Category: Books

Our Kindred Creatures, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy (Knopf, 374 pages)

With the notable exception of factory farms, cruelty to animals is generally not tolerated in the U.S. today. Criminal penalties exist for everything from neglect to the hoarding of pets; New Hampshire’s definition of animal abuse even includes taking a colt from its mother in the first three months of life.

It’s hard to imagine, then, that just 175 years ago animal cruelty was rampant and for the most part rarely noticed or remarked upon. The change to where we are now didn’t occur gradually but was the result of a moral crusade that began in the 1860s with three New Englanders at the helm.

In Our Kindred Creatures, husband-and-wife team Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy weave together the stories of George Thorndike Angell of Massachusetts, Caroline Earle White of Philadelphia and Henry Bergh of New York, the latter of whom was said to have founded “a new type of goodness.” While many other people have argued for compassion to animals over the course of human history, these three were especially effective and their stories are remarkable.

But let the reader beware: The book is tough reading for the tender-hearted and anyone who loved the movie The Greatest Showman. Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of P.T. Barnum, it turns out, left quite a bit out.

Angell is perhaps the best-known of the three crusaders, as his name is attached to a Boston animal hospital and an animal shelter near the Massachusetts-New Hampshire state line. But it’s Bergh whose story is the most compelling. He was left a fortune by his father, which enabled him to travel as a young man. During those travels he had a moral epiphany when he watched a brutal bullfight in Spain and was horrified not just by the suffering of the animals but by the glee he witnessed in the audience by a family with young girls. Bergh came to believe that “cruelism” arises when people are entertained by animal suffering of any kind, and that human beings themselves are made morally worse by even witnessing it.

Inspired by animal-rights efforts in Europe, he came back to the U.S. and founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866. Shortly afterward, thanks to Bergh’s efforts, New York passed its first anti-animal-cruelty law and ASPCA officers were given power to issue citations and make arrests. Bergh himself took to the streets, at first going after people abusing horses, and cattle en route to slaughter. He also boarded a ship carrying sea turtles from Florida to New York and tried to bring its captain to justice. (The effort failed when the judge ruled that turtles were fish and were not subject to animal cruelty laws.)

But Bergh most famously sparred with P.T. Barnum, whose story in The Greatest Showman was shockingly whitewashed. As Barnum bought and displayed an enslaved person in his exhibits, he also had elephants and whales captured and brought to New York for display. The whales all died in short order, but none in such a grisly fashion as the two that were burned in the fire that consumed Barnum’s “museum” in 1865.

Bergh and his compatriots were operating in a time in which animals were as numerous as humans on city streets, and they were not romanticized as they are today. Their excrement and, often, carcasses, were everywhere, and stray dogs were rounded up and drowned en masse in New York and beaten to death in Philadelphia. Dogfighting and rat baiting (betting on how fast dogs could kill a collection of rats) were common and cheap forms of entertainment.

Animals were also suffering behind closed doors in more sterile environs — laboratories and classrooms where vivisection was common — and at one point Bergh sent his ASPCA agents undercover into hospitals to see first-hand what was being done, similar to the undercover operations still done by PETA today.

Word spread throughout New England about what Bergh was doing, and the ASPCA offices were visited by people hoping to launch similar efforts in their own communities. One such person was Caroline Earle White, who visited Bergh on her way home to Philadelphia after spending the summer in the Adirondacks. White, like many people drawn to the animal-abuse cause, was an abolitionist, and she went on to found the Women’s SPCA of Pennsylvania and the American Anti-Vivisection Society.

She was also instrumental in the change to a more merciful manner of killing shelter dogs — using carbon dioxide, which of course is seen as cruel today, but at the time was seen as a step up from bludgeoning a dog to death with an ax. Also, in a revolutionary shelter that White and her colleagues created, dogs were given shelter and water, “and all were fed a healthy diet of horsemeat, cornmeal, and crisped pork skin, even those destined for culling.”

A Quaker-turned-Catholic, White had been troubled seeing mules and horses struggling to pull streetcars heavy with coal. She had started changing her routes around town so that she didn’t have to endure the sight. But one of the more horrific examples of horses being literally worked to death happened in Boston in 1868, when a “sleighing horse race” took place that resulted in the deaths of both animals after they were compelled to pull 400-pound sledges from Boston to Worcester, a distance of 38 miles.

