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Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

Saying It Loud

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Journalist Mark Whitaker’s (Smoketown) riveting Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement chronicles a key moment in the movement for racial justice in the United States: the shift in 1966 from the nonviolent organizational tactics associated with Martin Luther King Jr. to an emergent focus on Black Power as a “state of mind and a badge of identity” whose adherents used whatever means necessary to achieve justice.

On January 3, 1966, Black civil rights worker Sammy Younge was murdered by a white gas station owner in Tuskegee, Alabama, for asking to use the restroom. As Whitaker points out, Younge’s death “reverberated through a generation of young people who were reaching a breaking point of frustration with the gospel of nonviolence and racial integration preached by Dr. King.” Whitaker tracks many such seismic events and the ways they shifted the leadership within core civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), leading to the development of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party. Through meticulous research, he draws revealing portraits of figures such as Stokely Carmichael, who replaced John Lewis as SNCC’s chairman; Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, who formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California; and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, who became the executive secretary of SNCC and thus the highest-ranking woman in the civil rights movement. In stunning detail, Whitaker records all the ways that 1966 became such a pivotal year in the quest for civil rights that, before it was over, “a cast of young men and women, almost all under the age of thirty . . . [had changed] the course of Black—and American—history.” He concludes by demonstrating that the defiant rhetoric of the Black Power movement in 1966 planted the seeds for the Black Lives Matter movement and other responses to police violence against Black Americans over the last 50 years.

Saying It Loud provides an essential history of events that deserve more attention and consideration. Whitaker’s striking insights offer a memorable glimpse of a key period in American history and the struggle for racial justice in the U.S.

Saying It Loud chronicles the shift in the civil rights movement from the nonviolent tactics associated with Martin Luther King Jr. to Black Power.
NonfictionMusicMemoir

Bang Bang Crash

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In what ways is writing like drumming? Like a drummer, the writer lays down a pattern of rhythm that keeps the plot of a story moving, propelling it with a steady beat through various twists and turns. Novelist Nic Brown’s peripatetic memoir, Bang Bang Crash, examines his past life as a drummer and the ways it both haunts and informs his current life as a writer.

When he was 8, Brown took drum lessons from a local jazz musician, and by the time Brown was in high school, he was playing in a few bands around the Greensboro, North Carolina, area. Although he was accepted at Princeton and Columbia, he deferred enrollment to keep gigging with his band, Athenaeum. They landed a record deal when Brown was 19 and even had a hit song. Brown spent much of 1996 touring the country, fulfilling all he’d ever wanted for his life—but by the end of the ’90s, he was losing his enthusiasm for music, and other dreams were starting to glitter on the horizon. One day, Brown picked up his acceptance letter from Columbia again and discovered he was still enrolled, even after his deferral over a year earlier. So he dropped his sticks, picked up his pen and left behind rock to start writing fiction, eventually landing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

After all these changes, Brown realized that writing offered a kind of artistic fulfillment that playing music had lacked. “As a drummer, I’d been yoked to the projects of others for so many years,” he writes, “that now, as a writer, I [was suddenly] so intoxicated by the opportunity to have an artistic project be all my own.” Even so, those old percussive impulses remain deep in his heart and soul. “I never play the drums anymore, but they never cease playing me,” he writes. “Rhythms and songs and patterns are dancing constantly through my mind, twirling in and around the beat of the windshield wipers, the thud of my footsteps, the click of my grocery cart as I wheel it away.”

Bang Bang Crash doesn’t always keep a steady beat, and sometimes it hits more rim than skin. Nevertheless, it offers a stylish portrait of a life in search of a deeper rhythm.

Novelist Nic Brown’s stylish memoir examines his past life as a drummer and the ways it both haunts and informs his current life as a writer.
NonfictionMedicineHealth & Fitness

The People’s Hospital

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

As COVID-19 swept across the United States in 2020, health care professionals and patients quickly learned about the flaws in the public health system. Questions arose about equitable access to health care, the role of insurance and the quality of care in public hospitals serving uninsured people versus private hospitals serving people with private insurance. Taking the public Ben Taub Hospital—Houston’s “largest hospital for the poor . . . who cannot afford medical care”—as an example, medical researcher and practicing physician Ricardo Nuila explores these issues in The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine.

Nuila has been an attending physician at Ben Taub for over 10 years, and he has discovered that “good care comes from connecting with your patients in whatever way you’re able.” Using the stories of five patients, Nuila weaves an intricate web of questions about the shortcomings of insurance and corporate medicine and reveals how Ben Taub has succeeded in providing access to health care for people who are medically and financially vulnerable.

