Category: Books

How to Survive History, by Cody Cassidy (Penguin, 224 pages)

Until this week I never knew there was a category on Amazon called “humor history,” but I’m here for it. So is Cody Cassidy, who created for himself a cheeky publishing niche by imagining the improbable and then figuring out (with the help of experts) the answer to the question “What if…?”.

He did that first in 2017’s And Then You’re Dead, in which he wondered what would really happen if you, say, got swallowed by a whale, got caught in a stampede, went over Niagara Falls in a barrel or had sundry other unpleasant adventures. Now he’s back with How to Survive History, in which he offers (hopefully not useful) advice on how we can survive extinction-level events such as asteroids or volcano explosions should some time-traveling event send us back to one. It’s fanciful, of course, and a tad silly, but Cassidy comes to the task with a surprising gravitas and the right mix of “yes, this is kind of crazy” but also “this is serious stuff, pay attention.”

The serious stuff is the history behind the events, which include the strike of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the sinking of the Titanic and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Most of us learned in childhood about the asteroid that hit Earth some 66 million years ago, and we may have even retained some specifics about the planet-altering event, such as the size of the rock, believed to be between 8 and 9 miles wide.

But reading Cassidy’s description of what happened in the aftermath was the first time I really understood the scope of the destruction and the chain of events it triggered. “If this asteroid hit in the same spot today, the blast wave would kill you in Texas, deafen you in New York and blow out your window panes in Buenos Aires,” he writes. “The rock rang Earth like a bell.”

And there were so many ways that it could have killed you, had humans been around then, from the skyscraper-high tsunamis, to raining debris the size of school buses, to the fires caused by thermal radiation, to raging snowstorms in which 10 feet of snow fell each day. Unless you were a turtle or other aquatic creature that could take relative shelter under water, it seems impossible to survive this sort of destruction, but in talking to experts Cassidy comes up with a plan — it just involves getting to Madagascar or Indonesia. (As I said previously, this is fanciful stuff.)

Similarly, Cassidy has suggestions on how we can survive the sack of Rome, a voyage with the pirate Blackbeard, the stranding of the Donner party on their doomed trek to California, and the devastating San Francisco earthquake in 1906. In these and other catastrophes, he colorfully provides the history while breezily inserting the reader into the event. An example from his chapter on Titanic: “you’re a frugal time traveler, so you elect to travel third class … That buys you a bunk on F deck, six levels below the top. It’s about the size of a prison cell, only it’s occupied by four people rather than just two. But who cares! All you do is sleep in it anyway, and this ship offers world-class amenities to its third-class passengers, who in this era would typically have to stuff themselves into one large, poorly ventilated and inadequately converted cargo hold.”

Cassidy’s survival plan when the ship hits the iceberg (with only enough lifeboats for a third of its passengers) involves calmly dressing in finery (to make it seem that you are a first-class passenger), using ladders that you’re not supposed to access, and going to the starboard side instead of port. Stay out of the water if you can — it’s 27 degrees Fahrenheit — but if you have to enter it, slip in rather than jumping, to give your body time to absorb the shock. Then swim hard for 10 to 15 minutes to build body heat. That could buy you time for passengers on a lifeboat to take pity and pull you in.

Yes, we’ve all seen the movie, but Cassidy gives us a wholly different experience with fascinating detail that James Cameron didn’t provide.

When he takes us to the port of Pompeii, 6 miles from Mount Vesuvius, he describes our plight as challenging but not hopeless. The Pompeiians who survived were the ones who took off immediately instead of taking shelter as the ash fell. The volcano erupted on Aug. 24, but it wasn’t until the next day that the entire village was wiped out, meaning that many people went to sleep that night thinking wrongly that they had survived. Where to go? Cassidy says there were two options: running north toward Naples or south toward Stabiae — fast. Both routes presented danger, but none that involved being consumed by a river of lava.

Will any of this information help you navigate life in the 21st century? Probably not. But is it more useful than anything you will find in the typical summer beach read? Absolutely.

That’s why anything by Cassidy is the perfect book for summer. It’s airy enough to not feel dreadfully important (you don’t have to retain information about how to survive the fall of Constantinople) but engaging enough that you will constantly want to quote from the book to people sitting beside you at the lake or beach. Plus, How to Survive History solves a problem of beach reads that has always irritated me — most often they’re romance novels written for women, a la Elin Hilderbrand.

