B.F. Skinner became famous for animal experiments that he believed destroyed the idea of free will. Animals can be manipulated to perform an action by repeatedly offering them a reward until their behaviors become ingrained, similar to Pavlov’s salivating dog. Humans, being animals, are basically the same as pigeons in how we respond to rewards. So when we go to Instagram or Twitter looking for “likes,” we’re the equivalent of a Skinner’s pigeon extending its left wing and expecting a treat.

That’s one of the many unsettling images British writer Johann Hari puts forth in his blistering critique of what the digital world has wrought. Researchers have been watching our attention spans shrink over the past few decades and have theorized that this is occurring not only because of the processing speed of all the digital tools we use, but also because of sheer information overload.

The average worker spends about three minutes on a task before being distracted by something else, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s an incoming text or Slack message, a call from your boss or the siren call of TikTok. After we’re interrupted, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back into a state of deep focus. This isn’t only a problem in terms of our ability to accomplish the things on our to-do list, but has more profound implications than any individual’s stress.

When our ability to pay attention deteriorates, so does our ability to solve problems, Hari says. “Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them,” he writes. (Unrelated to the book, I’ve seen commentators remark lately that America’s involvement in Ukraine will only last as long as Twitter will continue to pay attention to what Russia is doing there.)

For Hari, the societal decline in focus became personal and urgent when he took his godson, a high-school dropout who was obsessed with screens, to visit Elvis Presley’s estate, Graceland. While this was supposed to be a trip of human connection, they were given iPads and earbuds to use while walking around. Hari watched as a couple got obsessed with looking at the images of Presley’s “Jungle Room” on the iPad — while they were standing in the Jungle Room. In a darkly funny moment, he told them, “There’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the Jungle Room.”

But Hari knew that, in different ways, he was as addicted to screens as the couple he chastised, and decided to spend three months in Provincetown without any form of connection to the internet. His experience there, however, is a fraction of Stolen Focus, which is built more on research than anecdote, and as such is a damning indictment of the attention economy, tech and what it’s doing to our brains. We can’t solve it by simply throwing away our phones; Hari identifies 12 forces — which include stress, poor diets, physical and mental exhaustion and a decline in long periods of reading — that are contributing to the problem.

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns,” Hari writes.

Unfortunately, a one-day or three-month digital detox does not solve the problem, even though Hari found that without the tyranny of his smartphone, he found time to write 93,000 words of a novel and to read three volumes of War and Peace. Indeed, former Google strategist James Williams later told him that a break from tech “is not the solution for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution.”

Hari doesn’t just read the work of people like Williams, Google engineer turned tech ethicist Tristan Harris, nutritionist Dale Pinnock and renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who died last year); he interviewed these men and others in person, and weaves their narratives into what ultimately is a manifesto for an “attention rebellion.”

The steps he outlines that can help may seem overly simple and ineffective, given the enormousness of the problem, but maybe that’s the point. If they were too daunting, we wouldn’t even try. Among the changes Hari has made in his own life: taking action (which he calls pre-commitment) to cut down on distractions before they can occur; taking periodic breaks from social media; building in unstructured “flow” time to let his mind wander and thus make creative connections; and being obsessive about getting enough sleep. He estimates that he’s improved his own focus by 15 to 20 percent, not a huge amount, but enough to make a difference in the quality of his life.

Stolen Focus is not a self-help book, not a cultural critique, but something even more important: an education. Read it, and you will be forced to evaluate the role of technology in your life, and that little bird on Twitter may forever look like one of B.F. Skinner’s pigeons; a reminder, in the immortal words of children’s book author Mo Willems: Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus. A

Book Notes

America’s shrinking attention span is a problem of such scale that it requires more than one book to address it. In addition to Johann Hari’s excellent Stolen Focus, reviewed this week, there are two other new books that provide variations on the theme:

In Peak Mind (HarperOne, 368 pages) Amishi Jha promises we can find our focus and “own our attention” in 12 minutes a day. (Seems a lot of pages for a 12-minute strategy, but OK.) And Bob Goff weighs in on the subject with Distracted (Thomas Nelson, 256 pages), in which he makes the case for living like a racehorse wearing blinders to focus on the most important stuff.

Otherwise, here are two new nonfiction books worth your attention:

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni is out with The Beauty of Dusk (Avid Reader Press, 320 pages), a reflection on how his life changed when he woke one morning with changed vision and fuzzy thinking, which he eventually found out was the result of a stroke he’d had during the night. The excerpts I’ve read so far are compelling.

For another look at lives suddenly changed, check out Amy Bloom’s In Love (Random House, 240 pages), which examines the fraught subject of medically assisted suicide — not when a person has a terminal diagnosis and six months or less to live, as allowed in some states in the U.S., but when the person still has a decent quality of life and a longer expected life span.

Bloom’s husband was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and wanted to die on his own terms, not the disease’s, so the couple sought the help of Dignitas, a nonprofit in Zurich that helps people arrange “accompanied suicide.” There is no happy ending here, but Bloom provides a thoughtful examination of a controversial issue.

Finally, in a novel described as a modern allegory in the vein of Animal Farm, Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (Viking, 416 pages) savages social media through the voices of animals living through a revolution in Zimbabwe. It’s getting great reviews, but at over 400 pages, you’ll need a good attention span to get through it. George Orwell needed only about a quarter of those pages to make his points in Animal Farm. Just sayin’.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 216 pages)

In her new novel Pure Colour, Canadian Sheila Heti imagines a new Genesis, one in which God is not yet finished with the work of creation but is just taking a break, stepping back, critically looking at what he has so far produced. “This is the moment we are living in — the moment of God standing back,” Heti writes on the first page.

And that, my friends, is the last time that this novel makes sense.

From there, Heti hurtles into a book-length word salad that is at times poignant and insightful; other times, a baffling stream of consciousness. At its best, it’s an imaginative fable about love and loss, wrapped in a blistering social critique. At its worst, which happens too often, you wonder what (and how much) Heti was drinking when she wrote it. Such is speculative fiction.

We begin in a world that is “heating up in advance of its destruction” since God has decided the first draft wasn’t good enough and a new one is needed. Like any good manager, God needs feedback, so “God appears, splits, and manifests as three critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling creation in its arms.”

People are born from the eggs of these creatures (yes, even the bear produces eggs in this world), and take on the characteristics of their breeders. People born from fish eggs care most about the collective; people born of bird eggs care about things like beauty, meaning and order; people born from bear eggs care about a few other people: “They are deeply consumed with their own.”

Our protagonist, Mira, wished she was of bear lineage, but she, born of a bird, had the hollow bones and heart of an artist. We follow Mira around in her strange world, where she works at a store that sells expensive lamps. (This all occurs during an unspecified age before the internet, when people found jobs and housing from “little paper signs.” Mira goes to school at the prestigious American Academy of American Critics (which, in a wry twist, has international branches) where self-important students learn to “hone their insights” and to “develop a style of writing and thinking that could survive down through the ages, and at the same time penetrate their own generation so incisively.”

The school, it seems, could have been worth an entire cynical book, or at least a couple of chapters, but it is quickly dropped to explore a brief love relationship Mira has with an American orphan named — wait for it — Annie. Coincidence or something more? Hard to say. Then her father dies, and this strange little novel gets even stranger.

When Mira’s father dies, his essence seems to take over her body. For a while, the book turns into a meditation on grief, as Mira processes her loss. “She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.” She stopped caring about the business of living (though, frankly, it wasn’t like she was doing that much living before her father’s death). “It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store in all that sunshine. It was the dead who need to be held on to, so they would not slip away. Who would save the dead from oblivion, if not the living?”

