Category: Pop

Life on Delay, by John Hendrickson (Knopf, 272 pages)

Since childhood, journalist John Hendrickson has had a severe stutter — or, as the condition is formally known, severe “disfluency.” His stutter was so pronounced that once, in a school play, he had been assigned to say three words: “place,” “sound” and “celebration,” with meaningful pauses between each word. He couldn’t do it, even when the assignment was reduced to one word. He wound up being the only kid on stage who didn’t have a speaking role.

This was one of countless embarrassments in Hendrickson’s memories about his stutter, memories that followed him into adulthood, even as he forged a career writing for respected publications like Esquire, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic. “I wish I could pinpoint the moment that shame changed from something that periodically washed over me to something I lug around every day like a backpack,” he writes in his memoir Life on Delay.

Although disfluency affected every aspect of Hendrickson’s life, it was something that wasn’t talked about by his family, at least not in productive ways. His mother took him regularly to speech-language pathologists, his father believed that it was a passing problem that he would outgrow, and his older brother cruelly made fun of him. It wasn’t until after Hendrickson wrote about Joe Biden’s speech impediment for The Atlantic in 2019 that he began a journey to acceptance and healing that is the focus of this book.

Biden has spoken often about overcoming a childhood stutter; Hendrickson called him out on the fact that it still exists in the piece, titled “What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say.” In the piece, Hendrickson wrote not only about Biden’s struggle with disfluency, but also his own. It wasn’t the first time that a moving account of stuttering caught the general public’s attention; the film The King’s Speech has done so, as well as Katherine Preston’s book Out With It. Celebrities such as John Stossel, Samuel L. Jackson, Carly Simon and Ed Sheeran have dealt with stuttering and spoken about it openly.

But Hendrickson’s account resonated, not only with the 3 million or so Americans who stutter (70 million worldwide), but also with the people who love them. His inbox quickly filled up with poignant emails from people who wanted to share their stories, in large part because they had previously felt so alone in their struggles.

Stuttering, as Hendrickson points out, can be painful not only for people with disfluency but also for those around them. (Hendrickson once was turned down for a job at a coffee shop by an owner who said the shop was “a place where customers feel comfortable.”) There will always be jerks who respond cruelly, and those who are impatient and unwilling to be uncomfortable even for a short time; Hendrickson writes of what he calls “The Look” that crosses people’s faces when they realize he has trouble communicating.

But even people who are empathetic blunder when talking to someone with disfluency. “Have you ever told a stutterer to take their time? Next time you see them, ask how ‘take your time’ feels,” Hendrickson writes. “‘Take your time’ is a polite and loaded alternative to what you really mean, which is ‘Please stop stuttering.’”

He and many other stutterers also hate when people, in an attempt to be helpful, cut them off or try to answer their own questions for the stutterer.

While it is true that around 75 percent of childhood stutters will resolve by adulthood, Hendrickson doesn’t seem to think that’s because of interventions provided by speech-language pathologists; there are 150,000 or so of them in the U.S., but only about 150 are board-certified in stuttering. Speech therapy offered to children may give them strategies and their parents hope, but most children who still stutter at age 10 will continue to do so to varying degrees throughout adulthood, he says. And he is dubious of even world-famous clinics that boast of “cure” rates exceeding 90 percent.

At some point, he says, achieving fluency is not a viable goal. He quotes a speech specialist who says that people’s lives often change dramatically not because of sudden improvement in their disfluency but because they encounter “people who cared about them, who didn’t care about the fluency of their speech, but the content of what they were saying, and expressed to them that total acceptance.”

Hendrickson writes movingly of the small indignities of stuttering which stem from things that most people take for granted — the ability to place an order at a restaurant, to record a voicemail, or even introduce yourself to another person. He quotes a fellow stutterer as saying, “I would love the ability to go around and say hi to people and not feel the world was about to end.”

But although the narrative is encased in difficulties which relatively few people experience, its broader theme is more universal: healing from childhood and family dysfunction.

While conducting interviews for the book and getting to know stutterers around the world, Hendrickson also opened the Pandora’s box of his own childhood and adolescence, going so far as to interview teachers and friends from the past about how they remembered him and how his struggles affected them. His reporting also forced him to confront his parents and brother about their mistakes in progressively difficult conversations. As such, his story is one to which many people will relate even if they don’t know anyone who stutters.