It’s paperback and won’t be shortlisted for any elite prize, but Cassidy owns “humor history” and it’s top-notch for the genre. A

Drowning, by T.J. Newman (Avid Reader Press, 293 pages)

If you haven’t read T.J. Newman yet, best get started. She is one of the hottest names in publishing right now, having seemingly emerged out of nowhere to sign multi-million deals that will put her two novels on the big screen. The first was 2021’s Falling; her new book is Drowning. Both are fast-paced thrillers set on a plane, drawing from Newman’s experience as a flight attendant, a job she took after failing to capitalize on her musical theater degree on Broadway. Both are best read on terra firma, not in the air.

In Falling, Newman gave us a Coastal Airlines pilot who learns midflight that his family has been kidnapped by terrorists who will kill his family if he doesn’t intentionally crash the plane. Coastal Airlines — the most cursed fictional airline since the TV show Lost gave us Oceanic — is back in Drowning, in which a plane with 99 souls on board has a catastrophic engine failure less than two minutes into a flight out of Honolulu and has to “ditch” — airline lingo for the dreaded “water landing.”

It’s unclear why Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger could land an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River without fatalities in 2009, while Coastal Flight 1421 — an Airbus A321 — could not, but ours is not to wonder why. Ours is to sit nervously in the grips of a book that author Don Winslow described in his jacket blurb as “Apollo 13 underwater.” The squeamish and claustrophobic will never make it through the movie when it comes out, but can probably suffer through the book just fine.

Probably.

The story revolves around a family of three which used to be a family of four — an engineer named Will, his estranged wife Chris, and their 11-year-old daughter Shannon. The couple had another daughter who died in an accident, and the relationship had broken from the weight of the tragedy.

Shannon is spending two weeks away from home, and Will is accompanying her on the flight because he is so anxious about something happening to his only surviving child. That setup seems unnecessarily campy given that the stakes are already so high, but Newman employs every trick to keep her readers engaged.

The entire family is brainy — Will had designed their Honolulu home so that even the position of the sun works to make it comfortable, and Chris is an industrial diver who — conveniently, as it turns out — owns an underwater salvage company. One criticism of Newman’s first book is that the circumstances so much require the suspension of disbelief, and that is certainly true here. (What are the odds that the mother of one of the children trapped on an underwater plane is an industrial diver? One hundred percent in a T.J. Newman book.)

There is no lengthy build-up to the disaster: Will notices the engine on fire on the first page, and we are rocketed into assorted passengers’ lives as they frantically try to come to grips with what is happening. We meet the flight attendants Molly and Kaholo, the co-captain Kit, the elderly couple who had traveled to Hawaii to celebrate their anniversary, the newlyweds, the newly divorced woman taking her first solo vacation, the unaccompanied minor, the requisite jerk whose death we won’t mind. When the plane goes into the water, some passengers die right away; others make the ill-fated decision to exit and take their chances in the water.

Only 12 stay behind — some following the advice of Will, who realized the risks of exiting the plane as a fire raged and fuel spilled into the sea — others because they just can’t get out in time. Not long afterward, the plane starts to sink and eventually comes to a precarious stop on the point of a cliff. Water is seeping into the cabin, but there is enough air that Will, Shannon and the other passengers can function normally, at least for the time being. Each new section of the book ominously gives an update on how much oxygen they have left: “2:48 p.m. 2 hours and 47 minutes after impact. Approximately 2.5 hours of oxygen inside plane.”

Meanwhile, on land, the military-led rescue operation somewhat improbably grows to involve a certain industrial diver whose estranged spouse and child happen to be on the plane. There is conflict over which of the severely limited rescue options has the least chance of killing the people inside the plane and those who are trying to rescue them.

The language is sparse to the point of comical when viewed with a critical eye: “A baby started to wait. The mother held her tight and sang a soft song into her ear. No one had a clue what was going to happen. Uncertainty brought fear. Fear created anxiety. They prayed. They cried. They texted goodbye to their loved ones.”

So you already know where this is going. And you probably have a decent idea how this will end. But that’s OK, because Newman, who looks to be her generation’s James Patterson, is a master at the carrot-and-stick formula that builds tension into every bite-sized chapter. A lot can go wrong even after a commercial jet lands in the ocean, let’s put it that way. And things are going wrong long past the point at which you’d think things should be starting to resolve.