The winner died the night of the race; the other horse a few weeks later. Reading about the event compelled Angell to renew efforts on behalf of animals, pushing for a law that would prevent such abuses and starting a newspaper that would go to every town in Massachusetts with the name “Our Dumb Animals” (“Dumb” here meant mute, not stupid). The publication would endure until 1970.

Wasik and Murphy are excellent storytellers, which is no surprise — he is the longtime editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, she is a veterinarian, and their first book, 2012’s Rabid, a history of rabies, was well-received. What was surprising to me was how much of this story I knew nothing about, even as an animal lover living in New England — from the Barnum whales to a horse plague that swept the country in the 1870s to how a novel published more than a decade earlier in England, Black Beauty, came to be harnessed by Angell to galvanize compassion for horses.

The authors say they researched Our Kindred Creatures for three years; 30 would have been equally believable. They have crafted an extraordinary, though heartbreaking, story. A+ —Jennifer Graham

Not in Love,by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley, 400 pages)

Ali Hazelwood prefaces her latest book with what is, essentially, a fair-warning note to her readers: Not in Love, she says “is, tonally, a little different from the works I’ve published in the past. Rue and Eli have dealt with — and still deal with — the fallout from issues such as grief, food insecurity, and child neglect. They are eager to make a connection but are not sure how to go about it except through a physical relationship. The result is, I think, less of a rom-com and more of an erotic romance.”

Hazelwood has thus far been known by fans mainly as a rom-com writer who creates smart female lead characters and puts them in STEM-related work environments amongst other smart people and, inevitably, a male counterpoint. In Not in Love, Rue is a biotech engineer working in food science, so we’ve got the STEM setting, and we have the male counterpoint – in this case, his name is Eli, and he works for a company that’s trying to take over Kline, the company Rue works for.

The difference between Not in Love and Hazelwood’s other STEM romances is a much stronger emphasis on sexual chemistry and very explicitly written descriptions of what happens when that chemistry ignites. When Hazelwood warns readers that this is more “erotic romance” than rom-com, she’s not kidding.

But, in addition to the (plentiful) steamy scenes, everything I’ve liked about Hazelwood’s rom-coms is here too: witty banter, emotional complexity and well-drawn characters.

I love that Rue is science-smart but not unapproachable; there are plenty of relatable I-need-to-Google-this types of moments. Case in point, the book opens with Rue and her friend Tisha trying to figure out what a loan assignment is; they ask her friend’s sister, a lawyer, who doesn’t understand their lack of comprehension (“You guys are doctors,” she says, to which Tisha points out that “the topic of private equity firms and loan assignments did not come up in any class during our chemical engineering PhDs. A shocking oversight, I know….”).

Meanwhile, Rue could not be convinced to dumb down the title of her Ph.D. presentation: “A Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry Investigation of the Effect of Three Polysaccharide-Based Coatings on the Minimization of Postharvest Loss of Horticultural Crops.” Her unapologetic thought is, “I had no talent for enticing people to care about my work: either they saw its value, or they were wrong.”

Rue is unapologetic about her dating life, too. She has a “no repeats” rule, meaning one and done, no exceptions; she doesn’t want a relationship, or the emotions that go with it. That was her plan when she matched with Eli on a dating app. She didn’t expect to ever see him again, so of course he ends up at the center of her workplace drama.

Rue probably could have stuck to her no repeats rule — she’s that emotionally stunted — but Eli falls hard for her. I like that the book moves between Rue’s point of view and Eli’s, because we can see how intense his feelings, emotional and otherwise, are, compared to her internal hesitations. And yet Eli is nothing but respectful to her and her hesitations, despite his desire for more, which makes him a very likable character.

The supporting characters aren’t always likable, but intentionally so — they all have a purpose and elevate the story, and many of their interactions with Rue and Eli are hilarious, adding to the novel’s smart, sassy vibe.

The plot is intriguing and believable, as Rue tries to save her scientific work from the grasp of Eli’s company, thinking — incorrectly, of course — that they’re being greedy. More seriously, as Hazelwood points out, there are mentions of grief, food insecurity and child neglect, but it’s not as depressing as it sounds. They’re issues that Rue and Eli dealt with that still impact them as adults, but there are no heavy-handed lessons or weepy sob stories — just real, life-goes-on reminders that what’s in the past doesn’t always stay in the past, and it can take a lot of work to build trust and open your heart after it’s been hurt.

This is another winner for Hazelwood, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes their romantic fiction smart, emotional and extra spicy. Just not you, Mom, and if you do read this, please never tell me. A-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worry, by Alexandra Tanner (Scribner, 290 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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