The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Sarah Kendzior is a journalist writing from St. Louis, Missouri, a city firmly tucked in "flyover country," that large swathe of the United States between the east and west coasts that tends to get little attention. Kendzior sets out to correct some of this neglect in her new book, The View from Flyover Country, composed of short pieces she wrote for Al Jazeera between 2012 and 2014.

All is not well in flyover country, although many of the issues Kendzior writes about affect the entire nation and the globe. Her overarching theme is social and economic justice -- the growing chasm between the haves and have-nots -- which she explores by looking closely at race and religion, the media, higher education, and what she calls the post-employment economy.

With years of journalistic experience and degrees in history, Central Eurasian studies (an MA), and anthropology (a PhD), Kendzior knows her stuff. She's also a clear and graceful writer. One of her primary contentions is that, increasingly, those in positions of influence -- in government, business, policymaking, and mainstream journalism -- belong to an affluent and self-selected set who, due to their privileged backgrounds, cannot possibly comprehend, assess, or report accurately on economic issues. But entry into their professional circles is too often barred to the rest of us by the sky-high cost of elite private schools and the fact that so many influential positions are now filled by those who were able to spend years in under- or unpaid internships and fellowships gaining access to those in power.

Kendzior hits hard on the surreal situation that exists in our public universities too, where student costs have shot through the roof, yet, in many cases, over 70% of tenure-track faculty has been replaced by poorly paid adjuncts. She also examines student-loan debt, stagnant and declining wages, the exorbitant cost of living in big cities, the gender gap, the shootings of unarmed black men, the surveillance state, and so much more. It's not a heartening collection to read, but Kendzior's candor is refreshing, and hope springs eternal that heightened awareness may eventually lead to solutions.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright's new book, God Save Texas, is a personal, highly anecdotal look at his home state, a place with which he clearly has a love-hate relationship. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Wright is most well known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 2005's The Looming Tower (about Al Qaeda and 9/11) and 2013's Going Clear (about scientology).

He's a pleasure to read, quite funny in casual mode, and, wow, has he got some rich material. According to Wright, "a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed the state’s reputation for aggressive know-nothingism and proudly retrograde politics." Among these are a wheelchair-bound governor who has argued that Texas should be granted "sovereign immunity" from the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and an evangelical-Christian lieutenant governor (and former radio shock jock) who opposes the separation of church and state and believes arming teachers will solve the problem of school shootings.  

The book's not all about politics though and Wright gives us chapters on the big booming cities of Dallas, Houston, and Austin (where he lives); the Texas history of oil and gas; Texas art, music, and culture; and more. Wright knows his state -- and half the people in it, it seems -- so his book is liberally sprinkled with personal stories about George W. Bush, Rick Perry, well-known Texas writers and musicians, and even actor and Austin resident Matthew McConaughey, who was Wright's neighbor at the time of the famous dancing-naked-while-playing the-bongo-drums police incident back in 1999.

Wright clearly loves Texas but makes no bones about his almost perennial desire to leave it. Despite its booming economy, the state ranks close to dead-last in spending on education, healthcare, social services, and the environment, areas vital to a high quality of life. Wright's is an honest and affectionate assessment of an extraordinary place, but you may feel quite happy to read about it from afar.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Educated by Tara Westover

I cannot recommend the memoir Educated by Tara Westover highly enough. It is captivating -- practically un-put-downable -- and very well written. That said, it is not an easy book to read and if you're like me you'll run the gamut of emotions, including anger and frustration.

Westover tells the story of her Idaho youth as the seventh and youngest child of ultra-fundamentalist, survivalist Mormons, who do not send her to school nor do they home-school her. They also choose not to obtain such documents as a birth certificate or Social Security card for her or to seek medical help for illnesses and accidents. This is because her father views the outside world -- the government, educators, the medical establishment, and so on -- as of the devil and about the devil's business.

In graceful prose, Westover paints a vivid picture of day-to-day life at the foot of Buck Peak. Day-to-day life, however, is filled with horrific accidents, car accidents and industrial accidents mostly, and these events and their aftermaths can be wrenching to witness as are the volatile instability of her father, the submissive blindness of her mother, and the descent into sadistic violence of one of her brothers. At times, my credulity was stretched almost beyond its limit (thanks, James Frey and other memoir fibbers) but in the end I believe this author is telling the truth.