There was a full-scale bidding war over the film rights, even before the book was released May 30. The excessively campy video trailer for Drowning says “the best film of the summer is a book.” It’s not wrong. The book reads like a screenplay, and therefore must be judged like one. No one will swoon over Newman’s prose, but in the summer thriller genre, in which literary standards relax quite a bit (like office dress codes on Casual Friday), she’s at the head of her class. B

The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer (St. Martin’s Press, 314 pages)

Clover Brooks is 36, single and surrounded by death — not the thing you’d want to put on a Tinder profile. The lifetime New Yorker lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment she shared with her grandfather growing up and she works as a death doula — the opposite of a birth doula. She sits with dying people, ensuring that they don’t die alone and helping them to process their pain and other complicated emotions they are experiencing. She keeps three notebooks in which she records notes; they are labeled “Regrets,” “Advice” and “Confessions.”

That’s what you need to know to understand the title of The Collected Regrets of Clover, a debut novel from Mikki Brammer, an Australian transplant who has a remarkable level of knowledge of New York City, where she lives now. It is a surprisingly upbeat novel, given the subject matter. The protagonist is a lonely young woman who has been hobbled by grief, having lost both parents as a child and, later, more traumatically, the grandfather who raised her. You might call her death-haunted; the first line of the novel is, “The first time I watched someone die, I was five.” (It was her kindergarten teacher.)

Clover does not have much of a life outside her work, caring for her two cats and a low-maintenance dog and keeping up with her neighbors. The only thing she does with any regularity is attend an occasional death cafe — a group where people gather to talk about death and enjoy refreshments (yes, this is a thing) — and every weekend have breakfast out and visit the bookstore she used to frequent with her grandfather before he passed more than a decade ago.

The few friends she has are old, and they include the 70-something bookstore owner and an elderly man who lives in her building and has known her since childhood. An only child who never learned to be social, she sees no reason to make friends and finds all the companionship and solace she needs in her structured life and in her books. Or so she thinks.

You probably see where this is going. Which is the only problem with this generally engaging book.

From the moment Brammer introduces a character named Sebastian, an overly enthusiastic visitor to a death cafe who tries to befriend Clover, there is a likely trajectory of this story. Our heroine will resist Sebastion’s overtures for only so long, and eventually he will bring her the companionship and love that she has long resisted. (She has never, she reveals, uttered the words “I love you” nor had them said to her — although her grandfather, a biology professor at Columbia University, clearly loved Clover deeply, he wasn’t one to say it, and her parents, whom she only vaguely remembers, had been more interested in each other than their child before they died in an accident while visiting China.)

To her credit, Brammer doesn’t follow that well-trampled plot, at least not completely. Instead, the story takes a sharp detour when Clover takes on a new client who, at 91, is dying of pancreatic cancer and has two months to live. Although she had a good marriage and a fulfilling life, she has long wondered if her life would have been better if she had married another man, someone she fell in love with when she was young and living in France. Clover does some research and finds the man seems to be living in Maine, so she sets off on a New England road trip to find him to fulfill the dying woman’s last wish.

In many ways The Collected Regrets of Clover is a literary death cafe — it is populated with millennials who grew up in families uncomfortable with talking about life’s end and who therefore are eager to explore the subject — everything from the legality of burial at sea to burial suits made out of compostable mushrooms. From Clover’s work to her memories to the visits to death cafes, the novel is one long conversation about grief and death. It’s a subject that the author seems to know something about.

One character says, “Someone told me once that [grief is like] a bag that you always carry — it starts out as a large suitcase, and as the years go by, it might reduce to the size of a purse, but you carry it forever.”

Clover has been carrying her own grief for reasons that unfold throughout the novel, and while it’s not an especially complicated story, it’s competently told and has enough light twists to keep readers engaged. The squeamish need not worry; death is largely a concept here; there are no unsettling depictions of the stages of decomposition or other things that happen to the body after we die. Nor does Brammer take up any discussion about the existence (or not) of an afterlife.

In a writing group she joined while she was working on the book, Brammer told others that she was trying to write a book about death “that’s fun and uplifting.” Strange as that sounds, she succeeded. B

Soul Boom, by Rainn Wilson (Hachette Go, 275 pages)

The shelf life of The Office and its cast seems eternal, even though it’s been 18 years since the sitcom’s debut. The actors keep turning up in other roles, in podcasts and in a surprising number of books, the latest from Rainn Wilson, who played the quirky paper salesman Dwight Schrute on the long-running NBC series.

