Good evening, everyone. No rant this week, and no deep thoughts. Just my list of the week’s notable new nonfiction.
- The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever, by Lydia Reeder. After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Barred entrance to universities like Harvard, women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from elite, white male physicians who were obsessed with eugenics and the propagation of the white race. Distorting Darwin’s evolution theory, these haughty physicians proclaimed in bestselling books that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Motherhood was their constitution and duty.
Into the midst of this turmoil marched tiny, dynamic Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. As one of the best-educated doctors in the world, she returned to New York for the fight of her life. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education. "Reminds us of the state of unfreedom and constraint of women just 150 years ago, with its implicit warning not to take our rights for granted." —Victoria Sweet, MD, author of Slow Medicine
- A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present, by Glenn Adamson. For millennia, predicting the future was the province of priests and prophets, the realm of astrologers and seers. Then, in the twentieth century, futurologists emerged, claiming that data and design could make planning into a rational certainty. Over time, many of these technologists and trend forecasters amassed power as public intellectuals, even as their predictions proved less than reliable. Now, amid political and ecological crises of our own making, we drown in a cacophony of potential futures-including, possibly, no future at all.
A Century of Tomorrows offers an illuminating account of how the world was transformed by the science (or is it?) of futurecasting. “A masterful cultural history, revealing how imagining the future has long been a way of remaking the present, not only for religious prophets, scientific thinkers, and science fiction writers, but in struggles for Native American sovereignty, civil rights, women's rights, environmental justice, and more. In a moment when the future can seem too dark to contemplate, A Century of Tomorrows advances the liberatory possibilities of thinking about the days to come. It's been forever since tomorrow held such appeal.” —Louis S. Warren, Bancroft Prize winning author of God’s Red Son
- Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, by Mark Lilla. Aristotle claimed that “all human beings want to know.” Our own experience proves that all human beings also want not to know. Today, centuries after the Enlightenment, mesmerized crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. Why is this? Where does this will to ignorance come from, and how does it continue to shape our lives?
In Ignorance and Bliss, the acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know. With erudition and brio, Lilla ranges from the Book of Genesis and Plato’s dialogues to Sufi parables and Sigmund Freud, revealing the paradoxes of hiding truth from ourselves. "This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit . . . Ignorance and Bliss is a splendidly invigorating antidote to the vapid nostrums and mindless pieties—from right and left—that swirl about us in a poisoned fog." —John Banville, The Guardian
- Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter, by Clare Mulley. During World War II, Elzbieta Zawacka—the WWII female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo—was the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the "Silent Unseen.” She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then she was the only female member of these forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland. There, while being hunted by the Gestapo (who arrested her entire family), she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland. “The astonishing story of an extraordinary woman—for so long silent and unseen bit now, thanks to Clare Mulley’s forensic research and razor-sharp eye for detail, no longer forgotten.” — Jonathan Freedland, author of The Escape Artist, The Many Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
- The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. When Tsar Nicholas II fell from power in 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest. Though Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, it was not fate that doomed the Romanovs—it was poor leadership and a blinkered faith in autocracy.
Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy. Encompassing the captivating personalities of the era, it untangles the struggles between the increasingly isolated Nicholas and Alexandra and the factions of scheming nobles, ruthless legislators, and pragmatic generals who sought to stabilize the restive Russian empire either with the Tsar or without him. By rejecting compromise, Nicholas undermined his supporters at crucial moments. His blunders cleared the way for all-out civil war and the eventual rise of the Soviet Union. “The capstone to a brilliant career, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s The Last Tsar is certain to become the definitive work on the chaotic, earth-shattering demise of the Romanov destiny. No historian before has dissected these tumultuous days with such clarity, precision, and insight.”—Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin
- Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus, by John Haywood. A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.
John Haywood eloquently argues that the perception of Atlantic history beginning with the first voyage of the celebrated Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus is a mistaken one, and that the seafaring and shipbuilding skills that enabled European global exploration and expansion did not arrive fully formed in the fifteenth century, but instead were learned over centuries and millennia in the Atlantic and its peripheral seas. The pre-Columbian history of the Atlantic is the story of how Europeans learned to master the oceans. This story is, therefore, key to understanding why it was Europeans, and not any of the world's other seafaring peoples, who “discovered” the world.
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When We Sold God's Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon, by Alex Cuadros.Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new, capitalist reality, discovering its wonders—cars, refrigerators, TV sets, phones—as well as a way to acquire them: by selling the natural riches of their own forest home. They had to partner with the white men who’d hunted them, but their wealth grew legendary, the envy of the nation—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre, bloody retribution that made headlines across the globe. Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God’s Eye tells a unique kind of adventure story, one that begins with a river journey by Theodore Roosevelt and ends with smugglers from New York City’s Diamond District.
