Summer book edition, part 2
I decided to go through my shelves to highlight new and older books that are related to the things I write about. Have a great summer! Here's Part 2.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds William Shakespeare
Here’s Part 2 of my summer book talk.
For those of you hungry for more accounting, stay tuned. My friend and frequent collaborator, Olga Usvyatsky of Deep Quarry, and I have a newsletter about uncertain tax positions and tax receivables coming up shortly.
Here’s how Talia Levin, author of Wild Faith describes herself on LinkedIn:
I'm an experienced journalist who's worked at the New Yorker, the Huffington Post and Media Matters, and has had bylines in marquee publications including the New Republic and The New York Times Review of Books. I am currently freelancing; I'm interested in a full-time staff writing job, as well as work writing commercial copy, translating from Russian or Hebrew into English, and fact-checking. Please get in touch!
I followed Talia on Twitter and now on BlueSky, and she is a lot more than that!
An interview for the newsletter Depth Perception starts like this and provides a better quote:
For her first book, 2020’s Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, Talia Lavin went undercover in neo-Nazi online communities for nearly a year. It’s an experience Lavin, who is Jewish and descended from Holocaust survivors, once likened to “bathing in acid every day.”
“I was constantly bombarded with really vicious, murderous propaganda,” Lavin tells Depth Perception. “Often people literally wanted to kill me, specifically. Not to mention anyone who looks like me or comes from my background.” So for her new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, she abandoned the “gonzo angle,” opting for a more traditional approach, which included more than 100 interviews with former Evangelicals.
Lavin says “a predilection for abyss-gazing” is what draws her to covering the right wing. To help maintain her sanity “and balance out some of the darker material,” she’s been going through Wikipedia’s list of sandwiches in alphabetical order and writing about them on her Substack, The Sword and the Sandwich.
“I’m pretty proud of my sandwich series,” she says. “I think they’re interesting and surprising and fun, and as often a look into forces like history and immigration — and personal narrative — as they are a look at just, like, a sandwich.”
Here’s a review of Wild Faith on Kirkus:
HOW THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT IS TAKING OVER AMERICA
by Talia Lavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2024
Often repetitive, but with a point: the culture war is a real war, and the fundamentalists have their eyes on the prize.
A full-bore attack on Christian nationalism’s crusade to remake America.
A reader of her book, warns peripatetic journalist Lavin, is “an enemy combatant in a war of the spirit that began before your birth and is being waged every day by determined, ordinary people you wouldn’t look twice at if they passed you in the street.” Those people, Lavin asserts, are a small minority; evangelicals represent just 14% of the populace. Still, that’s nearly 50 million people, and they have an unshakable goal for which they’re willing to play a long game: namely, to establish “a Kingdom of Christ on Earth ruled by his elect.”
Lavin’s book will help you understand why this women said such idiotic things, while strolling in a cemetery!
Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian is the latest by my old friend Emanuel Derman. According to the listing at Philadelphia’s Head House Books, it’s:
“…the author's account of growing up in a small, tightly knit, first-generation Polish-Jewish community in Cape Town in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
Observing through at first naive and then later more sophisticated eyes, he describes his childhood and youth in a protective off-the-boat immigrant Jewish family in very British-Commonwealth South Africa as apartheid becomes increasingly coercive.
Through vivid and candid personal stories, he brings to life a time, place, culture, people, and set of mores that no longer exist. At 21, he leaves Africa to study in America.”
I can’t wait to read it, since I’ve been a reader of the author’s published and unpublished works for years. He taught me about living in the moment, via an old Yiddish proverb, a motto I now live by, especially after my illness in 2023, A mentsh tracht und Gott lacht: A person plans and God laughs.
In November 2011, I wrote for Forbes that his book, Models.Behaving.Badly.,
“…reads like an assemblage of storytellling, memoir, and mathematics meant to explain how, in his words, the financial crisis was a failure of both qualitative and quantitative models.
Emanuel Derman leads the program in financial engineering at New York's Columbia University. He started his career as a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. Derman worked at Bell Labs but was lured to Goldman Sachs as one of the first “quants”. At Goldman he rose to the level of Managing Director and co-invented the tool for pricing options on Treasury bonds with Goldman colleagues Bill Toy and the late Fischer Black, of Black-Scholes formula fame.
Derman’s first lesson on the failure of models requires him to define model versus a theory.
