Category: Books

Weightless, by Evette Dionne (Ecco, 245 pages)

Are doctors who lecture their patients about their weight “fat shaming” them or “following the science”?

That’s the question at the heart of Evette Dionne’s Weightless, an account of her life as a Black woman with obesity who has had multiple health problems over the course of her often size 22 life and is now diagnosed with heart failure.

Part memoir, part journalism, Weightless explores Dionne’s struggles to fit into a society that prizes thinness even as it now demonizes “fatphobia” to the point of purging the word “fat” from Roald Dahl books.

In many ways, America has gone all in on what is commonly called “body acceptance.” Plus-size models are a thing, even making the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. Most fashion designers offer extended sizes. There’s even a movement to help overweight women avoid being weighed at doctors’ offices (you can present a card that says “Don’t weigh me unless medically necessary”).

Despite all this, our culture “hates fat people,” Dionne says. “Whether it’s Netflix greenlighting a television show that glorifies losing weight as a form of revenge or airlines enacting policies that purposefully discriminate against fat people, the world believes that we must assimilate and become smaller — not that it should become bigger to accommodate us.”

Proclaiming “Fat people aren’t a problem that needs to be solved,” she catalogs a long list of problems that fat people need to be solved. These include the indignity of flying (needing seat belt extenders and sometimes having to purchase two tickets), the unceasing rudeness of strangers (on one flight she confronts someone who was texting insults about her) and the tendency of those in the medical profession to brusquely dismiss anything that’s wrong with an obese person as something that can be solved by losing weight.

“There’s a running joke around fat people that if you go to the doctor for a sore throat, they’re going to ask you to take a blood sugar test to make sure you’re not diabetic,” she writes. (I can confirm that happens even after death, having recently heard of a case in which “obesity” was put as the cause of death of a woman in her 60s who unexpectedly died at home.)

Dionne says she set out to write the book as a way of shining a light on the biases of the culture, to “shift how we individually and collectively understand the fat experience.” She says that fat people “want, need and deserve new stories.”

That may be true, but the experiences that Dionne describes here are in fact old stories. Anyone who has grown up overweight has stories about bullies; any obese adult has stories about not being able to fit in a carnival ride, or being rejected by a potential lover because of their weight, or getting an underhanded “compliment” about weight loss that feels like a punch.

Dionne writes movingly about her assorted embarrassments and outrage in ways that could theoretically help other people be more compassionate, but the reality is, the cruel people she describes aren’t the ones who would read this sort of book, unless it was assigned. Her audience, her tribe, are those who have walked in her shoes.

As much as I empathize with Dionne, having lived through some versions of experiences she describes, I found it difficult to embrace her premise, which is that “Weight discrimination is as serious and widespread as the issue of ‘obesity’ itself.”

The bulk of medical research suggests otherwise.

There are those who have argued that overweight people can be just as metabolically healthy as those who are of what doctors deem “normal” weight, or those who are underweight, especially if they exercise. But Dionne is not making this argument. In fact, from her opening page, in which she declares “I am in heart failure,” she establishes that she is not a healthy person, and her problems are not only physical; she also has battled extreme anxiety and depression.

She writes, in a chapter about wanting to become a mother, “There’s no doubt I will be a fat mother, just as my mother was a fat mother” and also, “I will be a chronically ill mother, who will often have to prioritize my own health needs above the immediate needs of my children.”

She also acknowledges the ways in which her life became easier after she lost some weight after becoming ill, but says that in some ways this made her sad.

“Whenever I discuss what heart failure has done and continues to do to my body … my feelings are cast aside as people gush about how good I look. ‘You’re beautiful now’ is a common refrain. ‘You’re so small’ is another. What I also hear is: heart failure might have cost you, but sickness has also granted you something more important than your aches and pains.”

There is heart-rending truth here, and much pain bravely revealed.

But the book would have benefited from a chapter in which Dionne considered the ways in which the doctors she dismisses might be right — that obesity, not weight discrimination, is the biggest problem for people who are seriously overweight, that in fact, her obesity might have been responsible, at least in part, for many of her problems.

