• Becoming Eve by Abby Chava Stein **** (of 4)

    September 14, 2024

    If ever there were an experiment, god forbid, that could demonstrate how we are born with inbred sexual identities and sexual predilections, this would be it. Abby Stein was born a boy into an ultra-orthodox Jewish community. Her fundamentalist sect of Judaism is so strict that all members are forbidden to access the internet and are barely taught the fundamentals English, learning Yiddish and Hebrew instead. Young boys are committed to a lifetime of Torah study. They attend Yeshivas (religious schools) 10 hours a day (or more) six days a week and learn no science or social studies and barely any of the other topics required by state curricula. They live the lives of their 18th century ancestors down to the clothes they wear, the language they speak, and the foods they eat, utterly and completely apart from mainstream America.

    And yet from the days of her earliest memories, without any knowledge that homosexuality even existed, no less such a phenomenon as transgenderism, Abby knew without question that she was a girl. She was raised as a boy, had a penis, eventually grew a beard, and fathered a child, and yet she always knew she was a girl. Becoming Eve is an extremely well told story of escaping fundamentalist Judiasm and a male body and the accompanying losses that come with such a transition. It also confronts the notion headon that any amount of grooming of young people might persuade someone to change their gender (take that Ron DeSantis and your fellow Book Banners), nor any degree of counseling could reverse someone’s sexual identity. If you were faced with years of counseling to the contrary, would you change your gender?

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  • Feh: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander *** (of 4)

    September 14, 2024

    Feh, roughly translated from Yiddish, means yuck. It’s what you might say to yourself upon opening a tupperware container of leftovers that has sat on your counter unattended for two weeks. It is also how the author, Shalom Auslander, sees the world. Political divisions, internet conspiracy theories, twitter, climate change, systemic racism, indifference toward the homeless and dispossessed, Covid, and a news cycle of doom that spins every faster are all Feh. Everything about Auslander’s life is Feh. On the upside, Auslander is laugh-aloud funny. Intermittently, he is also a brilliant philosopher, literary critic, and analyst of religious dogmas. He drops pearls of wisdom so delicately they land gently upon felt cushions and simply lie there glowing. Then he has you laughing. There’s a rimshot for a well-timed joke every few pages. If only the package was not such a mountain of unrelenting depression.

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  • Burn Book by Kara Swisher ** (of 4)

    July 12, 2024

    You can take my review with a grain of salt: everyone else loves this book. Swisher has been reporting on advances in technology since the first personal computers hit the market. She has spent considerable time with Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk. She predicted that everything, everywhere, would be digitized, and then monetized. Burn Book is a history of the PC, iPod, iPad, iPhone, Google, and so on. She also reminds us of all the epic failures. Anyone recall My Space? Netscape? Vonage? Are Snapchat and Twitter going to be around a lot longer?

    The point of her book seems to be to make sure that readers are fully aware that all the tech bros are awkward, juvenile, and male. She also wants us to know that she is, and always has been, smarter than all of them. The one distinction seems to be that she knows she is arrogant and condescending, unlike most of her subjects. It is a little bit fun to relive the ups and downs of tech throughout our lifetime, but Swisher doesn’t offer any insight. So who cares if she tells us how smart she is and how socially inept the bros are?

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  • The Pigeon Tunnel by John LeCarre *** (of 4)

    November 23, 2023

    Nearing the end of a long and terrifically prodigious career as a writer, Le Carre assembled here the true events that undergird his novels. He revels in his encounters with world leaders and events of the 20th century. He meets Yasser Arafat amidst heavily armed bodyguards, dines with Soviet exile Andrei Sakharov, skis with the actor Alec Guinness, takes a field trip to meet African warlords, hob knobs with KGB intelligence officials, tours the killing fields of Cambodia, interviews jailed terrorists, kvetches at length about his low-life father, and generally downplays his early days as a spy for British intelligence as being insignificant.

    Every one of his stories is compelling, and quite often humorous, for their air of authenticity and authority. Each vignette is assembled with the care and precision of a master novelist. Yet, because Le Carre has passed his entire life as a fabulist — first as a spy and then as a novelist — lingering above each tale is a question of whether every event is reconstructed with full honesty. Near the end of the book, Le Carre hints that he is not a totally trustworthy storyteller, and a posthumously published biography claims that Le Carre used his skills as a liar and deceiver to philander with multiple mistresses. But, you know what? It doesn’t matter: The Pigeon Tunnel is a great read. The audiobook is read by the author, who is a master of impersonations, bringing his counterparts to life as he meets them one by one.

