Book Review

Before I went outside to unearth my car from the frigid drifts, I got to spend the morning reading a book. I’ve gotten in a nasty habit of starting my day out with television instead of reading, which has been good for keeping up on my shows, but not so good for my reading life (or, frankly, my mental health — reading helps keep me sane). It was nice to spend a few hours with a cup of tea, a big fuzzy blanket, and a fun book — Taft 2012 by Jason Heller.

In an effort to maybe, perhaps, hopefully get caught up on all the books I haven’t reviewed, I’m planning to start doing mini-reviews every couple of weeks for books that I read but didn’t have much to say about. If you have more specific questions aboutGone Girl by Gillian Flynn or Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, leave them in the comments!

As much as I love a good foodie memoir, one of the things that never rings quite true with me is the sophistication of the food — memoirs about food seem, inevitably, to be about people with palates that are more refined than average. But food is memory and family and important even when the only spices used on a roast chicken are garlic powder and Lawry’s Seasoned Salt, as Alex Witchel elegantly and poignantly points out in her memoir All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia, With Refreshments.

Although I live in a small town in rural Minnesota, we get quite a few lectures and cultural events thanks to our proximity to a small liberal arts college. Back in September, poet and author Jay Parini came to campus to discuss his experimentation with the “biographical novel” in a lecture called “The Imagination of Truth: How Fiction Shines a Light into the Dark Corners of History.” In preparation for his visit, I even read two of his books, but realized this weekend that I’d never actually written up any thoughts on the event or the book I read, The Last Station and The Passages of H.M.. So, here are some very, very belated thoughts.

For many people — artists and art consumers alike — the measure of good art is its aesthetic appeal. This emphasis on aesthetics and a measure of quality comes from and is maintained by the art world. This same art establishment promotes an idea that for artists to be politically engaged is to threaten or sabotage their careers as artists. Or, artists who do use their work to comment on social issues find their work “re-positioned as an aesthetic statement,” explains activist, critic and art historian Susan Noyes Platt in her book Art and Politics Now: Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis.

At 24 years old, Susannah Cahalan was poised to begin her adult life, setting out on her first post-college job and just settling into her first serious relationship. A month later, Cahalan woke up strapped to a hospital bed, unable to move or speak, after a terrifying autoimmune disorder almost took her mind and her life. In Brain on Fire, Cahalan reconstructs her month of madness through medical records, interviews with friends and family, and a journal her father kept throughout her ordeal to tell the story of what happens when our brains betray us.

The thing about a book like Born to Run is that the main story is one of those amazing and weird and interesting tales that can carry itself, and the journalist who stumbles across it just sort of has to get out of the way and let the story do the work. For the most part, McDougall does that, mentioning himself only as much as he needs to in order to provide some evidence that an average person can achieve the ultra-running feats that seem to come so naturally to the Tarahumara and the other ultra-runners he profiles.

For the French, love is something to celebrate. For centuries, the French have situated themselves as guides to the world of love. In How the French Invented Love, author and French professor Marilyn Yalom takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey of the multitude of ways that the French celebrate love.

I read The Victory Labback in September when I was going through a political books phase. However, I put off writing anything about it long enough that my election excitement turned into election exhaustion and I didn’t want to think about the book anymore, despite the fact that it was really very good. Admittedly, The Victory Lab is a little on the dry side for even the most hard-core political junkie — it’s hard to make political polling and microtargeting sexy — but Issenberg gives it a pretty decent shot by profiling the people who have helped develop the data-driven methods that have been used recent political campaigns.