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Kelly Blewett

Nonfiction

A bohemian’s lost notebooks

Review by Kelly Blewett

Joe Gould—mysterious madman, darling of the modern poets and, perhaps, a genius—began writing a book in the late 1920s. Or rather, several books. His writing, he believed, would turn the field of history on its head. Rather than stories of great men, Gould had a vision of capturing the everyday speech of people on the streets of New York. And so, pencil in hand, he went out to listen. He scrawled overheard bits in composition notebooks, and the notebooks came to dominate his small apartment, or so it was said. But the towers of notebooks are missing. Jill Lepore, at once detective and historian, decides to find them.

What readers will find in Joe Gould’s Teeth is a story of archival research of epic proportions. Lepore puts farflung snippets of the past together to tell a story about Gould and his writings that no one has yet heard—a story that takes readers into the heart of Harlem, into the classrooms of Harvard and down the long corridors of mental hospitals. What is at stake, though, is more than “What happened to Gould?” There’s also the question of history itself. What should history—and biography—be? Can a historian see anything accurately, or in the end, will her portraits of the past only reveal her own reflection? 

At once researching Gould and thinking alongside him about questions that hang behind every historian’s work, Lepore offers a book that is exciting and unsettling. Unlike her past work—think The Secret History of Wonder Woman—Lepore herself is very much a character in this book, and the hunt for the truth about Gould takes on a sort of Edgar Allan Poe-like atmosphere of dread and anticipation. At times haunting and even hallucinatory, this book is Lepore’s most vulnerable and thought-provoking work yet.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Joe Gould—mysterious madman, darling of the modern poets and, perhaps, a genius—began writing a book in the late 1920s. Or rather, several books. His writing, he believed, would turn the field of history on its head. Rather than stories of great men, Gould had a vision of capturing the everyday speech of people on the streets of New York. And so, pencil in hand, he went out to listen. He scrawled overheard bits in composition notebooks, and the notebooks came to dominate his small apartment, or so it was said. But the towers of notebooks are missing. Jill Lepore, at once detective and historian, decides to find them.
NonfictionMedicine

Discovering a new depth of feeling

Review by Kelly Blewett

John Elder Robison is already well known for his 2007 memoir, Look Me in the Eye, which detailed his life as a successful adult with Asperger’s syndrome. A key feature of this bestseller, and of Robison’s stance toward Asperger’s in general, is that being on the autism spectrum is a gift rather than a disease. And so, when given the opportunity, why did he submit to a series of experimental brain treatments? This is one of the questions Robison struggles to answer in Switched On, his eloquent, vivid and utterly compelling new memoir.

Robison undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) because it might increase his emotional awareness, or so researchers predict. But his reaction to the treatments far exceeds their expectations. His experiences are hallucinogenic, highly charged and deeply meaningful. They change him forever. Readers see Robison in the throes of the treatments and their dramatic aftermath—staying up all night listening to music, reconsidering relationships, reveling in his ability to finally look people in the eye. These stories are so moving and unpredictable that I found myself reading them aloud. 

It’s been seven years since Robison initially underwent TMS, and the long-term implications are still unfolding. Ultimately, though, this book provides an intellectual and emotional initiation into a different way of perceiving the world. Like books by Andrew Solomon and Oliver Sacks, Switched On offers an opportunity to consider mental processes through a combination of powerful narrative and informative medical context. Readers can put their hands, for a moment, on the mystery that is the brain.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

John Elder Robison is already well known for his 2007 memoir, Look Me in the Eye, which detailed his life as a successful adult with Asperger’s syndrome. A key feature of this bestseller, and of Robison’s stance toward Asperger’s in general, is that being on the autism spectrum is a gift rather than a disease. And so, when given the opportunity, why did he submit to a series of experimental brain treatments? This is one of the questions Robison struggles to answer in Switched On, his eloquent, vivid and utterly compelling new memoir.
NonfictionBiography

How literary greats cope with life’s end

Review by Kelly Blewett

Katie Roiphe’s latest offering details the deaths of five major writers: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas and Maurice Sendak. Roiphe took the book’s title, The Violet Hour, from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” because “the phrase evokes the mood of the elusive period I am describing: melancholy, expectant, laden. It captures the beauty and intensity I was finding in these scenes, the rich excitement of dusk.”