That is not to say that cruelty is ever justified, and I personally think she should have “accidentally” spilled a cup of water or coffee on the texting guy’s phone. And no, no one needs a diabetes test when they visit a doctor for a sore throat. But there is some reasonable middle ground when the subject is obesity, or at least there needs to be. Right now, it’s all finger-pointing and name-calling even as Americans keep getting larger and sicker.

As likable as Dionne is (but for some revelations that are truly TMI), disappointingly, Weightless breaks no new ground. B-

The Moon Over the Mountain, by Atsushi Nakajima, illustrated by Nekosuke (Vertical, 56 pages)

The Moon Over the Mountain is the second entry in publisher Kodansha’s “Maiden’s Bookshelf” collection, which presents acclaimed short stories from Japanese literature in illustrated collectible volumes.

First published in 1942, “The Moon Over the Mountain” is the most well-known work by writer Atsushi Nakajima. The story is set in 8th-century China where a ferocious man-eating tiger stalks the roads at night. When a government official decides to take a perilous nighttime journey, he discovers there is more to this mad beast than meets the eye. The story is more introspective than action-packed, delving into emotions and ambitions people would rather keep buried.

The physical book is small, but the cover will draw a potential reader in. There is thoughtful design with some beautiful typography and a good preview of illustrator Nekosuke’s art style. The illustrations have a distinct mood to them with deep reds and blacks, reminiscent of journeys along unlighted roads in the dead of night. When there is contrast, it is in the vibrant hues of nighttime feline eyes. The stark contrast of red and white is a subtle representation of the story’s themes with red as the character’s animal nature versus white as human reason and morality. The human character designs themselves are androgynously delicate with large doll eyes and long flowing hair, and many of the pieces explore the melding of man and beast. They circle around each other like an ouroboros, never fully accepting or rejecting their opposing nature.

Some readers may find themselves confused when reading, thinking the art is an exact representation of the story, trying to match the words and the images together, but it becomes the artist’s interpretation of the themes of the story which may not mesh with what the reader has in mind. In that light, while the tiger is the heart of The Moon Over the Mountain, illustrator Nekosuke seems to have a penchant for cats as many illustrations feature all varieties of domestic cats. As the narrative progresses, it becomes important how the man-eating tiger came to be. The meaning would be different if it were only a common house cat yowling into the night, so having them featured almost feels like a distraction. Also hindering the presentation of the story is the porcelain beauty of the artwork, so detailed and unblemished it almost feels sterile. As the story progresses and the reader learns more about why the tiger prowls the roads at night, the perfection is unable to carry the weight of the character’s anguish.

There is also a layout aspect of the book that divides the writing from the illustrations. Some page spreads are completely devoid of art, and for a book of little more than 50 pages this is noticeable. The pages are not left plain white but are instead in bold colors of black and gold fitting with the tiger theme. This design choice keeps the text impactful, but it still feels like something is missing. The detailed illustrations using different patterns thematically repeat throughout the story, so it would not seem too far off to have some of those patterns run across the empty spreads, tying the text and art together.

Issues aside, what pushes the book into the worth-reading category is the story itself. The closest piece of writing to compare it to would be Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” The Moon Over the Mountain does not have the grotesque imagery of “The Metamorphosis,” but the human condition presented is equal in ugliness. Both have the existential theme of what it means to fall short of society’s and one’s own expectations of living a meaningful good life. A man-eating tiger is no hero, but in The Moon Over the Mountain he is no villain either.

Scanning through different book marketplaces there does not seem to be a lot of Atsushi Nakajima’s writings circulated in the United States, and rarely does such an out-of-the-way story get such a thoughtful presentation, making this version of The Moon Over the Mountain unique and worth delving into. B

— Bethany Fuss

Dinner with the President, by Alex Prud’homme (Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages)

Before this week, if you’d asked me to share a single detail of the presidency of William Howard Taft, I would have struggled to come up with anything other than that he was also a chief justice and was said to have gotten stuck in the White House bathtub.

The bathtub story isn’t true, so I only would have gotten one thing right.

But having read Alex Prud’homme’s delightful Dinner with the President, I can now riff on obscure presidents with the ease of Doris Kearns Goodwin. That’s because Prud’homme has figured out how to make American history fascinating: tell stories connecting it to food. If my old high school history textbook, The American Pageant, is still in use, Dinner with the President should replace it immediately.