Then, Mira has an experience in which she takes the form of a leaf — a leaf in which her father’s spirit also dwelled — and they have the sort of beautiful and cleansing Kafkaesque conversations you might have if you suddenly found yourself inside a leaf. Was she dead? It seems so for a while, then she comes out of the leaf and is back with orphan Annie for a while while musing about gods, plural, specifically gods who tired people out when they wanted to stop them from doing things. “The weariest people are being the most prevented. They are the most dangerous ones, who would change the world if they could.”

Eventually, Mira’s mind-boggling dialogue comes to a close, though we are not sure what, if anything, has been accomplished, either for Mira or for the long-suffering reader.

Still, Heti proves herself a shrewd critic of modern life, as in her observation about social media:

“There were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people. … Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see — a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.”

That said, it seems that the world would be better served if she just wrote columns of cultural criticism. Maybe we are bears, and she’s a bird, building thought nests that others can’t fully see. In Mira’s world, artists who created stories, books and movies were producing their own second drafts, better versions of God’s world, as if hoping to get his (or her) attention. For the sake of the next world, let’s hope God doesn’t option this book. C

Book Notes

One of the silver linings of the pandemic was the virtual author event.

When physical bookstores were shuttered, many took to having author readings and Q&As online, which enabled people in remote locations to participate. You couldn’t get a book signed this way or shake the author’s hand, but it was still a better way to “connect” with an author than reading an interview.

Author events have now returned live in many places, but there are some bookstores that are still enabling people to watch online. Others have posted past events on YouTube, such as Washington, D.C.,’s famous bookstore, Politics and Prose. A quick Google search may find a few videos of your favorite author that will make for a more enjoyable evening than watching NFL reruns.

Here are a couple coming up of note:

Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., will have a virtual event March 14 for How She Did It(Rodale, 336 pages), by Molly Huddle and Sara Slattery, who offer “stories, advice and secrets to success from 50 legendary distance runners.”

Mystery writer Simone St. James has a new novel, The Book of Cold Cases (Berkley, 352 pages), for which she’s doing a virtual event March 17 through the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona.

Novelist Lisa Scottoline doesn’t release What Happened to the Bennetts (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages) until March 29 but is already doing events. One virtual one will be through Friend and Fiction on Facebook Live on March 23.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk has a new book, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama (Random House, 304 pages), for which he’s doing both live and virtual events. He’s got a virtual event March 13 through Live Talks Los Angeles. It’ll cost you $40 to get admitted, but you also get actor Jack Black, for what that’s worth.

Book Events

Author events

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

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

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

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

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur (Simon & Schuster, 265 pages)

As television sitcoms go, The Good Place was rather remarkable. The NBC show, which premiered in 2016 and aired for four years, had all the typical goofiness of low-brow comedy but was based on high-brow ideas: What does it mean to be a good person? Why should we care? And, of all the prevailing philosophical schools of thought on the matter, which ones are true and most relevant today?

These are tough themes to take on in 30 minutes minus commercials, but Michael Schur succeeded in creating a star-making show that worked on both levels and managed to elevate relatively obscure philosophy books into the mainstream (most notably, retired Harvard professor T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other). Now Schur has written a book of his own, a summary of the ethical frameworks he studied when developing The Good Place. It is, in many ways, a sitcom of a book, as Schur applies a vaudevillian touch to topics rarely taken that lightly: among them, existentialism.

Parts have a slapstick quality that would quickly grow tiresome but for Schur’s true comic gifts and his willingness to question his own moral judgments, among them his struggle to reconcile his admiration of Woody Allen’s work with revelations of the filmmaker’s personal life.

The punchlines begin on the book’s cover, in which the title is hysterically imperfect; it leaves off the “t” in “perfect.” (The subtitle, “the correct answer to every moral question,” also reveals itself to be a joke, because Schur’s ultimate aim isn’t to answer all the big questions, but rather to give readers the framework for thinking about them, and in fact, to insist that we think about them.) They continue through the acknowledgments, in which Schur peppers his thanks to friends and colleagues with random facts. (Einstein used a $1,500 check as a bookmark, then lost the book; moose in the Western Yukon appear to have parties for each other.)

Along the way, Schur unpacks the thinking of the likes of Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, Maimonides, Aristotle, William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, all names with which any graduate of a U.S. high school should have at least a passing familiarity. He applies their ethical concepts to modern first-world dilemmas — Should I cheer for sports teams that have problematic names? Should I eat at Chick-Fil-A? Should I eat meat at all? — injecting personal anecdotes along the way, such as the angst he felt after spending $800 for a baseball bat autographed by Red Sox players as a Christmas gift for his son.

In another story, he reveals that his interest in ethics pre-dates The Good Place by at least a decade. In 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, Schur’s then fiance (now wife) had a fender bender that resulted in an $836 claim, despite the fact that the claimant’s bumper was barely scratched and the responding police officer said there was no damage. Schur was furious and offered to donate $836 to Katrina relief if the man would drop the claim and continue to live with the indignity of having a scratch on his bumper.

While the man was thinking it over, Schur took his outrage to the internet and raised $20,000 in pledges for Katrina relief if the bumper went unreplaced. “I had dreams of rescuing New Orleans all by myself, armed with nothing but a keyboard and a brilliant masterstroke of moral reasoning,” he wrote. “And then I started to feel sick.”

The “chirpings” of conscience began to nag at Schur and his fiance, and he started consulting ethics books and philosophy professors about why his actions felt wrong and what he should do. While he still believed that the other driver was wrong to insist on replacing a barely scratched bumper, he came to believe that he was also wrong to subject the man to public shaming even if an auxiliary outcome (Katrina relief) was good. This experience led Schur into the rabbit hole of ethics that resulted in The Good Place and ultimately this book.

In 2019, Schur was asked to write the introduction to the re-release of controversial ethicist Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, and he wrote of it, “More important than what you feel when you read this book is what you will not feel: complacency. You will not feel like other people don’t matter.”

The same can be said of Schur’s book, which may seem superficial (2,500 years of complex moral philosophy condensed into 265 pages — with jokes!) but in fact achieves the author’s aim: to get us to think consciously about the mass of decisions that comprise our days, and to consider the ideas that could help us choose more wisely. Not because we think this might get us to a “good place” — this is a secular book, as was the show — but because, as Harvard’s Scanlon said, this is something that we owe each other.

B+

Book Notes

Some people choose books to read because they like the author; others, because they like the premise of the book. But have you ever chosen a book based on something the author said?

That happened to me this week when I read an interview with Brendan Slocumb, the author of the new novel The Violin Conspiracy (Anchor, 352 pages). I’d seen the book mentioned before, but it didn’t catch my attention until I read in Publishers Weekly that Slocumb said, “I wanted to pull back the curtain and let everybody know this is how the sausage is made. Classical music is a very cutthroat profession, though it’s especially tough for people of color.”

Classical music a “very cutthroat profession”? Who knew? Suddenly I was interested. Slocumb, who lives in D.C., is a music educator and professional violinist who also founded a nonprofit and plays in a rock band. Yet he found the time to write a novel. Definitely worth checking out.

Other new releases of interest:

Fans of Charles Dickens will be interested in The Turning Point (Deckle Edge, 368 pages), nonfiction by Robert Douglas Fairhurst that examines how the events of one year — 1851 — changed and shaped the beloved novelist’s career.

Funny Farm (St. Martin’s Press, 256 pages) is Laura Zeleski’s memoir of “my unexpected life with 600 rescue animals” and the story of how she, a graphic designer with government contracts, fulfilled her dying mother’s dream of running a rescue.