It was the kind of iconic role that is hard to escape later in one’s career. Like Bob Odenkirk will always be Saul Goodman to fans of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, Rainn Wilson will always be Dwight Schrute, which is a bit of a problem for someone who is now selling spirituality. As great as that character was, he would not be my first choice for discussing the mysteries of the universe, human consciousness, God and death.

But following his passion, Wilson founded a media company that he, perplexingly, called “Soul Pancake” and currently stars in a streaming travel show called The Geography of Bliss. It’s hard to see his third book, Soul Boom, as anything but other than a marketing vehicle for the show, given its timing and its promotion of The Geography of Bliss. But maybe it would at least be funny, I thought.

Sadly, not, at least not in the smart, sly way that The Office is funny. It’s lighthearted and at times amusing, but Wilson’s folksy style of writing often deteriorates into words that really should not be on the printed page, as in this cringy sentence from the preface: “So … OK to move forward on the old booky-wook?”

Really, it was not — he lost me at booky-wook — but I soldiered on, hoping for improvement.

Wilson grew up in a family of Baha’is, members of a monotheistic faith that teaches progressive revelation — the idea that God is so far beyond our comprehension that existential truths must be revealed to humans gradually through holy teachers like Jesus, Mohammed and the Buddha. Its founder and prophet, Baha’u’llah, was, to the mind of young Wilson, “loving and reasonable” with “absolutely no fire-and-brimstone qualities.” Although he left the faith for a time in his 20s (“For a couple of years, I even tried on atheism like some jaunty, rebellious cap!”), he eventually returned to it.

But Soul Boom is not a come-to-Baha’u’llah book. Wilson does not seem particularly interested in recruiting people to his faith, but just in expanding our spiritual consciousness generally. He believes that nothing less than a spiritual revolution can solve the problems the world faces. And although he’s not hard-line preachy about it, he does want us to believe in God and the continuation of consciousness after death. You can’t have a “soul boom” without belief in a “soul,” after all.

Wilson’s own belief in an afterlife solidified at the time of his father’s death of heart disease when, after life support was removed, he recognized that “This body, this vessel was not my father. … The still, vacant body on that hospital bed in the ICU was simply a suit he once wore.”

That leads into a discussion of consciousness that is informed by Wilson’s deep reading in philosophy and disparate religious traditions. He notes that for all our scientific advances, human consciousness is largely a mystery. He then invites us to think about death, a topic that he tried to address in a reality-type TV show called My Last Days. (The studios passed.)

Again, he was failed by an editor, who left intact sentences like this one: “But what, exactly, does death put into perspective? Why, the preciousness of life, you big silly willy.”

This is the problem with celebrities writing books. Editors are so star-struck that they obsequiously leave in sentences — indeed, sometimes whole paragraphs and chapters — that should never have survived the first draft. It is this sort of silly-willyness sprinkled throughout that drags Soul Boom to a literary nether level. It’s unfortunate, because there are some moving passages in the book and Wilson, despite admitting that he hasn’t read some of the books from which he quotes, has clearly thought deeply about the material.

In one chapter, he writes about the importance of pilgrimages and describes his family’s trip to visit the Shrine of Bahji in Israel, where the founder of the Baha’i faith is buried. After sitting on the floor and praying there for over an hour, Wilson writes, he found that his world had shifted. “It’s like when you hit your windshield wipers and spritz the glass in front of you and all of a sudden you realize just how dirty it had been. Just like that, you can see everything outside your car with a renewed clarity. It was like that. Only in my heart,” he writes.

Without proselytizing, Wilson rues the way in which our culture has turned away from words like “sacred,” “holy” and “reverence” and is losing touch with religious traditions of all kinds, to include those practiced by Native Americans. “In fact, my life in 2023 Los Angeles is pretty much lacking in anything remotely sacred or spiritually connected. It’s all iPhones, quickly devoured sandwiches and leaf blowers. It’s texts and podcasts and emails. It’s pressured phone calls, calendars, and a nonstop newsfeed.” But he points out that the problem is not capitalism, per se. While our society is losing touch with the sacred, even businesses created for profit can be meaningful places — he gives as an example the Seattle restaurant where he and his wife had their first date, before taking up the question “What makes something sacred?”

Ultimately Wilson proposes seven pillars of a spiritual revolution, which, while not terrible, are disappointingly platitudinal and sound more political than spiritual. (They include “Celebrate joy and fight cynicism,” “Build something new; don’t just protest” and “systematize grassroots movements.” It’s all fine, in the way that fast-casual restaurants are fine, and I’ll admit to being impressed that he’s friends with noted theologian David Bentley Hart and quotes from a wide range of poetry and scholarly books. (He also includes a list of recommended reading, which is also admirably diverse.)