For example, there’s Christian, a patient with chronic kidney disease who developed mysterious, debilitating knee pain. Because he was uninsured and had to pay out of pocket for his diagnosis and treatment, he traveled to a clinic in Mexico where he hoped his money would go further. A few weeks into his therapy, his knee pain diminished, and he moved back to Houston—but within weeks, he found himself facing the same medical issues again. When his kidneys started to fail and the insurance company denied him coverage, his mother admitted him to Ben Taub, where he started receiving hemodialysis on a regular basis and eventually left the hospital with hope.

Readers also meet Ebonie, who was 19 weeks into her pregnancy and experiencing dangerous levels of obstetric bleeding. After bouncing from hospital to hospital, she eventually landed at Ben Taub, where Nuila and another doctor developed a plan to deal with bleeding in the future and made sure she would be admitted to Ben Taub when it happened. Ben Taub also helped Ebonie apply for Medicaid so she would have an insurance safety net. Through his own experiences, and those of his patients and fellow health care professionals, Nuila paints a picture of a world where “people find healthcare and revere it like treasure.”

The People’s Hospital is an inspiring book that raises crucial questions about the future of American health care. Nuila illustrates that hospitals that make holistic decisions about care provide more effective and equitable treatment than those that ask simply about the ability of patients to cover expenses, reminding readers that the most effective health care systems always elevate humans and their needs over monetary gain.

Using the stories of five patients, physician Ricardo Nuila reveals how a public hospital in Houston has succeeded in providing health care to people who are the most vulnerable.
NonfictionNatureMemoirHistoryBlack History

Soil

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Like the garden at its center, poet Camille T. Dungy’s Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden blossoms in vivid hues, radiating love and illuminating the tangled roots of nature and ecology.

Six years after she arrived in Fort Collins, Colorado, Dungy set out to reclaim a portion of her yard and convert it into a “drought-tolerant, pollinator-supporting flower field.” However, once several dump trucks unloaded mounds of dirt on her driveway, only for it to be scattered by wind, she had second thoughts. Eventually, though, she turned what was once a cookie-cutter lawn into a richly diverse space filled with plants that prevent soil erosion and allow bees and birds thrive.

At the same time that she was planting her garden, Dungy also dug into the history of the wilderness movement. She discovered that ecology had its own homogeneity problem, especially its exclusion of Black women gardeners and Black women environmental writers from anthologies of environmental literature. “Maintaining the fantasy of the American Wilderness requires a great deal of work,” she writes. “It requires the enforced silence of women, of Black people, Chinese people, Japanese people, other East and South Asian communities, poorer white people, Indigenous people, Latinx people . . . the list goes on and on.” To help fill that gap, she introduces readers to gardeners such as Anne Spencer, a Black poet who created a spacious sanctuary of a garden in the late 19th century in Lynchburg, Virginia.

In Soil, Dungy plants poems next to memoir next to critical analysis next to environmental history next to African American history, cultivating the radical ecological thought she wants to see more of in the world. This vibrant memoir challenges readers to look beyond the racial and scientific uniformness of most environmental literature and discover the rich wildness and hope that lies all around them.

In her radical and vibrant memoir, Camille Dungy plants poems next to critical analysis next to environmental history next to African American history.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryBiography

King: A Life

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

“On December 5, 1955, a young Black man became one of America’s founding fathers. He was twenty-six years old and knew that the role he was taking carried a potential death penalty.” With these riveting opening sentences, journalist and author Jonathan Eig pulls readers into King: A Life, his vibrantly written biography of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. This monumental book takes King down from his pedestal, revealing his flaws, needs, dreams, hopes and weariness.

King: A Life draws on recently released FBI documents, as well as other new materials, including audiotapes recorded by Coretta Scott King in the months after her husband’s death, an unpublished memoir by King’s father and unaired television footage. In cinematic fashion, Eig follows King from his childhood through his seminary and graduate school days, his marriage and his steady insistence on the reformation of a society broken by racism. As Eig points out, King developed a rhetorical style and shaped a new moral vision when he spoke to the crowd gathered at Holt Street Baptist Church to rally in support of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. “On this night, King found a new voice,” he writes. “He discovered or sensed that his purpose was not to instruct or educate; his purpose was to prophesize. With a booming voice and strident words, he marked the path for himself and for a movement.”

Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King felt that the work he had begun in Montgomery was validated, but he recognized that the movement would be incomplete if it remained confined to the South. King desired to “root out racism” all over America, Eig writes, in all its “hidden and subtle and covert disguises.” He also began to turn his attention to issues beyond civil rights for Black Americans, focusing on poverty and the war in Vietnam. By the time he arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 to support the sanitation workers’ strike, King was exhausted, wondering whether the “arc of justice would not bend toward freedom.” In spite of his fatigue and the lack of broader racial reform in the U.S., King refused to give up hope. On the last day of his life, he thundered in his “Promised Land” speech, “I may not get there with you. But . . . we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

Eig candidly asserts that “in hallowing King we have hollowed him.” King: A Life makes him a real human being again, one who had affairs, smoked and drank, got angry and even plagiarized. But Eig encourages readers to “embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King” if we are to achieve the kind of change King himself preached in America.

Jonathan Eig’s monumental biography takes Martin Luther King Jr. down from his pedestal, revealing his flaws, needs, dreams, hopes and weariness.
NonfictionTravelReligion & Spirituality

The Half Known Life

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In many religious traditions, paradise names an otherworldly realm overflowing with lush greenery, luscious fruits, honeyed scents and cascading waterfalls. In others, paradise can be attained in this world, even in the midst of the clattering cacophony surrounding us. Bestselling travel writer Pico Iyer shares his own search for paradise in The Half Known Life, traversing the world’s vibrant religious traditions to uncover paradise’s contours, its purported locations and the role it plays in earthly conflicts. 

With vivid imagery and sterling prose, Iyer documents his wanderings from town to temple. In Tehran, Iran, for example, he learned that Rumi counseled readers to find a heaven within themselves because paradise is not some idyllic place that transcends this world. Rumi’s poetry created a “paradise of words,” Iyer found, amid the unceasing strife of the country’s various Islamic branches. In the Kashmir region of India, which some claim was the location of the Garden of Eden, Iyer embraced a paradisiacal moment as he floated in a houseboat in the middle of a lake. In Sri Lanka, he visited Adam’s Peak, a forest outcropping that Buddhists, Christians and Hindus all claim as sacred ground. In Jerusalem, Israel, he wondered where a “nonaffiliated soul” could find sanctuary and “make peace among all the competing chants.” He tried his luck at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, “a riot of views of paradise overlapping at crooked angles till one was left with the sorrow of six different Christian orders sharing the same space, and lashing out at one another with brooms.” At the end of his quest, Iyer woke to a “thick pall of mist” in Varanasi, India. It was so difficult to see through that it “made every figure look even more like a visitor from another world.” Observing them, he writes, “it was easy to believe we were all caught up in the same spell, creatures in some celestial dream, ferried silently across the river and back again.”

Part travelogue, part theological meditation and part memoir, The Half Known Life shimmers with wisdom gleaned from exploring the nooks and crannies of the human soul and the world’s urban and rural, secular and religious, landscapes.

Part travelogue, part theological meditation and part memoir, The Half Known Life shimmers with wisdom gleaned from exploring the nooks and crannies of the human soul.
NonfictionScienceLGBTQEssays

How Far the Light Reaches

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Science journalist Sabrina Imbler dives deep into the waters of human and marine life in their luminous essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches.

In the book’s 10 essays, Imbler cannily observes the lives of sea creatures, drawing out lessons about resilience, survival and wildness and tying those insights to their own experiences as a biracial, queer writer. For example, goldfish that survive being thrown from a tiny fishbowl into a larger pond revert to a feral state. When Imbler encountered these wild fish, they saw “something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone.” Imbler compares a female octopus who starves herself in order to nourish and protect her eggs to their own efforts at dieting to please their mother. Imbler eventually started to feel good in their body, learning to “revel in queer bodies and the endless and inventive ways we crease into ourselves.” In the deep rivers of China, sturgeon forage for food to survive in the murky waters, just as Imbler’s grandmother foraged for food to survive after fleeing Japanese-occupied Shanghai during wartime. In perhaps the most brilliant chapter of the book, Imbler alternates the necropsy of a whale with the necropsy of a relationship. Like the carcass of a whale, the threads of a dead relationship—“once so staggeringly alive”—float through space and time with no sense of what is to come.

How Far the Light Reaches meditates radiantly on the ragged ways we adapt to the world around us, probing the lives of marine animals for strategies for our own survival. Imbler’s first-rate science writing glistens with the same sheen as the best of Oliver Sacks’ essays.