I generally avoid memoirs of dysfunction but Westover's is actually a story of redemption, for she eventually breaks free of her parents (though she suffers horrible guilt and inner conflict in doing so), studies on her own, gets herself into college, and completes her education by nailing a Ph.D. at Cambridge in England. The wonders of this book, besides the prose, which is often incandescent, are Westover's evident love for her family, even after the estrangement, and the deep thoughtfulness with which she tells her story. Equally wonderful is Westover's strength of character, the inner compass or guiding light she possesses, which allows her to escape what struck me as a living nightmare but to Westover was the only life she knew.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

Janesville, Wisconsin is two hours east of Dubuque. It's a town of about 60,000 people that has traditionally had a strong economic base in the manufacturing sector, which for Janesville meant thousands of good-paying jobs, a strong union presence, and a fine community spirit with plenty of charitable giving. That rosy scenario began to change with globalization, outsourcing, the decline of union power, and other seismic economic shifts of the past few decades. What's amazing is that Janesville made it until 2008 before taking its hardest hit.

In her terrific book Janesville: An American Story, Amy Goldstein tells the story of the 2008 closure of the Janesville GM plant, which employed thousands of workers, many of them second and third generation GMers, people making $28 per hour and living solid middle-class lives. She also narrates the town's heroic attempts to shore itself back up (with mixed results).

Goldstein tells the Janesville story through the lenses of many of the individuals involved, from laid-off factory workers and their families to social workers and teachers, from affluent community business leaders to local and national politicians. Her focus on the fates of specific individuals -- and she follows them for many years -- brings the issue of middle-class decline into sharp relief. People are terrified and confused, kids go hungry, families are torn apart, the bankruptcy rate soars, one person commits suicide (the local suicide rate doubles after the closure). But there are heartening stories as well.

Goldstein effectively portrays the domino effect of just one plant closure: job losses and facility closures in other industries serving the plant, the overall plunge in local consumer spending, a sharp decline in charitable giving, mushrooming enrollment at re-training centers, an increased need for social services, and on and on and on. One unfortunate effect is a growing division in a once unified town between those who remain comfortable and those who fall. There's so much food for thought in this meticulous examination of one community and it's not all depressing despite the economic takeaway: those good wages are gone and it's anyone's guess if and when they'll ever come back.

Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan

First let me say that The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan is not a feel-good read, but it is a very fine and important book -- fascinating, well-written, and entirely accessible to the layperson. It is receiving a lot of attention -- it's the 2018-2019 selection for the University of Wisconsin's Go Big Read program for one thing -- so hopefully it is sounding a loud alarm that our incomparable Great Lakes are once again in dire need of help.

I read the book because I love the Great Lakes. I was also under the mistaken impression that the passage of the Clean Water Act decades ago had solved most of their problems. The Clean Water Act did help -- immeasurably. But new challenges, including farm run-off (exempted from the Act), unbelievably destructive invasive species, water shortages in distant places, and the myriad threats of climate change, once again endanger the lakes.

Egan spends several chapters describing some of the most harmful invasive species -- quagga mussels, zebra mussels, round goby, Asian carp, and alewives, to name just a few of the 180 invaders. These creatures were introduced by way of ballast water in shipping freighters (ballast water was also exempted from the Clean Water Act) and through the channels and canals dug to connect the lakes with the Mississippi River basin and eastern seaboard. The author then meticulously examines the lakes' other threats, from pesticide run-off (which causes eutrophication) to climate change.

All things considered, Egan closes the book on a cautiously hopeful note. The Great Lakes ecosystem has proven somewhat adaptable, which is heartening. Even more heartening is that a lot of hardworking, educated people have a very good idea of what should be done to stop the degradation: the concrete steps we need to take to shut the gates to invasives, reduce farm run-off, and otherwise rehabilitate the lakes. Most heartening of all is that, following the book's publication, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, as the rehab plan is called, survived the 2018 budget process with its full funding intact. Perhaps Great Lakes area lawmakers read Egan's book and recognized its clarion call.

~Ann, Adult Services

Bingeworthy TV: The Sopranos

The Sopranos and The Wire often butt heads for first place for best-ever TV drama. I just finished watching The Sopranos -- over several months. You could binge-watch it but you might lose the will to live.

Not that The Sopranos isn't good; it's excellent, but, wow, can it be intense. The seven-season show offers a bird's-eye view of one Mafia family, headed by Tony Soprano, played by the late actor James Gandolfini, who manages to imbue the role with equal measures of sensitivity and boorishness, quick intelligence and thick-headedness.