Sometimes books that bloom from popular articles seem contrived, an unnecessary expansion that does little more than make money. That’s not the case with Life on Delay, which opens a window beautifully into human struggles that often go unseen. It is the rare sort of book with the potential to make us better human beings. A

If starting (or restarting) an exercise program is one of your new year resolutions, Christopher McDougall can help you achieve it.

McDougall, a former war correspondent for the Associated Press, fell into a second career when he started writing about running. His 2011 book Born to Run had the effect of an incendiary device in the running community because it challenged the notion that runners need expensive shoes. Now he is back, with Eric Orton, for Born to Run 2.

Like the first book, which examined the athletic prowess of members of a tribe who can run for hundreds of miles without the accoutrement that most modern runners think they need, Born to Run 2 introduces us to some fascinating people, like a woman who was formerly 300 pounds but now runs regularly as a form of prayer. But this is essentially a training manual for regular people, especially people who have been told they can’t run, and people who find running tedious or hard.

McDougall argues that running is a natural state for the human body — “if it were difficult, we’d be extinct.” The earliest humans — for whom running was an occupation, not an interruption of the day — were able to survive in unforgiving circumstances not only because of their brains, but because they were able to run long distances. They weren’t faster than the animals they pursued, but since they could sweat and their prey couldn’t, they could outlast them by running until the animals collapsed. “Evolution doesn’t reward pain; it rewards joy,” the authors argue. For the modern human, “If it feels like work, you’re working too hard.”

Or running all wrong.

Most runners, even longtime ones, run wrong and in shoes that bring on injury. McDougall and Orton are particularly critical of the “squishy” shoes that are all the rage. While shoes that are padded and gel-packed may feel comfortable to stand in, they too much separate the foot from the ground, making our feet land unnaturally and preventing us from feeling the useful discomfort that should be the signal to run differently. They are equally disdainful of much common running advice:

“‘Listen to your body’ may be the only fitness advice more useless than ‘We are all an experiment of one.’ You and your body don’t speak the same language. You have no idea what each other is saying,” they write. “Your body still believes that on any given day it needs to run to find a mate, or fresh water, or a safe hideaway for the family before glowing eyes emerge from the dark.”

What advice does work? McDougall and Orton break it into seven fundamental steps: food, fitness, form, focus, footwear, fun and family. Yes, a cynic might say the sum total of the advice can be reduced to “eat less, exercise more,” but they offer counterintuitive, actionable steps to help us get to that point whether we are beginners or veteran exercisers who need a reboot.

For example, they point out that most runners focus on how they can run longer, not how they can run better (which would lead to running longer, and without injury). To run better, they maintain, takes all of 10 minutes to learn — in the comfort of your home, barefoot, with music. Your natural running form emerges when running in place, back to the wall, to songs set to a certain number of beats per minute — they recommend “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s, but they also offer other choices such as The Beatles’ “Help!” and Led Zeppelin’s “Rock & Roll.” Once you can feel how you’re supposed to run, it’s just a matter of practice out on the road or trail, they say.

They also promote a lifestyle full of what they call “movement snacks” — bite-sized stretches and movements throughout the day to keep us limber and emotionally in check. “The more you move, the more emotionally safe you’ll feel. The safer you feel, the happier and less anxious you’ll be.”

As for food, they advocate a diet heavy in sustainably sourced meat and cheese. “There is no ethical argument that can be made in support of commercial meat production,” they write, but with our carb- and sugar-rich diets today, our bodies have forgotten how to use fat as fuel, which is why so many people are obese. They prescribe a two-week “factory reset,” eating no foods that are high glycemic.

And of course, they take on running shoes, which they call “the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot.”

“If the Food and Drug Administration were in charge of running shoes, they’d be announcing a recall and yanking them off the shelves,” they write, citing a study that found people who ran in expensive running shoes bought after a gait analysis at a running-shoe store suffered five times as many injuries as people who hadn’t had that kind of “help.”

Minimalist shoes, however, had a short shelf life, and there’s little pleasure in running barefoot in New England in winter. There are some brands the authors recommend that can be ordered online, but at minimum, they recommend taking out the insole liners of your current shoes for immediate improvement. McDougall and Orton also offer advice on a number of other running topics, including best practices for running with dogs.