Daniel Pink sorted through more than 15,000 self-reported regrets of people around the world and found something resembling redemption, chronicled in The Power of Regret (Riverhead, 256 pages). If nothing else, reading the regrets of others might make you feel better about your own.

And finally, this is not a new release, but worth checking out given recent world events: Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine (Anchor, 466 pages), which examines another heartbreaking part of Ukraine’s history, when Josef Stalin intentionally starved more than 3 million people in the region through sinister agricultural policies.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents new book Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents new book Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents new book The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents new book Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents new book The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

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

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

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

The Horsewoman, by James Patterson and Mike Lupica

The Horsewoman, by James Patterson and Mike Lupica (Little, Brown & Co., 433 pages)

I probably shouldn’t confess this in public, but until this week, I was a James Patterson virgin.

Called by his publisher “the best-selling author in the world,” a claim questioned by Google, Patterson certainly is among the richest and most prolific. How many books has he written or co-written? There’s a printable checklist on his website that goes on for longer than I cared to count; in 2017, the Wall Street Journal put the number at 150. And lately, of course, Patterson has taken to collaborating with celebrities — for example, The President is Missing, written with former President Bill Clinton, and the upcoming Run, Rose, Run with Dolly Parton.

With a catalog like that, Patterson seems to offer something for everyone, and I thought he’d finally delivered for me with The Horsewoman; its jacket blurb promises “breakneck speed and hair-raising thrills and spills.” That should have been a warning, as should have been the partnership with sportswriter Mike Lupica, who comes by his knowledge of the horse world as the father of a competitive rider. In other words, Patterson knows the formula, and Lupica filled in the details.

The result: a formulaic yawner that’s twice as long as it needed to be, and it’s debatable whether it needed to be at all. (Does Patterson really need more money or adulation at this point?) But because Patterson is a pro at turning out bestselling novels, The Horsewoman has a serviceable elevator pitch:

A mother, Maggie Atwood, was on track to make the U.S. equestrian team in the Olympics but months before the qualifying trials, she was injured in a fall from her horse, putting not only her dreams at risk but also the solvency of the family farm. Her daughter, Becky, a hithertofore lackluster rider, reluctantly steps up to take her mother’s place. Then, because, as Becky repeatedly says, “[excrement] happens,” it turns out that the mother recovers and is able to compete after all and wants her horse back, setting up the pair to have many first-world resentments and to compete against each other in the Paris Olympics.

There’s more to the story, of course. There is a villain in the form of an investor in Maggie’s horse, who wants to take full control of the horse, instead of the 60 percent share he owns. Steve Gorton is a caricature of a villain, complete with the hedge fund and the Ferrari and the Harvard Business School ballcap.

Then there’s Daniel, the trainer from Mexico who is a love interest for Becky and also justifies some political theater involving the treatment of “Dreamers” — undocumented workers whose parents brought them to the U.S. as children. There’s also the reliable tension of assorted family drama — the cold and critical matriarch who snaps at her granddaughter a lot, and the absent father who only shows up halfway through the book.

It keeps you turning the pages because formulas work even when they are obvious: The short chapters, some only a couple of pages in length, that always end with some small cliffhanger, even it’s resolved on the very next page; the occasional good line thrown in to make you think “this isn’t so bad” even though it kind of is, at least compared to, say, Dickens.

Although the focus changes throughout the book — from Becky to Daniel to Maggie — it never deviates from the intellectual level of the 21-year-old Becky (who says things like “This guy doesn’t know a bridle from a bridesmaid”), even when it’s expounding on the minutiae of equine infections.

The Horsewoman kept reminding me of another, more interesting story about a horse family struggling against the odds, the story told in the 2010 Disney film Secretariat. Though the film was embellished, it was a largely true story about a woman fighting to save her family farm with a risky but promising horse. Secretariat had the same problem that Patterson and Lupica faced: how to make sympathetic characters out of poor little rich girls whose chief worries in life are losing multimillion-dollar farms and horses. But Disney gave its cinematic story a heart; Patterson and Lupica never do.

While they talk about the Atwood family’s struggles to keep their farm and to hold onto a horse worth more than a million dollars, Becky casually mentions her CWD saddle (the brand starts at around $5,000), and of course there’s the travel to all the horse shows, and the veterinary bills, and all the other things that make competitive riding a rich person’s sport. As such, this is a novel that will also have appeal on a certain socioeconomic level. It also helps if you’re a horse-obsessed 15-year-old girl.

The most offensive thing this novel does, however, is not the dumbing down of an intriguing premise, but that it, like a grasping New York socialite, drops names.

During a competition, the names of two real equestrians show up — Jennifer Gates, the daughter of Bill Gates, and Georgina Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg’s daughter. I’m sure they’re lovely people and have every right to appear in a novel with hair-raising thrills and spills, but their inclusion among otherwise fictional characters seemed a shameless bid for attention from people who can afford to buy lots of books.

If this is what it takes to be the best-selling author in the world, count me out as a fan. C-

Book Notes

Ten years ago, Amy Diaz offered me the opportunity to review books for the Hippo. This was a leap of faith on her part.

Even though I had been a journalist longer than most of you have been alive, at the time, I had exactly one book review to my credit: a blistering takedown of Caitlin Flanagan’s first book, To Hell With All That, that hasn’t aged well. Flanagan has since become one of The Atlantic’s best known and most beloved writers. I stand by the review, nonetheless.

Here, we give books a letter grade, but there’s another grading system that has evolved at my house: Terrible or mediocre books are given away, good books are “lent” to friends (never to be seen again), and the very best books never leave the house. This system is a pure and cold calculus of a book’s worth, given that I have limited space and seem to downsize every few years. So, on the occasion of my decade with the Hippo, here, in no particular order, are some of the books I once reviewed and now refuse to part with:

The Dog Stars (Knopf, 336 pages) — 2012 novel by Peter Heller about a man and his dog in a post-apocalyptic world.

The End of Night (Little, Brown & Co., 336 pages) — 2013 nonfiction by Paul Bogard about what artificial light is doing to the planet and our brains.

The Regrets (Little, Brown & Co., 304 pages) — 2020 novel by Amy Bonnaffons about a man caught between Earth and the afterlife.

Dwelling in Possibility (Bauhan Publishing, 240 pages) — 2013 nonfiction by New Hampshire author Howard Mansfield, who muses on “searching for the soul of shelter.”

The Mindful Carnivore (Pegasus, 304 pages) — 2013 nonfiction by conflicted carnivore Tovar Cerulli, who went from vegan to hunter.

This is How (St. Martin’s, 240 pages) — thought-provoking essays by Augusten Burroughs, the Running With Scissors guy, on how to overcome a lifetime of problems and catastrophes.

Florida Man (Random House, 416 pages) — 2020 novel by Tom Cooper, wickedly funny and fresh.

Bowlaway (Deckle Edge, 384 pages) — 2019 novel by Elizabeth McCracken that had me at the first sentence: “They found a body in Salford Cemetery, but above ground and alive.”

How to Have a Good Day (Currency, 368 pages) — 2016 nonfiction by Caroline Webb that is a well-written encyclopedia of social-science research on improving pretty much everything in your life.

A Particular Kind of Black Man (Simon & Schuster, 272 pages) — fiction by Nigerian-American writer Tope Folarin, whose real-life experiences inform this account of an outsider trying to find his path in America.

There are more, but the others might yet be given away. All of the above are keepers.

Book Events

Author events

• MARGARET ATWOOD Author presents Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, in conversation with Judy Blume. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., March 1, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $30. Via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

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

No Land to Light On, by Yara Zgheib

No Land to Light On, by Yara Zgheib (Atria, 285 pages)

Americans tended to think about the horrific damage of terrorist acts as things that affect only us — the lives lost on 9/11 or in the Boston Marathon bombing, the injuries of those who live, the property destroyed and so on, right down to the perpetual annoyances that stem from these attacks, such as removing our shoes to get through airport security.