Tony is a thug, a racketeer, an extortionist, and a cold-blooded killer, but he loves his wife and kids (he also loves animals). His love of family doesn't stop him from sleeping with an endless stream of  women or brutally offing relatives who've strayed from true north. He's in therapy about all this, a secret he prefers his mob associates not know.

The real beauty of the show lies in its huge cast of characters and their unfolding lives over time -- Tony's henchmen, their families, Tony's own extended family, competing crime families, and a revolving door of comers and goers (the latter often exit in pieces). Performances are great across the board.


I liked the domestic subplots the best, involving mob children growing up and independent (or not) and sympathetic mob wives and girlfriends who love their thugs and their church and the pope. The women lunch, they shop, they refuse to face the fact that their lives are entirely subsidized by blood money; all the while their men wreak holy havoc like outlaws in the Wild West except it's today and this is New Jersey.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Feel Free by Zadie Smith

In one of the pieces in novelist Zadie Smith's new essay collection, Feel Free, she writes that knowledgeable people -- educated people who not only pursue a craft or profession, but are also connoisseurs of Baroque music, say, or Renaissance art or French wine -- intimidate her, cause her to feel an almost-existential angst.

This seems odd because the overwhelming impression one has after reading Smith's new collection is "How can one person know so much?" Really. Smith writes (a lot), she travels, she teaches, she gives speeches, she's got a mate and a couple little kids. How does she do it?

What's even more remarkable is that she can write about so many different subjects, highbrow to low, without ever seeming pretentious, condescending, or dull. Rather, she seems down-to-earth, self-deprecating, just plain nice.

The topics of Feel Free's essays, many of which were originally written for New York Review of Book, New Yorker, and Harper's, run the gamut from Brexit to Jay-Z, British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye to Justin Bieber, portraitist Bathasar Denner to installation artist Sarah Sze. She writes about Key & Peele, Orson Welles, Billie Holiday, and Mark Zuckerberg. There are also book reviews and essays on joy, despair, optimism, climate change, writing, gentrification, and more.

Smith's a wonderful writer and her essays are engaging and personal because she's passionately engaged with life and acutely worried about the state of the world. If you're like me, reading her collection may make you feel like a bit of an underachiever, but you'll know a lot more when you finish than you did at the start and that's a small achievement in itself, right?

~Ann, Adult Services



 

Staff Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

My first review for this blog, back in 2015, was of Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, which impressed me with its architecture and language but left me wishing for more sympathetic characters. In that review, I wrote: “Upon [a] tragic foundation, Celeste Ng builds an intricate structure of aftermath and backstory, deftly weaving characters and events . . .  into a tight and increasingly oppressive and dysfunctional framework."

Which is exactly what she does in her new novel, Little Fires Everywhere, although it’s all backstory this time. The novel opens with an expensive house burning to the ground. We then move into the past to see what led to the fire and, since it’s arson, whodunit. Ng is even more skillful this second time around. I found several characters more likable too if not fundamentally deeper. Ng’s work has a heavy cultural component so in the process of discovering who burned down the house, we grapple with thought-provoking subjects like social class, race, and adoption.

Little Fires Everywhere is set in the affluent Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, where a very comfortable and locally rooted family, the Richardsons, with several teenaged kids, rents out a small cottage to an artist and her 15-year-old daughter. The relatively free-spirited renters represent the very opposite of conventional, rooted, and rich; they live a Bohemian lifestyle and what they own fits into their old VW Rabbit. The relationships and interactions between the Richardsons and their unusual tenants make up the bulk of the story.

The plot is far from simple and includes compelling subplots too, featuring a custody battle and a deep, dark family secret, which makes this novel a real feat of engineering -- and a riveting read. It’s set in the 1990s and Ng, who was a teen through those years, nails the details of that decade, right down to the AltaVista search engine and the appalling Jerry Springer, that harbinger of so much cheesy reality TV to come.

I think it’s fair to say Ng is as much an architect as a writer. With her first two novels, I envision just as much time going into the planning as into the execution. Her plot strategy runs the risk of becoming formulaic, but for now it still seems a marvel.

 - Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is approaching its one-year anniversary on the New York Times bestseller list. Having just finished it, I can attest that it deserves every week it has spent there.

For the crime of being an aristocrat after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is placed under life-long house arrest. The "house" to which he is confined, however, is vast: Moscow's majestic Metropol Hotel, where he is sentenced to a 100-foot attic room though he's free to move about the hotel.