Each section of this elegiac book begins with the image of an empty room. “I very conspicuously do not belong in these rooms,” Roiphe writes, yet she recreates them in piercing detail: the hospital room in Sloan-Kettering where Sontag lay dying of cancer; the empty office where Sendak, in happier moments, drew pictures and whistled operas; Updike’s spare and efficient desk. These writers have something in common with all of humanity—they died. And in their crackling, vivid work, Roiphe finds keys that enable her to approach the mystery of death, although not to unlock it.

The chapters are organized around a moment-by-moment narrative of each writer’s final days. We find out, for instance, that Sontag was grateful for a last haircut and that Sendak ate homemade apple crisp. And that Updike’s first wife, Mary, grabbed his feet through the sheets and held them when she saw him the final time. So while a medical story is being laid out, there is also what Barthes calls the punctum, the evocative detail that elevates the reportage to something more like poetry. As these moments accumulate toward their final, inevitable endpoint, Roiphe takes many tangents to explore the writer’s attitude toward death as communicated through his or her work, which, for all these writers, was the central and most transcendent aspect of their lives.

“It’s all on the page,” Updike said. That may be true, and yet by combining the writer’s final moments of life with what they left on the page, Roiphe ultimately offers us something beyond the work: a glimpse of death that is startling and new, intimate and uncomfortable, and deeply, deeply human.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Katie Roiphe’s latest offering details the deaths of five major writers: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas and Maurice Sendak. Roiphe took the book’s title, The Violet Hour, from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” because “the phrase evokes the mood of the elusive period I am describing: melancholy, expectant, laden. It captures the beauty and intensity I was finding in these scenes, the rich excitement of dusk.”
NonfictionEducation

The power of preschool

Review by Kelly Blewett

Written for anyone who cares about preschool education in this country, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups offers terrific insights into the world of children—the delight of imaginative play, the allure of nature, the power of emotion. I read this book in the company of my own children, ages 5 and 2. Often, I found myself observing them more closely, appreciating their richness of expression more fully and identifying more sympathetically with their frustrations. At the same time, early childhood education expert Erika Christakis is undeniably grumpy when assessing what preschoolers are getting from most grownups these days.

She sneers at the handprint turkey craft many children make at Thanksgiving (a version of which was displayed framed on my own wall as I read the manuscript). She sighs with exasperation at the ineffective design of preschool classes. Overstimulating colors, bins filled with “educational” toys and insipid curriculum are among her many targets. Yet she redeems these critiques by moving beyond them. In chapters after chapter, Christakis poses compelling questions and imaginative solutions. She wonders why, for instance, the slow food movement hasn’t gained more traction in preschools, where children could prepare food together and then clean it up. She describes engaging classroom environments she’s seen in beguiling detail, and recounts evocative conversations she’s had and overheard among small people. Her respect and love for them is undeniable.

Until late last year, Christakis was a lecturer in early childhood education at Yale. She and her husband, Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor, drew the wrath of some students when they voiced concern over Yale’s limitations on “offensive” Halloween costumes. Christakis quit her teaching post in December, citing a climate at Yale that was “not conducive to . . . civil dialogue and open inquiry.”

The Yale controversy played no role in the book, however, and The Importance of Being Little doesn’t delve into the nuts and bolts of preschool education at the policy level. What Christakis does offer is a compelling vision of what preschool could become, with many examples that provide useful context. Her experiences at Yale—surrounded by bright and curious people, resource-rich schools and extensive libraries—enrich what she offers to the reader: a somewhat academic, more than a little cantankerous and ultimately earnestly hopeful discussion about how to best serve our youngest charges.

Written for anyone who cares about preschool education in this country, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups offers terrific insights into the world of children—the delight of imaginative play, the allure of nature, the power of emotion.
NonfictionHistory

The settings that spawn brilliance

Review by Kelly Blewett

Journalist and globe-trotter Eric Weiner, perhaps best-known for his bestselling book The Geography of Bliss, continues his pursuit of big questions in The Geography of Genius. Why, he wonders, do some conditions give rise to networks of innovators who transform the world? As such a question suggests, Weiner is thinking about genius in a fresh way. He adroitly sidesteps our cultural myth of the solitary prodigy slaving away in isolation and instead thinks about genius as (always) socially situated, clusters of diamonds shining brightly in their original settings. “Certain places, at certain times, produced a bumper crop of brilliant minds and good ideas,” he explains.