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  • Homegrown by Jeffrey Toobin ** (of 4)

    October 27, 2023

    Toobin can be a captivating writer; he is one of the greats at uncovering the backstories of a variety of criminals and noteworthy trials: OJ Simpson, Patty Hearst, Donald Trump, the Gore vs. Bush election, Bill Clinton, and the make-up of the Supreme Court.

    Which is why it is surprising that he missed the mark with this book. No question that Timothy McVeigh was one of America’s most successful and by Toobin’s accounting, one of its first domestic terrorists. On April 19, 1995 he drove a truck bomb to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and blew it up, killing 168 people including 19 children in the building’s daycare facility.

    He was motivated by rightwing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and the conspiracy theories that circulated amongst politicians. Shock jocks and their supporters pedaled lies about government overreach and suggested in rather stark terms that only patriots and other defenders of the second amendment could save the nation. Toobin draws a direct and clear line from McVeigh to the treasonous revolutionaries that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Men and women who attacked the Capitol were also spurred forward by a new generation of right-wing conspiracists and a new generation of communication, social media, but recycled the same dogmas that led to McVeigh.

    It is an important arrow pointing at how dangerously thin the line is between election deniers, second amendment fanatics, Newtown skeptics (Alex Jones acolytes) and their proclivity toward violence.

    But Toobin makes two mistakes. The first is subtle. He implies that McVeigh was the first right-winger of his ilk, overlooking McCarthyism, Silver Shirts, American Nazis, the KKK, and White Supremacists some of whom have been around since colonists considered Native Americans subhumans. The line leading to January 6 is twisty, but continuous, and a lot longer than Toobin is willing to admit. In a single toss away line he points to the Tulsa Race massacre of 1921 as having killed as many as died in Oklahoma.

    The first half of the book is a thorough biography of Timothy McVeigh from birth to bombing with thorough detailing of the years, months, days, and minutes leading up to the bombing. Then, because he cannot resist describing courtroom proceedings, Toobin repeats everything we have already learned as it was presented by prosecuting and defending attorneys. One recounting, or half the book, would have been enough.

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  • How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker **** (of 4)

    October 7, 2023

    Jerald Walker is a Black professor at a prestigious Boston college. He lives in an overwhelmingly upscale Boston-adjacent community, and on the surface would appear to have put considerable distance between his childhood days in the ghettos of Chicago and the present day. Yet, as he chronicles his daily experience as the one person who can be identified from a distance as “other” in an otherwise liberal setting, not all is well.

    Walker’s essays are short, often funny, and almost always leave you with an underlying feeling of anxiety. When Walker’s child is accused of being “stinky” in elementary school, Walker wonders if the accusation borne of home-taught racism, and does he already need to explain to his son what he is about to experience, or just a schoolyard taunt? When Walker shops at his neighborhood Whole Foods, white women instinctively seal up their purses, pull them from their shopping carts, and draw them close to their bodies. When his child suffers a seizure, and then another, and he sits in a panic in the ER for an eternity, while others appear to be treated with greater speed, is it because his is the only Black family waiting, because by rules of triage, there really isn’t much to worry about?

    This book was nominated for the National Book Award for good reason. The author makes us tighten up our shoulders with every page and we have to recognize that the fear he has engendered in us, accompanies him all the time.

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  • The Art Thief by Michael Finkel **** (of 4)

    September 19, 2023

    The book opens by letting readers know that Stephane Breitwieser is probably the most successful art thief that has ever lived. He has been captured and some of his stolen art recovered. Because we know what has been done and who did it at the very beginning, subtler questions become the subject of the book. The first question of how he accomplished art thefts across Europe on three of every four weekends for years on end. Second is why? Breitwieser never sold anything he stole. He simply stored it in his one room flat and adored it. Art, he said, brought him unfathomable joy. Evidently, so did theft.