Rostov is in his early thirties as the novel opens and through the course of its 480 pages we inhabit thirty-plus years of house arrest with him. And what a time we have of it. Within the space of one building Towles has created a very full world, peopling it with an extensive cast that pivots around the appealing Count and includes international hotel guests, an unctuously evil hotel manager, a beautiful actress, a former Red Army colonel, a prodigious young child, a temperamental chef, a revolutionary friend, an orphan, and many others. The cast is delightful, with most characters assisting the Count in providing this enchanting book with its large heart.

The Count himself is the epitome of grace under pressure. Without ever surrendering his gentility or his humor, he accommodates himself to his newly restricted life, which he manages to lead to the fullest, even embracing a new career as headwaiter at the hotel's premiere restaurant (the Bolsheviks allow the hotel to function in its grand old style to impress foreign visitors who stay there).

The novel often reminded me of a fable or tale and as such it's very much in the Russian tradition. There are table legs filled with gold coins, a clock that tolls but two times a day, a key that opens all doors, a shadowy cat, fine wines by the hundreds, brandy snifters by the score, sumptuous meals and exquisite pastries galore. Yet amidst all these trappings of the old aristocratic life, we are also given a clear view of the new Soviet regime with its endless bureaucracies and Siberian gulags, its negation of the individual in favor of the collective, its privations and Orwellian turns of phrase.

The novel concludes very satisfactorily in 1954 and about that I will say nothing more. From start to finish this book is an impressive piece of architecture; many years of planning went into its construction.To my mind, the novel's two greatest pleasures are the sublime delight Rostov takes in literature, from Montaigne to Russia's great literary masters, and the consistent intelligence and civility of the prose (Towles's debut novel, by the way, published in 2011, was titled Rules of Civility). No small part of this new book's success may be due to its timing. With public discourse these days tending to the divisive and vulgar, A Gentleman in Moscow transports us to a far more charming world.

Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In 2015 I chose Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates as my best book of the year. It was a difficult book to read given that it tackles -- in a very personal way -- the race problem in America, a problem older than the country itself, its roots going back to the earliest colonial days. What impressed me so was Coates's intellectual vigor and how well he put it to use trying to make sense of the world he and his son inhabit as black males. He's a clear thinker and a clear writer. As brain food alone, the book was a pleasure.

His new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, is even tougher to read. The foundation of the book is a series of essays Coates wrote for The Atlantic magazine, where he is a national correspondent. These well-known essays cover such topics as the making of the first black president, the mass incarceration of blacks, and the strong case for reparations. The essays are strung together with new material, a series of memoir-like pieces relating Coates's thoughts and feelings each year of Obama's presidency, an event that buoyed him considerably, bringing hope for the future.

The book's final piece tackles the election of Donald Trump, a near-fatal blow to Coates's hope for Coates believes that Obama's successor is intent on negating the legacy of the country's first black president. By the time Trump is elected, within the book's trajectory, the reader has been educated on the real stories -- the truths -- of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the exclusion of millions of blacks from the provisions of the New Deal, and the horrific and intentionally broad scope of institutional racism. It was a painful education for me and I wondered why I had never known so much of it before.

Coates concludes his new work in a grim mood, but a hopeful ending would probably ring false. Many Americans aren't feeling very hopeful these days, which brings me to my only quibble with the book, which is Coates's reluctance to consider the enormous impact globalization, deregulation, outsourcing, inflation, automation, monopolistic practices, and a host of other economic and political factors have had on everyone, white, black, and every shade in between. There's an underlying presumption on his part that if you're white, the gravy train's still more or less available to you. Many would beg to differ. But this is indeed a quibble; the plight of whites is not Coates's topic. He does all of us a great and needed service by increasing our awareness of the hard lives of others and reducing at least some of our historical ignorance. Who knows what any of us might do differently if only we knew the whole truth?

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

I know, I know, you've been wondering when a book about writing was finally going to be featured. Well, your long wait is over! The Art of Memoir, by poet and memoirist Mary Karr, is so engaging, it deserves a little time in the spotlight.

Who better to write a book about the memoir genre than the author of The Liar's Club, Cherry, and Lit, a trio of memoirs published between 1995 and 2009 that are said to have re-ignited the genre's popularity, though I imagine The Glass Castle had a little something to do with that as well.

Born into a dysfunctional circus of a family in what she calls the ringworm belt of Texas, Mary Karr's gritty, funny, lively, and irreverent. She's been teaching memoir-writing in Syracuse's MFA program for years. Her book on the craft, The Art of Memoir, will appeal not only to those who want to write a memoir but to those who enjoy reading them as well.