Weiner generates a list of such places and times, and that list becomes his (and the reader’s) travel itinerary. From ancient Athens to contemporary Silicon Valley, with stops in China, India and Austria along the way, it’s a pleasurable ride. Like Socrates, Weiner enjoys coming to insights through dialogue, and so readers are introduced to a number of characters with whom he discusses his theories about genius. These interlocutors—whether Tony, who owns Tony’s Hotel in Greece, or Friederike, a “friend of a friend” who hosts a classical music show at a radio station in Vienna—add an immediacy the book. The reader has the sense that the ideas and insights arrived at through this talk are spontaneous. The progression feels natural, which is a pretty neat trick.

The fun, relaxed mode is also maintained when outside scholarship is brought in to help situate and consider a particular genius at hand, for instance, whether or not Beethoven’s messy habits contributed to his musical genius. Turning to research at the University of Minnesota that studied whether research participants came up with more creative ideas in messy environments or clean ones, Weiner manages to illuminate Beethoven through an unlikely blend of scholarship, musings about the popular photograph of Einstein’s chaotic desk and on-the-ground observation in Vienna. Well read, thoughtful and above all curious, Weiner invites the reader to explore a satisfying take on a meaningful topic while also enjoying daily pleasures in cities around the world.

Journalist and globe-trotter Eric Weiner, perhaps best-known for his bestselling book The Geography of Bliss, continues his pursuit of big questions in The Geography of Genius. Why, he wonders, do some conditions give rise to networks of innovators who transform the world? As such a question suggests, Weiner is thinking about genius in a fresh way.
Memoir

Searching in vain for common ground

Review by Kelly Blewett

Stories about brothers make Barry Moser weep. He yearns for a fraternal closeness that never existed between himself and Tom, his older brother. In We Were Brothers, a memoir shrouded in wistful melancholia, Moser recalls his childhood in Tennessee and his “heavy ladened and knotty” relationship with his brother.

Barry and Tom grew up on a country road in Chattanooga, surrounded by family, all of whom are now dead. They were born to be racists, or so Barry believes today. Relationships with black folk were complicated in the Jim Crow South. But soon—as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s—Barry began to see race and the South differently from his older brother. He eventually relocated to New England and became an acclaimed illustrator—of works ranging from Moby-Dick to the King James Bible—while Tom raised his family in the South.

Of course, the pair did not see eye to eye politically. They did not even speak for years. But with the sweetness and richness that only comes when remembering something nearly lost, Barry recreates slices of their Southern childhood. He recalls drawings they made as children, riding the school bus together, attending military school, hunting pigeons, brawling in their living room and debating ideas. Though Tom comes off as a bully in many of Barry’s childhood memories, a series of letters the pair exchanged late in life reveal Tom to be deeply sensitive and loving, and more softhearted than his younger brother often perceived. The inclusion of Tom’s voice through the full quotation of one long letter creates in the reader the same sort of hollowed-out, raw feeling that Barry describes in the book’s prologue.

We Were Brothers is a beautifully honest book about two real brothers—full, complicated people—who, though they shared a childhood and loved each other as best they could, never managed to repair the cracks in their fragile relationship.

Stories about brothers make Barry Moser weep. He yearns for a fraternal closeness that never existed between himself and Tom, his older brother. In We Were Brothers, a memoir shrouded in wistful melancholia, Moser recalls his childhood in Tennessee and his “heavy ladened and knotty” relationship with his brother.

NonfictionReligion & Spirituality

What do you want to believe?

Review by Kelly Blewett

“Anger has always been my adversary, crouching just outside the door.” One might not expect to hear such a confession from a figure like David Gregory, the NBC newsman who moderated “Meet the Press” and served as the White House correspondent during the second Bush administration. But in How’s Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey, a kind of measured honesty keeps Gregory revealing unexpected sides.

