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Marianne Peters

Social Science

Following the trail of trash

Review by Marianne Peters

Do you religiously recycle your stuff, but wonder what happens after the truck carts it away? Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter’s book about the trade in trash and recyclables, looks at how billions of dollars’ worth of usable materials (sometimes tossed after just a single use) gets collected, sorted, baled, sold and shipped off to recyclers, and reveals who is making a living harvesting the materials we pay to part with. He follows the trail all the way to the end, describing the people who pay a high price to pick apart and process (usually with bare hands) the valuable resources locked up in our waste. The book also includes color photographs of working conditions few Americans would tolerate.

Minter is uniquely qualified to write about this industry. He grew up in the family scrap business and now lives in China, where he serves as the Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View. The book is part family history and part travelogue, as he accompanies Chinese scrap dealers crisscrossing the U.S., snapping up shipping containers’ worth of materials, including electronics that are tossed out by the tons every year. He also travels to Asia, where entire regions have dedicated themselves to recycling our scrap. Recycling brings much-needed employment to these often-impoverished areas and demonstrates the resourcefulness of the developing world, whose citizens repurpose, reuse and resell the stuff we consider “trash.” Minter describes these places, transformed from fertile rural backwaters to bustling, polluted urban centers where the labor is unregulated and the materials are toxic.

Adam Minter does not claim to be an environmentalist, and readers of that bent might be offended at his disdain of recycling, especially as practiced by well-to-do and well-meaning suburbanites. He does point out, however, that despite the toxic effects of some overseas materials processing, the developing world is doing what people in America used to do before things got so disposable: They are using brains and initiative to reuse perfectly good stuff. For all our talk about sustainable lifestyles and “going green,” Minter says, the people who buy our leftovers might be teaching us a lesson or two.

Do you religiously recycle your stuff, but wonder what happens after the truck carts it away? Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter’s book about the trade in trash and recyclables, looks at how billions of dollars’ worth of usable materials (sometimes tossed after just a single use) gets collected, sorted, baled, sold and shipped off to recyclers, […]
NonfictionHealth & Fitness

Are you paying attention?

Review by Marianne Peters

Who doesn’t feel distracted these days? With the vast resources of the Internet in the palms of our hands via our smartphones, it’s so convenient to tune out the real world and tune in to the latest trending topic. What are we missing when our ability to focus becomes compromised?

Daniel Goleman asks that question in his new book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. He writes, “Life today seems ruled to a troubling degree by impulse; a flood of ads drives us, bottom-up, to desire a sea of goods and spend today without regard to how we will pay tomorrow.” However, he avoids a simple lecture in favor of an explanation of focus itself.

In lively prose, Goleman explores the circuitry of our brains, what happens to us physically when we concentrate and when we become distracted. He investigates the evolutionary roots of focus and asks if we are less focused now than we were decades ago. He also explains how the ability to focus helps us sense our own values, understand and empathize with others, find peace through meditation and even perceive threats. In later chapters, he expands the scope of his discussion to the topic of leadership. How do the best leaders among us pay attention, and what do they see? How do they help their organizations avoid distractions?

Goleman’s book is both an explanation of focus as well as a tool for improving it in our daily lives, unleashing creativity, living mindfully and leading strategically.

Who doesn’t feel distracted these days? With the vast resources of the Internet in the palms of our hands via our smartphones, it’s so convenient to tune out the real world and tune in to the latest trending topic. What are we missing when our ability to focus becomes compromised? Daniel Goleman asks that question […]

The science of having too little

Review by Marianne Peters

Scarcity has the ability to change your life. Or at least, it will make you on time for your next meeting.

Defined by the authors, scarcity means having less than you feel you need. Whether it’s time, food, customers or insurance coverage, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir argue that one single impulse underlies everything we do when we feel our resources are scarce. They ask, “What happens to our minds when we feel we have too little, and how does that shape our choices and our behaviors?” They believe that a feeling of scarcity in any part of our lives results in predictable behavior patterns that we can understand and even transcend.

Understanding scarcity’s effect on our thinking has implications for daily living, but also for society’s understanding of poverty. One of the key questions of the book is, “Why do the busy stay busy and the poor stay poor?” The authors explore how deadlines work for and against us, sometimes giving us the nudge to get busy and sometimes causing us to “tunnel” and neglect other important tasks. They explain why we often choose activities that go against our values because we feel a scarcity of time or money, such as forgoing family dinner to work late on a big project.