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The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic, by Mark L. Clifford. The astonishing story of the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai who became one of Hong Kong’s leading activists for democracy and is today China’s most famous political prisoner. "An extraordinary life story—from rags to riches to political prisoner—sheds light on Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy in this rousing biography. . . . An appealing portrait of a colorful, ebullient figure full of charm and moxie who in prison becomes near-saintly, enduring persecution with patient humility. It’s a spirited profile in defiance."— Publishers Weekly
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The Roads to Rome: A History of Imperial Expansion, by Catherine Fletcher. "All roads lead to Rome” is a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire—and these ancient roads continue to grip our modern imaginations as a physical manifestation of Rome’s extraordinary greatness. Over the two thousand years since they were first built, these roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. As channels of trade and travel—and routes for conquest and creativity—Catherine Fletcher reveals how these roads forever transformed the cultures, and intertwined the fates, of a vast panoply of people across Europe and beyond. "Catherine Fletcher’s mastery of history and storytelling converge beautifully in this captivating exploration of the Roman roads. She expertly leads us on a journey that reaches from Rome to Spain to Constantinople, and from the remote past into the present. A must-read for tourists and armchair travelers alike."
— Ross King, author of The Bookseller of Florence
- Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film, by Julie Gilbert. The stupendous publication of Edna Ferber's Giant in 1952 set off a storm of protest over the novel's portrayal of Texas manners, money and mores with oil-rich Texans threatening to shoot, lynch or ban Ferber from ever entering the state again.
In Giant Love, Julie Gilbert writes of the internationally best-selling Ferber, one of the most widely read writers in the first half of the 20th Century – her evolution from mid-west maverick girl-reporter to Pulitzer Prize winning, beloved American novelist, from her want-to-be actress days to becoming Broadway's acclaimed prize-winning playwright whose collaborators – George S. Kauffman and Moss Hart, among them, were, along with Ferber, herself, the most successful playwrights of their time. Here is the making of an American classic novel and the film that followed in its wake. We see how George Stevens, Academy-Award winning director, wooed the prickly, stubborn Ferber, ultimately getting her to agree to everything including writing, for the first time ever, a draft of a screenplay, to her okaying James Dean for the part of the ranch hand, Jett Rink, something she was dead set against. “A brilliant evocation of a remarkable woman and her achievements. One is left with the feeling—’Edna, thou shouldst be living (and writing) at this hour. We need you!’” —Barry Day, editor of The Letters of Noel Coward and author of Coward on Film
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Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing, and Touching Plants is Good for Our Health, by Kathy Willis. In the last decade there has been an explosion of “proof" that incredible things happen to our bodies and our minds when our senses interact with the natural world. In Good Nature, Kathy Willis takes the reader on a journey with her to dig out all the experiments around the world that are looking for this evidence—experiments made easier by the new kinds of data being collected from satellites and big-data biobanks. Having a vase of roses on your desk or a green wall in your office makes a measurable difference to your well-being; certain scents in room diffusers genuinely can boost your immune system; and, in a chapter that Kathy calls "Hidden Sense," we learn that touching organic soil has a significant effect on the healthiness of your microbiome.
What is remarkable about this book is how its revelations should be commonsense—schools should let children play in nature to improve their health and concentration; urban streets should have trees—and yet it reveals just how difficult it is to prove this to businesses and governments.
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Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human, by Dr. Guy Leschziner. Gluttony. Greed. Sloth. Pride. Envy. Lust. Anger. These are The Seven Deadly Sins, the vices of humankind that define immorality. But do these sins really represent moral failings, or are they simply important and useful biological functions that humans need to survive? Instead of being acts of immorality, are they really just a result of how our bodies, our psyches, and our brains in particular, are wired? In Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human, Guy Leschziner, a professor of neurology, dares to turn much of what society thinks of as morality on its head and to ask these controversial questions. "A captivating examination of the neurological basis for ‘bad’ behaviour raises questions about the existence of free will...The author’s writing is crisp, clear and artful as he guides readers through decades of neurological research." - Sarah Manning Peskin in Nature
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Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey. Contrary to the teachings of the church today, in the first several centuries of Christianity’s existence, there was no consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. Instead, there were many different Christs. One had a twin brother and traveled to India; another consorted with dragons. One particularly terrifying Christ scorned his parents and killed those who opposed him. Moreover, in the early years of the first millennium there were many other saviors, many sons of gods who healed the sick and cured the lame. But as Christianity spread, they were pronounced unacceptable – even heretical – and they faded from view. Heretic unearths the different versions of Christ who existed in the minds of early Christians, and the process of evolution—and elimination—by which Jesus became the singular figure we know today. “Heretic has the mother lode of tales too hot for Christendom. Nixey has carefully wrung out a number of apocryphal texts for scandal.” — Harper's Magazine
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Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, by Callum Robinson. The eldest son of a master woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing craft lessons in his father’s workshop. In time he became his father’s apprentice, helping to create exquisite bespoke objects. But eventually the need to find his own path led him to establish his own workshop and chase ever bigger and more commercial projects, until the devastating loss of one major job threatened to bring it all crashing down. Faced with the end of his business, his team, and everything he had worked so hard to build, he was forced to question what mattered most.
In beautifully wrought prose, Callum tells the story of returning to the workshop and to the wood, to handcrafting furniture for people who will love it and then pass it on to the next generation—an antidote to a culture where everything seems so easily disposable.