Subtitled “Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House,” this is really a foodie’s guide to American history, and despite the suggestion otherwise, it’s not all about the meals served at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, Prud’homme, the great-nephew of Julia Child (and co-author of her autobiography My Life in France) takes readers from George Washington spooning mutton stew into his almost toothless mouth in Valley Forge in 1777, to Rosalyn Carter getting tense Israeli and Egyptian diplomats to mingle at Camp David in 1978 by putting elaborate desserts in different rooms, to the hearty homemade soups that Ronald Reagan shared at his California ranch with Nancy.

“Hardly frivolous, a meal at the White House is never simply a meal: it is a forum for politics and entertainment on the highest level,” Prud’homme writes.

Smartly, Prud’homme begins at “the dinner table where it happened” — the famous repast Thomas Jefferson arranged to soften tensions between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison as they fought over the structure of the new government. The underpinnings of the Compromise of 1790 were already in the works, but Prud’homme describes in mouth-watering detail the fabulous meal that significantly contributed to saving the still vulnerable republic. (It wasn’t just “sausage being made” as the Hamilton musical says.)

Jefferson, Prud’homme notes, had been the ambassador to France and was “a skilled host who understood how to use food and drink to build political consensus.” He was both a foodie and an oenophile, and presided over a multi-course meal that included truffles simmered in chicken stock, white wine and cream; beef braised in wine, brandy, tomatoes and herbs; a green salad dressed in wine jelly; and vanilla ice cream (a rarity at the time) in puff pastry — and of course several bottles of fine wine and Champagne.

The men could “barely look at each other” when the night began, but they stood no chance of remaining angry after a palate cleanser of meringues and macaroons; really, who could? Similarly, nearly 200 years later, Ronald Reagan dined privately with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev to develop a friendly rapport two years before he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” at the Berlin Wall and the two men signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Not every administration gets the attention given to Reagan, Carter, Kennedy and the first presidents. Of 46 presidents, just 26 are featured, because they had the most compelling anecdotes, Prud’homme says.

And some who were included got short shrift: George H.W. Bush, for example, is allotted just four pages and a paragraph, some of it a tad disdainful, as Prud’homme chastises the elder Bush for his famous diatribe against broccoli (“Not only did Bush send a message to the children that vegetables are not important, but outraged broccoli farmers sent ten tons of their crop to Washington D.C. in March 1990”) and suggests his penchant for pork rinds and beef jerky might have been politically calculated to win working-class voters.

When researching this book, Prud’homme had ample resources, including his great-aunt’s 1968 TV special White House Red Carpet with Julia Child and detailed journals of the Founding Fathers. Curiously, it was more difficult to get information from recent White House occupants; no living president or former president or first lady agreed to talk about food, and Henry Haller, the chef for five presidents between 1966 and 1987, died while Prud’homme was writing the book, during the pandemic.

Regardless, the book is richly detailed all the way from Washington’s lodge at Valley Forge to Donald Trump’s 2019 fast-food banquet for the Clemson University football team, which won the NCAA championship that year and was fed Domino’s, Wendy’s and McDonald’s at the White House. While Trump was excoriated on social media, Prud’homme wrote, “The president had divined something primordial: we humans are wired to feel kinship with people who like to eat the same things we do.”

What then, should we make of Dwight Eisenhower, who once made a stew of squirrel meat, potatoes and beans on a camping trip; and Taft, who liked turtle soup and roasted possum?

Well, they were products of their time, and let’s be thankful that time has passed, and that the cold and hungry members of the Continental Army for the most part stayed loyal to Washington in that miserable winter of 1777 when they survived on something they called “fire cakes” — “patties of flour and water with a dash of salt, if they could find it, formed into sticky cakes, smeared over stones, and baked in glowing embers.”

