Musician Nicolay (The Humorless Ladies of Border Patrol) paints a perceptive portrait of musicians who are not known “as the authors of the works in which they participate, but without whom those works would not exist.” Drawing on interviews with a mostly male, mostly white group of bassists, horn players, backup singers, and accompanists who comprise the “support staff” of the music industry, Nicolay dissects such challenges as cutting business deals in a world of “handshake agreements and vague ‘understandings,’ ” navigating power dynamics in bands, and striking the right balance between working for other musicians and pursuing one’s own artistic ambitions. The interview subjects shed fascinating light on the complications of dedicating one’s life to another’s music—one guitarist observes that “there’s such a physical aspect to music that my musculature will have changed after playing [certain music] hundreds of times” (“In the most literal, embodied way,” Nicolay comments, she’s “been shaped by those songs”). Taken as a whole, these profiles succeed in complicating the “lone genius” narrative of artistic creation and raising provocative questions about how society values the production of music. It’s a captivating look at what it means to occupy the complicated space “between a career and a calling.” (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/14/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this idyllic ode to the pastoral life, Young (The Secret Life of Cows) reflects on the quirks and rewards of working her family’s organic farm in England. Drawn from Young’s diary entries, the episodic chapters capture the rhythms of her day-to-day life. She recounts chasing after rogue sheep, bottle-feeding lambs whose mothers can’t produce enough milk, and troubleshooting ways to prevent foxes from entering the turkey enclosure, among other activities. Animals “are as individual as we are,” she contends, describing how some mother cows are unperturbed if their calves don’t follow them into the barn for the night while others “go pretty mad” until they’re reunited. Elsewhere, Young describes how a particularly determined hen laid an egg in Young’s kitchen despite efforts to usher the chicken outside, how Young and her partner aided a cow struggling to give birth to twins, and how a herd of sheep once allowed a fox cub to take refuge in their shed during a storm. The meditative, low-stakes stories have a soothing effect, and the evocative prose finds beauty in Young’s workaday routines (“The rain-soaked fields create a percussive squelch under your feet and you can hear and feel a rhythmic harmony as you walk, picked up by the metronomic tap of your zipper pull”). It’s an appealing slice of country life. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/14/2024 | Details & Permalink

“Our consciousness and selfhood is not annihilated when we cross over into death,” according to this eyebrow-raising treatise. Highlighting recent studies that blur the boundary between life and death, Parnia (Erasing Death), the director of resuscitation research at NYU’s School of Medicine, notes that one neuroscientist was able to restore function to pig brains up to 14 hours after death and that another researcher discovered bursts of electrical activity in human brains between 30 seconds and two minutes after the heart stops. Parnia claims to have uncovered evidence proving the reality of near-death experiences, describing how an AI program he commissioned found testimonies from those who had nearly died to be linguistically distinct from remembrances of dreams and hallucinations. Unfortunately, Parnia’s failure to discuss how the program was designed or how it evaluated evidence will do little to appease skeptics. Though some of the studies intrigue, Parnia’s most outrageous claims strain credulity. For instance, he suggests that the out-of-body experiences and “expansion of consciousness” reported by survivors of near-death experiences might result from the human brain’s efforts to process higher dimensions. This is unlikely to change minds. Agent: Andrew Stuart, Stuart Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/14/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this comprehensive debut study, journalist Honeycutt examines how contemporaneous attitudes toward women have shaped female filmmakers’ contributions to the horror genre. She contends that though early 20th-century France was marked by conservative gender norms, Alice Guy-Blaché was able to become the first woman to direct a horror flick (1913’s The Pit and the Pendulum) and establish herself in the country’s film scene because directing movies wasn’t yet considered a prestigious profession. The sharp analysis elucidates how women filmmakers have both pushed back against and perpetuated sexist genre tropes, sometimes in the same movie. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), for instance, was written by feminist Rita Mae Brown as a satire of the phallic imagery and sexual puritanism of slasher films, only for director Amy Holden Jones to bury that subtext by shooting the script as a traditional genre exercise. Elsewhere, Honeycutt discusses how Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000) toned down some of the source novel’s violence so that the satire might “come through more clearly,” and how Jennifer Kent drew inspiration for The Babadook (2014) from a friend whose three-year-old son was terrified by an imaginary monster man he reported seeing around the house. Insightful and encyclopedic, this is a bloody good time. Photos. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

MIT computer scientist Rus and science writer Mone follow up The Heart and the Chip with a rosy assessment of how artificial intelligence might change society. The authors suggest that AI will speed up advancements in medicine, describing how Canadian scientists synthesized a new cancer drug by using AI to first identify “weak spots” in the proteins that contribute to the disease and then to propose designs for drugs that could exploit those weak spots. AI can also provide one-on-one tutoring services, the authors contend, citing a study that found a program capable of adapting “its lessons in real time based on the participant’s engagement” successfully helped narrow one elementary school class’s achievement gap. Rus and Mone express confidence that AI will supplement rather than replace human workers, tackling mundane tasks so that people are free to focus on more creative activities. The authors’ optimistic perspective serves as a refreshing corrective to AI doomsaying, and they offer practical suggestions for curbing what dangers the technology does pose, advocating for federal oversight of AI development and for disclosures to consumers when AI has been used to generate content. This enlightens. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

