• Draft No. 4 by John McPhee *** (of 4)

    McPhee is one of the preeminent nonfiction craftsmen of the last half century. As a staff writer for The New Yorker his longform essays have culminated in 31 books, four Pulitzer nominations, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has summarized his decades of experience as writer, and writing instructor at Princeton, in Draft No. 4, a book that is richer than chocolate mousse: every word is at once carefully calculated and placed with seeming effortlessness so that it is best digested in small servings.

    McPhee shares universal truths such as the observation that all writers are either insecure about their writing or, falling into a second category, find that having other people read their work makes them feel insecure. You are not a writer, says McPhee, unless you experience bloc and that bloc is best overcome by typing at the top of the page, “Dear Mom, here is what I am working on now…” Assembling a first draft is painful, but second and third drafts are easier. Fourth drafts are a necessity at a bare minimum.

    It is hard to say if non-writers will get as much from this book as those who have agonized over putting together a compelling essay. For readers, rather than writers, I recommend any of his 30 other books.

  • Deep South by Paul Theroux **** (of 4)

    This is Paul Theroux’s only travel book wherein the act of traveling is intentionally easy. Unlike his other books – taking the railroad across Siberia, traveling from Cairo to Cape Town by public transport – in this one, he heads from his home in New England to the Black Belt of the southern U.S. in his personal car. He returns several times, responding to the siren, “Y’all come back, now.”

    The driving is easy but the landscape is just as poor, but less tended to by national and international aid organizations, as anyplace he has seen in Africa, and Theroux has spent years in rural Africa. What emerges from a book written in the early 2000-teens is that Black people in the southern United States continue to face economic segregation that is so severe as to leave families living in tar paper shacks, on degraded farmland, facing an inability to get loans or federal assistance more than a century after Reconstruction.

    Making the book even more unique is Theroux’s discourse on other travel writers and especially to famous southern writers, most notably William Faulkner. It’s like taking a roadtrip with a particularly informative English professor, albeit a driver who keeps asking how it is possible that former President Clinton’s multi-billion dollar foundation (and others like it) can provide aid to villages in Africa, but won’t pay attention to desperate hollers in his Arkansas backyard or impoverished cotton farmers with leaking roofs in Mississippi.

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

    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.

  • We Didn’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole **** (of 4)

    The book’s subtitle is accurate: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. This history of Ireland begins in 1958, more or less, when O’Toole was born. In the 1950s, Ireland was an Old World agrarian country: nearly three-fourths of the population worked farms. Families were enormous, schooling was negligible, the government corrupt, and the Catholic church set values, standards, mores, and rules. Economic gain was achieved, as it had been for centuries, by emigration.

    This is the story of how in just fifty years Ireland not only joined the world of modern, high-tech, gig-economy nations, but also passed some of the most anti-Catholic, pro-Abortion, pro-LGBTQ+ laws in the world. It is hard to think of another country in the world that has undergone such a transformation in so short a period while maintaining relative stability. Or done so without a revolution.

    O’Toole’s thesis is that there were, and always have been, two Irelands. On the one hand the structure of church monitored, inviolate rules on marriage, divorce, sex, sexuality, and devotion. Yet, on the other, the church itself violated nearly every one of its own rules by disappearing children born out of wedlock or into inescapable poverty into severely abusive private institutions. They beat children in regular schools. They incarcerated mothers with unwanted pregnancies. They sexually assaulted children for decades.

    Concurrently, Irish people swore allegiance to the Church, while living authentic lives reflecting the full gamut of human desires: they were sexually active, they loved people of the same sex, they sent their daughters to England for abortions, and they invented work arounds for birth control.

    The country changed in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s as government corruption and clerical abuses became too large to ignore. In essence the private lives of Irish people became public at the same time that the private abuses of church and state were finally acknowledged.