As celebrity books go, it’s a pleasure to find one that takes on life’s biggest questions, but there’s nothing here that seems especially revolutionary. C

Halcyon, by Elliot Ackerman (Deckle Edge/Knopf, 256 pages)

In a recent poll, fewer than 10 percent of young Americans said they were interested in military service, according to an NBC News story. This makes Elliot Ackerman one of a disappearing breed of writers, writers in the mold of Vonnegut, Hemingway and Salinger, who bring an intimacy with military life to their work.

Ackerman, a decorated Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, used his experience in his 2022 nonfiction book The Fifth Act, America’s End in Afghanistan. But in his new novel, Halcyon, Ackerman offers a more subtle slice of military history, that of the Civil War, through a protagonist who is studying postbellum attitudes at a time of dizzying biotechnological change.

The change: Scientists have just figured out how to resurrect cryonically preserved organisms — first mice, then humans. This isn’t set in the future, but in 2004, in an alternate universe in which Al Gore is president and under fire for pardoning Bill Clinton.

If this sounds mind-blowingly complex, yes, on some levels it is. But in sparse, logical prose, Ackerman has created a completely plausible universe and characters who grapple with seemingly disparate questions, such as whether it is morally right to tear down old monuments (such as the Virginia Monument at Gettysburg) and what are the unforeseen consequences of bringing dead people back to life.

The story revolves around a historian and college professor, Martin Neumann, who is recently divorced and has been granted a semester-long sabbatical to advance his research, which is inspired, in part, by the work of the late (real-life) historian Shelby Foote.

Neumann has rented a cottage on an estate in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. It turns out that the property is owned by one of the 134 people who have been recently resurrected — a World War II veteran turned prosecutor named Robert Abelson.

Neumann doesn’t know from the start — he simply thinks the nonagenarian is remarkably healthy: “His face was high-boned, his cheeks rosy and vital, his features distinct. … He was possessed by a vigor that he insisted was the result of his daily walks.”

Fortuitously, Abelson had long ago married a woman 20 years his junior, so they weren’t unusually matched. And as the couple grow closer to their tenant, Abelson’s wife suggests that Martin go meet with their physician, where he learns not only more about Abelson’s life (both pre- and post-resurrection) but also about Mary’s condition.

Meanwhile, the public, which had not known that the processes that had resurrected a brood of “Lazarus mice” had already been practiced on humans, is just now learning that human beings had also been “reborn.” In a press conference that is surreal on multiple levels, President Gore has announced that “Before death, a family would soon be able to apply to the Department of Health and Human Services for a ‘rebirth grant.’ Based on suitability — a vague criterion he did not fully define — the government would defray a portion, if not all, of the medical costs, making rebirth a possibility for ‘most any American’ …”

The resurrection storyline is fascinating enough on its own, as Ackerman’s characters work through the complexities of what this development would mean in a practical sense. At one point, for example, Ableson has to go to a Richmond courthouse to have his own death annulled, much like a marriage. His stepsons (who did not know that their stepfather was alive again until about the time the press got the story) have to mull what the news means for what they’d thought was their inheritance. And as the novel slowly reveals, there can be a troubling tension about what’s acceptable for people born, say, in 1915, and those born in 1995, when one lives in “a present that was not his own.”

But Halcyon also has a complex understory about alternative timelines — both in the past and in the present. The existence of a President Gore is one; the narrator suggests that the resurrection of the dead would not have been funded under a Republican president, and in one conversation with his daughter Ableman debates whether he owes Gore his vote by virtue of benefiting from government-funded science.

But there is also a running thread about what would have happened to America if certain aspects of the Civil War had gone differently — if, for example, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson had not died of pneumonia eight days after he was shot by his own troops, who’d mistaken him for a Union soldier. And Ackerman touches on current debates over what history is and how it should be represented. In touring a Civil War site with a fellow historian, Martin is disturbed by something his friend said: “The study of history shouldn’t be backward looking. To matter, it has to take us forward.”

In this, the novel is remarkably complex and intelligent, while retaining the aura of a science-fiction thriller.

The historian who argued that history shouldn’t be “backward looking,” also said, “Every ethicist knows that death isn’t such a bad thing. For mice. For people. Or for certain ideas.”