How Far the Light Reaches dives deep into the waters of human and marine life, glistening with the same sheen as the best of Oliver Sacks’ essays.
NonfictionScienceMedicine

The Song of the Cell

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In 2010, oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies provided a stunning history of cancer and medical scientists’ ongoing research into ways to overcome it. In 2016, he delivered a similarly breathtaking treatment of genetic biology in The Gene. Now, in The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Mukherjee tells the compelling story of cell biology and the ways that cellular engineering can help us rethink what it means to be human.

Drawing on case studies, interviews, visits with patients, scientific papers and historical archives, Mukherjee tries to understand life in terms of its smallest unit: the cell. As he puts it, he’s listening to a cell’s “music” when he observes its anatomy and the way it interacts with surrounding cells. For example, the genes, proteins and pathways used by healthy cells are “appropriated” or “commandeered” by cancer cells. “Cancer, in short, is cell biology visualized in a pathological mirror,” Mukherjee writes.

Such knowledge allows medical researchers and doctors to imagine how cellular therapy could modify a patient’s cellular structure to treat their disease or medical disorder. In one case, a girl named Emily Whitehead, who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, received CAR T-cell therapy: Her own T-cells were extracted, modified to target her disease and infused back into her body. Although there was an initial setback because of an infection, the cellular therapy succeeded. Mukherjee includes other stories like Whitehead’s, as well as those of heroes such as Rudolf Virchow, who discovered that “it isn’t sufficient to locate a disease in an organ; it’s necessary to understand which cells of the organ are responsible”; John Snow, the founder of germ theory; and Frederick Banting and Charles Best, who discovered insulin.

According to Mukherjee, the cell sings of a new human who is “rebuilt anew with modified cells [and] who looks and feels (mostly) like you and me.” Using cellular engineering, he writes, “we’ve altered these humans to alleviate suffering, using a science that had to be handcrafted and carved with unfathomable labor and love, and technologies so ingenious that they stretch credulity: such as fusing a cancer cell with an immune cell to produce an immortal cell to cure cancer.” Captivating and provocative, The Song of the Cell encourages us to rethink historical approaches to medical science and imagine how cellular biology can reshape medicine and public health.

This captivating, provocative book from Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee encourages us to imagine how cellular engineering can reshape medicine.
NonfictionMusicHistory

Well of Souls

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In the popular imagination, the banjo is an instrument played by white bluegrass or old-time musicians plucking out traditional Appalachian ballads on their front porches. Many folks associate banjo music with the theme from the “Beverly Hillbillies,” played by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, or Eric Weissberg’s “Dueling Banjos” from the movie Deliverance. However, in 2016, Laurent Dubois’ The Banjo probed deeply into the instrument’s true origins, revealing that the banjo evolved out of enslaved communities in the Caribbean and North America as Black musicians preserved the sounds of their African cultures by fashioning instruments similar to the ones from their homes. Kristina R. Gaddy’s superb Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History builds on Dubois’ work to provide an even more detailed look at the “culture and lived experience of the people of African descent who created, played, and listened to the banjo.”

Gaddy’s lively storytelling re-creates scenes from 17th-century Jamaica to 19th-century Washington, D.C., and beyond, illustrating not only the birth and development of the banjo but also its co-optation by white people. In 1687, the governor of Jamaica’s physician recorded his encounter with perhaps the earliest incarnation of the banjo, two- and three-stringed gourd lutes he called Strum Strumps, played during religious rituals by enslaved communities from West Africa. By the 18th century, the instrument—variously known as a banjo, bonja, bangeo, banjoe and banger—was being made and played by enslaved musicians on plantations, with some banjo players leading the wider community in song. In the 19th century, white performers who wore blackface in minstrel shows often included a banjo or two in their productions, mocking the Black musical experience while also popularizing the banjo. By the end of the 19th century, collections of slave songs had started to circulate, preserving the heritage of the banjo as an instrument used in religious ceremonies by Black communities.

Well of Souls’ coda points to the work of Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, Allison Russell and other Black musicians who are reviving the African history of the banjo through their albums, workshops and performances. Gaddy’s captivating book likewise recovers chapters in what is still a little-known history of this quintessential American instrument.

Kristina R. Gaddy’s captivating book reveals the African history of a quintessential American instrument: the banjo.
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ

Diary of a Misfit

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

“A few months after my pastor asked God to kill me, my mom ran to the bathroom, and I ran after her.” You can’t look away from the riveting opening sentence of Casey Parks’ spellbinding Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir. It draws you quickly in to her atmospheric tale of self-discovery after coming out as a lesbian to her mother in her small Louisiana town.