Karr begins each chapter with an intriguing quote and then tackles some aspect of crafting a memoir, from how to approach writing about loved ones to the importance of enlivening your story with lots of sensory detail. I particularly enjoyed her frequent -- and vehement -- insistence that memoirists tell the truth, even if that truth is, by necessity, somewhat subjective.

Karr provides concrete examples of effective technique from a wide variety of fine memoirs, all of which sound so good you'll intend to read every one just as soon as you finish reading her book. Karr kindly includes a handy, six-page Required Reading list of these titles and many more at the end of the book.

If you're in the mood to read even more about the crafts of writing and editing, check out our November display of writing guides, set up by the first-floor Recommendations Desk. The display features dozens of titles, including some of the classics: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland, and On Writing Well by William Zinsser. 'Cause the next best thing to writing is reading about it, right?

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen's not a rocker, he's a religion -- to my mind. I worship the guy and his music, having been baptized in the church of Bruce one night in Madison years ago at a concert on his Darkness tour. The evening was life-changing; I went home a believer.

That said, let me now proceed to an honest and objective review of Springsteen's 2016 memoir, Born to Run, named after his greatest album. Well, I have to say, Born to Run is a mighty fine book, which is hardly surprising because Springsteen is, above all, a storyteller and his life makes for quite a story. He's also a lyrical poet, so his words rest polished and powerful on the page.

His memoir traces the entire course of his life, focusing in particular on his troubled relationship with his father, an unhappy, hard-drinking, verbally-brutal factory worker and the model for many of the hopeless characters in Bruce's songs. Sorting this relationship has been an abiding struggle for Springsteen, especially given that he himself has been tormented by the black melancholy that so often consumed his pop. Bruce's battles with depression are probably the revelation of the book.

Front and center, however, is the music. Springsteen's life has been spent in active, if not obsessive, service to his music: his songwriting, his performing, and his fans. He's famously hardworking and exacting of his bands; no one would argue with the contention that he may be the hardest working performer ever to grace a turntable or stage. Now 68, Bruce is still putting on high-energy, high-intensity, no-breaks, nearly-four-hour shows -- and lots of them. For many readers, the memoir pages dedicated to his musical inspirations, his creative habits, and the arduous practice schedules to which he and his band adhere will be ample reward for reading the 500-page book.

But there's plenty of personal detail too. Who else but Bruce can provide the honest-to-God truth about the failure of his ill-advised and brief first marriage, his dovetail-joint of a bond with second wife Patti Scialfa, and his love for his three kids. Even when recounting the history his hardcore fans already know, Springsteen does so in such a heartfelt, humble, and often humorous way that we're happy to hear it all over again. An added bonus in these troubled times is that unlike with so many rocker bios, we're left not with an overwhelming sense of the guy's decadence and debauchery but rather his profound decency. The man's a testament to integrity.

I wish I could catch Bruce on Broadway, where he's currently doing a series of one-man shows, which include acoustic songs and readings from this book. Springsteen recently extended his Broadway run by another ten weeks after the initial run sold out in a day. Hail the Boss! May he live forever! Read this book and then catch one of his shows.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams stands a very good chance of being my 2017 best book of the year. I loved it so much I'm about to read it all over again. The book combines all my favorite genres: history, nature writing, memoir, travel. Published in 2016 to coincide with the National Park Service's centennial celebrations, The Hour of Land is a very personal tour, conducted by Williams herself, through a dozen of the nation's 58 national parks.

And what a tour guide she is. A naturalist, writer, and native of Utah, Williams is probably best known for her 1992 memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place about losing her mother to cancer just as the Great Salt Lake floods, threatening the migratory birds Williams treasures. She's extremely knowledgeable, she loves wild places with a passion, and she possesses what I can only call a beautiful spirit: generous, gentle, peace-loving, compassionate. Plus, she's a terrific and highly poetic writer.

It's a pleasure to tour the country in her company, even when she's surveying wrenching scenes like the damage inflicted on Gulf Islands National Seashore by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 or the encroachments of the Bakken oil fields on Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. More often what she surveys is sublime, from Alaska's Gates of the Arctic and Wyoming's Grand Teton to Acadia National Park in Maine. She even makes a stop at Effigy Mounds National Monument here in Iowa.

