2011 Top 10: Radioactive

Eighth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

Radioactive by Lauren Redniss, ©2011

In Radioactive, Lauren Redniss uses art (primarily illustrations created through a process of “cyanotype printing” that evokes negative images and glowing radiation) to present a biography of Marie Curie ... and of radiation itself, from Roentgen to Hiroshima to Spider-man.

Even the words are art, in a font (developed by the author) that looks like delicate hand printing, arranged interestingly on the pages. I enjoyed seeing the personal side of Marie Curie, loved learning that Roentgen “dubbed the invisible light an ‘X’ ray, X for unknown,” and can understand how, at the turn of the century, the piling-up of discoveries of so many invisible forces (electricity, radio, telegraph, x-ray, radioactivity) “blurred the boundary between science and magic.”

It’s a part-linear, part segue-filled slideshow. Lovely.

2011 Top 10: My Own Country

Seventh in a series of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

My Own Country by Abraham Verghese, ©1994

A fascinating, moving memoir of a doctor treating (more accurately, devoting his life to) early AIDS patients in small-town Tennessee. It's a startling reminder of how much more closeted gays were in the late 1980s and how much a death sentence AIDS was then. The last hundred pages are just sad with loss, which is exactly how it was.

Jan 14 edit: Fortuitous timing -- just came upon this TED Talk by Abraham Verghese on the importance of touch; it concludes with a moment that could have been in this book.

2011 Top 10: Boys of My Youth

Sixth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard, ©1998

My mother is sewing a button on my father’s shirt while he’s still wearing it. “I was having this terrible feeling,” she says, “that she’d be this forty-year-old woman, going around telling people that we took her d-o-l-l away from her.” She leans down to bite off the thread. My father tests his new button and it works perfectly. “In three days she won’t remember she even knew that d-o-l-l,” he predicts.

But of course Beard remembers, and tells, in this non-linear collection of linked personal essays. They’re coming-of-age essays, where growing up is as likely to occur at thirty as at thirteen or three. Each age is rendered perfectly, as are the characters and the 1970s-80s period details of small-town Midwest.

Among the boys of Beard’s youth are Hal, that beloved d-o-l-l her mother’s oldest sister bullies her mother into throwing away; teenage boys who mostly ignore her at backwoods parties; her father who drinks and disappears for weeks at a time; Eric: boyfriend, husband, …; and a school-shooter in the University of Iowa physics department on a day Beard has gone home early to care for her aging dog. There are girls, too -- aunts and cousins; her older, nemesis sister; her mother who smokes on every page; a lifelong best friend she consults while writing these essays.

I love these people and their settings, love Beard’s writing and want more. I've also read her new novel In Zanesville, the first half of which feels exactly like these essays. I'm still scouring the Internet for anything else she's written.

2011 Top 10: Blood, Bones & Butter

Fifth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

Blood Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, ©2011

Slowly the meadow filled with people and fireflies and laughter -- just as my father had imagined -- and the lambs on their spits were hoisted off the pit onto the shoulders of men, like in a funeral procession, and set down on the makeshift plywood-on-sawhorse tables to be carved. Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper bag luminaria, which burned soft glowing amber, punctuating the meadow and the night, and the lamb was crisp-skinned and sticky from slow roasting, and the root beer was frigid and caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat.

Gabrielle Hamilton looks back on her nine-year-old self in that passage -- over-the-moon infatuated with her older siblings, her mother’s way in the kitchen and her father’s way with setting a stage ... and unaware that divorce and neglect are just around the corner.

By 13, she’s drugging with an older crowd and lying about her age to get work in restaurant kitchens to support herself; before long she's participating in a felony-level employee theft racket. Yet she has a knack for stumbling onto cooking mentors and gradually learns enough to run the kitchen at a kids’ summer camp and freelance-cook at high-volume caterers for fancy Hamptons (NY) parties. She completes a fiction-writing MFA, but only because she simultaneously finds a wellspring of sanity and true creativity in a side cooking job that recalls the down-to-earth food and settings of her childhood. And it's with that "real food" perspective that she eventually opens a restaurant -- New York City’s acclaimed Prune.

There's evidence of that MFA in this memoir -- a beautiful mix of literary and culinary creativity. I marked evocative passages throughout, and especially recall Hamilton’s homage to the simplicity and humility of 75-year-old (chef extraordinaire) Andre Soltner preparing a perfect omelet. Although she does settle into a somewhat straightforward prose to tell the bulk of her story, and I don’t think she’s quite figured out her relationships with her parents or partners, these pages are fierce and vivid. And thus I also find myself over-the-moon infatuated -- with Hamilton’s writing and with her story of reclaiming family ... or at least an adult, work-centered facsimile of it.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)

2011 Top 10: Being Wrong

Fourth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz, ©2010

Being Wrong turns the camera inward to our own personal experience of error. Kathryn Schulz writes that we relish being right:

“Our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient. […But of] all the things we are wrong about, […] error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. […] it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.”

In a gentle, leisurely narrative filled with curiosity and even humor, Schulz explores philosophy, psychology, history, and the personal experiences of people being wrong (lovers, explorers, crime victims and economists, among others). Over four sections, she 1) defines error; 2) investigates how we get there (e.g. our senses, memories, beliefs, the data at hand); 3) examines our reactions to being wrong; and 4) encourages us to embrace error. Extensive endnotes and an index complete the book.

She’s adamant that error isn’t an intellectual inferiority or moral flaw but rather something beneficial, a way of learning and becoming -- where, quoting the philosopher Foucault, “The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” Schulz writes, “When you were a little kid, you were fabulously wrong about things all the time”; she suggests that when we seek new experiences it is a way of plunging ourselves back into the childhood experience of not-knowing, where error leads to rapid learning.

She also suggests that there is no actual state of “being” wrong -- we believe we’re right and then we discover we were wrong and we transition to a new state of being right. And it’s those “hinge moments” of awareness that provoke the revelatory shifts that change us; it’s also our reluctance to acknowledge error and complete those transitions that keeps us stuck in painful life situations.

It's an intelligent and deeply researched book, highly readable and highly recommended.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)