This month offers a plethora of excellent new nonfiction, including work by Hermione Lee, Orlando Swain, Sarah Haas, and more.
Matt O’Hara, The Flying Death: Poison, Plunder, and the Quest for a Miracle Medicine in the Amazon
In 1938, sickly, scheming Richard Gill made his way down the Amazon river in search of the poison native tribes used for their blow darts: curare. American by birth, Gill believed that curare had the potential to heal any number of diseases, including his own multiple sclerosis. If he could corner the market on exports to North America and Europe, Gill thought, then he stood to make a fortune—as long he got to curare before the big drug companies did.
In this gripping true narrative, historian Matt O’Hara introduces us to the opportunists, adventurers, and chancers who raced both to find curare and figure out a way to make money off it. But as curare transforms the nature of anesthetics across the globe, O’Hara shows us how those well-funded personalities used, manipulated, and discarded the indigenous people who first learned curare’s secrets. Gill would never recover from his voyage, and neither would the people he used to get there.
Olivia Swarthout, The Wordspotter’s Guide: A Jaunt Through Our Etymological Past
Etymological study walks a fine line between dry and delightful. Olivia Swarthout announces on which side she intends to land right in the subtitle, and she delivers. This book manages to deliver on the promise of the jaunt without losing any of the rigor. Swarthout leads reader on a researched trip (nothing so arduous as a journey) through the history of well-chosen English words. Did you know that boycott is actually a proper name of one English jerk? Yes!
English land agent Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832–1897), who was responsible for enforcing unfair policies upon Irish tenants under threat of eviction. In response, Boycott’s community collectively shunned and refused to do business with him.
That’s one you can pull out at parties for the rest of your life. Especially parties in Ireland.
Jessica Craig-Martin, I Regret I Am Able to Attend: A Life Among the Artists
The writer and photographer Jessica Craig-Martin is known for her relentlessly un-gauzy portraits of high society. When she wields her camera for the Condé glossies, she focuses her lens on the beads of sweat smearing a socialite’s makeup, or a frozen and dead-eyed smile on a power broker. I Regret I am Able to Attend, Craig-Martin’s new memoir, maintains that transparency to deliciously gossipy, name-dropping effect.
Chapter by chapter, Craig-Martin walks us from her bohemian childhood as the daughter of two London artists, rubbing shoulders with Ossie Clark and David Hockney; to her years slogging away as an assistant at Vanity Fair and British Vogue; until at last she discovers her own love of photography. “You may stumble across a narrative arc of some kind, but I’ll be damned if you detect any redemption,” Craig-Martin tells us early on. She keeps her promise, and thank god for that.
Sarah Haas, Jealousy: A Memoir
Jealous has always been a feature of human relationships, but social media has provided it with a horrifying level of fuel, allowing even the most minor of jealousies to spiral into obsession. Sarah Haas uses jealousy as both lens and character in this memoir. She traces her life, beginning in utero, and her technologically-assisted unraveling from jealous. As memoirs increasingly function as PR campaigns for the self, it’s amazing how unflinchingly Haas is able to look at the inner workings of herself.
Hermione Lee, Anita Brookner: Art and Life
Anita Brookner, the English novelist who won the Booker in 1984 for her novel Hotel du Lac, has been largely forgotten in the US. In the UK, her reputation drowned under waves of misogyny after she won the award everyone thought should go to JG Ballard. Popular imagination dismissed her as one of the lonely and disappointed women in a cardigan who peopled her novels, her books discarded as conservative and constricting. In this vivid and vigorous new biography, literary critic Hermione Lee makes the case for Brookner as a literary figure worth not only remembering but celebrating.
Brookner doesn’t give her biographer an easy time of it. She bragged to interviewers that she planned to “leave no trace” of her private life and seems to have destroyed most of her papers; Lee writes that she can hear Brookner’s voice in her head saying “Go away” as she researches. Yet Lee shows that the iron sense of control with which Brookner approached her own legacy runs through her fiction, too, creating the austere elegance that characterizes her prose. Brookner’s fame, Lee writes, is “greatly diminished” from its height in the 1980s, but Lee’s book has “tried to find her and to bring her back.” It will make you want to walk to the nearest library and look up a copy of Hotel du Lac at once.
Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, Northern Comfort: The New England Baking Tradition
Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, food historians and retired library directors, are the perfect guides through the rich and fascinating food culture of New England. Organized by category of baked good (from Breads to Cookies and Cakes), Stavely and Fitzgerald let the micro do much of the work, resulting in intimate historical portraits of the way New Englanders baked, ate, and lived. And, of course, recipes are included. What better way to piss off your Republican relatives this Thanksgiving than by telling them the bread on the table was from a recipe created by an abolitionist?
Catherine Heymans, How to Design a Universe: The Science of Real and Virtual Worlds
In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom argued that the universe as we know it is almost certainly a computer simulation. According to Bostrom’s thought experiment, the chances are devastatingly high that we are living within the confines of a highly realistic video game for galactic beings beyond our understanding, a conjecture known as the simulation hypothesis. In her new book How to Design a Universe, Heymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, decides to take Bostrom on.
Heymans’s scientific specialty lies in finding ways to observe unobservable things: mapping dark matter by the way its gravitational force distorts the path of light from distant galaxies. In the charming, approachable How to Design a Universe, Heymans uses a similar toolkit on the simulation hypothesis. If our universe really is a simulation, she asks, then what are the warpings and distortions in our own physical world that could lead us to the hypothetical base reality?
Piece by piece, Heymans explores what it would take to create a virtual universe with as much detail as ours has: the spooky physics of quantum mechanics, the electromagnetic chemical reactions that inform human senses, the mysterious force of consciousness. By the end, she’s poked a number of holes in Bostrom’s slick philosophical argument—and she’s taught us all a great deal about the nature of reality in the process.
Orlando Swayne, How to Use a Fork: Stories of Mending the Broken Brain
Neurologist Orlando Swayne has somehow written a book about brain injury that is not just moving, but also hopeful. By focusing on the brain’s extraordinary—and still under-recognized—capacity for repair, Swain doesn’t encourage us to marvel at the many ways in which things can go terribly wrong. Instead, he writes what amounts to a love letter not just to the human brain, but for the human capacity to rebuild even when the most fundamental parts of ourselves are profoundly, devastatingly altered. Comparisons to Oliver Sacks are inevitable, and warranted.
Allison Leigh, The Misogynists: A Reckoning with Modern Art
It should come as no surprise that the early history of modern art was not a friendly place for women. But as Leigh’s deeply researched cultural history of the careers of six art world giants—Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Picasso—reveals, it was, in fact, absolutely awful. The misogynistic exploitation endured by women at the hands of these still revered icons was shocking even to their contemporaries, showing us once again just how awful the man behind the art we love can be.
Matthew Teller, Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller
In 1709, the French scholar Antoine Galland was attempting to add a new volume to his wildly popular translation of One Thousand and One Nights, the first edition of its kind for a European audience. But while Galland’s public clamored for more fanciful stories of djinni and sultans and magicians, Galland himself feared he had run dry. He’d translated the entirety of the Arabic manuscript that was his primary source. He had no more.
Then Galland happened across Hanna Diab, a Syrian adventurer exploring Versailles for a lark. Hanna’s madcap life gave him plenty of material for storytelling, and his fertile imagination did the rest. He spun tale after tale for Galland—including one of the stories that would become most deeply associated with One Thousand and One Nights: the tale of Aladdin and his magic lamp. But while Galland translated Hanna’s tales to wild acclaim, he gave Hanna himself no credit.
In this fascinating piece of literary detective work, journalist Matthew Teller sets off on a quest to tell Hanna’s story—and, by extension, the story of how legends filtered back and forth between Europe and the Middle East over centuries, and who gets remembered and forgotten when they do.
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