But terrorists inflict damage on their native countries and cultures, too, most notably in lasting discrimination borne of fear and suspicion. It would be hard to find a better illustration of this than in No Land to Light On, Yara Zgheib’s poignant novel about the devastation brought on two innocent lives in the wake of an executive order that temporarily suspended the entry of Syrians into the United States.

There was such an order in recent years, yes, and it is easily Googled, but for the most part, Zgheib stays clear of the politics involved and doesn’t mention the president by name. Instead she stays focused on the love story at the heart of the novel: Sama and Hadi, who meet at a social event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and fall in love despite their vastly different circumstances.

Hadi has been admitted to the U.S. as a refugee after enduring horrific conditions in a Syrian prison — confined to a cell about the size of a coffin — during that nation’s Civil War. Sama, meanwhile, had come here as an anthropology student at Harvard, where she was studying similarities between the migratory journeys of birds and humans. She had left just before the war began and knew little of the country’s current conditions. Sama’s research informs the novel’s title and also the parallel stories the author tells about the migration of the 1,800 species of birds (out of 5,000). For example, sandpipers, also known as “red knots,” are birds “so tiny one could fit in the palm of your hand,” yet they travel each year from the Arctic to Argentina, for reasons that scientists don’t fully understand.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that Hadi and Sama get married not long after they meet, and soon after that, conceive a child. In a wonderful scene, after learning that Sama is pregnant, they decide not to share the news with other people yet, but spend an afternoon telling inanimate objects in Boston, such as the “Make Way for Ducklings” statues in the Boston Public Garden. In this way and others, this is an extraordinarily New England book, despite its main characters being from Syria. (There’s even a somewhat comical Dunkin’ Donuts scene, when Sama goes to one for the first time and eats her first doughnut: “Her heart flapped madly in her chest. Columbus must have felt this.”)

But the couple’s brief happiness is coldly upended when Hadi is detained and then deported — because of the just-issued executive order — on his return from a trip home to bury his father. His deportation occurs as Sama, six months pregnant, gets trampled in a protest at Logan Airport, causing her to prematurely go into labor.

Again, the couple’s travails are based on real events. There were protests at airports around the country in 2017; you can see snippets of them on YouTube and Twitter. Politics aside, inasmuch as this is possible in 2022, even people who support this and similar orders understand that they impact innocent families, even as they seek to turn away those who would do Americans harm. And the harm that the order caused this fictional couple (and their newborn son) is heartwrenching, as is the auxiliary heartache of a new mother having to leave a premature baby in the care of a hospital while she herself is discharged.

Told in alternating first-person language from the perspective of Hadi and Sama, the story does not unspool in chronological order, but jumps around, eventually revealing the circumstances of Hadi’s imprisonment and arrival in America. But it never feels disjointed or complex; Zgheib is a masterful storyteller, and the novel’s only real problem is the unrelenting heartache it inflicts upon readers. That, of course, was the author’s intent: to assign faces to the effects of immigration orders, faces that are deeply sympathetic and not vaguely suspicious. No Land to Light On lands as an uncomplicated but deeply affecting novel. A

Book Notes

A decade ago, one of the bestselling parody books was Go the [expletive] to Sleep (Akashic Books, 32 pages), a riotous little book by Adam Mansbach that mimicked peaceful and comforting verse in children’s books in every regard, except for its profane mantra.

The book actually contained the full expletive on its title page, but of course, it presented a dilemma for reviewers who wrote for publications that would never print the word. But that hasn’t stopped publishers from turning out new titles in the genre, seemingly every few months. It’s as if adding an expletive to a title guarantees an extra measure of sales. The latest to capitalize on the trend is Carolina Dooner, author of 2019’s The [expletive]-It Diet, who is out this month with a follow-up, Tired As [expletive] (Harper Wave, 320 pages).

Presumably we’re tired as, you know, because children who won’t go the (you know) to sleep.

This follows 2020’s Buy Yourself the [expletive] Lilies by Tara Schuster (The Dial Press, 320 pages), 2016’s Un[expletive] Your Brain by Faith Harper (Microcosm, 192 pages) and the ever popular The Subtle Art of Not Giving a [expletive] by Mark Manson (Harper, 224 pages), which came out in 2016 but remains a fixture on Amazon’s bestseller lists.

But as difficult as it is for reviewers to write about these and other books that use expletives in the title, the motherlode of difficulty is in Penguin’s reissue this month of a book by Randall Kennedy that is titled with a racial slur. The subtitle is more respectable: “the strange career of a troublesome word.”

Kennedy is a Harvard law professor and the 20th anniversary edition of his book (Pantheon, 253 pages) is certainly timely, given the recent news coverage of Joe Rogan’s use of the word. But since I can’t even bring myself to type the word into my browser, it will be interesting to see how other media outlets deal with it. (So far, NPR discussed it with an editor’s note that said “The title of the book discussed in this segment contains a racial slur.”) It may be an excellent and important book, but it’s a marketing nightmare. I certainly will not be requesting it at my local library, which actually may bode well for sales.

Book Events

Author events

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss their book, New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, from 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ROBERT G. GOODBY Author and professor of anthropology presents his book, A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., Feb. 23, at 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARGARET ATWOOD Author presents her book Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, and will be in conversation with Judy Blume. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., March 1, at 8 p.m. Tickets cost $30. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents his new book, Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, from 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents her new book, The Possibility of Red, and Henry Walters presents his new book, Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, from 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents her poetry collection, Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

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

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

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

This Will Be Funny Later, by Jenny Pentland

This Will Be Funny Later, by Jenny Pentland (Harper, 341 pages)

You may not have heard of Jenny Pentland, but you’ve probably heard of her mother, an actress and comedian by the name of Roseanne Barr. Barr was the star of the eponymous sitcom that aired on ABC for nine years in the ’80s and ’90s, and I have to confess before we start that I’m not sure I ever watched an episode in its entirety.

As such, I’m not much impressed by the fact that Pentland and her siblings — indeed, her entire family — were the models for the messy TV family known to Americans as the Conners. (In addition to Barr, the show made John Goodman, her TV husband, a household name.)

Truth be told, I’m not much impressed by anything that comes out of Hollywood lately.

That said, Pentland has emerged from relative obscurity to write a surprisingly interesting book that doesn’t demand binge-watching Roseanne as a prerequisite.

It is intelligent and scathing, indicting and forgiving, bitter and loving, a large dose of acid with just the right amount of sweet. Pentland’s childhood was, in effect, kind of horrible by all objective standards, meaning the standards of Child Protective Services — and that was before her mom became famous. “Aside from being half-naked and feral, we were also being raised part atheist, part Jewish and part Wiccan, with a touch of paganism and voodoo thrown in.” For years, the family struggled, graduating from trailers to an apartment to a 500-square-foot bungalow. “We may have been climbing the ladder, but we were still on the lower rungs,” she writes. “We could afford name-brand foods now, but we couldn’t afford to spill them. We still had to make our frivolous purchases, like toys, from other people’s lawns.”

Her dad was a trash collector before he became a mail sorter; her mother struggled to assimilate her creative ambitions with the day-to-day drudgery of having three young children in diapers. Meanwhile, Pentland herself showed signs of a comedic streak even as a child: Her growing collection of dolls, some scavenged by her father from other people’s trash, always had something wrong with them, so she took to diagnosing them with various illnesses — polio, sickle cell anemia, debilitating autoimmune diseases. She even made crutches out of pencils for one of the dolls. Yes, a social worker seeing this would have intervened, but in retrospect, since Pentland turned out OK, it’s wicked good black humor.