    The lessons for me is the ability to be hypocritical or to hide the truth from our eyes while it stands in plain sight is not a uniquely Irish trait. We Americans also maintain principles based upon mythology: we are supposed to be a country of equal opportunity where hard work and strong family values are all one needs to get ahead. And yet the lived experience of many Americans is riven by uncrossable class divides and deeply entrenched racism, all plainly visible if we choose to look.

    The good news is that if Ireland can make a leap into the first world of commerce and culture in just two generations — and hang onto much of its core culture — is it possible that other countries in Africa or Asia might do the same?

  • Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe ** (of 4)

    Keefe is the author of a couple of other books I thought were terrific (Empire of Pain, Say Nothing), but not this one. A staff writer for the New Yorker, Rogues is a collection of his previously published, long form essays bound together. Chapter after chapter we meet bad guys – white-collar crooks, narcos, fraudsters, arms merchants, and so on. Taken alone, each malcontent is pretty interesting, but Keefe starts each story letting you know at the outset what terrible deeds have been perpetrated. That doesn’t leave a lot of mystery while you plow through scores of pages to learn more, and more, about the same detail you were made aware of in the opening paragraphs. By the time you’ve read five or six of these stories, each one of which running out of steam about three-fourths through, you might wonder to yourself how many more bad guys you need to need to meet at one time.

  • River of the Gods by Candace Millard **** (of 4)

    By the 1860s California had absorbed an influx of hundreds of thousands of gold miners, the southern states of the U.S. had seceded, and North America’s native populations were mostly subdued, and yet in those years the only parts of the African continent known to western Europeans was its long perimeter. Ninety percent of Africa’s interior was unreliably mapped by whites. River of the Gods describes British expeditions to locate the source of the Nile River.

    An expedition into Africa’s interior required a combination of hubris, fearlessness, undaunted courage, and an unquestioning belief in racial superiority that is mortifying to behold. Without ever becoming overbearing, Millard’s description of the men, British and African, who risked their lives in search of the Nile’s origins, pits innate curiosity and urge for exploration — who doesn’t want to know the headwaters of the world’s longest river? — against the sheer audacity of believing that exploration can only be achieved by khaki-clad Britishers in charge of scores of largely nameless local guides, porters, and pack animals. Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke hiked for months at a time, enduring, no exaggeration, more than 20 diseases and fevers which left them periodically blind, paralyzed, unable to speak or swallow, and crazed for weeks and months on end. Yet they marched forward, sometimes born on litters, often to the complete detriment of their physical, mental, and social wellbeing.

    Richard Burton (left) and John Speke in an engraving by Emile-Antoine Bayard (1837-1891). Credit.

    River of the Gods is part adventure tale, part biography of key explorers, and a rendering of an age of recognition, that colonialism, though not yet finished, was nearing its climax. Africa’s interior was about to be overrun by European countries whose competition with one another would expand from the purchase of bonded human chattel to the exploitation of timber, minerals, and colonial boundaries. It is a marvelous book that can cover the intricacies of Richard Burton’s courtship with his wife, the swarming insects of Africa’s jungles, and the international race for hegemony.

  • To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron *** (of 4)

    Mount Kailash in Tibet is a mountain revered and sanctified by Hindus and Muslims. Walking around its base cleanses the soul and brings respect and understanding to our dead ancestors. The mountain is reached from Nepal into Tibet, but is now monitored by China, intent upon Sino-fying the ancient kingdom of Tibet. Colin Thubron is one of Great Britain’s preeminent travel writers, barely a hare’s breadth away from nineteenth century British explorers, bedecked in pith helmets and khaki shorts, who preceded him.

    Thubron, already in his 70s, made his own pilgrimage immediately following the death of his mother, his last remaining relative and does so bathed in introspection. He pays exquisite attention to details noting interesting stones along a path made nearly entirely of stones. He shows us prayer flags worth looking at, discarded flashlights, exhausted acolytes crawling their way toward Nirvana, icy torrents, and armed Chinese soldiers anxiously hunting for protestors. He takes notes by the light of yak-butter lanterns and provides enough religious, spiritual, and political history to inform without overwhelming. He hikes to 18,000 feet in elevation meditating on his mother, who, like him, at the end, was gasping for oxygen, and his long-lost sister buried by an avalanche at the age of 21. Thubron’s adjectives cut like razors to the heart of every description. His account on life, death, and walking should be taken one step at a time, with concentration.

  • Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan *** (of 4)

    As the 19th century was drawing to a close, the photographer Edward Curtis took it upon himself to photo-document and record ethnographic information on every Indian tribe left in America. Pause for a minute and consider the audacity of the undertaking. At a time when the majority of white Americans still considered that only dead Indians were worth celebrating, Curtis not only took up a morally opposing perspective, but was determined to meet and speak with any indigenous tribe with enough function left to be whole and visitable.

    In what would ultimately amount to a 20-year project to produce the 20 volumes of The American Indian, Curtis took 40,000 images of more than 80 tribes.

    Photographs made during the early days of photography, while staged, remain some of the most iconic and artistic of any people in any era.

    His subjects transmit history, pathos, despair, and pride directly into the camera.

    Writing a book about the visual arts is no small feat and yet, Egan, a multiple-award winning author, succeeds in telling the life story of Curtis, the obsessed photographer, and the nadir of Indian life in America. Curtis was so obsessed with the need to document The American Indian he forfeited his marriage, his home, and his income. America, however, and its Indians owe debts of gratitude to Curtis for his fortitude and to Egan for so elegantly drawing him to our attention.

  • The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr **** (of 4)

    At some level all of us who shop for food know that canned tomatoes don’t really grow in cans and that frozen shrimp don’t really come from the freezer. What Benjamin Lorr does so engrossingly well is write about the people who make the system run. He speaks with Burmese shrimpers enslaved by Thai boatmen — seriously enslaved in every sense of the word. He rides with truckers who move every item we own in our homes — try to think of an item that has not been transported by truck — and discovers an industry where nearly every driver is simultaneously on the verge of incipient bankruptcy and utterly replaceable.

    He meets brokers driven to amass new products (check out the cereal aisle to see what is new this week) and interviews entrepreneurs convinced they have the next best thing since the invention of Sriracha. Lorr explains why Fair Trade, and other certifications, are primarily designed to drive sales (to self-aggrandizing shoppers like me), but might not make much difference to growers or to the planet.

    Floor-workers in supermarkets from WalMart to Whole Foods are all subject to unpredictable hours (so no childcare planning and no second jobs) and held to just under the number of hours needed to receive benefits.

    What every hidden stage of the commodity chain has in common with the next link is the capitalistic insistence upon unlimited abundance at the lowest possible price. It all appears as tens of thousands of distinct products whose glaring availability is only possible if we treat the people who make and deliver them as interchangeable, standardized machine parts.

    No one does it more effectively than Amazon (now owner of Whole Foods). The company places haptic monitors on the bodies of its workers to ensure efficiency of motion and penalize wasted efforts, like a pause to scratch an itch.

  • In the Kingdom of Ice by Hamptom Sides **** (of 4)

    At the end of the nineteenth century, because no one had ever been there, the virtual consensus among geographers was that the North Pole resided in a warm, open sea.  One needed only to sail a ship through the ice surrounding it to reach the open ocean.  In 1879, Captain George DeLong and a crew of 30-plus sailors set off for the North Pole.  At end of the their first year, their ship, having failed to find open water, was instead frozen in place, where they remained out of communication with the rest of the world for three years. Half of their time was in near total darkness and nearly all of their days and nights were below freezing.  Finally, sheets of ice crushed and sank the U.S.S. Jeannette.  The crew walked and sailed for hundreds of days across ice floes and freezing oceans with hopes of reaching the coldest landmass on earth, the north coast of Siberia.  The  test of human physical and psychological endurance is simultaneously contemporary and otherworldly.  The relationship of European and American men to the environment, native people of the Arctic, to women, and stoicism is history not to be overlooked.