Particularly pleasurable is the variety of approaches Williams takes to her park descriptions, focusing closely at times on ecology or American history, then shifting her lens to her own life and family. She includes letters, emails, and journal entries to fine effect and provides a wonderful personal anecdote about Lady Bird Johnson. Modern readers, who may be unaware of how our great park system got started, learn about the unflagging philanthropic and environmental efforts of such National Park greats as Laurence Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, Stewart Udall, and many others. This book's a lavish banquet of luscious park detail and I, for one, could not get enough of it. How I wish Williams had visited all 58.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel

I was living in Maine in 2013 when the North Pond Hermit was apprehended. He was caught 29 miles from my house. His arrest was a big deal because Christopher Knight, the hermit, had subsisted in the wilds of Maine, undetected, for 27 years largely by burgling empty vacation cabins. For decades the home owners had no idea who was taking their stuff. According to Knight himself, he broke into about 40 cabins per year for 27 years for a grand total of 1,080 break-ins. He did no damage, took only what he needed to survive (food, tarps, books, etc.), and always felt remorse.

How Knight wound up in the woods -- and survived 27 Maine winters without once building a fire -- is the subject of journalist Michael Finkel's book The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit. I couldn't put the book down.

Knight grew up in Maine, the son of quiet, self-sufficient, live-off-the-land Mainers. Chris took the family's characteristic reticence to an extreme and after finishing school and quitting a dead-end job, he drove up to Moosehead Lake, abandoned his car, and began trudging south through the dense Maine woods. He eventually found a spot near North Pond (within earshot of civilization) -- a small clearing ringed by thick foliage and huge boulders -- and here he hunkered down for the next 27 years.

Knight's arrest and the incredible unfolding story of his life in the wild caught Finkel's attention, and, through sheer determination and persistence, Finkel was able to launch a correspondence with the man. He also visited Knight in jail several times, never expecting or receiving a warm welcome. His resulting book sheds as much light as can be shed on Christopher Knight.

Some reviewers have dinged the book because they find Knight to be a cipher with nothing deep or interesting to say about his strange existence or his motivations. I disagree. While the hermit is not the most likable guy in the world, I actually grew to like him. He's smart, droll, nuts about books, and eccentric, which is not such a bad thing. He often struck me as insightful and profound. Above all, I found his outdoor survival abilities astounding. He maneuvered through the woods, and in and out of area camps, for decades without being found, and he survived 27 bitter winters through a carefully-honed schedule of meticulous practices (never sleeping past 2 AM on the coldest nights, for instance, so he wouldn't succumb to hypothermia in his sleep). So, Hermit of North Pond: hero or villain? Read this riveting book and decide for yourself.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline

Christina Baker Kline, author of the runaway bestseller Orphan Train, is back with a fine new novel, A Piece of the World. The impetus for this new work was Kline's interest in painter Andrew Wyeth's relationship with a considerably older woman, a native Mainer named Anna Christina Olson. Christina, as she was known, is the subject of Wyeth's most famous painting, 1948's Christina's World, and in her new novel, Kline brings the enigmatic Christina to life.

She does a bang-up job of it too, alternating chapters that propel us through Christina's young adulthood with chapters narrating her initial introduction to Wyeth (when she is 46 and he just 22) and their ensuing friendship. At age 46, Christina's life is solitary and hard. She lives without electricity or running water and has suffered since childhood from an undiagnosed condition that eventually reduces her to crawling on her arms, dragging her legs behind her.

Crushed by a huge romantic disappointment in her youth, Christina spends the bulk of her days caring for her crumbling old farmhouse and her brother Alvaro, who works their farm. Their days are not often visited by joy. Enter the energetic and idealistic Andy Wyeth, who is artistically intrigued by the Olson house, its occupants, and the surrounding landscape. Soon he is painting there every day, which he continues to do for the next thirty years, often painting Christina and Alvaro. Not included in the book but adding to its poignancy is the fact that upon his death at age 91, the famous and wealthy Andrew Wyeth, happily married with his own large family, chose to be buried beside Christina and Alvaro in their humble family plot.

Kline paints her characters with the same magical precision Wyeth's paintings are known for. She paints the landscape uncommonly well too, vividly evoking the sometimes-harsh, always beautiful Maine coast. Most touching of all, Kline imbues the physically disabled Christina with dignity and grace, the very qualities Wyeth ascribes to the awkward woman in his paintings. Christina's life was difficult, her days filled with pain, but she enjoyed 30 years of friendship with a remarkable man and was immortalized in one of the world's most famous works of art.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Barkskins by Annie Proulx

Barkskins, the new, multi-generational epic by Annie Proulx, won't be for everyone. For one thing, it's over 700 pages long and covers over 300 years of history, specifically the history of the de-nuding of the American landscape by woodchoppers (or barkskins) large and small, individual and corporate. Yes, it's a lengthy tale of the destruction of the great North American forests -- not exactly the feel-good read of the year. At the same time, it's brimming with vitality: lovely, lively writing; gorgeous descriptions of nature; wild and colorful characters. I loved it.