“Models try to squeeze the blooming, buzzing, confusion into a miniature Joseph Cornell box, and then, if it more or less fits, assume that the box is the world itself. In a nutshell, theories tell you what something is; models tell you merely what something is like.“
More than a description of what went wrong with models during the financial crisis, Derman describes what’s gone wrong with the use of them by those who infused models with omniscience. Derman says, “You can be disappointed only if you had hoped and desired. To have hoped means to have had preconceptions - models, in short - for how the world should evolve.”
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Molly Jong-Fast, came out on June 3 but much had been written about it, including by the author, in advance.
Molly Jong-Fast, in an excerpt from the book about her mother Erica Jong in Vanity Fair, wrote:
I grew up with Erica Jong everywhere—on television, in the crossword puzzle, in the newspaper. She was a kind of second-wave feminist, a white feminist, and (a highly educated, wildly affluent, Jewish, and somewhat out-of-touch) Everywoman. But she wasn’t an actual Everywoman, of course; she was too famous for that. Too famous, and too special. She was famous for her book Fear of Flying, and then later she was famous for being famous, and then eventually she wasn’t famous anymore. Because fame, like youth, is fleeting; it deserts you when you least expect it. The wheel of fortune is always spinning.
My mother never got over being famous. Even years after people stopped coming up to us in stores, even years after she slipped from the public consciousness, the virus of fame had made her someone different. Becoming normal like the rest of us, the journey to unfamousness, was for her an event so strange and stressful, so damaging to her ego, that she was never able to process it.
In a column in 2023 in the New York Times (gift link), Jane Kamensky — who was coming out with her own book Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History From Below, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jong’s Fear of Flying. She described it as a book “so sexually frank that you may have found it hidden in your mother’s underwear drawer, broke new ground in the explicitness of writing by and for women.”
She hints at the origins of the mixed reception for the book and eventual “unfamousness” that Jong-Fast describes:
A whiff of misogyny hangs over the book’s many reviews written by men, most pointedly in the British press. A young Martin Amis damned the book as mere autobiography and declared, “I neither know nor care whether all the horrible and embarrassing things in this book have actually happened to Miss Jong.” Paul Theroux compared the “witless” Isadora to “a mammoth pudenda, as roomy as Carlsbad Caverns” — such erudite revulsion for the organ Jong reclaimed in four letters.
Yet female critics proved little friendlier. The Nation sent women reviewers after Jong twice. The first accused her of writing in the “unwelcome” confessional style favored by women’s libbers; the second damned her for writing like a man.
In the end, a single male reviewer cemented the book’s success. In an essay for The New Yorker aptly titled “Jong Love,” John Updike proclaimed that Isadora Wing was Holden Caulfield minus the boring idealism, Alexander Portnoy without the cruelty. Jong, Updike said, could “now travel on toward Canterbury,” as the female Chaucer Isadora longed both to read and to be.
Molly Jong-Fast will be at the 92nd Street Y in New York talking about the book on June 18. I hope to attend. I ended up with three copies, two from the Strand and one from Politics and Prose. One will be for my sister, and I’ve got one more to lend, so I hope to get them all signed at this or another appearance.
Roxane Gay’s new The Portable Feminist Reader, is a NYT bestseller. She talks about it at LitHub in an excerpt:
Feminist skepticism of canon is healthy, but I believe there is a feminist canon, one that is subjective and always evolving but also representative of a long, rich tradition of feminist scholarship. Dynamism was the guiding principle as I assembled The Portable Feminist Reader. I wanted to contribute to the feminist canon by choosing works that reflect compelling, fiercely intelligent, and diverse in every sense of the word, feminist thought.
To our detriment, we try to be definitive about what feminism is or isn’t, and how it should be represented. It serves us better to be more expansive. This anthology recognizes that no one collection could or should cover every aspect of a sociopolitical movement. I have included traditional scholarship alongside poetry and personal essays. There are ancient texts, pieces published within the past five years, and everything in between. I’ve included work from established feminists like bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Hélène Cixous alongside more recent feminist thinkers like Jessica Valenti, Brittney Cooper, and Sara Ahmed.
More than anything, this feminist reader is not a fortress; it is not an end point. It is the beginning of what I hope will be a vibrant and vigorous conversation about historical and contemporary feminist thought. The Portable Feminist Reader is a text that embraces contradiction and complexity. You could, I suppose, think of this as a Bad Feminist Reader.
In this post she also links to an interview on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert thus:
We had a time. A time was had. There was talk of butter. You had to be there.
Roxane Gay is a fascinating writer and person. I subscribe to her Substack, The Audacity, since she not only writes about writers and her own initiatives — which are non-stop — but does a great round-up of the headlines we should be aware of.
