Great Reads for Grown-ups

Author, editor, and essayist Richard Rodriguez notes that for the writer "there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive." The books that I have selected for my ninth annual recommended reading list express that essential vitality—celebrating lives well lived and, in some cases, not so well lived. Many writers have chronicled their search for meaning following the tragic events of September 11, others their quest for a personal, racial, or spiritual identity. Still other authors have pursued less weighty topics, writing passionately about food, fishing, and the relentless accumulation of wealth. No matter what your opinions of the people and ideas encountered between these covers, each and every story vibrates with life. It is my hope that these 10 titles will add enjoyment, verve, and enlightenment to your life. They have to mine.

110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11
Baer, Ulrich, editor
New York University Press. $22.95. ISBN 0-8147-9905-1.

The number of selections in this heartfelt collection of poems, recollections, and short works of fiction corresponds, of course, to the number of floors destroyed in each of the Twin Towers. Ulrich Baer, who teaches literature at New York University, has assembled contributions from some of the city's finest writers and emerging artists, including Paul Auster, Peter Carey, Vivian Gornick, and Phillip Lopate. In some cases, the selections are existential attempts to come to grips with the aftermath of 9-11; in others, the narratives are personal meditations on the nature of grief and loss. Some of the most noteworthy entries are "Finding the Center" by Tony Hiss, a clear-eyed remembrance of the World Trade Center as a landmark that was "not instantly lovable or easily cherished," and "We All Saw It or the View From Home" by A. M. Holmes, a fellow at New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers, that examines the impact of September 11 on those more accustomed to viewing tragic events on their TVs than firsthand. Illustrator Art Spiegelman's cover art is particularly arresting: the unmistakable image of the Twin Towers, cloaked in a black shroud, hovers specter-like above the cityscape, expressing the continuing sense of dread and loss that many New Yorkers still feel each time they look toward Ground Zero.

The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide
Conniff, Richard
Norton, $26.95. ISBN 0-393-01965-9.

Nature writer Richard Conniff has turned his well-honed powers of scientific observation on a unique cultural subspecies—the super rich. His wry romp—think of it as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous meets PBS's Nova —is as intoxicating as a split of Dom Perignon. With deadpan humor and a true gift for discerning the telling detail, Conniff draws a line of demarcation between those with old money and the nouveau riche, examining the various consequences of procreation (or the failure to produce an heir), strategic marriages, divorce, and trophy wives (accompanied by the requisite prenuptial agreement). Along the way, Conniff observes the "right" size for a mansion, the impact of primogeniture on international inheritance laws, and ultra-rich vacation spots such as Aspen and Monaco. He also titillates us with up-to-date information on the ongoing feud between media moguls Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, the skinny on former GE head honcho Jack Welch's divorce settlement, and an inside peek at the temporarily diminished lifestyles of indicted Enron and Global Crossings executives. As novelist Susan Howatch once wrote, "the rich are different"—and Conniff serves up the delectable details.

After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti
Danticat, Edwidge
Crown Journeys/Crown. $16. ISBN 0-609-60908-4.

As a young girl growing up in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat was not permitted to attend carnival, the nation's wild and frenetic celebration. Her uncle, a Baptist minister whom she lived with before moving to New York at age 12, cautioned that "people always hurt themselves during carnival…. It was their fault, for gyrating with so much abandon that they would dislocate their hips and shoulders and lose their voices while singing too loudly." Two decades after immigrating to the U.S., the Haitian-American writer (author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Behind the Mountains, a new novel for young adults) returned to her native land to experience her first carnival. Danticat's account of that journey is a leisurely perambulation through the revelers-packed streets of Jacmel, a small coastal village perched on the southern coast of Haiti. Jacmel's carnival is characterized by an unruly crush of men and women —wearing papier-mâché masks and fancy clothes, and slathered in body paint—parading through the congested streets on the backs of flatbed trucks. There, the author encounters an unforgettable array of traditional carnival characters, people whose lives reflect a synthesis of European, African, and American cultures, as well as that of the now long-forgotten Medieval Lenten Masques. For Danticat, a member of the post–Duvalier Haitian Diaspora, this walk through the streets that was denied her in childhood is a personal revelation: "Even as others had been putting on their masks, just for one afternoon, I had allowed myself to remove my own."