    But even subtler questions are on offer as this tight little book moves along. How is the value of art determined? If Breitwieser’s collection was worth upward of $2 billion, according to whom? If a private collector buys a rare masterpiece and hides it from the public in his bedroom is that so different from Breitwieser’s crimes? Most vexing of all is the definition of stolen art. Were Breitwieser’s thefts any more criminal than the British Museum’s acquisition of the Elgin Marbles or rare objects taken from Egypt’s tombs? Are millionaire collectors who fail to complete thorough investigations of an object’s provenance purchased from a dealer who might not have asked all the right questions any less culpable?

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  • Grandma Gatewood’s Walk *** (of 4)

    August 2, 2023

    In 1955, when the Appalachian Trail (AT) was still in its infancy, Emma Gatewood walked its full length, 2050 miles from Mount Oglethorpe, Georgia to Mount Kathadin, Maine. She was 67 years old, a great grandmother, and did it solo. Her 11 adult children only found out after she was gone for several weeks and had already walked 800 miles.

    What is most striking about her walk is not her age nor intrepidity, though her courage and fortitude were boundless, but rather how simple she made it all seem. She sewed her own knapsack and filled it with less than 20 pounds of stuff. She hiked in sneakers and dungarees and slept on the ground on piles of leaves when she couldn’t find a lean-to. Almost without exception, whenever she appeared on someone’s doorstep, strangers welcomed her and fed her. Everything about her hike seemed matter-of-fact, because that was Gatewood’s attitude: put one foot in front of the other, a useful philosophy for living.

    It is hard to believe there was a time in America when hikers did not bear high-tech equipment or post selfies from every peak. It is just as hard to remember a time when a bedraggled stranger could arrive at someone’s door and expect to be offered a meal, a shower, and a bed.

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  • Taste: My Life Through Food *** (of 4)

    July 3, 2023

    Beginning with his childhood in the 1960s suburbs of New York City and continuing through the pandemic, Tucci traces his own growth as an eater, cook, actor, and professional name-dropper. His mother, obviously an exceptional Italian cook, introduced him to the joy of eating and the power of a home cooked meal to bring people together. His book covers the same decades that Americans discovered food-ism, initiated by black & white transmissions of Julia Childs, an early influencer on the young Stanley.

    Tucci’s recounting of family conversations before, during, and after meals feels universal, and are hysterical. Take your time to savor the interaction of Tucci’s adult sister and their mother, now a grandmother, as each, tries their hardest to offer food as a proxy for love to the other. Mother and daughter are confronted by the other’s obstinate refusals to accept, even so much as a small package of cheese. “Why, should I take this?” they each retort at some point during a prolonged and testy conversation. “I have plenty of food of my own, already at home.”

    Tucci’s descriptions of his favorite foods made me want to convert to Italian on the spot, and for a while, pushed me toward becoming an unapologetic carnivore. Until, that is, his description of slaughtering and roasting a suckling pig persuaded me to stick to cannellini beans as my primary source of protein.

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  • A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan **** (of 4)

    May 19, 2023

    Following more than 100,000 American casualties in WWI and the death of 450,000 Americans from viral influenza in 1918, most Americans roared into the 1920s with abandon. They drank, they danced to America’s indigenous musical invention – Black jazz, they smooched in the back seats of cars and in public. The backlash from Christian Nationalists was swift, brutal, and shockingly widespread across the heartland.

    By the early 20s, Indiana alone boasted more than 400,000 Klansmen, Klanswomen, and KlansKiddies. Colorado, Texas, Pennsylvania added hundreds of thousands more. The Klan grew in status and popularity under the spell of D.C. Stephenson: a fabulist with no allegiance to truth, an abuser of women, an orator who reflected the fears and desires of white Americans concerned for the purity of “their” nation, a money-hungry businessman anxious to make the next deal, a strong desire to become America’s dictator, a virulent anti-woke activist who said clearly and repeatedly that America was threatened by Jews, Catholics, foreigners, and especially Blacks, and a politician who dominated and controlled other politicians. Ultimately, Stephenson said aloud, and believed completely, that he was above the law.

    Timothy Egan never mentions any contemporary politicians with similar proclivities, but makes clear that Stephenson was as much a man of his time and place as he was a leader of it. In response to Reconstruction, the Klan and Jim Crow were born. In the 1920s, the Klan rose again. In the 1940s, as Ultra makes clear, American Nazis were more prevalent in society and in Congress than most of us realize. For those who care about the rights of racial, ethnic, sexual minorities, and others deemed unacceptable, Timothy Egan’s well-told history is a reminder that vigilance remains a necessity in America.

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