Great Reads for Grown-ups

Foodies, spiritual seekers, and writers rule—at least, they do on this year’s list of the best nonfiction books for adults. One of the titles I just couldn’t put down was David Kamp’s smart (and smart-alecky) The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. Kamp, a veteran Vanity Fair writer, shows how a land of frozen-food lovers was somehow transformed into a nation of shameless, latte-guzzling epicureans. Of course, we’re not only what we eat, and My Life with the Saints by Catholic priest James Martin is a timely and really funny reminder that you don’t have to be a saint to be spiritual. Finally, novelist Francine Prose offers some priceless advice on how to become a writer by doing exactly what we love—reading. Her Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them is a perfect gift for any librarian who works with kids or dreams of one day composing the Great American Novel. To my way of thinking, each of the following 10 selections is superb in its own way. I hope you’ll agree.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Anderson, Chris. Hyperion, 2006. ISBN 1-4013-0237-8. $24.95.

What exactly is the long tail? According to Anderson, who coined the phrase, it’s the perfect metaphor to describe how the Internet has revolutionized our access to information and consumer commodities, most notably music, films, and books. For much of the last 50 years, explains Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, we’ve gone gaga over blockbusters—“making them, choosing them, talking about them, and following their rise and fall.” Even though we still swoon over what’s hot, lately our traditional mass culture has begun to fray around the edges. Hollywood box-office revenues, for instance, were down six percent in 2005; not a single all-time best-selling album has been made since Bob Dylan turned 60 five years ago; and the ratings of the top TV shows keep dropping. What’s happening? For starters, broadband, iPods, cellphones, MP3s, TiVo, and online shopping have become as common as Kleenex, and because of this newfound connectivity, we’re besieged with an almost endless supply of culture and content—and “the tail” keeps growing. If you’re a librarian who’s struggling to respond to this increasingly wired world, Anderson’s provocative analysis is required reading.

The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. Johnson, Marilyn. HarperCollins, 2006. ISBN 0-06-075875-2. $24.95.

We’re living in the Golden Age of the Obituary, says Johnson. Who would know better? Johnson, whose byline appears in Esquire and other monthlies, is a death-notice junkie who has penned obits for scads of celebrities, including Katherine Hepburn, Johnny Cash, and Princess Diana. From the get-go, Johnson makes it clear that obituaries aren’t lightweights: “This tight little coil of biography with its literary flourishes reminds us of a poem. Certainly it contains the most creative writing in journalism.” It also attracts its share of characters, like Andrew McKie of London’s Daily Telegraph, who showed up at a recent Great Obituary Writers’ International Conference wearing a big black cowboy hat and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. If you’re obsessed with the occasionally morbid but always memorable world of obits, check out Johnson’s “Internet Tour Guide,” an appendix that includes many of the best Web sites for keeping up with the dead. And don’t overlook daily papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, which devote a substantial amount of print to “feature-style stories of the dead,” often written, revised, and fact-checked while their famous subjects were still alive and robust.

The Female Brain. Brizendine, Louann. Morgan Road Books (Random House), 2006. ISBN 0-7679-2009-0. $24.95.

Not all that long ago, if you’d said that hormones directly affect our behaviors, most scientists would’ve handed you a dunce cap. But recent studies have shown that hormones “can affect being talkative, being flirtatious, giving or attending parties, writing thank-you notes, planning children’s playdates, cuddling, grooming, worrying about hurting the feelings of others, being competitive, masturbating, and initiating sex.” Who would’ve guessed? Starting in the 1990s, says Brizendine, director of the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, researchers finally began paying attention to the physiological and psychological differences between the sexes—and they discovered some remarkable stuff. For example, did you know that women have 11 percent more neurons in their brain centers for language and hearing than males? Although that distinction may seem like small potatoes, it explains why “women are, on average, better at expressing emotions.” On the other hand, youth librarians won’t be surprised to learn that middle school girls actually get a neurochemical rush every time they confide in one another. Brizendine offers a top-notch guide to the latest brain research and, best of all, some irrefutable evidence of what it truly means to be a woman.