From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals
Haber, Barbara
Free Press. $25. ISBN 0-684-84217-3.

Culinary historian Barbara Haber has pored through diaries, cookbooks, and women's magazines to create a highly entertaining social history. Her survey of how food and cooking has shaped America's history begins with a look at the Irish famine and continues through the Civil War era, entrepreneur Fred Harvey's "Girls" (hundreds of thousands of "meticulously groomed" young women who helped civilize the West by serving decent meals), and the 19th-century origins of fast food. In a chapter winkingly entitled "They Dieted for Our Sins," Haber details the distinctions between good and bad food that influenced health food faddists like the Millerites (who eventually became the Seventh Day Adventists), William Kellogg and his competitor C. W. Post, and Sylvester Graham (whose cracker was promoted as part of a regimen to curb sexual excesses, such as marital relations more than once a month!). Haber seasons her lively text with photographs and vintage recipes. Contemporary cooks may (or may not) want to try recreating the Civil War's precursor to Ritz crackers' mock apple pie or Ella Kellogg's "savory meat loaf"—crushed zwieback is the main ingredient! "Growing Up With Gourmet," a particularly pleasing chapter in which Haber deconstructs the meaning of cookbooks, will resonate with anyone debating over whether to keep or toss out their mother's (or their own) stacks of carefully preserved Gourmet magazines.

The Founding Fish
McPhee, John
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24. ISBN 0-374-10444-1.

This time out, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer John McPhee turns his keen eyes on the American shad, a "very dark greenish-blue [ocean fish] with an almost metallic lustre" that begins its life in freshwater rivers. Also known as Alosa sapidissima, in the early spring schools of mature "shad return to their natal rivers and eat nothing on the spawning run… [they] exist on their own fat." But why does the author crown it "the founding fish"? A survey of American history provides some ready answers. Henry David Thoreau reported that the Massachusetts militia unit that stood on the Concord Bridge was dubbed the Shad. And it was none other than a large catch of migrating shad that helped revive George Washington's starving troops after a devastating winter at Valley Forge. Equal parts fisherman's daybook, natural history primer, and social history narrative, this is one great fish story. McPhee's prose is so lucid and absorbing that the accreted details (about hatcheries, dams, fish ladders, lure makers, eels, and fishing contests) consistently buoys even a non-angler's interest. Is everything recounted in this immensely readable book absolutely true? McPhee, a fisherman as well as a writer, offers an unequivocal response: "There is nothing like a rod, a reel, a stream, and the privacy of nature to make a liar out of anybody."

The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Finalists
Osen, Diane, editor. Introduction by Neil Baldwin
Modern Library. $12.95 paperback. ISBN 0-679-78351-2.

If you read only one book about books this year, make sure it's this one. Diane Osen prepared meticulously for these interviews with 15 National Book Award winners and finalists, and it shows. The interviews are tightly focused, substantive, and telling. Almost every page bursts with enduring insights into the value of reading and writing. And not surprisingly, none of the interviewees was able to restrict himself to citing a single most-influential book. Barry Lopez (author of Arctic Dreams) acknowledges two novels, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley, as enduring influences on his writing. "Both early on and all the way though your life as a writer," says Lopez, "certain books change in a larger or smaller scale the way you approach your work." Longtime devotees of children's book writer Katherine Paterson, a National Book Award winner and a Newbery Medallist, will knowingly whisper "Of course!" when she points to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins as an enduring influence on her work.

The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired
Prose, Francine
HarperCollins. $24.95. ISBN 0-06-019672-6.

Muses, as most of us were taught, are those ancient mythic females who dwell on Mount Helicon. But Francine Prose is not interested in crusty mythological beings; she's after contemporary, flesh-and-blood sources of artistic inspiration. In The Lives of the Muses, she has created brilliant and entertaining portraits of nine extraordinary women—modern-day muses whose impact on literature and the arts is still with us. Prose's lineup includes Alice Liddell (whose request for a story prompted Lewis Carroll to sit up all night recording Alice's adventures), Elizabeth Siddall (an opium addict who also happened to be painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti's favorite model), and Suzanne Farrell (the muse and prima ballerina who inspired choreographer George Balanchine's finest creations for the New York City Ballet). Of course, no discussion of contemporary muses could be complete without Yoko Ono, the artist who married John Lennon and supposedly broke up the Beatles. Prose observes that though these women may have played traditional roles (nurturer, mirror, and "understander") for their beloved artists, none of them was conventional. Each woman, writes Prose, "was a product of her time, and each moved, outside and beyond it… in the process that turns experience into art."

Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Rodriguez, Richard
Viking. $24.95. ISBN 0-670-03043-0.

Richard Rodriguez, perhaps best known as an eloquent and frequent commentator on PBS's Newshour with Jim Lehrer, writes about race "in the hope of undermining the notion of race in America." His latest mediation on personal and racial identity and the complex relationship between Hispanic Americans and American culture—subjects he has also explored in his memoirs Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation —is no simplistic cri de coeur, neither is it a sociological study or a political tract. This extended essay is poetic and associative, a contemporary "Song of Myself," in which the past and present merge, expressing, at times, seemingly mystical insights. Rodriguez, a 21st-century Walt Whitman, embraces and revels in the certainty of contradiction. He is fully at peace with the many disparate aspects of his own psyche—that of a gay, Catholic, Indian, and Hispanic American male. Rodriguez suggests that brown is a synthesis of the past and the future: "Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable—the line separating black from white, for example." After reading Rodriguez's moving and persuasive prose, the reader is left to wonder: Could brown possibly be the color of hope?

Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song
Turner, Steve
Ecco/HarperCollins. $23.95. ISBN 0-06-000218-2.

Music writer Steve Turner, the author of Trouble Man: The Life and Death of Marvin Gaye, offers a fascinating exploration of the origin and popularity of one of America's most enduring hymns, "Amazing Grace." The true story of the song's creation is stranger than the stuff of fiction. As a passenger aboard a ship returning to England, in 1748, sea captain and slave trader John Newton survived a brutal, 11-hour storm in the Atlantic Ocean. The experience resulted in a spiritual epiphany. Although Newton continued as a slave trader after his conversion, he eventually gave it up, becoming a country vicar and a prolific composer of Christian hymns. In 1772, while living in Olney, England, Newton wrote "Amazing Grace," a song that has captured the hearts of both the religious and secular world. With fascinating details, Turner traces the song's more than 200-year history. "Amazing Grace" is now far "greater than the sum of its parts," writes Turner. After all, how many songs still have "a life-changing impact [with] words that in the twenty-first century were still encouraging, challenging, comforting, and even stopping people in their tracks"?

Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Religious Life
Winner, Lauren F.
Algonquin. $23.95. ISBN 1-56512-309-3.

In this compelling 21st-century pilgrim's progress, Lauren Winner, the daughter of a lapsed Jewish father and a fallen-away Southern Baptist mother, charts a rocky spiritual course that is sincere, affecting, and unsentimental. In late adolescence, Winner's search for meaning took her to New York's Columbia University. Why Columbia? It was where she could immerse herself fully in Orthodox Judaism: studying Hebrew scripture (the Torah and Talmud), keeping Kosher, observing the Sabbath, and dressing modestly. Winner made friends and found community. But along the way, she made a 180-degree turn, having an unexpected, life-altering dream, a dream that called her, inexorably, to Christianity. Determined to become a Christian, she eventually joined the Episcopal Church. All superficial details to the contrary—this is anything but a melodramatic tale of a 20-something's personal "Road to Damascus." Winner, now a writer for Christianity Today, is a forthright, warm, sexy, and bright young woman. Her book is a genuine, heartfelt tale of spiritual progress; one in which the elements of Jewish belief and ritual are both continually referenced and reverenced.