The foodie history of America, in other words, wasn’t all wonderful when it came to the actual food. But Prud’homme’s account is as engrossing a history book as you’ll likely read. Also, there are recipes, including Andrew Jackson’s inaugural orange punch (which resulted in drunken revelers surging through his house), Woodrow Wilson’s morning health tonic (grape juice and raw eggs) and Abraham Lincoln’s gingerbread men, also called ginger crackers. Bon appetit. A+

Ms. Demeanor, by Elinor Lipman (Harper, 304 pages)

I’ve never before finished a book and thought, “That was delightful,” but that’s the phrase that kept running through my mind as I transitioned from the fictional world of Ms. Demeanor to the bleak reality of New Hampshire in winter. It was a bright spot in a string of cold, gray days, and it’s a step up from the typical beach read romance, with a unique plot, witty writing and fun, well-developed characters.

Protagonist Jane Young, a spunky, sassy lawyer, is under house arrest for public indecency, having been caught on camera by her nosy neighbor as she was enjoying an intimate moment with a coworker on her semi-private rooftop.

This house arrest leads to Jane meeting an amusing cast of characters, including cute, age-appropriate Perry Salisbury, whom she learns from her doorman is also under house arrest, also for a white-collar crime. (I said it was a unique plot, not necessarily a believable one — regardless, a nice change from the average fictional meet-cute.) I like that Perry is just a normal dude. In many chick-lit-type novels, the male characters who end up with the female protagonist are often portrayed as pompous jerks who eventually show that they have a kinder, softer side worth loving, or as friendly next-door-neighbor types (as opposed to an actual neighbor, a la Perry, who is neither annoyingly friendly nor a pompous jerk). He’s a great foil to Jane, pretty chill and tolerant compared to her less relaxed, quicker-to-anger vibes.

Lipman’s minor characters are well-developed and quirky. There’s Mandy, another building dweller Jane introduces herself to, because why not, being stuck there for six months, and there are Dani and Krzysztof, whom Jane meets because of their relation to the old woman who called the cops on her. Even Perry’s parents are hilarious, his mom especially, being all posh and snotty but also likable somehow.

This book features a lot of relationships of convenience. Jane and Perry’s relationship is transactional at first, starting with food — Jane is trying her hand at making food from the 1800s and posting her cooking videos on TikTok, and she agrees to make meals for Perry as well, which gets her a bit of a paycheck and helps him curb his fast-food habit. That quickly transitions to a friends-with-benefits situation.

Dani and Krzysztof, meanwhile, are looking for green cards through any means necessary so they don’t get deported back to Poland. They ask Jane to hook Krzysztof up with anyone she knows who might want to get married, like perhaps her twin sister Jackleen, who is saved from the absurdity of even considering that plan because when Jane mentions it to Mandy — a quirky woman who apparently has no qualms with marrying someone, anyone, because her biological clock is ticking — Mandy jumps on the opportunity.

Some of Ms. Demeanor’s plot seems to go off the rails at times. For example, there’s a possible murder situation that isn’t really resolved — but that didn’t bother me at all because a resolution wasn’t really the point. The whole cooking on TikTok thing, which Jane is doing because for some unknown reason her sister has been asking her to for years, was kind of pointless. Jane cooking for Perry would have made just as much sense without that, though it may be more that I don’t understand how people use TikTok. Like, she’s making very old-school foods while complaining about her current house-arrest situation — why would anyone care? But my teenage kids tell me it’s normal to follow random people doing random things. My daughter was just watching a total stranger getting ready for a first date while talking about the guy’s red flags. So, there’s that.

The easy, witty writing made me want to keep reading no matter which storyline Lipman was on. Plus, it’s a quick read with those deliberately short chapters that make a book hard to put down (just one more chapter, I thought many times). I think the readability is one of the reasons it’s so delightful. Sure, there’s no going back to read over gems of sentences; this isn’t Shakespeare by any stretch of the imagination. It’s fast-paced and fun and at no point trying to be a contender for a Pulitzer Prize. So if you’re looking for serious, this isn’t it. B

The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (268 pages, William Morrow)

In the windswept snow-packed emptiness of a place so remote it can only be accessed by helicopter is the Northern Institute, an abandoned research facility. Its staff has suddenly left under mysterious circumstances, requiring the employment of three caretakers tasked with keeping the six-story building functional.

Sound like your job? No? Keep reading. It will.

The light-hearted novel is a satirical take on the modern workplace, from the mind-numbing and largely unimportant tasks that can disproportionately consume a workweek, to the multitiered and often useless health plans offered by large employers, to mediocre supervisors obsessed with maintaining control.