The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. Kamp, David. Broadway, 2006. ISBN 0-7679-1579-8. $26.

It’s hard to believe, but a little over 20 years ago, most Americans had never even heard of sushi or salsa. How tastes have changed. Today, says Vanity Fair and GQ writer Kamp, the “food world has its own ESPN (the Food Network, founded in 1993), its own constellation of marketable stars (Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, etc.), its own power elite (Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, etc.), its own literary lights (Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain), and its own high-end glossies….” And it’s not just foodies who are imbibing the benefits, it’s your average Joe—the guy who gets his coffee from Starbucks and dines on fresh pasta with pesto. Cooking would have never become a national obsession, explains Kamp, without the efforts of “The Big Three”: James Beard, the paterfamilias of contemporary American cuisine; Julia Child, who brought French cooking into ordinary Americans’ kitchens; and Craig Claiborne, the New York Times’ first restaurant critic who turned food writing into a respected form of journalism. Kamp tells their stories (and those of their professional progeny) with great pizzazz, and his always-amusing observations run from reflective to tongue-in-cheek to laugh-out-loud funny. If you love to cook or eat—and who doesn’t?—unplug the microwave, kick off your shoes, and get ready to savor Kamp’s latest mouth-watering concoction.

Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert, Daniel. Knopf, 2006. ISBN 1-4000-4266-6. $24.

Why are we usually wrong about what will make us happy? And why do we spend so much time worrying about things to come? Blame it on the frontal lobe, that part of the brain that compels us to imagine the future. We simply can’t help dreaming, scheming, and planning, explains Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University. And when it comes to happiness, those tendencies seldom pay off. But don’t lose hope. Although Gilbert concedes that happiness is as tricky to pin down as a politician, he recommends a practical approach to pursuing it. One of the best ways is to talk with others who’ve been where we’d like to be. Ask them what it really feels like to have children or to raise a Lhasa apso or to live in the south of France—or whatever your deepest desires may be. Finally, Gilbert offers some sage counsel: “Look at your own life, and ask what has brought you the most joy.” Not surprisingly, real happiness is often found in our relationships with family and friends, rather than in the possessions we acquire. More science than self-help, this is a funny, off-beat, and profoundly wise book.

The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Era That Gave the World Impressionism. King, Ross. Walker, 2006. ISBN 0-8027-1466-8. $28.

If you think Mac and PC lovers have irreconcilable differences, wait until you read King’s mesmerizing account of the bumpy birth of Impressionism. In 1863, a turbulent year in French history, there were essentially two types of artists in Paris—those whose conventional paintings of gods and historic scenes were displayed in the government-sponsored Salon (an annual exhibition that drew up to a million people during its six-week run) and those whose daring images of everyday people and landscapes were routinely excluded from the prestigious event. To lend drama to this clash, King contrasts the careers of two of its most prominent participants: Ernest Meissonier, at the time France’s most famous and wealthiest artist (thanks to his painstakingly rendered portraits of elegantly attired chess players and musketeers), and a little-known painter named Édouard Manet, whose less fussy paintings of nudes and contemporary Parisians would soon topple many of the art world’s conventions. Along the way, we’re introduced to a vast cast of beguiling characters, including Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and the writers Émile Zola and Victor Hugo. Always scholarly, never stuffy, King makes this story seethe with suspense and passion—a mark of a true artist.

Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. Horne, Jed. Random, 2006. ISBN 1-4000-6552-6. $25.95.