The book is classified as a religious memoir, and indeed a spiritual story forms its core: how Gregory grew from a nominally Jewish childhood, married a Christian woman, navigated the spiritual upbringing of his children and ultimately decided to explore his own faith more deeply—both through introspection and, unsurprisingly given his profession, interviewing experts. So How’s Your Faith? is as much about Gregory’s search for the spiritual answers of others as it is about stressing answers of his own. He listens to evangelical preacher Joel Osteen and to Cardinal Timothy Dolan. He listens to Mohamed Magid at a mosque in Virginia, and he listens to rabbis in his own tradition. 

Gregory’s vulnerability in sharing the lessons he learned, as well as the details of his tumultuous departure from NBC in 2014, distinguish this book in the crowded lineup of spiritual-seeking memoirs. Not only does Gregory concede his shortcomings, he also relates how faith and religious practice have enabled him to address them. “We cannot make our adversaries disappear,” he says after acknowledging his struggles with anger. “All we can do is refuse to let them in.”

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Anger has always been my adversary, crouching just outside the door.” One might not expect to hear such a confession from a figure like David Gregory, the NBC newsman who moderated “Meet the Press” and served as the White House correspondent during the second Bush administration. But in How’s Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey, a kind of measured honesty keeps Gregory revealing unexpected sides.
NonfictionHistory

A shining city on the brink

Review by Kelly Blewett

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, September 2015

David Maraniss didn’t set out to write a ghost story, but Once in a Great City, his glimmering portrait of Detroit, has a lingering, melancholy quality that will leave the reader thoroughly haunted. 

The story begins on November 9, 1962, a day of tragedies: The Ford Rotunda, an architectural masterpiece that was once one of the nation’s top five tourist attractions, burns to the ground. On the other side of town, the Detroit police ransack the Gotham, a landmark hotel memorialized in prose by Langston Hughes. The Gotham eventually becomes a parking lot, and the Ford Rotunda is never rebuilt.

These troubling opening passages seem to portend the storms that will crash upon the city, yet Maraniss doesn’t linger in the gloom. Instead, he regards them as cracks in an otherwise gorgeous facade, for Detroit in the early 1960s was a tremendous place to be. From the inventors of the Mustang to the producers of Motown Records, Detroit’s movers and shakers were extraordinary. Maraniss brings them to life in vivid flashes, recounting details like the story behind Motown producer Berry Gordy’s nickname, and the tenor of the voice of civil rights advocate Reverend C.L. Franklin, the father of Aretha Franklin.

Once in a Great City has it all: significant scenes, tremendously charismatic figures, even a starry soundtrack. (I challenge anyone to read this book without sneaking off to listen to old Motown favorites like “My Guy.”) Maraniss chronicles events from the fall of 1962 through the spring of 1964. Reading about the city in its heyday is like falling backward in time and running into someone whose youthful blush you’d completely forgotten. Detroit is that someone. She is bright and laughing, flickering before you like a specter from the past. I doubt I’ll forget her anytime soon.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

David Maraniss didn’t set out to write a ghost story, but Once in a Great City, his glimmering portrait of Detroit, has a lingering, melancholy quality that will leave the reader thoroughly haunted.
NonfictionMemoir

Foreign feelings in a foreign land

Review by Kelly Blewett

Tracy Slater thought she’d stay in Boston forever. A writing teacher with a Ph.D. in literature, Slater worked with diverse students, practiced yoga, published essays and enjoyed her close-knit community of friends. Yet one fateful summer, she agreed to teach English in Japan. “Don’t fall in love,” said her mother. Naturally, she did. 

Enter Toru, a soft-spoken and quietly joyful Japanese man. Toru and Slater develop a deep emotional bond that baffles Slater’s friends and family. Against all odds, the pair indulges in a transcontinental romance that lingers long after Slater’s teaching stint in Asia ends. The Good Shufu chronicles their romance in all its charming—and occasionally painful—detail.

Slater is candid about the intellectual, emotional and cultural tensions in her new life. Why, she wonders, would a devoted feminist be happy to play shufu, or housewife, in a traditional Japanese context? How has life led to her cooking dinner three nights a week for her boyfriend and his dad? Why would someone who loves Boston so much take up a life in a land where she will always be a cultural outsider?