This rousing debut oral history from sports reporter Raymond traces how the Penn State Nittany Lions rebounded following former coach Jerry Sandusky’s 2011 arrest for child sex abuse. Documenting the fallout from the scandal, Raymond notes that the players were left doubly shaken by the death of once-beloved coach Joe Paterno from cancer mere months after he was fired for failing to prevent Sandusky’s abuses, and that the NCAA’s decision to release players from “all obligations to the school” resulted in a “feeding frenzy” for recruiters. The players who stayed had a shaky return to the field in 2012 (“We were just so high-strung,” remembers defensive back Stephon Morris), but they gradually regained their groove under the stewardship of head coach James Franklin and won the 2016 Big Ten championship after triumphing against Wisconsin. The detailed play-by-plays of games excite (“You could feel it throughout your whole body. The whole stadium kind of just lifted up,” offensive lineman Brendan Mahon remembers of a touchdown scored on a blocked kick), and Raymond highlights the poignant stories of individual players, describing, for instance, how starting quarterback Christian Hackenberg’s red-hot career was derailed by a shoulder injury. A fine-grained account of how a beloved program reinvented itself, this scores. Agent: David Halpern, Robbins Office. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Ganz (Why David Sometimes Wins) draws on his career as a grassroots organizer, particularly in the Mexican farm workers’ movement in the 1970s, to offer an accessible manual on how to bring about meaningful social change. He maintains that for democracies to survive, activists and concerned citizens must come together in an organized way to effectively counter authoritarian moves from their governments. Ganz divides organizing into five key practices—“building relationships, telling stories, strategizing, acting and structuring”—and neatly breaks down each practice into the values they communicate, the concepts they lean on, and the skills needed to master them. He emphasizes that the skills are ones often used in everyday life and that they can be taught to anyone, which brings an approachable realness to legends like Cesar Chavez and Saul Alinsky who populate his personal recollections and whom he draws on for examples. Throughout, Ganz puts a premium on fostering a community’s cohesiveness and training it in the tools of organizing over preaching ideological purity, arguing that laying the groundwork will “enable that community to turn resources it has into the power it needs to get what it wants.” Ganz’s can-do-ism is a welcome counterpoint to recent books bemoaning a decline in civic engagement. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Sociologist Akbari (Startup Your Life) expands on her 2014 Observer article for this riveting account of deception and emotional abuse in the early days of online dating. It begins in March 2011, when Akbari connected with two other women who had been communicating with—and growing suspicious of—a man named Ethan Schuman, before flashing back to December 2010, when Akbari received her first OkCupid message from Ethan, initiating their protracted virtual courtship. “It was his cleverness, his openness, and... his eagerness to keep the conversation going” that Akbari says kept her hooked despite repeated delays to their IRL meeting (Ethan’s excuses escalated from a snowstorm to a cancer diagnosis). The narrative takes on a thriller-like quality as Ethan grows increasingly cagey and flies into rages. Eventually, the women discover that Ethan is actually medical student Emily Slutsky (now a practicing gynecologist), who, when caught, offers insincere apologies and murky justifications; she pleads boredom, talks about Ethan as the narrator of a novel, and calls catfishing “an addiction.” While they were corresponding, Akbari was ironically teaching a class at NYU about the construction of identity—a topic about which she and Ethan mind-bendingly engage in a lively debate early on—and Akbari concludes with a fascinating if brief discussion of the sociological implications of catfishing. Though Emily’s motivations remain somewhat opaque, there’s plenty in this internet horror story to hold readers’ attention. (June)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Confusion reigned on the colonial-era American frontier, according to this labyrinthine account. Historian Parkinson (Thirteen Clocks) profiles two intertwined families in the 18th-century Ohio Valley: the Iroquois Shickellamy family, renowned “Native brokers” who worked to foster white/Native coexistence, and the white Cresaps, whose patriarch Thomas Cresap earned the title “the Maryland Monster” for his violent clashes with Pennsylvania colonists over contested borders. The bloody Yellow Creek massacre of nearly all of the Shickellamy family on April 30, 1774, by white associates of the Cresaps sets up Parkinson’s twisty tale of both families’ fates and fortunes. With densely detailed snapshots of small- and large-scale colonial invasions and Native counterattacks over several decades, Parkinson argues that the rapidly shifting relationships and frequent side-switching among various Native, British, and American groups created an atmosphere of “bewilderment” that confounded all parties (and can occasionally confound the reader). Parkinson also intriguingly charts the “colonizing words” settlers used to encourage violence against the “other”—such as consistently referring to themselves as “aggrieved”—and sheds light on how white frontiersmen and Natives were perceived as equally “savage” by eastern colonists until the American Revolution, when patriotic easterners “embrace[d]” violent figures like the Cresaps “as part of the infant nation.” The result is a fine-grained look at life on the frontier that offers rewarding insights into the colonial mentality. (May)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Television journalists Quiñones (Heroes Among Us) and Salinas (I Am My Father’s Daughter) offer a moving yet insufficiently contextualized look at a bereaved community. Following the 2022 murders of 19 fourth-grade students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., producer Cindy Galli suggested that, rather than pull up stakes soon after the killings, an ABC news crew “commit to six months to a year to tell the stories of the families and the community.” Her idea was implemented, and the authors, along with support staff, embedded themselves in the grieving city and patiently worked to establish bonds with parents who’d lost their children and others affected by the massacre. The book’s strongest sections center on the harrowing, in-depth reflections the authors elicited from shooting victims. They include Arnie Reyes, a teacher whose entire class was killed, and 10-year-old Noah Orona, who witnessed the murder of his friends. The authors also loosely chronicle the massacre’s political aftermath, including an unsuccessful push for Texas gun control measures and the search for answers over a delayed law-enforcement response. Despite the authors’ care and thoughtfulness, Galli’s pitch that “the narrative is not in the shooting” but instead “the real story is in the recovery” never stops feeling like a misdirection away from accountability. This unsophisticated approach will leave readers unsatisfied. (May)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink