Category Archives: Non-fiction

March 1, 2024 · 2:54 am

The Talk: Excellent

I hadn’t heard of Darrin Bell before my mum suggested The Talk, but I can’t wait to spend more time with his work. The Talk is Bell’s memoir of growing up in amid racist structures and people and of his path to becoming a Pulitzer winning editorial cartoonist. A Künstlerroman for those collecting their literary terms. I wish I’d had it to recommend in a recent conversation with a white man who told me there were no racist police officers. Or that I was teaching a course that I could put it on the booklist for so that more white young people could hear early: racism is real and white supremacy is not an accident and you have responsibilities for change. And as Bell ends the book, so that more black young people could hear early: you are not alone. Alas, all I have is this humble platform on which to echo mum’s recommendation: go read The Talk!

Oh and if you needed more reason: it’s visually stunning.

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August 18, 2023 · 7:04 pm

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: What a bad title for an excellent book

Rebecca Donner’s biography of her great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, is great (though the title is impossible for me to remember thus making it terrible when I try to recommend it). It has a thriller vibe as the resistance forms and fights in Berlin leading up to and during the Second World War. The cast of characters (I know, I know, they’re people) feel sharp and present – the best kind of biography for me is one where you can forget its non-fiction. And how wonderful to have recovered the story of Harnack, all but forgotten, from fragments and trace references, and to bring her heroism to the contemporary moment.

Harnack’s heroism is her bafflement that those around her are quiescent amid the rise of Hitler. Everyone, she thinks, seems to think someone else will solve the problem of Hitler, someone else will put a stop to the madness.

Most pressing to a reader in 2023 are the questions of what we do ourselves amid our parallel moment. Bravery is not my strong suit, and so I’ll simply suggest you read this one, and think about accrual of silence and shrugs. Sort of like how I approach choosing take-out on Friday nights, and then find myself annoyed that we’ve ended up with shawarma. Once again.

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January 3, 2023 · 8:17 pm

Chance: Good thing the 5 year old didn’t read it.

R. who is (somehow) now 5 picked out Uri Shulevitz’s memoir Chance: Escape from the Holocaust from the library which was (I suppose appropriately) shelved in the children’s section as it is pitched at an older young adult reader. Anyway, I’m pretty shrug shrug to whatever the kid brings home to read – we’ve read a lot of garbage Little Critter books and a lot of much to adult books about dragons as a consequence – but in this case I thought I’d give it a quick go over before reading it to him (something I have truly not done before – which results in a lot of adapted stories let me tell you).

And not that I won’t read it to him, but maybe not at 5. He is still, after all, afraid of giants and requires illustrations with ‘angry eyes’ to be covered up, so not sure he’s ready for the steady description of a family of Jewish refugees from Poland through Soviet Russia (and back again) during WWII. Like the descriptions are never super graphic, but the relentless hunger, terror, uncertainty and sudden death of loved ones… might be a lot.

It does make me wonder when the right time might be to read books to him (or the other kid) that are… difficult. Like we’ve been reading books that explore racism, or violence, or death or other manner of hard stuff forever – in (I like to think) age appropriate and supported ways. But eventually he will be ‘ready’ for a book like this one – where the fate of the author is genuine chance (or maybe God, but you know, chance) and he’ll have to sit with that. I guess I’ll just leave it to school to figure it out. Ha ha.

But seriously – how have you figured out when to read something with a younger person that might be Hard? Or when have you yourself approached a challenging topic and what did you need to read through it well?

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November 24, 2021 · 3:19 am

Empire of Pain: It Won’t Feel Good (and not just because it is literally very heavy) But A Must Read

I did commit to reading more nonfiction this year, and so in the waning months of 2021 I thought, why not read something cheerful, like a 560 page deep dive into the Sackler family and their obscene greed that brought the world mass marketed pharmaceuticals and Oxycontin and the subsequent hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths?

I didn’t realize when ordering it from the library that it was from the same author, Patrick Radden Keefe, as my previous 2021 nonfiction win, Say Nothing. But happy discovery, as like Say Nothing the writing is ‘novelistic’ in that people (cough characters) are afforded full depth and complicated motivations and that there is a plot that one can latch onto. So no dry, dull non-fiction for this reader. (Sure, sure, I get it, 2021’s experiment has proven that non-fiction is… pretty great. Don’t rub it in, NHFH.)

What this one offers is on the surface a biography of the Sackler family, beginning with the three brothers that found Purdue pharmaceuticals, but chiefly Arthur, who is something of an impossible figure to believe in the range of interests, the maniacal pursuit of them and the ‘success’ he brought in merging the fields of advertising, medicine and drug development. We then follow the subsequent generations of Sacklers and their truly relentless and amoral pursuit of profit over the clear and consistent and unequivocal proof the dangers of their opioid products. The level of corruption within the government and government agencies, of doctors and pharmacies, the collusion and feigned ignorance, it’s all… a lot, and yet, somehow not at all surprising.

The book explores with some complexity the complicity of later generations and what level of involvement within the Sackler business should ‘taint’ a Sackler family member. Or whether benefiting – directly or indirectly – from Sackler profits besmirches the character or actions of an individual family member, some of whom (though not many) were tangential to the direct business dealings.

I especially appreciated the section detailing the work of activist artist, Nan Goldin, and the demonstration of the power of art to unsettle and unseat power. A meta commentary, I’m sure, on the potential of the book to provoke change, of books to make a difference.

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