Molly McArdle

The Mythical Bill: A Neurological Memoir by Jody McAuliffe

Playwright McAuliffe’s (theater, Duke Univ.; My Lovely Suicides) brief, impressionistic memoir meditates on the life of her father, William, who died in a VA hospital when she was 20. A veteran of World War II’s Pacific theater, William developed torticollis after returning home, which caused his neck to twist and his head to turn sideways, a condition also known as wry neck. Along with this physical contortion, McAuliffe witnessed her father’s descent into periods of dementia, which grew in frequency and severity throughout her life. Searching for the origins of her father’s external and internal conditions, she intersperses her story with diary entries and letters her father wrote in his last years, positing causes that include psychoanalytic, post-traumatic, neurochemical, and genetic possibilities.  VERDICT Eloquent, elegiac, and razor sharp, McAuliffe’s memoir neither offers nor finds easy answers. This is a moving tribute to a father and a probing exploration of memory, loss, and illness.—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

[star] Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice by Karen Houppert

Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court guaranteed in Gideon v. Wainright the right to free counsel to all defendants facing the possibility of imprisonment if they were unable to procure it themselves. Today, more than 80 percent of defendants are represented by public defenders. Here, Houppert (contributing writer, Washington Post Magazine; Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military—for Better or Worse) takes up the call of Anthony Lewis’s classic Gideon’s Trumpet and examines what has changed—and what has not—in the past five decades. What results is a stinging indictment of a system of indigent defense, a widespread failure that, the author claims, dooms the nation’s poor to being represented by insufficient counsel, unwise plea bargains, and wrongful convictions. Houppert examines public defense systems in Washington, Louisiana, and Georgia and follows illustrative cases: a teenager facing vehicular manslaughter charges, a prisoner who has served nearly 30 years for a crime he did not commit, and a defendant facing the death penalty. VERDICT Fluent and fluid, Houppert’s book has all the urgency this subject demands and is a page-turner. Alternately thrilling and gut-riling, this book will grab and hold lovers of great nonfiction. Highly recommended. [For more on this title, see Editor’s Picks.—Ed.]—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

[star] In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell

Here Bell (creative writing, Northern Michigan Univ.; How They Were Found) puts the fable in fabulism. This spare, devastating novel peels back layers of geography, modernity, and even proper nouns. Its characters—husband and wife, fingerling and foundling, bear and squid—share in their universality something with the woodsmen and witches and stepchildren of fairy tales past. This story follows a husband and wife as they arrive, freshly married, in a wilderness and try to start a family. The wife is endowed with great powers of creation; she can sing objects, and even whole worlds, into being. When their attempts to conceive result in miscarriage, she resorts to other means to provide their family with offspring, while her husband is haunted by the ghost of their unborn son. Their grief divides them, and they must separately grapple with the bear who rules their woods and the squid who dwells in their lake, with labyrinths of memory, and with the anger of children both injured and unrecalled. VERDICT Bell’s story is as beautiful as it is ruinous. A tragedy of fantastic proportions, the book’s musical, often idiosyncratic prose will carry its readers into an unfamiliar but unforgettable world. [For more on Bell and this title, see the Editors’ Picks feature and a Q&A with the author.—Ed.]—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

Though my heart belongs to fiction, I am a nonfiction editor, so my picks were all of that ilk. I found a couple memoirs I loved, two histories, and one beautiful, heart-rending book of essays.

From our Top Ten list:

Blair, Joe. By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir of Disaster and Love. Scribner. ISBN 9781451636055. $24; ebk. ISBN 9781451636079. MEMOIR
A startling, bleak, and thoroughly honest memoir from husband and father Blair, it documents a flood, a marriage in danger, a family in flux, and an inscrutable but mesmerizing boy whose developmental disabilities make his parents’ life a kind of hell but whose lovely, undulating patterns, which he traces in the dirt of their backyard, will stay with readers long after they finish the book. While the midlife-crisis memoir might seem typical, this one isn’t. (LJ 12/11)—Molly McArdle

