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Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle

Michael Andor Brodeur. Beacon, $27.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8070-5936-4

Brodeur, a classical music critic for the Washington Post, debuts with a winsome and insightful blend of cultural history and memoir that tracks the idealized beefcake body from ancient Greece to today and chronicles his own queer coming-of-age transformation from “wispy, waify string bean of a boy” to “meathead.” The historical segments shed particular light on contemporary fitness culture’s development, explaining how it first emerged in early 19th-century Germany in deep entanglement with nationalist principles, and was brought to the U.S. by failed 1848 revolutionaries. Throughout, Brodeur maintains a sharp focus on the way Western culture’s perceived mind-body divide has shaped ideas about masculinity (during what he calls American men’s “first identity crisis” in the mid-19th century, the Atlantic Monthly lamented that “a race of shopkeepers, brokers and lawyers could live without bodies”). This ideological undercurrent also surfaces in the autobiographical sections. Of his teenage years, Brodeur writes: “I longed to forget I even had a body. I started thinking of myself as my thoughts.” He builds up to an intriguing hypothesis concerning today’s extremist online culture of men seeking to reclaim a lost masculinity characterized by physical fitness and misogyny. Its catalyst, according to Brodeur, was the internet itself, which, by chipping away at real-life interaction, has set in motion another identity crisis over the separation between mind and body. Punchy, entertaining, and perceptive, this delivers. (May)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Rapture

Christopher Hamilton. Columbia Univ, $20 (176p) ISBN 978-0-231-20155-1

King’s College London philosophy professor Hamilton (A Philosophy of Tragedy) presents a wide-ranging exploration of “rapture,” or that which causes one “to be taken out of oneself” and simultaneously “returned to oneself unburdened, with a sense of freedom.” Among other examples from history, philosophy, art, and literature, Hamilton examines Friedrich Nietzsche’s rapturous mid-1880s return to health after a long illness, which reacquainted him with everyday sensual delights, and director Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, which followed a self-stylized “protector” of bears whose obsessive pursuit of the animal ended in his being killed and eaten by one (this courting of death is a kind of rapture, according to Hamilton). Also discussed is Anton Chekhov’s 1887 short story “The Kiss,” in which a man is kissed by a woman who mistook him for someone else, inspiring rapturous romantic imaginings that he eventually realizes are futile. Hamilton’s take on his subject is more belletristic than analytic, with scholarly rigor sometimes sacrificed for lyrical and moving meditations on living a life that’s sensuous, daring, and authentic. Of tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s “rapturous” 1974 high-wire stroll between New York City’s Twin Towers, Hamilton writes, “he becomes wholly animal, his body completely at one with his mind. And both are at one with the wire.” The result is a captivating if somewhat murky reverie on the extremes of existence. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words: Unpublished, Unvarnished, and Told by the Beatles and Their Inner Circle

Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. St. Martin’s, $32 (352p) ISBN 978-1-25028-501-0

Forty years after The Love You Make, Brown, former COO of Apple Corps, the Beatles’ media corporation, and journalist Gaines reunite for a revealing oral history of the forces that spurred the band’s breakup, which was first announced in 1970. Drawing from a trove of never before published conversations with each band member, except for John Lennon, and their intimates, the account touches on shifty characters within the group’s orbit, including “Magic” Alexis Mardas, who almost talked the Beatles into buying four Greek islands; Lennon’s descent into heroin addiction; and the fraying friendship between Paul McCartney and Lennon as the two fought over shares in the Beatles’ business ventures. There are also plenty of tender moments, including Yoko Ono’s musings on the genesis of her relationship with Lennon while he was still married to his first wife, Cynthia; their love was “bigger than both of us,” Ono claims. Taken together, the interview transcripts reveal that “the time had come” for the band’s split: “Realistically, how long could they go on being a Beatle and feel creatively satisfied?” Brown and Gaines write. Nearly all the interviews were conducted in the two months before Lennon’s 1980 murder, casting a melancholy shadow over his estrangement from McCartney, who seemed to have been softening toward his former bandmate (“I still do feel for the guy.... I still see that he thinks he’s the one who was hurt”). Beatles fans will be impatient to get their hands on this. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Desolation: A Heavy Metal Memoir

