It is this time of the year where just about every media outlet, from The Economist to The New York Times is looking back on the year and publishing "best of" lists, so I thought that for today's post I would mention some of the best nonfiction books I've read this year. (I've also read a few very good novels, but I don't feel as strongly about them as about the nonfiction books below. I welcome any suggestions in the comments section, though!) They are listed in no particular order.
Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues by Bill Moyers: far-ranging interviews Moyers had on his TV program, "Bill Moyers Journal", from 2007 to 2010, with writers, politicians, activists and others. The selection of interviews touches upon a broad range of issues, and the discussion is thoughtful and well-argumented. Impossible not to learn something new in current affairs.
Berlin 1961 by Frederick Kempe: since part of my family lived in Berlin for many years and I read a lot about the Berlin War and the two Germanies when I was in high school, in addition to traveling to Berlin several times, I didn't think twice when I first saw that book on display at the bookstore. Going home, I did ask myself when I was going to find the time to read such an enormous volume (600 pages in hardcover), and opened the book in front of a cup of tea to see the extent of my mistake. It turned out that I, more or less, didn't stop reading until I was done. The book is exceptionally well-written, thorough, scholarly without being pedantic; it also makes the various key characters come to life and accomplishes the feat of being a page-turner while we all know how the story ended. I did learn many new details, especially the role that the disastrous handling of the Bay of Pigs by John F Kennedy played in Krushchev's calculations.
Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his fifteen quartets, by Wendy Lesser: this recounts Shostakovich's life as a leading figure of the Soviet Union as he composes his quartets. According to the book, it is not clear whether he was a dissident through his actions or whether he played along with the regime (although he never kowtowed to it) precisely because he was a renegade at heart and wanted to continue making music without being silenced. This book forces a discussion of what it makes of standing up to power for the long run. If you decide to buy the book, keep in mind that Yale University Press charges hefty prices ($28 for a rather thin hardcover volume), so you might want to look for an used copy or order it from Amazon, as much as I advocate for buying indie.
How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and 20 Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell. I read this book on the recommendation of fellow novelist, blogger and educator Elizabeth Collins, and I am glad she suggested it. As a French woman, I learned about Michel Eyquem de Montaigne in school and was already well-versed in his lifestory in Bordeaux and his friendship with Etienne de la Boetie. Nonetheless, the book provided plenty of valuable additional details, both about the friendship and Montaigne's life in general, and was written in an engaging style without dumbing down its subject. Bakewell made Montaigne come to life, as if he lived in this century and we shared his hopes and his travails - he is certainly the first modern essayist of our times. The idea of using twenty "attempts at an answer" came across as a bit contrived, but it allowed the author not to peg her book as a traditional biography, while focusing on the key points of Montaigne's life. Once I got started, I couldn't put the book down, and will probably read it again in the near future. (This book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.)
The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America, by Raymond Arsenault: black contralto Marian Anderson was denied the use of a performance hall by the Daughters of the Revolution in segregated Washington, DC, in 1939. The issue became a cause celebre; Anderson ended up singing outside the Lincoln Memorial in front of a crowd of 75,000 on Easter Day. The book is the story of Anderson's rise to fame (as an opera singer rather than a jazz singer, i.e., as a singer of "respectable" songs as opposed to more traditional "African-American fare") decades before the civil rights movement put an end to the "separate but equal" doctrine. It is an inspiring book, which I had never heard of but stumbled on at the Joseph Fox bookstore near Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. Anderson, in fact, was a Philadelphia resident most of her life. Her quiet courage should serve as an example for us all.
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford: I'll be honest, I bought this book at Harvard Bookstore while I still lived in Cambridge, MA and for some reason never got to reading it, between the move to PA, the tenure-track position, and other aspects of life getting in the way. I picked it up from my shelves a few weeks ago as I was rearranging my "library" (one day I will have a room in my apartment full of books from floor to ceiling just like you see in the New York Times and the New Yorker... In the meantime, space on my shelves is at a premium) and found it truly absorbing. This biography recounts the life of poetess Edna St Vincent Millay, from poor prodigy to Vassar graduate to Greenwich Village resident to wife with many love affairs, to finally alcoholic. The topic of talented women who find themselves dissatisfied with life and slowly succumb to liquor and bitterness - from Lee Miller to Martha Gellhorn - has long been dear to my heart because of a certain close relative, except that this relative has no talent. Milford's account of how someone who started adulthood with the best of intentions and enormous potential can struggle in various ways as she becomes older should serve as a warning lesson for us all. Milford provides plenty of sonnet excerpts, so that we get to learn about her poetry as well as the time in which she was writing it.
Anne Sexton: A biography, by Diane Middlebrook, is the remarkable account of the life, success and ultimate self-destruction of famed poetess Anne Sexton, who was a beautiful but depressed housewife suffering from mental illness before she took a poetry course where she met Maxine Kumin and Sylvia Plath, among others, rose to enormous fame thanks to her style of confessional poetry, had an unhealthy relationship to her family (drinking more alcohol than ever thought possible... entering trances... goading her husband to hit her... wanting her elder daughter to mother her... climbing in bed with that same daughter...) also marked by many affairs and finally committed suicide in 1974. This book is very dear to my heart.
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple. I usually don't read much about the 19th century, but this book was a real treat. First, I learned a lot about Emily Dickinson, about whom I previously knew very little (besides the fact that she was a recluse in Amherst and wrote poetry, which everyone knows), but I also learned about essayist Higginson's fight for racial equality as well as women's rights, his integrity and leadership, the marriage to a very ill woman that drained his energy and sadly didn't leave him with any children, and the slow turn his life took in falling below expectations, in spite of his promise as a younger man. (This book was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.)
It is, of course, downright impossible to extract a coherent message of all the books I have read this year; however, if I were to pick one, I would mention this idea of life trajectory that starts under the best auspices - with the protagonist showing talent and being blessed by some early successes - but that never leads to the expected triumphs: the path changes little by little in an imperceptible manner; energy gets sucked into caring for an ailing and bitter spouse or parent; our hero becomes stuck in a bad spot, whether it is job, spouse, neighborhood or environment. He postpones taking action until this or that happens, and of course "this or that" never does. In the end he doesn't realize his potential. In some cases life has so worn him down he doesn't even remember he had potential in the first place.
The danger is for us to get caught in a busy day-to-day life that doesn't leave us the time to realize our boat is changing course - instead of heading for the ocean we are unwittingly returning for the shore, so that the great exploration of the world we had planned ends in a tiny trip within sight of the coast.
Educators usually recommend reading for the windows in exciting worlds it offers, but reading can also serve as a repellent: it shows us what happens if we don't keep correcting the course of our life and let our trajectory be altered by wind and waves and other outside forces we have no control on. How sad to reach the end of one's existence and admit we have strayed far from our destination. The fight for the life of our dreams begins with a good book.