After Parks came out, her grandmother revealed that she “grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man” named Roy Hudgins in the town of Delhi, Louisiana. Astonished, Parks asked if Roy was happy, and her grandmother replied that she didn’t know but that she’d always wondered what happened to him. Parks announced to her grandmother, “I’ll find out about Roy.”

Diary of a Misfit audiobook cover
Read our starred review of the ‘Diary of a Misfit’ audiobook, narrated by author Casey Parks.

Seven years later, Parks, then working as a reporter for The Oregonian, made a series of visits to Delhi in search of clues about Roy, interviewing anybody who would talk to her. Although she was on a quest to find out about Roy for her grandmother, Parks also started to unravel clues about herself, her sexuality and her fraught relationships with family and church. The more she learned about Roy, the more she learned about her own yearning for the love and acceptance that Roy seemed to have felt in a town where the church had rejected him but where his neighbors looked out for and took care of him. Then, as she flipped through Roy’s journals, she discovered a poem titled “The Town Misfit” in which he had written, “When my life on earth is over, and it’s time for me to die, / No one here will miss me. There will be no one to cry.” Parks had hoped “reading Roy’s diaries would settle something inside me. . . . But I understand now that most of what haunted me before might haunt me forever.”

Like Harper Lee, Parks evokes the simmering suspicions of a small Southern town. Like Eudora Welty, she tells a poignant story of people trying to fit into a way of life that once suited them but no longer wears well. And like Truman Capote, she packs her memoir with eccentric characters—especially her mother, whom Parks describes as “bright and joyous when she was off the nose spray, vacant and mean when she was on.” Parks’ dazzling narrative gift imbues Diary of a Misfit with all the makings of a great Southern story that readers won’t be able to get out of their minds.

Casey Parks’ dazzling narrative gift imbues Diary of a Misfit with all the makings of a great Southern story that readers won't be able to get out of their minds.
NonfictionHistoryCultural HistoryArt

Picasso’s War

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

By the mid-20th century, Pablo Picasso’s paintings and sculptures were turning heads in France and Germany, ushering in cubism, a new artistic style that challenged older styles. At this same moment, American art was dominated by a devotion to realism and the old masters, and therefore resistant to and repulsed by the “modern art” of Picasso. In 1939, that all changed when the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in New York City held an exhibit titled “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art,” featuring pieces that two Americans, who never met, worked tirelessly to make available to the public. Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War tells the scintillating tale of how John Quinn, Alfred H. Barr Jr. and others brought Picasso’s work to America and changed the face of American art.

Irish American lawyer Quinn championed modernist novels and poetry and avant-garde art, introducing Americans to William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, as well as to Marcel Duchamp’s painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.” A great collector, Quinn had a “growing aversion to what he called ‘dead art,’” Eakin writes, and wanted to promote painters and writers who could “express the values and forces of his own time.” Although he personally never understood cubism, he believed that “American art needs the shock that the work of some of these men will give.” After he met Picasso, the artist started reserving his best work for Quinn, who built a modest collection. Quinn dreamed of opening a museum devoted explicitly to modern art, since the Metropolitan Museum of Art excluded such art as “degenerate.” He never saw his wish come true, however. He died of cancer in 1924.

In 1926, Barr took up Quinn’s vision for such a museum, aided by wealthy patrons who shared Quinn’s hope. Three years later, Barr opened the Museum of Modern Art using pieces from Quinn’s collection, striving to build a collection of premier work by the most important modern artists. He worked incessantly to open a show devoted to Picasso, but he was hampered at several turns by challenges from Parisian art dealers and even by Picasso himself. By the late 1930s, though, as Adolf Hitler’s campaign against so-called degenerate art ramped up and museums and galleries in Paris began removing and hiding certain paintings, Picasso and his dealer, Paul Rosenberg, tried to get as many of the artist’s paintings as possible to America. Such forces enabled Barr to put on his 1939 Picasso exhibit and to secure a place in the American cultural world not only for Picasso but also for the Museum of Modern Art, which flourished following the Picasso exhibit.

Eakin’s rapturous storytelling makes Picasso’s War a spellbinding, page-turning read about this illuminating chapter in cultural history.

Hugh Eakin’s rapturous storytelling makes Picasso’s War a spellbinding, page-turning read about the fight to bring Picasso’s art to America.

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