That is ultimately what Halcyon (the name comes from the Abelson estate) wants us to consider. While Ackerman’s no-frills prose won’t make anyone swoon, he has constructed a page-turner that doesn’t feel slickly commercial or dumbed-down, with a conclusion that is surprisingly satisfying. B+

All the Beauty in the World, by Patrick Bringley (Simon & Schuster, 226 pages)

When Patrick Bringley’s older brother died after a lingering illness, his life was upended at age 25 and so he did the only thing that made sense at the time: He applied to be a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, that hallowed institution most people simply call “The Met.”

Like a lot of us, Bringley had visited the museum as a child and had memories of being gobsmacked by a couple of exhibitions even at age 11. Looking at a Pieter Bruegel painting from 1565, he writes, “I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. … As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest.”
The opportunity to be a guard was both employment and healing, though he didn’t realize it at the time. Bringley’s brother, Tom, was two years older and a math genius who was, at the time he was stricken with cancer, studying for a Ph.D. in biomathematics (which I’d never heard of, but which is exactly what it sounds like: the use of mathematical models to understand biology). Newly wed, he’d been philosophical about his fate and rapid deterioration. (“Everybody suffers, my time. Everybody dies, my time.”) But the loss of such an extraordinary person, and the time caring for Tom for before he died, hit the family especially hard. Art of all kinds was one way they coped — reading Dickens, tacking a Raphael print above Tom’s hospital bed.

After Tom’s death, Bringley and his mother took their grief to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where his mother lost herself in a painting of Mary supporting the dead body of Jesus, a cathartic experience. “She cupped her face and her shoulders shook, and when I met her eyes, I saw she wept because her heart was full as well as breaking, because the picture inspired love in her, bringing both solace and pain. When we adore, we apprehend beauty. When we lament, we see the wisdom of the ancient adage ‘Life is suffering.’”

It was on his way back home to New York that he conceived of quitting a dream entry-level job he held at The New Yorker, where he hobnobbed with people like Stephen King and Michael Chabon, in order to stand as a sentry at the Met, which in many ways was not a dream job. (It’s so hard on the feet that the guards are given extra compensation to buy socks, and you have to work there more than a year to get a week’s vacation, the timing of which is assigned by seniority.) But working at the museum expanded his horizons in ways working penny-ante tasks for the magazine for four years had not. It connected him with the ages, and with beauty, and gave him an education as fine as — or finer than — any Ivy League school.

Bringley becomes an authority on the various pieces of art in the corridors he patrols, as well as the minutiae of what the museum contains. (He takes to counting, for example, the number of inhabitants in the paintings in any particular hall — “I will count 210 Jesuses in Section B” — and says, “If you’re wondering how I could possibly count all that, you underestimate the kind of time I have.”

In conversations with visitors to the museum, and with his coworkers, he brings us fully into the job with him, letting us see through the eyes of first-time and regular visitors the effect that the ancient art has on them. All the while, he himself is healing, not only from his brother’s death but from the stifling job and career trajectory that he had escaped. A remark from a co-worker one day is telling: “You know, it really isn’t such a bad job,” Brimley’s colleague says. “Your feet hurt, but nothing else does.”

One of the gifts of All the Beauty in the World is that you don’t need to know anything about the Met, or even about art, to enjoy the book. The best memoirs don’t just chronicle the author’s experiences; they also bring value to ours. Bringley provides an easily digestible education of some of the Met’s greatest pieces, and the museum itself, and rough illustrations show the outlines of the art. As such, this is a great book for anyone planning a visit to the museum.

But it also opens a window into why art matters, and Bringley’s account can kindle, or rekindle, an interest gone dormant. His reflections on grief will be especially poignant to anyone who has recently experienced a loss, as will his slow path to recovery.

The book spans roughly a decade, during which time Bringley marries and becomes a father, an experience he compares to the “Virgin and Child” paintings of the masters. (“How composed the Child always looks! How serene the holy parent! By contrast, the animal squirming in my arms is lusty, rude, ridiculous.”) His experience of fatherhood is a hopeful one, analogous to life: “goodness subsuming the struggles.”

He ends with some advice for the Met goer: “Come in the morning, if you can, when the museum is quietest, and at first say nothing to anyone, not even a guard. … Find out what you love in the Met, what you learn from, and what you can use as fuel, and venture back into the world carrying something with you, something that doesn’t quite easily fit in your mind, that weighs on you as you go forward and changes you a little bit.” Wise counsel from a short but memorable book. A