These questions are very much Slater’s own, yet anyone whose life didn’t quite turn out as they imagined can relate. The pleasure of this book is Slater’s ability to wrestle with very real contradictions in her life even as she masterfully unfolds a story of falling in love and finding home in unexpected places. 

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tracy Slater thought she’d stay in Boston forever. A writing teacher with a Ph.D. in literature, Slater worked with diverse students, practiced yoga, published essays and enjoyed her close-knit community of friends. Yet one fateful summer, she agreed to teach English in Japan. “Don’t fall in love,” said her mother. Naturally, she did.
NonfictionBiography

Bringing Yoga to America

Review by Kelly Blewett

Anyone who has completed a grueling round of sun salutations may be glad to learn that such exertions were intended for adolescent boys. Yoga, as it was taught to Americans by Indra Devi in the 1950s, was a slower series of postures, yet it was no more “authentic” than the intense hatha yoga of today. As Michelle Goldberg capably illustrates in The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, yoga has always been a bizarre blend of Eastern and Western tradition, particularly in the U.S. Like many other trends, yoga’s popularity began in Hollywood.

Devi, the subject of Goldberg’s terrific new biography, arrived in the City of Angels when she was almost 60 years old. Born Eugenia Peterson in early 20th-century Russia, Devi bounced from her war-torn home to Berlin in the 1930s. An actress, dancer and incurable adventurer, Devi soon traveled to a land she’d always dreamed of: India. While there, she put her charisma to good use by convincing recalcitrant yogis to be her teacher. (She also starred in a silent film on the side.) Just before she moved to Shanghai to be a diplomat’s wife, her latest guru told her to devote herself to spreading the practice of yoga. She opened her first studio the following year. When she finally arrived in Hollywood, minus the diplomat, it was 1947. Soon she was teaching the likes of Greta Garbo and Elizabeth Arden. And her story, improbable though it may seem, was only beginning. (She lived to be 102.)

As spectacular a figure as Devi obviously was, Goldberg wisely devotes a lot of her book to yoga itself: the development and popularization of not simply a physical activity, but also a philosophy. For anyone interested in the practice, The Goddess Pose offers an irresistible story of yoga’s unlikely and, yes, even audacious origins.

Anyone who has completed a grueling round of sun salutations may be glad to learn that such exertions were intended for adolescent boys. Yoga, as it was taught to Americans by Indra Devi in the 1950s, was a slower series of postures, yet it was no more “authentic” than the intense hatha yoga of today. As Michelle Goldberg capably illustrates in The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, yoga has always been a bizarre blend of Eastern and Western tradition, particularly in the U.S. Like many other trends, yoga’s popularity began in Hollywood.
NonfictionNature

Nature’s small wonder

Review by Kelly Blewett

Thor Hanson’s The Triumph of Seeds is an unexpected delight. Composed in charming and lively prose, the book introduces readers to a variety of quirky figures—biologists, farmers, archaeologists and everyday gardeners—who have something profound to say about a seemingly mundane topic: those little kernels that, against tremendous odds, have managed to take root all around us.

The impact seeds have had on human history can hardly be overstated, as Hanson enthusiastically makes quite clear in endless practical examples that range from the seeds needed for fracking to the variety of seeds in the average pantry. The author’s good cheer and curiosity lead to several memorable passages. In the first pages, for example, he aggressively attempts to split open a particularly well-guarded seed he gathered in the rain forest. Another chapter opens with the delicate dissection of an Almond Joy bar that quickly gives way to an extended discussion of the mysteries of the coconut seed.

Chapters are organized into themes about what seeds do best: nourish, unite, endure, defend, and travel. And within the chapters, Hanson wisely organizes material not so much by topic as by scene. He artfully draws readers into a particular moment, be it his attempt to teach a biology class about moss or the recounting of a spirited conversation with an archaeologist in New Mexico. There is something so approachable about this book, and something so confident and at home in the world about the writer.

For the reader the image of the natural world becomes, through this lens of seeds, at once finely detailed and gloriously panoramic. In all, The Triumph of Seeds is a remarkable, gentle and refreshing piece of work that draws readers further into the wide arms of the world and makes them grateful for it.