O’Connor, Anne-Marie. The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Knopf. ISBN 9780307265647. $32.50; ebk. ISBN 9780307957566. FINE ARTS
This epic story of a painting begins in the late 19th century, as Gustav Klimt becomes the premier painter of the Vienna Secession and Adele Bloch-Bauer, a renowned salon hostess and patron of the arts, and ends at the beginning of the 21st century, as his portrait of her is auctioned for a record-breaking $135 million. In between, the painting is seized by Nazis, renamed to hide its Jewish subject, held by Austria for decades, and finally won back by Bloch-Bauer’s heirs in an agonizing legal battle. (LJ 3/1/12)—Molly McArdle

Strayed, Cheryl. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from “Dear Sugar.” Vintage: Random. ISBN 9780307949332. pap. $14.95; ebk. ISBN 9780307949325. SELF-HELP
Strayed has made a career out of touching her readers’ lives with stories of her own. This collection of her “Dear Sugar” columns, which originally appeared on The Rumpus, may at first glance look like a nontraditional Best Book pick. Instead, Strayed’s columns transcend the genre that made Ann Landers famous. This is a book for readers who want to cry their eyes out but emerge feeling, somehow, stronger. (LJ 5/15/12)—Molly McArdle

From our More of the Best list:

Wa’Thiong’o, Ngugi. In the House of the Interpreter. Pantheon. ISBN 9780307907691. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9780307907707. MEMOIR
Kenyan novelist Wa’Thiong’o (whose iconic A Grain of Wheat, about Kenya’s struggle for independence, I read in college) follows his memoir, Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir, with this story of his time in a British-style high school during the turbulent Mau Mau Uprising. As fluidly written as any of his other works, what’s striking about this book is how it captures the experience of double consciousness: Wa’Thiong’o’s simultaneous love for the British culture he imbibed in school and hatred for the British imperialism he experienced outside it.—Molly McArdle

Wasik, Bill & Monica Murphy. Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus. Viking. ISBN 9781101583746; ebk. ISBN 9781101583746. $25.95. MED
No dry medical tome, this book digs up the rabid origins of cultural fixtures like werewolves and vampires. Reaching back to ancient Babylon and the shores of Troy, Wasik and Murphy trace the path this terrifying virus has burnt through human history—while it is still a certain death sentence, the disease was nearly eliminated after Louis Pasteur and Émile Roux developed a vaccine in the late 19th century. Full of art, literature, and history, this is the perfect science book for humanities nerds. (LJ 6/1/12)—Molly McArdle

Rowling, J.K. The Casual Vacancy. Little, Brown. 2012. 503p. ISBN 9780316228534. $35. F

Overlong and bereft of the rich brocade of invention that made “Harry Potter,” well, magical, Rowling’s latest novel might seem to have the critical deck stacked against it, but this, her first “book for adults,” is made of stronger stuff. It tells the story of a small English town, Pagford, which loses, in the novel’s first pages, one of its lynchpins: father, friend, rowing instructor, and council member Barry Fairbrother. Across the wide scope of Rowling’s story, Fairbrother is the common thread, as some characters cope with his absence and others use his name to enact personal vendettas. The cast is, unsurprisingly, large, and Rowling excels with her teenage characters—who are vivid and mercurial in her hands—where the adults are often thick and one-note. She doesn’t shy away from the material noticeably absent in her YA series—i.e., sex, drugs, and religion—and overall her frankness is refreshing, though there are several moments that clunk, thud, and bewilder (many of which will prompt laughter). VERDICT Still, Rowling is a storyteller, and this book is no exception to her powers. Though slow to start, it has the momentum to carry readers through to the end, and they will be glad they stayed with it. A rewarding read; recommended. [See Rowling Goes Adult.—Ed.]—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

From the July Library Journal, two books I really loved:

[star] Díaz, Junot. This Is How You Lose Her. F

Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) returns to short fiction in his latest book, the first since he won the Pulitzer in 2007, and his second collection of stories after 1996’s Drown. The stories hinge on Yunior de las Casas, Díaz’s Nick Adams: a Dominican-born, Jersey-raised writer and—as is especially on display here—chronic womanizer. Díaz tells of love won and lost with his signature verve; the book pulses with Spanish, sf, and the music and apocalyptic TV shows of the late 1980s. Through the lens of the women that Yunior, his older brother Rafa (who dies of cancer while Yunior is in high school), and their mostly absent father love, leave, and are left by, Díaz maps out a painful, aching geography of desire. The final story, “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” which will be of particular interest to fans of Oscar Wao, further explores Yunior’s (who was the novel’s primary narrator) relationship with Lola, Oscar’s sister. VERDICT Díaz’s third book is as stunning as its predecessors. These stories are hard and sad, but in Díaz’s hands they also crackle. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/12.]—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