Mullainathan and Shafir also explore how poverty and scarcity go hand in hand. They argue that penalties such as late fees make it harder for the poor to pay off credit cards, and they discuss why so often those in poverty drop out of the very programs meant to help them. They offer solutions for the poor that bring scarcity into consideration rather than creating more hurdles for people already struggling to run the race.

Mullainathan and Shafir are not interested in dry psychological study. Their book contains plenty of theory, but also stories, examples and illustrations of scarcity at work, which makes it engaging and applicable. Even at 300 pages, it reads quickly and offers plenty of insight on an attitude that can affect every area of our lives—and our society.

Scarcity has the ability to change your life. Or at least, it will make you on time for your next meeting. Defined by the authors, scarcity means having less than you feel you need. Whether it’s time, food, customers or insurance coverage, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir argue that one single impulse underlies everything we […]
Memoir

Stories of a record-setting hike

Review by Marianne Peters

In this memoir of her 2011 record-setting hike down the Appalachian Trail, Jennifer Pharr Davis demonstrates the strength it takes to complete such a feat, and she credits the people who made it possible—especially her husband, Brew.

Pharr Davis hiked the 2,181-mile Trail in an astounding 46 days. She did the walking, but family, friends, fellow hikers and even complete strangers provided food, shelter and companionship to lessen her load.

Called Again is most inspiring when Pharr Davis describes her struggle to balance the strain of breaking a record without breaking down physically. She deals with the bodily wear and tear of more than a month on rough terrain, but also paralyzing fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, chest pain and shin splints that nearly cripple her. She also copes with unpredictable weather as she hikes through torrential rain, blistering heat and freezing sleet.

Pharr Davis does not shy away from revealing her own personal weaknesses in this book. Her fierce determination to set the Trail record also creates conflict with the people she loves, and so the book is also an exploration of relationships on the trail and in marriage. At times, Pharr Davis craves help and company; at other times, she is annoyed when people do not anticipate or understand what she is thinking, particularly Brew.

The book is an insightful look into the give-and-take of a supported hike and the unique culture of long-distance backpacking. For those who love the challenge of a long walk in the woods, Called Again will tempt you to strap your boots on.

In this memoir of her 2011 record-setting hike down the Appalachian Trail, Jennifer Pharr Davis demonstrates the strength it takes to complete such a feat, and she credits the people who made it possible—especially her husband, Brew. Pharr Davis hiked the 2,181-mile Trail in an astounding 46 days. She did the walking, but family, friends, […]
NonfictionMemoir

Her own hidden life

Review by Marianne Peters

Known for translating her observations of people and animals into powerful literary prose, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas now studies her own history in the memoir A Million Years With You.

Thomas’ story testifies to the value of curiosity. When she was just 18, she dropped out of college to join an anthropological expedition, headed by her father, to the Kalahari Desert, where they would meet with isolated tribes of Bushmen. Others have speculated that Thomas’ father, Laurence Marshall, wanted to get reacquainted with his family after his work during World War II resulted in many long separations, but Thomas says there was much more to the experience. “I’m sure we didn’t go [to Africa] merely so that Dad could know us better,” she writes. “We went because he liked wild places.” Her father, perhaps the most influential person in her life, encouraged his daughter to explore wilderness both near and far.

Thomas continued to explore and observe, even after marriage and the birth of her two children. She sought research opportunities and continued to travel to Africa, including trips to Uganda and Nigeria during periods of terrifying political unrest in the 1960s, experiences that would deeply shake her. She also wrote about subjects closer to home; her book The Hidden Life of Dogs was a bestseller.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has been described by a close friend as “strong as a snow leopard, tough as Genghis Khan.” In A Million Years With You she also recounts her weaker moments with humor and honesty, including her struggles with alcohol addiction, serious family crises and the realities of aging. Now in her 80s, Thomas retains her lively curiosity about the world. “As has been said,” she writes, “while wandering down the road of life, it helps to look for something more meaningful than oneself, and I’ve never had to look far to find it, from the stars when I look up to the soil when I look down.”

Known for translating her observations of people and animals into powerful literary prose, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas now studies her own history in the memoir A Million Years With You. Thomas’ story testifies to the value of curiosity. When she was just 18, she dropped out of college to join an anthropological expedition, headed by her […]
NonfictionMemoir

The love in a child’s life, however brief

Review by Marianne Peters

In her memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, Emily Rapp steps into the very center of the horror all parents dread: the death of a child. She doesn’t document her son Ronan’s death from Tay-Sachs disease symptom by symptom, but she maps the progress of her own sorrow as she seeks to accept his fate. As she cares for a baby who is slowly, inexorably dying, she finds counsel in the words of poets, writers, spiritual leaders and philosophers who have faced the unthinkable and survived more or less intact.