Some of their recommendations may be radical, but Born to Run 2 is engaging and for the most part convincing. It can be read without having read the first book, but for maximum inspiration, start with the first and proceed to the second. B+

Great Short Books: A Year of Reading — Briefly, by Kenneth C. Davis (Scribner, 448 pages)

In the early stages of the pandemic, Kenneth Davis grew tired of doomscrolling, but he wasn’t up for reading long books. As a compromise, he began to read a collection of tales set at the beginning of the Black Death in Florence, Italy, in the 14th century. It’s called Decameron, written by Giovanni Boccaccio, and its style is similar to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in that a character tells a different story each day.

Davis set about reading one of the novellas each day, which took him a little more than three months. After that, he decided to move on to short novels. Great Short Books is the culmination of this pandemic experience; it is Davis’s ode to the short novel, which he likens to a first date: “It can be extremely pleasant, even exciting, and memorable. Ideally, you leave wanting more. It can lead to greater possibilities. But there is no long-term commitment,” he writes.

Of the short novels he has read during the pandemic, Davis selected 58 to highlight in hopes that more readers will come to appreciate short fiction. Great Short Books contains the work of both famous and obscure writers from around the world; what they have in common, he says, is that they can be read in “one to several sittings” and “with careful rationing” we can read one each week. (With that, Davis reveals himself to not have small children under his care.) Generally, this means these books are anywhere from 100 to 200 pages, with some exceptions.

They aren’t just books he stumbled upon; he got recommendations from friends, librarians and people who work in publishing, and took care to make sure that the list wasn’t all from “dead white guys.” But Davis says that there was one standard that was nonnegotiable: to be included, the book had to be a pleasure to read. “I had … pledged that I would not read out of duty,” he writes.

The resulting titles include the work of George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among other famous writers, as well as authors that would only be household names to people with multiple graduate degrees in literature. (Or maybe I’m just revealing my own ignorance by being unfamiliar with the work of Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe.)

Each work gets its own chapter, set up with the opening sentences of the book. Perusing the openings of 58 lauded books is instructive in and of itself. (Some grab you at the start; others make you wonder why the eventual publisher even kept reading.)

From there, Davis composes his own CliffsNotes-type summary, promising no spoilers, then gives us a rundown on the author. He concludes each chapter with a bit of literary moralizing in a section called “Why you should read it,” and finishes with a summary of “What to read next.” For example, in the chapter on Orwell’s Animal Farm, he suggests we follow up with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s three nonfiction books (Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia) as well as one of the author’s essays, “Politics and the English Language.”

For anyone who’s already a fan of Orwell, nee Eric Blair, there’s not much to be gained here; in fact, even Davis says that his advice to read or re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four is a “no-brainer.” But then again, this is not a highbrow book, nor does it pretend to be. Davis describes himself as the “common reader” that Virginia Woolf wrote about: “He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously” as a critic or scholar, she said. “He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”

Davis writes for people who find solace and camaraderie in books of all sorts, not necessarily those that win literary prizes. He advocates for reading outside of one’s comfort zone as a form of lifelong learning, no different from taking courses at a community college. And there’s no question that anyone who reads Great Short Books will come away with a list of a dozen or more on their “to-read” list. I’ve picked out a few just by virtue of their opening sentences. (July’s People by Nadine Gordimer and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson.)

If there’s anything to quibble with here, it’s Davis’s argument that “Short novels are literature’s equivalent to the stand-up comedian Rodney Dangerfield’s signature line: they ‘get no respect.’” He says they “occupy the place of the neglected middle child of the literary world.” As an example, Davis says that critics dismissed Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach as too short (203 pages) to be a candidate for the Booker Prize in 2007. “So, a degree of critical prejudice — call it literary sizeism — exists against short fiction,” he concludes.

But does it really? Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (128 pages) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year and won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. One of the most beloved books of all time, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, is only about 31,000 words, roughly a third of the size of a typical novel.

And many books in the canon presented here argue against the author’s own words. Was there critical prejudice against Charlotte’s Web? A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? And the book we all forget existed prior to the movie: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King?

That argument doesn’t hold up over centuries; in fact, with America’s famously shrinking attention span, it’s likely short books like these are our future. From the titles highlighted here, that’s not a bad thing. B+