Humor got scarcer in adolescence. After her mother discovered her talent at making people laugh at open-mic nights, she began spending less time tending to her children and more time tending her career, and Pentland’s weight started to become an issue; like mother, like daughter. (She says her mother once lost a lot of weight with a diet that allowed her one doughnut and one ice cream cone a day, and nothing else.) Barr would be traveling and come home to find out that everyone had gained five pounds from eating fast food. Then they’d all go on a fad diet. Visits to her grandparents’ “house/feedlot” didn’t help. No surprise, Pentland developed an eating disorder that found her at times eating spoonfuls of granulated sugar or plain pats of butter. At one point, to try to keep their children from eating, the parents literally put a padlock on the refrigerator.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Barr and Pentland’s father was catastrophically unraveling, even as Barr’s star was ascending. When they finally got divorced, he lost not only his kids, but his job writing for the TV show. Pentland and her siblings had to deal with all the ordinary fallout from a family disintegrating, while also dealing with reporters and photographers stalking the family. Then Barr got involved with Tom Arnold, a man 10 years younger than she was, and their lives got even messier.

Through her teen years, Pentland was shuttled from weight-loss camps to wilderness survival programs, some of which have now been described as child abuse. At the start of one, participants were given a can of peaches each, but no way to open them. (The staff just watched as the teens tried to smash them.) In the next phase, they were given nothing to eat but raisins, peanuts, raw cornmeal and beans to eat. She writes of being covered with blisters and mosquito bites, and having to spend a night in the woods by herself. She was 15. Later, when she was done with all that, there were the classes at the Scientology Center.

It is much like driving past a car wreck, only in this book we are invited to look at the horror. What is most amazing about this story is that somehow, inexplicably, it seems to end well. Despite a train-wreck of a childhood and adolescence, Pentland turned out amazingly well. She is now the mother of five (none of whom have polio) and she lives a seemingly idyllic life on a farm in Hawaii. Moreover, her relationship with her mother is confoundingly good. She recently told People magazine, “We communicate at all costs. Even if it’s uncomfortable, annoying or the timing is bad, that’s the priority.”

It is unclear how such a good relationship could have emerged out of what came before, and I still have zero desire to watch Roseanne, but This Will Be Funny Later succeeds as a thoughtful and provocative memoir, even it’s title isn’t always true. A

Book Notes

In February, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of strangling the infernal groundhog.

Winter will be with us for a few more weeks, although there are those who say it won’t be with us in a few more centuries. Porter Fox, for example, asks us to consider The Last Winter (Little Brown & Co., 320 pages), his examination of “the scientists, adventurers, journeymen and mavericks trying to save the world” from climate change.

A former fellow at MacDowell, the artists’ colony in Peterborough, Fox grew up on the coast of Maine and has previously written about skiing and the future of snow, so he’s not new to the topic. Depending on how cold you are right now, this might be a dystopian book, or one of hope.

Continuing the theme, poetry fans will want to check out Winter Recipes from the Collective (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 64 pages) from Louise Glück, an underachiever who has won both a Nobel Prize for literature and a National Book Award and has also been the U.S. poet laureate.

If you prefer short stories, there’s Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter (Grove Press, 240 pages), of which Ann Patchett said, “It filled up every chamber of my heart.”

Skiers will like Winter’s Children, A Celebration of Nordic Skiing (University of Minnesota Press, 448 pages), by Ryan Rodgers, even though it’s mostly about skiing in the Midwest.

And worth dipping back to the past is Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (Ecco, 368 pages), which was published in 2003 but is an evergreen discourse on how animals survive through New England winters. It’s by biologist Bernd Heinrich, a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont.

Book Events

Author events

• ERIK LARSON Author presents The Splendid and the Vile. The Music Hall Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Wed., Feb. 16, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $13.75. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

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

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

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

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg (Ecco, 263 pages)

It is apparently the fashion to write a memoir about writing after having achieved at least some modest success. Maybe this isn’t new and goes all the way back to Montaigne, but the trend seems to have accelerated after Anne Lamott’s ever popular Bird by Bird, published in 1994.

Into this space enters Jami Attenberg, a novelist of acclaim whose body of work includes The Middlesteins, her 2012 portrait of a family obsessed with eating; 2017’s All Grown Up (given a B+ here), and most recently, 2019’s All This Could Be Yours.

In I Came All This Way to Meet You, subtitled “writing myself home,” Attenberg gets personal in a refreshingly candid manner. It’s not so much a book as it is a conversation, the sort that occurs at a bar after strangers have had a couple of shots.

It’s a conversation that takes place during the pandemic; Attenberg peppers the memoir with mentions of life during Covid-19 and she occasionally touches on ongoing social issues. But it’s mainly the story of an ordinary woman who got tired of all the ordinariness in her life and set out to build something different. As Attenberg writes in the opening, in which she bluntly summarizes the first 20 years of her working life, most of her jobs were essentially bringing other people’s ideas into being.

“Eventually I thought: What about my ideas? When do I own them?” she writes. “And once I realized that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I could not stay where I was any longer.”

In a perfect world, an aspiring writer who comes to this conclusion would then find an oceanside cottage in which to write her first book, ensconced there rent-free except for the task of walking someone’s dog. And for Attenberg, it was in fact a perfect world, at least in this regard.

After she spent decades working invisible, low-paying jobs — to include temping, waitressing, typing, blogging — a supportive friend helped set her up in this space, and Attenberg started bringing her characters to life. But that was the extent of her perfect world. It was a hard slog to get to where she is today, an “Author with a capital A,” and she shares her remembrances of this unglamorous life, much of which involved arduous road trips in an old car, trying to get people to buy her books when people didn’t want them — including, at one point, her publisher, who dumped her after her first few books didn’t sell well.

In many ways it would be hard to find a more unappealing depiction of a novelist’s life, from driving alone in a white-out in Wyoming to being booed at a literary festival when she was introduced as being from Brooklyn.

At one point she says this about a book tour: “I do my event. A Jewish event, a panel of four authors. I sell five books. Thanks, Jews. Another car to the airport, two hours before my flight. And there I sit.”

That paragraph, in all its pith, demonstrates precisely why this memoir is so engrossing. Attenberg is completely uninhibited; you never know what she is going to say next. The writing is as choppy as the sea, and as unpredictable, as is her life story, which she unspools gradually.

As much as the memoir is about Attenberg, it’s also about her friends. Despite being a generally anxious person, she has the enviable talent of finding and cultivating friends, such as the Alaska mom she met in Guatemala when she was doing travel writing — a woman who travels internationally for a month by herself every year — or the younger Italian novelist she spotted at a literary festival wearing a black Victorian gown. (“I immediately thought: Her, I must know.”)

On the subject of friendship, Attenberg waxes philosophical, writing: “The thing about bad friends is you never realize when you’re being one until it’s too late. Forgiveness and understanding? Not in this economy.”

She also brings that candor to writing about her romantic relationships. One, undertaken after a solitary trip to Sicily during which a restaurant refused to seat her because she was alone, was particularly promising: “No children, no desire for them whatsoever. No old marriages rotting in the past. We both owned our own homes. We both had flexible schedules. He even promised to quit smoking for me.”

There may have been no children, but a beautiful essay grew out of this relationship, about their trip to a “bone chapel” in Portugal — Capela dos Ossos, circa the 16th century, built using the remains of more than 5,000 people. Visiting it, Attenberg writes, she was “in a state of thrall to the bones.”