Hopkinson, Natalie. Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City. MUSIC

Few people outside of Washington, DC, have heard of go-go, the city’s homegrown brand of funk, marked by heavy percussion (predominately congas, more recently roto-toms), call and response, and live performance. Hopkinson (contributing editor, The Root; coauthor, with Natalie Y. Moore, Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation) explores the music that poet Thomas Sayers Ellis called the most “radical opposition to English syntax” through the lens of gentrification, which has utterly remade the physical landscape of many DC neighborhoods and erased a black majority that defined the city for half a century. Hopkinson faces a steep challenge: she sets out to pin down a genre that is famously unrecordable and describe a side of DC that is almost entirely invisible. VERDICT She pulls in German philosopher Jürgen Habermas almost as often as she does Nico Hobson, go-go’s unofficial archivist, and the book struggles under the weight of a subject that too few have addressed. Still, Hopkinson writes with great, sometimes astonishing, insight, and this is a work that is sorely needed. Recommended for readers interested in gentrification, nongovernmental DC, and the music that animates its culture.—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

Both from the June 15 issue of Library Journal.

McPhee, Sarah. Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini. ART

Baroque master Bernini’s relationship to Costanza Piccolomini, the young wife of an assistant sculptor, is one of the pulpiest footnotes to the artist’s life: reportedly, he was overcome with passion for her; carved a striking, intimate portrait of her; and, upon learning that she’d taken up with his brother, hired a man to slash her face. (Bernini, meanwhile, chased his younger sibling through St. Peter’s with an iron rod, breaking two of his ribs.) In this biography of the woman at its center, McPhee (art & architectural history, Emory Univ.; Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican) peels back the layers of the scandal that most art historians either ignore or sensationalize. Costanza, born into an impoverished branch of a noble family that produced two 15th-century popes, was literate, canny, and ambitious. With her husband, she built a prosperous sculpture business and amassed an enviable collection of art, including a canvas by Poussin (The Plague of Ashdod) now at the Louvre. VERDICT A scrupulously researched and sober biography of a remarkable woman who was both muse and patron. Recommended.—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

Schofield, Michael. January First: A Child’s Descent into Madness and Her Father’s Struggle to Save Her. PSYCH

Schofield’s (English, California State Univ., Northridge) daughter January—or, variously, Janni, Blue-Eyed Tree Frog, or 47—astonished her parents with her early grasp of negative numbers at age two and memorization of the periodic table of elements before she was four. But what Schofield first called eccentricities stemming from January’s prodigious imagination doctors later diagnosed as child-onset schizophrenia. Covering June 2006 to July 2011, Schofield keeps the pace brisk as he recounts January’s early quirks, the violent turn she took after her little brother’s birth, and her journey through a gauntlet of doctors, hospitals, and treatments. With some creative thinking (trading a single apartment for two smaller ones, one specially equipped for January’s needs), the help of a psychiatric emergency team (getting January into UCLA’s inpatient psychiatric facilities), and a drug cocktail that seems to work (clozapine, lithium, and Thorazine), January’s parents managed to wrest her back into day-to-day life. VERDICT The anxiety, frustration, and loss Schofield and his wife experience are palpable, so much so that the author’s tone is, at times, grating. Still, their heart-wrenching story—featured on 20/20 and Oprah—is bound to move parents and caregivers of children with similar psychiatric disorders.—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

Both from the May 15 issue of Library Journal.