In May 2024 I attended an all day workshop on writing a novel at Rutgers, hosted by Professor Roxane Gay, the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies. I wrote about it, with photos, here. She continues to sponsor workshops, readings and programs. Highly recommended.
Caste: The origins of Our Discontent, is a book by Isabel Wilkerson. Here’s a description from a review in the New York Times (gift link):
Wilkerson’s book is about how brutal misperceptions about race have disfigured the American experiment. This is a topic that major historians and novelists have examined from many angles, with care, anger, deep feeling and sometimes simmering wit.
Wilkerson’s book is a work of synthesis. She borrows from all that has come before, and her book stands on many shoulders. “Caste” lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her. This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.
This is a complicated book that does a simple thing. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, avoids words like “white” and “race” and “racism” in favor of terms like “dominant caste,” “favored caste,” “upper caste” and “lower caste.”
Caste explores America’s racial divide, and was the basis for the 2023 Ava DuVernay movie “Origin.”
The next two books I ordered because I stumbled onto reviews, in The Guardian and by the author, Hildur Knútsdóttir on BlueSky.
The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen review – a sweeping Sámi epic
Hanna Pylväinen’s engrossing novel The End of Drum-Time brings to light the world of the Sámi – who with their reindeer herds inhabit the northern regions of the countries now called Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia – as they coexisted and clashed with Scandinavian missionaries and settlers during this turbulent time. Lars Levi Laestadius, who plays a central role in this story, was a historical figure, a Lutheran minister, himself part Sámi, who worked to convert these nomadic people from their traditional religion and way of life. Pylväinen, who was raised in the American midwest in a sect that evolved from Laestatius’s movement, drops the reader immediately and arrestingly into a bitter northern climate that she makes intimate and familiar through the richness of her descriptions and the honesty of her characterisations.
I follow Hildur on BlueSky and she lives in Iceland and has an incredibly gorgeous dog named Uggi.
Here’s Sonja van der Westhuizen reviewing The Night Guest.
‘Have you tried exercising, vitamins or a better diet?’: a familiar refrain often heard by women seeking medical attention for exhaustion. In her first book translated into English, Hildur Knútsdóttir draws on female experience to create a chilling feminist horror that cuts dangerously close to the bone.
Iðunn wakes up exhausted every morning with bruises over her body, a taste of blood in her mouth, and the scent of the sea in her hair. After being dismissed by her older, male doctor, she puts her faith in Ásdís, a young female practitioner. But extensive examinations and blood tests show nothing. That it’s all in Iðunn’s head and she’s losing control of her body is a real and terrifying possibility. And so we bear witness to the gradual unravelling of Iðunn’s psyche…
The Night Guest is a feminist horror, subsequently some violence – against both humans and animals – can be expected.
The Night Guest is reminiscent of the work of other writers in the feminist horror genre, particularly ‘body horror’, such as Maria Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, V Castro, and, even further back, Angela Carter. At only 208 pages, The Night Guest is the perfect length to deliver just enough terror for readers to endure and enjoy while proving that, in horror, the psychological is far more disturbing that the visible.
Translated from Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal
Do you have a pre-teen? The next book is perfect for them. From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg, was published in 1967. It is a Newberry Medal award winner and that’s how I found it as a young reader in the 70’s. I read everything from that collection at the time in the school and public library.
My copy is a 1967 hardback one, with the Newberry medallion on the cover, that originally cost $3.95. I picked it up at some point from a used book bin for $5.00. It has the price in pencil and a name in pen written on an inside page, Grace Blomquist.
Family members may know one of my other all-time favorites from my precocious pre-teen years is Harriet the Spy, a book published in 1964 and also a film.
Harriet the Spy, the debut novel by Louise Fitzhugh, was shut out of the 1965 awards, [but] it's cast a long, long shadow over the succeeding half-century of children's literature.
Harriet was a highly controversial novel at the time, and in some ways, it's remained so. Its realistic, almost brutal look at playground politics is jarring, and its often-unlikable protagonist is something of a love-her-or-hate-her proposition. The narrative arc too is unusual, given that it has much more in common with the infamous Seinfeld rule ("no hugging, no learning") than anything typical of children's literature. The setting is familiar, but treated much differently than in earlier books; Harriet felt to me like nothing so much as a dystopian version of Roller Skates.
Here’s Jia Tolentino writing about The Mixed Up Files… in The New Yorker on its 50th anniversary in 2017.
The first paragraph of E. L. Konigsburg’s 1967 book “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” about two young runaways who become entangled in an art-historical mystery, is a masterpiece of graceful, efficient exposition:
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
After just six sentences, the reader knows Claudia intimately, and is ready to go to the Met…
Elaine Lobl Konigsburg was an unpublished stay-at-home mother of three when she started working on the “Mixed-Up Files.” (She would eventually write twenty-one books and win two Newbery Medals, for the “Mixed-Up Files” and for the brilliant “The View from Saturday,” published in 1996.) Back then, on Saturdays, she would take the train down from Port Chester for art lessons and drop her kids off at the Met. She’d meet them at the museum afterward. One day, as they were walking through a gallery of French furniture, she saw, behind a velvet rope, a single piece of popcorn on a blue silk chair.
When Konigsburg died, in 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a private event in her remembrance, and her son Paul recalled his mother wondering aloud about that piece of popcorn. The moment was “burned into shrapnel memory” for her, he said, and it provided the kernel, so to speak, of the whole book.
From The Mixed Up Files… was made into a highly entertaining — for a fan-girl like me— film in 1973, starring Ingrid Bergman! Here’s a really fun video about the book produced by The Met.
The next book, The House on Mango Street, is by Sandra Cisneros, who was born in Chicago in 1954. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of the Arts, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation.
Cisneros wrote two novels, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo; a collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek; two books of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman; a children’s book, Hairs/Pelitos; a selected anthology of her own work, Vintage Cisneros; with Ester Hernández, Have You Seen Marie?, a fable for adults; A House of My Own, a memoir; and Puro Amor, a bilingual story that she also illustrated.
I have most of them on my shelves.
I can’t remember when I became familiar with Cisneros’ work, perhaps when I returned from Latin America in 2001 and tried to relive my experiences through books. I wanted to dig deeper into the cultures I had encountered especially in Mexico and to bridge the gap for me between the those cultures as I encountered them — in particular the Mexican culture— in their home countries and in diaspora in Chicago. I have multiple shelves of books by Mexican and South American writers and about Mexico, Argentina, and other South American countries and their indigenous people.
Here’s what the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame site says about Sandra Cisneros’ house on “Mango Street” and her actual home in Chicago.
The narrator, though barely an adolescent, understands that her neighborhood is considered undesirable. She writes, in “Those Who Don’t,” about that reputation. “Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives.” Among the Mango Street denizens, there are unwed mothers, petty thieves, drug abusers, and a garden variety of mischief-makers.
Esperanza does wander off Mango Street from time to time, especially to “the avenue which is dangerous. Laundromat, junk store, drugstore, windows and cars, and more cars…” This likely refers to North Avenue, which would have been the busiest street near the fictional home and its model. Gil, “a black man who doesn’t talk much,” owns the junk shop. Esperanza’s school is just south of “the boulevard.”
Cisneros was born in Chicago on December 20, 1954. One of seven children and the family's only girl, the Cisneros’ moved between Chicago and Mexico City all throughout her childhood. Because of this nomadic upbringing, Cisneros began to view the idea of home not necessarily as the place one is born, but where someone comes into their own—a concept that would be prevalent in her future literary endeavors. As stated in her memoir A House of My Own, “Sometimes I was living on a grant. Sometimes I was living in a borrowed house or guest room. Sometimes I convinced myself I was in love, but most of the time I lived in a space that wasn’t mine with bills that flared like small fires. That meant I passed through a lot of houses, loves, and typewriters, never quite finding the right one.”
Somehow this book ended up on some “banned book”lists!
The Remains of The Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my all time favorite books, and there is an excellent film of it too! In fact, this is one of the “books on film” I used for an old book club I led at the Barnes & Noble in Chicago on Michigan and Pearson (it is no longer there) when I returned from Latin American in the early 2000’s.
Here’s a great scene that goes from suffocated emotions to heightened ones, to pathos. Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugh Grant are brilliant and the film has evergreen themes.
In the 1930s, James Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) serves with unwavering devotion as a proper English butler to the well-meaning but misguided Lord Darlington (James Fox). Stevens’s commitment to duty runs so deep that he sacrifices a final visit to his dying father and turns a blind eye to his employer’s troubling Nazi sympathies and rising anti-Semitism. Two decades after Lord Darlington’s death, Stevens sets out to reconnect with Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), the former head housekeeper, and begins to confront the personal costs of his blind loyalty.
Here’s the British novelist and 2017 Nobel Literature Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro at a TIFF Bell Lightbox post-screening discussion of the film adaptation of The Remains of the Day:
© Francine McKenna, The Digging Company LLC, 2025