“Everything was dead … and yet it felt so alive to me at the same time. It was designed for thought. Alive and dead, stories everywhere. Thousands of possibilities, thousands of stories. The bones had been brought together in this space, the bones would never be alone. They have each other, I thought. And all of us, visiting them, every day.”

Bones became a metaphor for her life, and ultimately for the relationship as well. She is a work in progress, as we all are, but just is more talented than other people in lassoing the mess into art.

To call Attenberg an original thinker is an understatement. Her words crackle like an overbuilt fire, and whether or not you’ve read her work previously, this thoughtful memoir is worth a look. A

Book Notes

With Valentine’s Day coming up, you’re probably scouring the shelves of your local independent bookseller looking for the perfect book to give to your significant other. If you’re not, you should be. Chocolate is gone in a week. The perfect book may outlast your relationship.

You can buy love poems, of course — a new title is Love by Night (192 pages, Andrews McMeel) by SK Williams. But these are not to be confused with poems about love, such as Please Love Me at My Worst(Andrews McMeel, 144 pages), last year’s collection by Michaela Angemeer.

You can buy books about great relationships other people had — such as Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (Bloomsbury, 432 pages), the story of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s marriage in their own words. Or books that promise to help you have a great relationship of your own, such as Fierce Love, Creating a Love That Lasts — One Conversation at a Time (Thomas Nelson, 240 pages).

Or you can forget the cheesy sentimental stuff and give your significant other a book about love that isn’t really about love, but just has love in the title and is a cool and interesting book. To wit: Love Poems (for Anxious People) by John Kenney, known for his writing in The New Yorker and also for two previous books, Love Poems for Married People and Love Poems for People With Children. It’s from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 112 pages. With poems titled “Here comes someone whose name I should know” and “Am I meditating yet?” these are not really love poems, but that’s kind of the point.

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness (Riverhead, 304 pages) by Claire Vaye Watkins is a novel released last fall that’s probably more of a wry gift for your BFF when you exchange cards about how much you hate Valentine’s Day. But we can’t resist the title. Premise: Woman with postpartum depression leaves her baby and husband and goes all Thelma and Louise without the Louise. It’s widely described as hilarious.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper, 816 pages) by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers was an Oprah’s pick last year and Barack Obama said it was one of his favorite books. It’s a novel that reads like poetry and it is not actually about Du Bois, the late Civil Rights activist, historian and sociologist, but his words are interspersed throughout.

But there are limits to how edgy you can be when selecting a book with love in the title. The ‘I Love My Instapot’ Anti-Inflammatory Diet Recipe Book: Not recommended. If that’s your only choice, go with the candy.

Book Events

Author events

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• ROB AZEVEDO Poet reads from his new book of poetry, Don’t Order the Calamari. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Feb. 3, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan (Simon & Schuster, 325 pages)

Parents are more likely to have a child taken away from them by the government than by a stranger. Yet for most of us, Child Protective Services enters our consciousness only when we hear of its failure.

An alternate world is presented in Jessamine Chan’s debut novel, The School for Good Mothers, in which the state vastly oversteps its bounds and is given terrifying power over families when someone is accused of child neglect or abuse.

The story is about a single mother, Frida, who, overcome by exhaustion and stress, makes the shockingly bad decision to leave her toddler alone while she goes to get coffee and pick up some forgotten work at the office. Neighbors call the police when the child, named Harriet, starts crying.

When the police call Frida to say they have her child, she is overcome with guilt and rushes to the station, expecting to pick up her child after sufficient explanation and groveling. Instead, she finds herself in a cascading nightmare.

The police let Frida’s ex-husband, Gust, take Harriett to the home he shares with his young girlfriend. They tell Frida that she will have to convince Child Protective Services of her worthiness before she can have her child again. This isn’t just today’s Social Services, however, but a 1984-ish imagining of a state darkly empowered by surveillance technology and the belief that the state knows more about proper child-rearing than parents.

Soon after Harriett goes home, two men from Child Protective Services arrive to inspect her home and outfit it with cameras. They will be watching, even without Harriett in the home, in order to assess Frida’s fitness to mother her child. They explain that artificial intelligence will use the footage to analyze her feelings, that this will be fair because it eliminates human error.

Frida accepts this because she has no choice; it’s a condition for getting her child back. But so are monitored visits with Harriett with a social worker watching — visits in which she is expected to play with her toddler in her ex-husband’s house, the same daughter who now feels abandoned by her mother.

Not surprisingly, these visits go spectacularly poorly, and eventually Frida is deemed “insufficiently contrite” and a “narcissist with anger-management issues and … poor impulse control.” She is given her last option: to submit to a year’s stay at a state-run facility at which she and other mothers accused of neglect or abuse are taught how to be “good” mothers. At the end of the year, the state will decide whether she can have her child back.

Chan engages a politically fraught topic in the age of debate over free-range parenting, the ethics of nanny cams and other forms of surveillance, and whether parents or educators should decide what children are taught in public school. But she has crafted an elegant and engrossing story that only once steps out of the narrative (and then only briefly) to mention contemporary conflicts. Other than a few paragraphs, this is a story about Frida alone, and she is a complicated and bewilderingly sympathetic protagonist.

Although Frida insists she had one very bad day in her mothering career — her lawyer coaches her to call it a “lapse in judgment” — it was an extraordinarily bad day, and the fact that she had barely slept the night before does not absolve her of leaving a toddler alone in an exercise saucer for nearly two hours. Even though the child wasn’t hurt, it was a horrific offense, and it seems right that the state conduct a review for Harriet’s sake.

But compassion grows as we learn more about Frida’s circumstances — the discovery of her husband’s affair while she was still pregnant, the over-involved girlfriend who texts parenting advice to Frida and posts pictures of Harriett on social media, the shared custody arrangement that forces Frida to work while caring for a sick child on her own.

But again, there are no stereotypes here, just human beings in varying stages of imperfection. The father who left Frida also held her hand in divorce court; the girlfriend who seems to want the child for her own testifies on behalf of Frida’s parenting.

The only true villains here are the smug, condescending “playground moms” who look down on the parenting of others, and of course the state.

Its arrogant and overreaching arm, which coldly keeps Frida from the child who gives her life purpose and meaning, becomes so much of a villain that we wish the Avengers would swoop in.

Chan has a delicate touch and she refrains from overt moralizing; moreover, The School for Good Mothers is an extraordinary first novel because Frida is not one-dimensional. She did a terrible thing and we never really understand why she did it. But Frida is not quite an antihero, either; she loves her child desperately and did many things right before the state began training its eye on the things it believes she does wrong. As such, it’s a nuanced and intelligent novel that is also thoroughly absorbing, the sort of book you can breeze through on a weekend but will think about all the next week. A

Book Notes

Last week, we started running through a literal Book of the Month club for 2022, choosing the best-reviewed books that have a month in the title.

So far, we’ve had The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow; February House by Sherill Tippins; March: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks; One Friday in April by Donald Antrim; Eight Days in May by Volker Ullrich; and Seven Days in June by Tia Williams. On to the rest of the year.

July: The most recent is a book of poetry, July (Sarabande Books, 120 pages), published last June by New York writer Kathleen Ossip. NPR named it one of its “books we love.” But you can also go back to 2014 for the Tim O’Brien novel July, July (Houghton Mifflin, 322 pages), a story of 10 friends attending their 30th college reunion.

August: Snow in August (Little, Brown & Co., 320 pages) by the late Pete Hamill, former editor of the New York Daily News, is the best we can do, although this takes us back to 1997. It’s the story of a friendship that bloomed between an Irish Catholic boy and a lonely Brooklyn rabbi.