Rapp is truthful, which makes her story both wrenching and refreshing to read. She shares no platitudes or explanations—just the raw emotions of parents whose child would, as Rapp describes, “gradually regress into a vegetative state within the span of one year. . . . This slow fade would progress to his likely death before the age of three.” She faces the big questions head on: Will she meet Ronan in the afterlife? Does his small life matter at all? But she also faces the mundane struggles: Should she and her husband prolong his life with a feeding tube or other interventions? Does it matter what they feed him? What kind of therapy will keep him comfortable?

Grief, Rapp learns, is neither predictable nor logical. Seeking answers from C.S. Lewis, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, as well as Buddhism, Christianity and other sources, she recognizes that her own intensely personal experience is no less important for being hers alone. She sees that Ronan himself is precious, a whole person whom she loves, not for his future achievements, but for who he is now. Rapp writes, “We made him, we loved him, end of story. . . . I reminded myself that unconditional love asks nothing back; being Ronan’s mom was my giant, painful opportunity to learn this. What I was being asked to do felt both entirely instinctive and completely impossible . . . to love my child without limits or expectations.”

Emily Rapp’s willingness to share these philosophical, emotional and practical issues makes this book particularly helpful for parents facing similar struggles. However, all parents would benefit from the reminder to love their children for who they are, not who we hope they will become.

In her memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, Emily Rapp steps into the very center of the horror all parents dread: the death of a child. She doesn’t document her son Ronan’s death from Tay-Sachs disease symptom by symptom, but she maps the progress of her own sorrow as she seeks to accept […]
NonfictionHistory

The woman beside Joan of Arc

Review by Marianne Peters

In 1429 the embattled French dauphin, Charles, faced an internal civil war and an external threat from English invasion. He was fast losing hope that he would ever survive to take his father’s place on the throne. All seemed lost until an obscure teenage mystic arrived on a mission from God: to raise the siege of Orleans and crown Charles the true king of France.

Joan of Arc’s triumphant and tragic story has fascinated people for 600 years. However, most scholars have studied these events from Joan’s perspective. Now Nancy Goldstone has uncovered new elements of Joan’s story by gazing through a different lens: the life of Yolande of Aragon, Queen of Sicily.

Yolande, mother-in-law of the dauphin, was ambitious, strong, intelligent and one of the busiest diplomats of her day. A devoted wife to Louis II, king of Sicily, she was not just an ornament but wielded power as his equal. She also raised Charles along with her own children, married a daughter to him and acted as his closest advisor and confidant for years. When his rule was threatened, she worked tirelessly to protect him (and her own interests); and she may have been the one who delivered Joan to his court just when he needed her most.

Goldstone has written a lively, fast-paced and fascinating account of Joan’s story, weaving together the labyrinthine intrigues of medieval politics, the real story behind a medieval fairy tale and the astonishing events that led a young peasant girl from the command of an army to a fiery death at the hands of the English. As in her previous books, Goldstone also sheds light on a little-known but admirable woman, Yolande of Aragon. The Maid and the Queen reminds us that, as Goldstone has remarked, “History makes a lot more sense when you put the women back in.”

In 1429 the embattled French dauphin, Charles, faced an internal civil war and an external threat from English invasion. He was fast losing hope that he would ever survive to take his father’s place on the throne. All seemed lost until an obscure teenage mystic arrived on a mission from God: to raise the siege […]
NonfictionPolitics

Starting a much-needed conversation

Review by Marianne Peters

“What happened to the America I knew?” writes Tom Brokaw in his new book, The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation About America. According to Brokaw, our nation is challenged by political partisanship, environmental degradation and, thanks to technology, rapid-fire and sometimes shallow social connections. Rather than a lament, however, Brokaw has written a hopeful volume, providing insightful analysis as well as a call to action. “What follows,” he writes in the preface, “are the observations, hopes, memories, and suggestions of a child of the twentieth century . . . with some observations on how we might realize the great promise of a future that would benefit us all.”

In The Time of Our Lives, Brokaw dissects such issues as education, public service, the 2008 recession and the Internet explosion. Along with his own analysis, Brokaw weaves in memories of his South Dakota childhood and his experiences covering major events of the last half of the 20th century. He’s not a policy wonk, but a seasoned journalist who still respects the values of hard work, integrity, thrift and generosity demonstrated by his Midwestern parents and grandparents. He asks, as America’s place in the world shifts and our society changes, will we still retain the character necessary to be a great nation?

Brokaw tells his own story, but he also tells the stories of the Americans he has met in his travels across the country. Some of these stories are heartbreaking, others inspiring. They all illustrate both the problems and the solutions citizens are grappling with as they navigate difficult economic times. By putting human faces on these issues, Brokaw reminds us that statistics about unemployment, foreclosures and failing schools represent real people.

“Do we have the will to restore a sense of national purpose that unites us rather than divides us?” he inquires. “Shouldn’t we take a realistic inventory of our strengths, needs, objectives, and challenges as we head into a new century in a changed world?” Tom Brokaw hopes his new book will start that discussion.

“What happened to the America I knew?” writes Tom Brokaw in his new book, The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation About America. According to Brokaw, our nation is challenged by political partisanship, environmental degradation and, thanks to technology, rapid-fire and sometimes shallow social connections. Rather than a lament, however, Brokaw has written a hopeful […]
NonfictionMemoir

A long, strange trip to sobriety

Review by Marianne Peters

Sacha Scoblic lived to drink, until the morning she stumbled out of a bar with only vague memories of the night before. She gave up alcohol that day, sick of the person she had become. But without alcohol, who was she? In Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety, she discovers that sobriety has its own strange trips.

Memoirs about recovery travel a well-trodden path, but not many of them manage to be this piercing and ribald. Scoblic’s memoir uncovers the everyday frustrations recovering alcoholics face as they negotiate a world saturated with their drug of choice. It’s a hilarious, honest and heart-breaking glimpse into the routine torments of addiction.

Terribly insecure and already addicted to booze, 30-something Scoblic feels intimidated by her sophisticated new colleagues at the New Republic. “At the time, I assumed either cosmic intervention or a gas leak in the building had led to me getting hired at the New Republic magazine,” she writes. “Still, I was completely ready to emulate Hunter S. Thompson: I’d drink all night and write colorful scene-scapes about American zeitgeist by day.” She relies on drinking to transform herself into a snarky party girl willing to try anything once, even if it also makes her cruel, self-centered and prone to property damage.

But after years of hangovers, panic attacks and relationships as empty as last night’s beer bottles, Scoblic finally gives it up. She struggles to stay clean, fantasizing about wacky scenarios that would require her to drink again, such as celebrating a successful nuclear arms treaty with Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and a bottle of Russian vodka.

Fearful of becoming banal without the stimulation of alcohol, Scoblic realizes that a sober life has its own richness. In the end, she finds that sobriety is a life of unmissed opportunities, authentic love and forgotten dreams waiting to be rediscovered.

Sacha Scoblic lived to drink, until the morning she stumbled out of a bar with only vague memories of the night before. She gave up alcohol that day, sick of the person she had become. But without alcohol, who was she? In Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety, she discovers that sobriety has its own strange trips. […]
Memoir

Raw memoir from talented food writer

Review by Marianne Peters

Kim Severson, who now writes for the New York Times, first found success as a food writer for the Anchorage Daily News. But by the time she arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle seven years later, she had nearly succumbed to alcoholism, despite her professional success. Spoon Fed, her new memoir, recounts her journey from strung-out restaurant rookie to spouse, mother and award-winning food writer.

Severson engages the reader with her self-deprecating humor and insight into the family dynamics that shape us and sometimes hold us prisoner. She effectively interweaves the story of her young adulthood, during which she realized she was gay, with her encounters with some of the most influential cooks in America. From each woman, she learns lessons about food and life. She also gleans some great recipes, listed at the end of each chapter.

“It would take a series of women who know how to cook to re-teach me the life lessons I forgot and some I never learned in the first place,” Severson writes in her introduction to the book. Her conversations with Alice Waters, Marion Cunningham, Rachael Ray, Ruth Reichl, Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis and Leah Chase illustrate each woman’s passion for food, of course, but Severson is also honest enough to reveal their strengths and weaknesses as well as her own, resulting in a satisfying peek into the real lives of cooking icons.

The eighth cook Severson describes is her mother, Anne Marie Severson, an Italian-American who made home-cooked meals a daily priority. By the end of the book, with her mother facing a life-threatening illness, Severson is the one at the stove. Their story is not only about the heritage of food and family, but also about growing up, telling the truth and making the perfect red sauce.