The supervisor here goes by one name, presumably his surname, Hart. Like his two-person team, Gibbs and Cline, he seems to have come to his job with little information; he doesn’t even have a good sense of where he is, having fallen asleep during the helicopter ride.

All Hart knows is that provisions and instructions will be delivered once a week by helicopter, and that while the work is simple, he has a protocol to follow, and follow it he will, even though he often feels disrespected by underlings who aren’t appreciative enough that he provides them coffee and the opportunity for “light socializing” each morning before getting down to work.

Calling their tasks “work,” however, is a stretch. It is more like busy work — things given a person to do only so they have something to do. One week, for example, they are tasked with sitting in all the chairs in the building, ostensibly to test their structural integrity; another week, they measure the flatness of the tables by seeing if golf balls roll across them. The work is so boring, as are the surroundings, that Hart has trouble keeping up with the passage of time; he doesn’t know how long he has been there or what holidays have passed. The only remotely interesting thing that happens is when one morning Cline looks outside the window on a particularly windy day and spots it: “the thing in the snow.”

It’s unclear what the thing is as, like everything else, it’s covered with snow. But Hart, Gibbes and Cline all agree that it hadn’t been there before. And because of some mysterious “snow sickness” that had befallen former employees at the facility, they have been instructed not to go outside. So they have no way to check it out.

There is only one other person on the premises: Gilroy, a researcher who was part of the previous team and for reasons unknown got left behind to continue working on some project regarding “the cold.”

“Condescending, pretentious, and often outright batty, he’s the kind of person who eschews empathy with such vigor that distaste is not just warranted, it is the correct evolutionary response,” is how Hart, the narrator, describes him. Gilroy knows nothing about the thing in the snow, either.

Nor does the “health specialist” who arrives to administer the team’s regularly scheduled checkups (and haircuts) later. In one of the more hilarious sequences of the books, the health specialist informs them that they are all on the “basic” health care plan, as opposed to the premium or platinum. The eye chart, therefore, only contains five letters, whereas the premium plan has 15 and the platinum plan the whole alphabet. Also, “The thermometer’s readings come only in multiples of three, but we have the option to upgrade to the premium option of whole numbers or the platinum level, which includes decimals.”

But that is just a comic aside. The mystery before our caretakers, of course, is what the thing in the snow is, and how they can find out.

The limitations of the characters and their surroundings necessarily immerse the reader into the blandness of their days; we’re redeemed only by Hart’s occasional dry wit and sardonic observations. But then there are small, strange mysteries that unfold, like cryptic messages Hart and Cline find written under tables. It’s as if the most trivial dialogue from the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was inserted into the TV series Lost.

Meanwhile, because the Northern Institute was a thriving research facility at one time, surely it’s possible that the caretakers are themselves being studied as they numbly perform the assigned rituals this week. Maybe the thing in the snow is a test of their compliance? Or is it something more sinister?

It would be wrong to classify The Thing in the Snow as a mystery or a thriller; it’s much too sly for that, and the author, unlike his narrator, doesn’t seem to be taking any of this too seriously, even when he’s skewering the modern workplace.

What he does take seriously is the cold. A resident of Des Moines, Adams is as acquainted with the miseries of cold as New Englanders are. When at one point the characters are asked if they’d rather have a pay raise or the temperature in the building elevated a few degrees, they opt for the warmth, which is entirely plausible this time of year. The book is droll like that and doesn’t ask much of the reader but to come along for the ride — under a blanket, of course. It’s a pleasant distraction for a couple of winter evenings. B

The Matter of Everything, by Suzie Sheehy (Knopf, 320 pages)

If you’ve been on this planet for more than two decades and have decent health insurance, you’ve probably had an X-ray at some time. However, you may not have given any thought as to how the technology came about unless it was required on a test.

Suzie Sheehy, an Australian physicist, is here to forgive and redeem the incurious with a surprisingly engaging book that delves into 12 experiments that radically upended the world. While “read a science book by a particle accelerator physicist” might not be on your bucket list, The Matter of Everything is an easily digestible dive into advances in physics that will be especially useful for anyone who struggles to define a quark.