September: The Fortnight in September (Scribner, 304 pages) is a 1931 novel by R.C. Sheriff that was reissued last fall as a 90th anniversary paperback edition. NPR called it a “gift” that came back into the public consciousness during the pandemic. It’s also described as a “timeless classic” and is about a family of five vacationing on the coast of England.

October: The End of October (Knopf, 400 pages) by Lawrence Wright, a writer for The New Yorker, is about a deadly pandemic that begins in Indonesia and spreads across the world. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.

November: November Road (William Morrow, 320 pages) is a 2019 thriller by Lou Berney. It’s set at the time of the John F. Kennedy assassination, and involves a mobster on the run who picks up a mother and kids on the side of the road and gives them a ride in exchange for his cover: disguising himself as an insurance salesman on a trip with his family.

December: Lots of choices here, many of them terrible, but let’s go with Lost in December (Simon & Schuster, 368 pages), a novelized retelling of the Bible’s “prodigal son” story by the wildly popular Richard Paul Evans, author of The Christmas Box. Scoff all you want, but it’s got five stars on Amazon. Guess we’ll need to read The Christmas Box, too.

Book Events

Author events

• TOM RAFFIO Author presents Prepare for Crisis, Plan to Thrive. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Jan. 27, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

• CHAD ORZEL Author presents A Brief History of Timekeeping. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 27, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ISABEL ALLENDE Author presents Violeta. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., Jan. 29, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration and tickets required, to include the purchase of the book. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• JOHN NICHOLS Author presents Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiters. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Feb. 1, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• ROB AZEVEDO Poet reads from his new book of poetry, Don’t Order the Calamari. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Feb. 3, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen

Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen (Knopf, 272 pages)

We are just now beginning to see how Americans’ work lives may have forever been changed by the pandemic, and in Out of Office, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen craft a vision for how things could be better for the so-called “knowledge workers” who are able to do some or all of their jobs remotely. With some companies already announcing that they will be fully or partially remote even after the pandemic ends, this isn’t necessarily cause for celebration for people sick of working in their basements. But the authors begin by arguing that what we’ve been doing for the past two years isn’t truly remote work, but remote work during a stressful pandemic while homeschooling and wondering where the next roll of toilet paper is coming from. In other words, forget the past two years. Instead, dream with them about working fewer hours with no commute, fewer unnecessary meetings, more time to focus on the most important and fulfilling aspect of your job. It’s not The 4-Hour Workweek promoted by Tim Ferriss, but a more realistic fantasy.

And it’s necessary, the authors say, because the workforce is “collapsing” under the pressure of what they called fetishized standards of productivity and the hours we work: more than workers in other Western nations.

Among their points:

• To improve work life, we need not boundaries but guardrails. Boundaries are permeable. Guardrails protect. “Not because we’re fragile or undisciplined, but because the forces that undergird work today — especially the obsession with growth and productivity — are indiscriminate in their destruction,” the authors write. Other countries have guardrails that have been legislated, such as France, which passed a law in 2016 aimed at discouraging people who work at large companies from sending or replying to emails after working hours.

• Four-day work weeks can be achieved when companies eschew “faux productivity” and focus on getting important stuff done in less time. Companies can create policies that don’t accidentally discriminate — for example, childless people should be entitled to leave or sabbaticals without going to the trouble of having a baby. Like remote work, flexibility in employment is not necessarily a perk, the authors argue, but an opportunity to work 24-7. True flexibility would be like the software developer who gets much of his thinking done on a hiking trail, or the graphic designer who works for a few hours in the middle of the day, then three hours in the evening, building her day around the needs of her young children.

Companies like theirs operate with a culture of trust, “granting real freedom to make small and occasionally large decisions about when work should be done. … They’re focused not on immediate growth but on long-term vision: retaining valuable employees in a competitive industry.”

• Be suspicious of companies that present themselves as a family, rhetoric that emerged in the past half-century. “Treating your organization as a family, no matter how altruistic its goals, is a means of breaking down boundaries between work and life.” What many of us need is not a work “family” to compete with our own, but more emotional distance from all-consuming work.

In recent years, tech companies have normalized lavish perks that have contributed to this sense of work being a second home, from pool tables and pinball in break rooms, to free gourmet coffee and snacks, to bring-your-dog-to-work days. In order for a new hybrid model of work to succeed, offices need to be less appealing to workers, not more. Otherwise, remote workers already anxious about their relative invisibility, compared to people who keep showing up, suffer FOMO, fear of missing out, leading to even more stress. Companies need to create a culture in which there is truly a level playing field whether you’re remote or in an office building, Petersen and Warzel say.

• Remote workers contribute to their own stress by doing something that the authors call LARPing; the acronym stands for live-action role playing, and we do it at work when we become obsessed with constantly looking like we’re working, even when we ostensibly shouldn’t be. (An after-hours response to an email or Slack message is an example.) “A flare sent into the air to show you’re working incites others to send up their flares, too,” the others write.

In the end, Petersen and Warzel describe today’s knowledge workers as enduring a sort of carnival horror house of employment. In doing so, they make remote work sound worse than it is; there’s a reason so many workers are refusing to go back to the office, and it’s not all Covid-19-related. On the other hand, there’s also a reason for what’s been called the Great Resignation, and it’s not that we’re all clamoring to drive for Amazon.

Post-pandemic, we’re not going back to the lives we led in 2019, and Out of Office is part of the thoughtful conversation that needs to take place before we mindlessly take on other ghastly routines. Not every idea presented here is sterling; I’m deeply suspicious of the authors’ argument that cutting back on office time frees us to volunteer in our communities. That may solve some societal problems, but still leaves us with exhausted citizens. Also, the ideas presented in Out of Office may inspire hope among knowledge workers, but most have little power to change their own circumstances; it’s their bosses who need to read this book and sign on to the ideas. Workers can, however, help to foster change by thinking about why they revere hyperproductivity, a mindset the authors argue is a relic of the agrarian past. “Who would you be if work ceased to be the axis of your life?” they ask. While much of this book could be condensed into an article in The Atlantic, it’s good that the authors are posing the question they raise here. B-

Book Notes

Reader’s Digest Condensed Books are a thing of the past (we have SparkNotes with which to cheat-read now), but there are still “Book of the Month” clubs out there that offer to send you a book every month in the genre of your choice. Given that Americans read 12.6 books, on average, in 2021, according to Gallup,they’ve at least got the pacing down right.

But there’s another way to see books of the month — quite literally.

Last year, for example, The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow came out in paperback (Redhook, 416 pages). It’s a well-reviewed novel about a 17-year-old girl from Vermont named January who finds a peculiar book that leads her on a fantastical adventure. Reviewers called it magical and inventive.

Let’s move onto February: February House (Mariner Books, 336 pages) is “the story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, under one roof in Brooklyn.” And you thought your bathroom was crowded. Sounds a bit like the Algonquin Roundtable, 24-7.

March: No way to begin spring without Little Women, so let’s do March: A Novel (Viking, 288 pages) by Geraldine Brooks, who envisions the Civil War experiences of the absent father of Meg, Beth, Jo and Amy.

April: One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival (W.W. Norton, 144 pages) is a gripping memoir by Donald Antrim, released last fall about his near suicide and struggles with depression.

May: Eight Days in May (Liveright, 336 pages) is another fall 2021 book that examines the collapse of the Third Reich. The author, Volker Ullrich, is a German historian, and the book was translated into English by Jefferson Chase.

June: Seven Days in June (yes, there’s a pattern here) is a celebrated novel by former beauty editor Tia Williams released last June (Grand Central Publishing, 336 pages). It’s about a pair of writers who had a fleeting romance as teenagers, then parted ways yet continued to write about each other in their books — while pretending not to know each other as adults.

Promising stuff here, if you missed these books when they first came out. Next week: July through December.

Book Events

Author events

• TOM RAFFIO Author presents Prepare for Crisis, Plan to Thrive. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Jan. 27, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

• CHAD ORZEL Author presents A Brief History of Timekeeping. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 27, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book Sales

• USED BOOK SALE Used books for $1, $3 and $5. GoodLife Programs & Activities, 254 N. State St., Unit L, Concord. Jan. 10 through Jan. 21 (closed Jan. 17). Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Visit goodlifenh.org.

Poetry

• CAROL WESTBURG AND SUE BURTON Virtual poetry reading hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 20, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ROB AZEVEDO Poet reads from his new book of poetry, Don’t Order the Calamari. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Feb. 3, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

Sweat, A History of Exercise, by Bill Hayes

Sweat, A History of Exercise, by Bill Hayes (Bloomsbury, 221 pages)

Every time a new study comes out about the benefit of exercise, there’s a sort of breathlessness about it, as if the authors have come across some undiscovered bit of wisdom that will change hearts and minds — and bodies.

Exercise does that, of course, but this is not a new development. Joe De Sena built a fitness empire on the concept of “Spartan Fit” and Sparta was last a player in ancient Greece. Most of us know at least a vague history of the Olympic games, and that physical fitness was a key component in the education of young men in ancient societies. “To achieve excellence, we first must sweat,” the Greek poet Hesiod wrote in 700 B.C.

It’s surprising, then, that when New York writer Bill Hayes set out to learn more about how exercise became a human compulsion, he found few contemporary histories on the subject, but found a comprehensive one written in 1573. Called De arte gymnastica (in English, the Art of Gymnastics), the work was compiled by an Italian physician, Girolamo Mercuriale, and written in medieval Latin. It was, Hayes would later be told, the sort of book that medieval intellectuals kept on their bookshelves but never read, “like the Bible or Infinite Jest.”

Mercuriale himself had set out to do precisely what Hayes does here: to comb through centuries of accounts of how people exercised and why they exercised, going back to the fifth century BC. There was, of course, exercise as a form of preparation for war. The Spartans, in particular, organized their society around principles of building not just men but warriors. But in other Greek societies, there was a culture of exercise more similar to the luxurious athletic clubs of today: While men went to athletic facilities known as “palestras” to strenuously train and challenge their bodies, there were also physical pleasures to be found there, such as saunas, bathing rooms and “oiling” rooms, where athletes would be rubbed with scented olive oil.

The goal, however, according to Mercuriale, should not be to become more physically attractive but to live a long and healthy life — in contemporary lingo, to have not just a long lifespan but a long healthspan. “Those who exercise moderately and appropriately can lead a healthy life that does not depend on any drugs, but those who do so without proper care are racked by perpetual ill health, and require constant medication.”

What’s amazing about Mercuriale’s conclusions, and similar ones by Plato, Hippocrates and the second-century physician Galen, is that they came in a time in which people got a lot of things wrong about health. They believed, for example, that illness was caused by imbalance in the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and bile), and that people could be healed with practices such as letting leeches suck their blood. But on exercise generally, these guys got it right, even if they did some weird things along the way, like collecting the sweat of athletes to use as a healing balm for hemorrhoids and genital warts.

Hayes is the the author of six other books, including Sleep Demons, a memoir about insomnia, and Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood. He is also known as the partner of the legendary late physician Oliver Sacks, and has written about other aspects of medical history before, including a nonfiction book that examines how the medical classic Gray’s Anatomy came to be. So it’s a little disappointing that Sweat sometimes devolves into more of a personal blog rather than an erudite history. This happens when Hayes drops in his own workouts, from mastering the crow pose in yoga to taking a boxing class. He may be an accomplished author, but he never convinces me to care deeply about his sports injuries, even when he slammed into a rock once while he was swimming. Not that I’m not sympathetic to head injuries, but it wasn’t what I came for.

That said, it was interesting to learn about the exercise habits of diverse, interesting people, from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who famously did 20 military-style push-ups each day, even in her 80s, to an Italian publisher and translator of Mercuriale who rings 600-pound church bells for exercise. Fun fact on the topic of unusual forms of exercise: Mercuriale counted laughing, crying and holding one’s breath as exercise, another reason to like him. And again Mercuriale was prescient: a belly laugh has been likened to “jogging for the innards.”

Hayes received funding from two foundations that enabled him to travel around the world to research this book, in part by inspecting old and rare books, aided by friendly librarians. (This in itself offered a glimpse into a strange world, as when he wrote that the librarian “placed a clean white pillow on the table top — a soft bed for these often fragile volumes — and provided a fresh package of handwipes” in order that he could clean his hands thoroughly in between books.) He also took an eight-week class that certifies people to become personal trainers, not to become one (although he did become certified), but just to learn about the process and more about the human body.

As with any book that runs the gamut from Pliny the Elder to Jane Fonda, Sweat attempts to cover a marathon in the space of a 5K. It’s a perfectly serviceable book, but not one that’s particularly memorable, since for so much of it the reader is subjected to watching the author travel and exercise. At least he had fun, so there’s that. As for advice, it’s hard to top this from Galen’s The Art of Medicine, dating from 180 A.D.: “Exercise should cease as soon as the body begins to suffer.” If, for you, that’s the moment you step out the door, best move on to another title. B-

Book Notes

If you haven’t heard, birds aren’t real. They’re drones sent by the federal government to spy on us, according to a tongue-in-cheek movement. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t feed them and enjoy looking at them when we’re trapped inside by miserable weather.

There is no “birds aren’t real” book — not yet, anyway — but there’s been an equally cheeky book leading the “bird field guides” genre on Amazon recently. The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of the Whole Stupid World (Chronicle, 176 pages) is Matt Kracht’s followup to his The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, published in 2019 (Chronicle, 176 pages). Kracht, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, is gaming the system by showing up here. While the books are in the field-guide format, and technically about birds, they’re pure humor, and crude humor at that.

What’s really fascinating, though, is that Kracht’s take is not especially original. The same year Kracht’s first book came out, Aaron Reynolds gave the world the Effin’ Birds: A Field Guide to Identification (Ten Speed Press, 208 pages), which has even more profanity and absurdity than Kracht’s books offer. (Who knew there was such animosity toward birds?)

Effin’ Birds is cultural commentary wrapped in bird bodies, with Reynolds inventing creatures such as the “spotted do-nothing” and the “peevish ringneck.” It too is kind of juvenile in its humor, but also kind of funny, as we all have a spotted do-nothing in our life.

If you prefer to take your birding more seriously, Princeton University Press recently published How Birds Evolve, What Science Reveals About Their Origin, Lives and Diversity by New York evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma (320 pages).

And last year, Deckle Edge published a new version of The Bedside Book of Birds, an Avian Miscellany, by the late Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood (392 pages).

But you’ll have to wait a few months for the book you really need: an actual field guide, snark-free: Birds of New Hampshire. It’s by Marc Parnell and is part of the Birding Pro series. (Naturalist and Traveler Press, 272 pages, coming March 22).

Book Events

Author events

• TIMOTHY BOUDREAU Author presents on the craft of writing short stories. Sat., Jan. 15, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• TOM RAFFIO Author presents Prepare for Crisis, Plan to Thrive. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Jan. 27, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Book Sales

Poetry

Category: Books

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur

The Horsewoman, by James Patterson and Mike Lupica

No Land to Light On, by Yara Zgheib

This Will Be Funny Later, by Jenny Pentland

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan

Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen

Sweat, A History of Exercise, by Bill Hayes

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