Lepore, Jill. The Mansion Of Happiness: A History Of Life And Death. Knopf.. ISBN 9780307592996. HIST

New Yorker staff writer and historian Lepore (American history, Harvard Univ.; The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History) presents a patchwork history of how modern Western—and in particular, American—culture has conceived of the passage of life from birth to death. Many of the chapters originally appeared in The New Yorker, and as a result the book’s focus is at times disjointed. (What is a discussion of Stuart Little, for instance, doing between chapters on breast feeding and sex education?) Still, a pattern begins to emerge as Lepore chooses quirky, though always revealing, lenses through which to examine the changing definitions of conception, infancy, childhood, puberty, marriage, middle age, parenthood, old age, death, and immortality. Readers learn more than they may have bargained for about board games, the Time magazine—New Yorker rivalry, scientific management, and psychologist G. Stanley Hall. VERDICT Through sheer force of charisma, Lepore keeps her readers on track: this book, with all its detours and winding turns, is a journey worth taking. Though footnotes are ample and lively, it is not designed for research; recommended for readers looking to peruse. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/12.]—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

Strayed, Cheryl. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice On Love And Life From Dear Sugar. Vintage: Random. ISBN 9780307949332. SELF-HELP

This beloved Internet advice columnist, using the pseudonym Sugar, revealed herself in early 2012 to be the acclaimed novelist and memoirist Strayed (Wild). First appearing on The Rumpus (therumpus.net) in 2010, her column “Dear Sugar” quickly attracted a large and devoted following with its cut-to-the-quick aphorisms like “Write like a motherfucker” and “Be brave enough to break your own heart.” This collection gathers up the best of Sugar, whose trademark is deeply felt and frank responses grounded in her own personal experience. In many ways, it is a portrait of Strayed herself: she describes her estranged father, her passionate but doomed first marriage, her relationship with her current husband (Mr. Sugar), and, most thoroughly, her much-missed mother, who died suddenly while Strayed was in college. She answers queries on subjects ranging from professional jealousy to leaving a loved partner to coping with the death of a child to a (not-so) simple “WTF?” VERDICT Part advice, part personal essay, these pieces grapple with life’s biggest questions. Beautifully written and genuinely wise, this book is full of heartache and love. Highly recommended.—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

A book I reviewed in the April 15 issue of LJ:

Mark W. Scala. Fairy Tales, Monsters, And The Genetic Imagination. Vanderbilt Univ. ISBN 9780826518149. FINE ARTS

Lockman, Darcy. Brooklyn Zoo: The Education Of A Psychotherapist. Doubleday. ISBN 9780385534284. PSYCH

In 2007, psychologist and freelance magazine writer Lockman began her yearlong internship at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, barely a month after the New York Post broke a story about the hospital’s “Dickensian” conditions. In this debut memoir about her training there, she marvels at the counterintuitive practices in place in the G Building, Kings’s inpatient adult psychiatric center, where a lack of supervision, resources, and even working elevator call buttons are a matter of course. Readers follow Lockman’s rotations through inpatient, psych ER, forensic psychology, and consultation-liaison psychiatry. Though lively details do emerge—a female patient, hiding in a restroom garbage pail, terrifies a male patient who sees “her intense little eyes peering over the top”—Lockman’s tone is grudging. She’s more animated when railing against the hospital’s “strong ambivalence about psychology,” psychoanalysis in particular, than its “culture of offhand neglect.” VERDICT Neither a moving personal history nor a crusading insider’s look into a broken system, Lockman’s book lacks that certain storyteller’s spark. In the end, her patients spin better tales.—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

This was a fun book:

Kaster, Robert A.. The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen Of Roads. Univ. of Chicago. ISBN 9780226425719. TRAV

In this slim travelog, Kaster (classics, Princeton Univ.) tromps down and drives up the Appian Way—the Roman Republic’s first major thoroughfare and the original piece of a system of roads eventually extending to 75,000 miles. (As of 2006, the United States could claim only 46,000 miles of interstate highways.) In Part I, he begins at the Appian Way’s traditional start (now in central Rome) and walks its first ten miles. In Part II, Kaster travels by car along more modern paths from Brindisi (ancient Brundisium, the Appian’s end) back to Rome, following the road’s general route. Throughout, he draws on the breadth of his knowledge of the classical world. Readers are introduced to the road’s creator, Appius Claudius; society wife Caecilia Metella; and statesman Marcus Cicero, not to mention Roman road construction and burial practices. Kaster also offers suggested reading, tips for walking the Appian Way near Rome, general driving advice, geographic coordinates of his favorite stops, and map recommendations. VERDICT A wonderful preface for any traveler planning an outdoorsy day in Rome or, especially, a trip through southern Italy. Kaster’s enthusiasm for the road and the people (past and present) who populate it is contagious.—Molly McArdle, Library Journal