Barkskins opens with the 1697 arrival in New France (now Canada) of indentured servants Charles Duquet and René Sel, both indebted to the same boorish master. The two men quickly part, one dutifully working off his indenture and the other escaping into the woods before losing any more teeth to his master's crude dentistry pliers.

The novel proceeds to tell Duquet's and Sel's stories, following each man's line of descent through multiple generations. Start to finish, they all make their livings from the trees of the vast northern woods, widely considered to be inexhaustible.

René Sel marries into the Mi'kmaq tribe of Nova Scotia and through his line we see the fate of America's indigeneous people as white immigrant families flood into the new country, extirpating the wildlife and appropriating all the land, relentlessly chopping, burning, and laying waste to the woods exactly as they had done in the countries they fled. Think The Lorax writ large. Charles Duquet, he of the bad teeth, founds a timber dynasty, amassing enormous wealth and passing on his rapacious greed to his offspring.

Proulx's characters are rarely two-dimensional, never all good or all bad. A number are even quite sympathetic, and plenty of the rascals come to highly undesirable ends.

If you're into American history -- natural history, Native American history, the history of the timber industry, the settling of North America, the French and Indian Wars --  just to name a few areas, this may well be the book for you. Characters roam the globe as well, travelling to China, New Zealand, Europe, and other vividly-wrought locales. The novel is extremely well-researched and very well- written. It's a lively and rollicking tale, and, in parts, very funny. A live-wire herself, Proulx peppers the book with forceful, intelligent women. And as a added bonus, just by reading it, you'll compile an extensive list of the many graphic and gruesome ways people met untimely ends in the good old days.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

It's hard to do justice to Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad in a quick review. I was leery of reading it because I knew it was going to be emotionally wrenching -- and it was -- but it's also sublime and wonderful: beautifully written, compelling, imaginative, even fantastical in parts, yet it rings so true. Whitehead obviously did a vast amount of research for the novel, but there's not a word of dialogue that breaks the story's spell.

In the second sentence of her New York Times review of the book, Michiko Kakutani calls The Underground Railroad "a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery." That it does. 

The novel tells the story of Cora, a slave on the Georgia cotton plantation of an especially brutal man, a drunkard and a sadist. Circumstances and a fellow slave convince Cora to attempt an escape and what follows is the wild narrative of her long journey to freedom, with an ever-changing cast of accomplices, comrades, and brutes. Sadly, lots and lots of brutes; slave-catching was a lucrative pursuit and particularly attractive to the lowest of the low. 

Cora travels via a literal underground railroad, to South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and then further west. We observe the topography of slavery from myriad, awful angles. It's a rough journey in every possible way, but thankfully it leads in the direction of redemption. 

I thought, going in, that I was well aware of the depths of the slavery horror but, come to find out, I'd barely plumbed them. It's a terrible thing confronting the fact that man's inhumanity can exceed one's wildest imaginings. The challenge is not to hate back. 

Reading The Underground Railroad was an experience I won't soon forget. It deepened my compassion and increased my understanding. The novel has occupied the bestseller list for over 30 weeks now, which is heartening. Maybe compassion and understanding will start to go viral.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler is not the sort of book I normally read, but my daughter works in the restaurant business, so we decided to read it together. She read a paper copy and I listened to audio. This novel earned its young debut-author a six-figure advance but it's meeting with mixed reviews; critics are swooning but readers aren't so smitten: on Goodreads, they're more inclined to three stars.

Sweetbitter tells the story of Tess, a 22-year-old Midwesterner who, in 2006, leaves home to move, solo, to New York City, where she quickly lands a back-waiter position at one of New York's most prestigious restaurants (a loosely disguised Union Square Café).

What follows is the narrative of her exhilarating, heartbreaking, exhausting, energizing new life. There's a great deal of food and wine talk, lots and lots of drugs, and a generous helping of sex. Foodies will enjoy the book for the truffles, figs, and oysters alone. It's the alcohol- and drug-fueled decadence that seems to turn some readers off, but my daughter confirms that the lifestyle Danler depicts is spot-on for many in the industry.