Kim Severson, who now writes for the New York Times, first found success as a food writer for the Anchorage Daily News. But by the time she arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle seven years later, she had nearly succumbed to alcoholism, despite her professional success. Spoon Fed, her new memoir, recounts her journey from […]
Nature

Finding comfort in the natural world

Review by Marianne Peters

Why does nature awaken our joys and soothe our sorrows? Kathleen Dean Moore explores this question in her fourth book of personal essays, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature.

Moore, an activist and professor living in Oregon, had planned to write about joy. However, as she explains in the introduction, “Events overtook me. I guess that’s how I’ll say it. That autumn, events overtook me, death after death, and my life became an experiment in sadness.” Several of her loved ones died that season, both close friends and her father-in-law, who “faded away like steam from stones,” and in her grief, she turned to the natural world to be healed.

The three sections of Wild Comfort mirror Moore’s journey from gladness through solace to courage. Her interactions with nature—fishing for salmon, canoeing a misty lake, observing an eagle feather—reveal unexpected connections to her own joys, fears, doubts and memories.

Moore’s descriptions are powerfully visceral. In her essay “The Patience of Herons,” she writes, “And here is the work of patience: to become brave and fierce, set like a spring to seize whatever life puts in the way of our stiletto beaks. To stalk it and impale it and with a flip of our muscular necks, to fling it into the air and swallow it whole. Seize the day in a razor beak. This patience is the birth of joy.”

Employing a naturalist’s understanding of the world and a poet’s gift for language, Moore faces nature’s bracing truth and endless cycles of birth and death, wrestling to reconcile her own eventual death with a life of joyful surrender. “The bottom may drop out of my life,” she writes, “what I trusted may fall away completely, leaving me astonished and shaken. But still . . . there is wild comfort in the cycles and the intersecting circles, the rotations and revolutions, the growing and ebbing of this beautiful and strangely trustworthy world.”

Readers will not find much sentimental musing in Moore’s book. However, they will find that the world seems larger, wilder and yet safer than they had thought—more beautiful, and more like home.

Marianne Peters is a freelance writer and editor based in Plymouth, Indiana.

Why does nature awaken our joys and soothe our sorrows? Kathleen Dean Moore explores this question in her fourth book of personal essays, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature. Moore, an activist and professor living in Oregon, had planned to write about joy. However, as she explains in the introduction, “Events overtook me. I guess […]
Memoir

One friendship that changes everything

Review by Marianne Peters

Cathie Beck, a single mother of two, had always lived on the solitary knife-edge of poverty. In her late thirties, with her children off at college, she yearned to live the life she had missed while struggling to provide for them, but she needed a posse. She placed an ad in the Boulder Daily Camerafor a new women’s group called WOW, “Women on the Way.”

“I’d invented a women’s group because I needed friends, preferably the instant kind,” she writes. “I don’t know why I thought placing an ad was the answer, except to say that for a great many quiet years I had looked for—yearned for—just one more person who was living the same life I was.”

At WOW, Beck met Denise, and their friendship ignited instantly. Denise, a sophisticated artist who gave generously and lived wildly, enthralled Beck. Denise was a risk-taker, sure of herself but not always wise, and some of her actions led to painful consequences. Despite their misadventures, though, she showed Beck how to live wholeheartedly and headlong. However, there was a catch: Denise had advanced multiple sclerosis, and the symptoms were worsening.

Cheap Cabernet is difficult to set aside, unblinkingly true, funny, coarse and sometimes pensive, with an unpredictable narrative structure that reflects the two women’s meteoric friendship. Beck writes honestly about her past—haunted by poverty—her early motherhood, abandonment, desperate loneliness and an even more desperate desire to give her children a good life. She applies that honesty to her friendship with Denise. Their relationship inspires both hilarity and helplessness, especially as the MS takes its toll and both women struggle to define their place in the shifting sands of each other’s lives.

Relationships are messy, imperfect affairs, Cathie Beck emphasizes. However, because of Denise, Beck learned how to live without fear, to open her heart to others and to occasionally lift a glass of cheap cabernet in the company of friends.

Marianne Peters is a freelance writer who occasionally sips cheap cabernet in Plymouth, Indiana.

Cathie Beck, a single mother of two, had always lived on the solitary knife-edge of poverty. In her late thirties, with her children off at college, she yearned to live the life she had missed while struggling to provide for them, but she needed a posse. She placed an ad in the Boulder Daily Camerafor a […]

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