Thor Hanson’s The Triumph of Seeds is an unexpected delight. Composed in charming and lively prose, the book introduces readers to a variety of quirky figures—biologists, farmers, archaeologists and everyday gardeners—who have something profound to say about a seemingly mundane topic: those little kernels that, against tremendous odds, have managed to take root all around us.
NonfictionMemoir

Don’t let the light in

Review by Kelly Blewett

At this moment on the other side of the world, a girl is sitting in the dark. A rare skin disease prevents exposure to the sun, to a shining bulb, even to the benign glow of a Kindle screen. She covers up the slightest cracks of light with tin foil. What do people who pass her house on the street think of these ceaseless black-out blinds, she wonders. She doesn't find out.

She spends her evenings with her husband, who enters her box of darkness to listen to the radio and to make love. He looms large in her world, and one can feel her enthusiasm for him. Lyndsey, who before falling ill worked for the British government, finds she cannot listen to music alone because it stirs up too much despair. Her very skin is a prison. Yet, like many stories of enduring seemingly impossible circumstances, Lyndsey's poetic reflections on her life in the dark shed light on how valuable it is to be human, how beautiful it is to be alive. 

Rather than a strictly chronological account, Girl in the Dark offers short, vital essays around various themes, such as dreams, word games, hats, autonomy, rain, her mother, physics and memory. In one titled "People," she writes, "For [guests] I put on my corset of cheerfulness, a solid serviceable garment. It holds in the bulgings and oozings of emotions, and soon I find they are, temporarily, stilled." The image of the corset of cheerfulness does not quickly leave the reader. Similarly thoughtful metaphors are planted like so many bright flowers on the fertile pages.

Through Lyndsey's remarkable storytelling, through the rightness of her words, her world comes alive. The book becomes so much larger than her darkened room. I cannot recommend it warmly enough.

At this moment on the other side of the world, a girl is sitting in the dark. A rare skin disease prevents exposure to the sun, to a shining bulb, even to the benign glow of a Kindle screen. She covers up the slightest cracks of light with tin foil. What do people who pass her house on the street think of these ceaseless black-out blinds, she wonders. She doesn't find out.
NonfictionPop CultureBusiness & Finance

Spilling the beans

Review by Kelly Blewett

Remember the Beanie Babies? Peanut (a blue elephant), Lovie (a little lamb) and Cubbie (a Chicago bear) are just three of the beanbag animals highlighted in Zac Bissonnette’s strange, compelling book on the 1990s fad. Behind the Beanies was the meticulous, ambitious Ty Warner, a bizarre combination of wolf of Wall Street and master elf of Santa’s toy factory.

Warner comes vividly to life in The Great Beanie Baby Bubble through stories from his sister, two ex-girlfriends and dozens of former coworkers. Obsessed with the appearance of his plush cats, Warner plucked hairs around their eyes before trade shows so they could gaze at guests more persuasively. In fact, it was Warner’s obsession with detail that led to the strategy of “retiring” certain Beanies. As Warner tinkered with designs, changing a color from royal blue to light blue (as in Peanut’s case), Beanie collectors went into a frenzy to achieve a complete set. Readers will meet these collectors, from the first Chicago moms who made a killing, to the late arrivals, like a retired soap opera star who blew his children’s college fund on Beanie Babies.

When the market was rising, everyone—from Ty employees to shop owners to consumers—was exhilarated. The company had one of the first direct-to-consumer websites, which would announce upcoming retirees via a Beanie character who spoke in rhyme from the “Ty Nursery.” The secondary market went wild on a new website called eBay. But once the market bubble began to break, it broke hard. Bissonnette’s research into the history of speculative markets helpfully situates the Beanie phenomenon in a larger framework. The story is a Greek tragedy served with a brutal twist of American capitalism.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with author Zac Bissonnette.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Remember the Beanie Babies? Peanut (a blue elephant), Lovie (a little lamb) and Cubbie (a Chicago bear) are just three of the beanbag animals highlighted in Zac Bissonnette’s strange, compelling book on the 1990s fad. Behind the Beanies was the meticulous, ambitious Ty Warner, a bizarre combination of wolf of Wall Street and master elf of Santa’s toy factory.

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