Sweetbitter looks, and occasionally reads, like a nice bit of fluff, but the novel is more than a beach book. It's got some meat on its bones. For one thing, Danler can write and she has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, whether it's the look, smell, and feel of a rapidly altering New York City or the devastating after-effects of an over-the-top binge. The rigors of restaurant work are nicely drawn too, and we get a genuine feel for staff camaraderie, liaisons, and clashes, the flawless nights of almost-choreographed service and the nights that are slapstick fiascos.

I found the book's ending to be something of a disappointment. That aside, what impressed me most about the book is the author's psychological acuity. She describes her character's loneliness in the vast, churning city, or her sudden recognition of the shallowness of her staff friendships, and the reader feels these things too. For all her callow youth, Tess's observations are often wise beyond her years and it's a testament to the author that they so often ring true.

Audio Notes: the audiobook narrator takes a little getting used to --  her voice is husky, characterized by what reviewers call "vocal fry," but once I adjusted, I enjoyed her nuanced reading. She's great with accents too and has some fun with southern, Bronx, and heavy Russian ones. 

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead may be the best book I read in 2016. I read it (twice!), just after the unsavory election season ended, deciding I'd forego the news for a while and lose myself in a really good book. The result was amazing. Not only did I love the book, but I found myself going about my business in a much better mood.

My Life in Middlemarch is an English major's dream, a hybrid work of nonfiction: one part memoir and four parts literary biography. Mead's subjects are the great Victorian writer George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans) and her masterpiece, Middlemarch, which multiple critics have suggested may be "the greatest novel in the English language." 

Middlemarch is Mead's favorite book for sure, one she re-reads every few years. She finds that the novel speaks to her in new and compelling ways every time, as she navigates her way through life's milestones: moving away from home for the first time, finding a life's work, beginning and ending relationships, acquiring a family.

I've been in love with Middlemarch myself for a long time, so it's hard for me to judge how Mead's book will strike someone who hasn't read it. Eliot's highly unconventional life is certainly fascinating in its own right. As a young woman in the 1840s, Eliot rejected the conservative church-faith of her beloved father and established herself as an independent, free-thinking writer (and to say this was scandalous is an understatement). She next fell in love with a married man who was unable to divorce his estranged wife and she lived with him openly for 24 years. A highly disapproving London society eventually softened its censure somewhat as Eliot became one of the most beloved novelists of her time, right up there with Dickens.

So, if you love English authors, especially the Victorian kind, and you enjoy literary biographies, My Life in Middlemarch may well appeal to you. For maximum enjoyment though, read Middlemarch first. Yes, it's a doorstop, but you'll be glad you picked it up -- and we have it in audio too!

 ~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Painter by Peter Heller

The Painter by Peter Heller, the second novel by the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel The Dog Stars, was the library's adult book discussion selection for November.

Heller is an experienced travel and adventure writer who tackled fiction for the first time four years ago. His years spent writing about the outdoors surely show in this beautifully written new novel: his evocations of the landscapes of New Mexico and Colorado shimmer.

The focus of the story is one artist's attempts to come to grips with his darker side, his sudden and seemingly unavoidable urges toward violence when sufficiently triggered. What renders renowned painter Jim Stegner sympathetic is that what sets him off would set us off too: lewd comments about his teenaged daughter, a man's cruelty to a terrified horse. Unfortunately, Jim's reactions to these offenses tend toward the lethal; if only he could content himself with a good punch.

The novel opens with Jim having served time for one such incident and then having fled New Mexico for Colorado, to heal and resume his painting. But as one might expect with such a volatile man, Jim's new tranquility is short-lived. A second incident quickly ensues.

The novel narrates the second episode and its aftermath, taking the reader on a suspenseful journey through police investigations, games of cat and mouse with vengeful men, and Jim's increasingly successful and lucrative art life. We also get romance and plenty of fly-fishing, Jim's outlet and obsession, each fishing scene beautifully described. Heller writes his villains well too.

The novel has an interior life as well: Heller describes his protagonist's frequent musings down memory lane, his many old and new relationships, and his nearly continuous, if not entirely plausible, grappling with his demons.

Where the book let me down (and at times made me mad) was in its depictions of its female characters, who are "fleshed out" rather too much: we're told over and over of their beauty, their body parts, their sex appeal, assets they wield like the men wield their fishing rods and guns. Heller's male characters are never objectified this way. One reviewer called this book "a novel for manly men" and "a well-landed punch on the side of rugged masculinity."  If you ask me, we've catered to that crowd long enough.  

~Ann, Adult Services