Mark Morton, with Ben Opipari. Hachette, $32 (320p) ISBN 978-0-306-83098-3

Lamb of God guitarist Morton debuts with a bruising personal history of music and addiction. Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, Morton spent his childhood in suburban Virginia skateboarding, watching MTV, and grappling with body image anxieties that drove him to start using drugs and drinking to fit in. He found punk rock music in his early teens and began playing in bands. In the mid-1990s, he formed Lamb of God (initially known as Burn the Priest), a heavy metal group known for its chaotic musical style (“We were a burning car crash: jarring, unhinged, and impossible not to watch”). Rising fame led to world tours and the author’s descent into a “black hole of drugs and alcohol,” which accelerated after the death of his newborn daughter in 2009. Morton spent years seesawing between addiction and sobriety as he tried to “blot out... reality” while contending with suicidal thoughts, agonizing withdrawals, and a strained marriage. Realizing he’d begun to feel “spiritually and emotionally dead,” he hit rock bottom in 2018 and got sober. Morton writes movingly of the way pain and art are intimately linked, and has a sharp eye for the gifts afforded by sobriety, including more fully experiencing “fans’ connections to our music” at live shows. It’s a raw yet hopeful portrait of a tumultuous life. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Gravity of Math: How Geometry Rules the Universe

Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau. Basic, $30 (272p) ISBN 978-1-5416-0429-2

Science journalist Nadis and Tsinghua University mathematician Yau follow up 2019’s The Shape of a Life with an esoteric exploration of geometry’s role in explaining gravity and the structure of the universe. The authors chronicle advances in physics and mathematics alongside highly technical discussions of the theory and details behind those advances. An overview of how Albert Einstein combined Bernhard Riemann’s “ideas about curved space with [Hermann] Minkowski’s concept of four-dimensional spacetime” to develop a theory of gravity is challenging yet comprehensible. The historical perspective intermittently intrigues, covering how astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild first posited the existence of black holes in 1916, and how mathematician Theodor Kaluza’s belief in “the presence of dimensions that have so far remained invisible” provided the premise for string theory. Unfortunately, discussions of more recent advances made by Stephen Hawking and Yau will be exceedingly difficult to grasp for most readers. For instance, the authors write of Yau’s efforts in the late aughts to figure out the “conditions that a definition of quasilocal mass should satisfy”: “The ‘correct limit’ realized at a point—after a procedure called normalization is done to obtain a nonzero limit—would, in fact, be the value of the stress-energy tensor at that point.” This is best suited to those with advanced knowledge of the field. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man’s Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

Joél Leon. Holt, $28.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-250-88710-8

“What does it mean to be a Black man, now?” asks Leon, creative director at the New York Times’s T Brand Studio, in his intimate debut essay collection. In “All Gold Everything,” he contends that the ostentatious gold chains worn by Mr. T, Michael Jordan, and Slick Rick are a “reflection of all the excess we weren’t privileged enough to obtain when we were stolen and brought to the Americas.” Grieving the lost potential of L.A. rapper Nipsey Hussle and other Black men killed in their hometowns by local rivals or the police, Leon laments the “clear and present dangers of staying in the same places where the homies and the 12 know our names” in “Homecoming.” The tender “How to Make a Black Friend” meditates on the support Leon derives from his friendship with Tyron Perryman, whom Leon met after appearing on Perryman’s podcast, Tea and Converse: “The idea that male friendships don’t get to be as special, as intimate, and as warm as other relationships is what leaves so many of us looking for vices that isolate us from the truest, most vulnerable and loving versions of self.” Leon’s lucid prose elevates his perceptive insights into the need for more expansive visions of Black masculinity. This auspicious outing announces Leon as a writer to watch. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession

Amy Stewart. Random House, $32 (336p) ISBN 978-0-593-44685-0

In this wholesome report, novelist Stewart (From the Ground Up) explores the myriad motivations of 50 tree enthusiasts. Many of those profiled find symbolic meaning in their orchards. For instance, a Northern California woman recounts how she started planting persimmon trees in 2012 as a tribute to her Korean elders, explaining that the fruit is often “placed on altars and grave sites to honor the dead.” Others have more practical goals, such as the South Carolina man who intended to secure generational wealth for his children by growing loblolly pine for timber on a tract his formerly enslaved great-grandfather took over from his former master after the Civil War. For Mexican bonsai artist Enrique Castaño, the dedicated work of “learning how to read the tree by watching the size of the leaves, the curvature of the branches, and the direction of new growth” is its own reward. Elsewhere, Stewart details how a New Mexico botanist spent her retirement collecting pine cones from as many of the 115 pine species as she could find, and how a local leader in Piplantri, India, plants 111 trees for every girl born in the village to push back against the cultural preference for boys. The lighthearted character studies survey the diverse ways that humans relate to the natural world, and Stewart’s tranquil watercolor illustrations charm. Readers will breeze through this. Illus. Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science

Erin Zimmerman. Melville House, $28.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-68589-070-4

Evolutionary botanist Zimmerman discusses her passion for plants and inveighs against sexism in the sciences in her marvelous debut memoir. Zimmerman grew up in southwestern Ontario, where she spent much of her childhood exploring “open spaces full of green in every direction.” Her lifelong fascination with the natural world led her to a PhD in molecular plant systematics and research on rare plant species in South America. Zimmerman writes rapturously of her work (focusing closely on a specific specimen “felt spiritual, like time spent in quiet worship before a vast and intricate cosmos”) and argues that botany, despite its waning popularity, is crucial in combating the effects of climate change because it aims to understand and catalog changes in biodiversity. She also writes of the hostility she faced from superiors when she became pregnant, which drove her to abandon her research career for one in science reporting and medical ghostwriting. Intriguingly, she compares the “impoverishment of genetic potential” that results from plant extinction to the exodus of new mothers like her from the sciences. Throughout, Zimmerman’s enthusiasm and expertise make the science accessible even to those without a background in the subject. The results are as edifying as they are galvanizing. Illus. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Bomb Cloud

Tyler Mills. Unbound Edition, $28 (330p) ISBN 979-8-9892333-0-4

In this potent and formally inventive memoir, poet and Sarah Lawrence writing professor Mills (City Scattered) unravels the circumstances surrounding her grandfather’s possible witness to the Trinity atomic bomb test. When Mills and her mother visited Mills’s grandfather near the end of his life, he handed them a personal scrapbook he claimed had long been “classified.” Thumbing through the album later, Mills discovered a photo of “an atomic cloud towering in the sky,” which set her on a quest to determine whether the image came from the 1945 detonation of the first atomic bomb in White Sands, N.Mex.—and if so, to what degree her grandfather may have been involved. The investigation took Mills from conversations with her mother to research about the bomb’s ecological effects, and eventually, to White Sands itself. She recounts her questioning and meditates on “the erasure of peoples, places, and facts that cloud the development of the atomic bomb” in lyrical, sometimes cryptic essays, which are accentuated with collages, photographs, and poems. The results draw immense power both from Mills’s forceful prose and her urgings to “think about the self in relation to history... and ways of experiencing the catastrophic.” Adventurous readers will treasure this poetic, haunting excavation of family legacy, national history, and the nature of memory. Photos. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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College Life of a Retired Senior: A Memoir of Perseverance, Faith, and Finding the Way

Yvonne Blackwood. LifeRich, $16 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-4897-4637-5

Blackwood (Into Africa) recounts her experiences attending Toronto’s York University at age 64 in this enchanting memoir. After retiring from a 37-year career with Canada’s Royal Bank, Blackwood—having already self-published a few memoirs and children’s books—joined the Writers’ Union of Canada. At a group meeting one afternoon, a woman encouraged Blackwood to study English to “add texture” to her writing. Blackwood took the suggestion to heart, resolving to complete an English degree at York University over the course of six years. Her penchant for preparedness is immediately clear, and immediately charming: before classes began, she shopped for her first-ever backpack, took pains to establish her best bus route to campus, and reread syllabi to ensure nothing slipped through the sieve of her aging memory. Classes on “The Bible in Modern Context” and the relationship between famous writers and their favorite drugs, which she initially took simply to amass credits, wound up expanding her horizons in unexpected directions. Despite the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and a run-in with sarcoma (which was treated with successful surgery), Blackwood graduated magna cum laude in 2021. This inspiring account will resonate with learners of all ages. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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