''Katrina tore up lives as well as landscapes,” says Horne of the monster hurricane that devastated New Orleans in August 2005. “Rich people died along with the indigent,” he writes. “That did not make Katrina an 'equal opportunity destroyer,’ as some hastened to call it. Poor blacks did disproportionately more of the dying. And as the engines of recovery creaked into gear, people of means enjoyed advantages that had been theirs all along.” Horne, an editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, won a Pulitzer for his role in the paper’s coverage of Katrina, and his compelling account chronicles the storm’s vast destruction, as well as the often heroic efforts of New Orleans’ residents to rebuild their wounded city. What makes this narrative so powerful (and so painful to read) is its intimate portrayal of many of the catastrophe’s victims, survivors, and even villains—a view that cuts much deeper than anything reported on TV. And Horne’s depiction of our federal government’s frighteningly inadequate response to the disaster is likely to leave you feeling outraged. Breach of Faith is a shocking and powerful narrative that will linger long in your memory.

My Life with the Saints. Martin, James. Loyola Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8294-2001-0. $22.95.

''How gloriously different are the saints,” the writer C. S. Lewis once noted. Boy, did he ever get that wrong. As Martin, an associate editor at America magazine, reminds us, the saints were once flawed creatures like us, and that’s what makes them such powerful role models, intercessors, and even friends. Martin didn’t always have such an enlightened view. When he was a kid, he sent away for a statue of St. Jude, thinking the patron of lost causes would help him do well in Little League or clear up his acne. Years later, Martin became a fast-track executive with GE, but soon realized the work made him miserable. One evening, as he watched a PBS special about a Trappist monk named Thomas Merton (someone Martin had never heard of), he became captivated by the Catholic priest’s life. And two years later, the 28-year-old Martin entered the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits, one of the largest religious orders in the Catholic Church. “It was certainly the best decision I’ve ever made,” he says. Martin’s list of heroes includes both official and unofficial saints, such as Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits who, Martin says, “may be the only canonized saint with a notarized police record”), and Dorothy Day, a former Greenwich Village bohemian who founded the Catholic Worker newspaper to call attention to the plight of the poor. Martin makes all of their stories come alive in this beautifully written, often hilarious account of a thoughtful man’s search for meaning.

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Pollan, Michael. Penguin, 2006. ISBN 1-59420-082-3. $26.95.

America has a serious eating disorder, says Pollan. How else do you explain our obsession with diet books, protein bars, and food supplements? Or that beef (once considered bad news) is now thought to be good for us, while bread, a longtime staple, has been banished from the table? “To one degree or another, the question of what to have for dinner assails every omnivore,” says Pollan, who teaches journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you. This is the omnivore’s dilemma….” Pollan sets out to resolve that conundrum by examining firsthand the origins of four very different kinds of meals: a fast-food outing at McDonald’s, a natural-foods dinner prepared with ingredients from Whole Foods, a repast made mostly from local food grown and raised on a small organic farm, and, finally, a menu featuring ingredients that were hunted, gathered, or grown by the author himself. What Pollan discovers isn’t always easy to stomach, but Omnivore’s Dilemma provides an astonishing look at how agricultural, industrial, and social forces shape our daily eating habits.

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Prose, Francine. HarperCollins, 2006. ISBN 0-06-077704-4. $23.95.

Every year thousands of aspiring authors flock to writing workshops, hoping to become the next Flannery O’Connor… or Jackie Collins. But can creative writing really be taught? “It’s a reasonable question to ask,” says Prose, “but no matter how many times I’ve been asked it, I never know quite what to say. Because if what people mean is: Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no.” But for those who have a genuine love of literature and a knack for inventing tales, “[a] workshop can be useful,” says Prose. “A good teacher can show you how to edit your work. The right class can form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you.” And, she might have added, a good guide can offer invaluable advice. Prose, the author of more than a dozen novels, is well acquainted with the travails of struggling writers: she’s taught creative writing in some of our nation’s finest programs. She’s also a passionate reader, who, like many other fiction writers, learned her craft by carefully reading (and rereading) stories that she loved—paying keen attention to every word, sentence, and paragraph. Prose’s thoughtful guide is a brilliant distillation of her experience as an author and teacher, and it’s essential reading for anyone who loves great writing.