Sheehy didn’t plan on a career in physics; she was studying civil engineering in college when she was invited to an overnight astronomy event at the Leon Mow Dark Sky Site not far from Melbourne. (Dark sky preserves are places where you can see much more of the galaxy because of the absence of artificial light.)

There Sheehy saw Saturn’s rings and the arc of the Milky Way and experienced a recalibration of what she thought about the universe. She writes, “I wanted to know how it was all connected and how I was connected with it. I wanted to know if there really was a theory of everything. I felt deeply that all this mattered, that it mattered to me as a human, that understanding this was a goal big enough that if I managed it even a little bit, I’d not have wasted my blip of time as a conscious being.”

She changed course and began studying particle physics — how particles form, transform and behave. And her interest in connectivity eventually helped to shape this book, as she connects historical dots to show how some of the most ground-breaking advances have come about not from the “lone genius theorizing at a desk” but by stubborn and curious scientists who were determined to figure out something that stumped them.

Take, for example, the X-ray.

A German scientist named Wilhelm Rontgen was working with cathode rays (observable streams of electrons) when he noticed a green-colored glow coming from the other side of his lab. The light disappeared when he turned the cathode ray tube off, but remained when he covered the tube with black paper. He became obsessed with figuring out what was happening, and discovered that the strange light would leave shadows of what it passed through.

Rontgen had dark hair that protruded from his forehead “as if he were permanently electrified by his own enthusiasm” and was a shy loner ill-prepared for the fame that would find him when he began telling the world about the discovery of this new kind of ray, to which he assigned the letter “X,” to denote “unknown.”

While conducting experiments, “He spent seven intense weeks in his lab, occasionally being reminded to eat by his wife, Anna Bertha.” He used his wife’s hand to test what happened when the ray passed over a human limb and an image of her bones and wedding ring showed up.

Writes Sheehy: “According to legend, when Bertha saw the bones in her hand, she exclaimed, ‘I have seen my death!’ and never set foot in her husband’s lab again.”

Rontgen soon realized how transformative his discovery would be in medicine, and he made the first public presentation of his findings to a medical society. It marked the first time that doctors would be able to see inside the human body without cutting it; within a year, X-rays would be used to find shrapnel in wounded soldiers on battlefields.

Of course, with one being born every minute, as P.T. Barnum would say, X-rays quickly seized the public imagination in non-medical ways. “X-ray-proof” underwear and “X-ray glasses” would soon be for sale by unscrupulous entrepreneurs.

Sheehy (or her editors) was smart to begin with the X-ray experiment, since that is something to which most people can easily relate. She has to work a bit harder to get us to care about the origins of, say, cloud chambers or the linear accelerators that led to the discovery of quarks. But she is a good storyteller despite her formidable intellect and weaves in the sort of detail that humanizes her subjects and holds our attention.

We might not, for example, be as intrigued by the origin of the nuclear theory of the atom until we learn that it was developed by a man who believed that “swearing at an experiment made it work better” and thus cussed his way into changing what we previously believed about the composition of atoms.

Or that technology that dates historical artifacts was developed, in part, because contemporary physicist Charles Bennett bought an $80 violin at a New York flea market and was determined to find out if it was a famed Stradivarius instrument made in Italy.

This is not to say that the entire book is riveting to people who aren’t conversant in physics. For the science-impaired, it can go from fascinating to bewildering in the span of 10 seconds. I have lived many decades on this planet without once using “muon” in a conversation and don’t expect that to change even though I now know that muography is a thing and muons are apparently going to assure the structural integrity of our bridges in the future.

And while I understand in principle the importance of the Large Hadron Collider, which in 2012 confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson particle, I take it on faith, much like I take on faith that my air fryer will not explode no matter how loud it gets.

Disappointingly, Sheehy did not help me to wax eloquent on these subjects, nor did she convince me that with just a little more study I, too, could explain the Standard Model of particle physics to an innocent bystander.

That said, I am a little bit smarter for having read this book, my eyes having been opened to many more things that I know embarrassingly little about. There are about 13,000 particle physicists in the world, and they are just like you and me except that they spend their time using ion traps to mimic particle accelerators. Whatever that means. B