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Sarah McCraw Crow

Nonfiction

Keeping pace as the world moves faster

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Fans of Thomas Friedman will be happy to know that he’s back with another comprehensive look at the world’s trends and troubles. In Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Friedman, longtime New York Times columnist and author of six previous books, returns to the forces of globalization, climate change and technology. These are themes he’s covered before, but in this book he explains that we’re living in an age of simultaneous accelerations—ever-faster changes in climate, globalization and technology—that affect different parts of the world differently. These accelerations work together, Friedman argues, to create effects as disparate as an intelligent electrical grid that makes wind power viable, vast waves of migration out of overpopulated regions of Africa, and the political rise of Donald Trump.

Drawing on interviews with academics, CEOs, Silicon Valley innovators and other experts, as well as quotations from books, magazines and TV interviews, Friedman distills complicated concepts, using catchphrases and analogies to underscore his points; for instance, he refers to the amplifying effect of the computing cloud as “the supernova.” While the mix of sources and quoted passages can occasionally make for jumpy reading, Friedman’s informal style keeps the reader engaged.

The accelerations that Friedman describes are worrisome indeed, especially climate change and “the world of disorder,” his phrase for an increasing number of disintegrating nations. As to solutions, Friedman goes in two directions: He makes recommendations based on Mother Nature (be adaptive, embrace diversity, build ownership culture). He also returns to his hometown of St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb that produced an unusual number of writers, thinkers, and creatives, among them Joel and Ethan Coen, Al Franken and Norm Ornstein. He uncovers the factors that made his community successful, drawing lessons from its experience. Thank You for Being Late is vintage Friedman: clear-eyed on the world’s enormous problems, but optimistic about possible solutions.

Fans of Thomas Friedman will be happy to know that he’s back with another comprehensive look at the world’s trends and troubles. In Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Friedman returns to the forces of globalization, climate change and technology.
Nonfiction

Einstein’s imperfect theory

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Wait—Albert Einstein, whose equations revolutionized our understanding of the origins of the universe, made a mistake? That’s what science writer David Bodanis posits in Einstein’s Greatest Mistake. The personal qualities that allowed the young Einstein to make such enormous breakthroughs kept him from making similar advances in later years, Bodanis writes.

In this chatty account, Bodanis gives us Einstein the young man, trapped in his Bern Patent Office clerkship, struggling to find a teaching post and attached to Mileva Marić, a former mathematics student whom his parents couldn’t stand. Bodanis makes Einstein’s theories graspable, using analogies and illustrations to explain Einstein’s 1905 paper linking energy and mass (E = mc2), and his 1915 general relativity theory (G = T), which indicated that the universe was expanding. Contemporary astronomers saw the universe as static, and so Einstein revised his theory, a mistake that laid the groundwork for another mistake, in Bodanis’ view. Later, experimental scientists like Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington, Radcliffe graduate Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître proved that Einstein had been correct at the start: The universe was expanding.

Meanwhile, the state of subatomic physics changed too, as physicists Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger theorized that the tiniest particles don’t behave according to the expected laws of physics. Even as experimental evidence supporting this theory grew, Einstein disagreed, assuming future experiments would prove him right. Einstein’s stubborn refusal to accept this concept was his greatest mistake, Bodanis writes: “In his theory of 1915, [Einstein] had revealed the underlying structure of our universe, and he had been right when everyone else had been wrong. He wasn’t going to be misled again.” This refusal isolated him from the younger generation of scientists.

Bodanis’ biography offers a window onto Einstein’s achievements and missteps, as well as his life—his friendships, his complicated love life (two marriages, many affairs) and his isolation from other scientists at the end of his life.

 

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

Wait—Albert Einstein, whose equations revolutionized our understanding of the origins of the universe, made a mistake? That’s what science writer David -Bodanis posits in Einstein’s Greatest Mistake. The personal qualities that allowed the young Einstein to make such enormous breakthroughs kept him from making similar advances in later years, Bodanis writes.
NonfictionMemoir

Coming-of-age in colorful Queens

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Tara Clancy is only 36, but she manages to make her 1980s childhood feel like a long-lost era. In The Clancys of Queens, she gives us a coming-of-age memoir defined by the distinctive neighborhoods she grew up in: Broad Channel, Queens, a “bread crumb of an island” where her Irish-cop dad lived; Bellerose, her grandparents’ Italian-American enclave; and tony Bridgehampton, Long Island, where Clancy spent half her weekends with her mom and Mark, her mom’s well-to-do boyfriend.

A frequent contributor to “The Moth Radio Hour,” Clancy expanded her Moth stories for this memoir. She offers colorful character studies of the people who filled her young life, like cursing Grandma Rosalie (“Fahngool” was Rosalie’s “go-to, catchall punctuation”) and the barflies at Gregory’s bar—English Billy, Joey O’Dirt—where young Clancy and her dad were regulars, and where she had her first Communion party, with her large Irish clan that includes 21 first cousins in attendance.

An always-in-motion tomboy, Clancy loved her scrappy St. Gregory’s softball team and her best friend Esther, but not school. Unable to sit still in elementary school, she’d wander out of class to chat up any grown-ups she could find. The memoir follows her through her more difficult teen years, where she went from drinking and smoking pot daily to finding herself obsessed with Shakespeare and scraping together the money for college.

The oddities of Clancy’s upbringing make for some hilarious passages, but each chapter also forms a love letter—to her parents, Grandma Rosalie, Mark, her friends and lovers. Although she sometimes skates over darker material, like her dad’s drunk driving, her own teenage partying and a close friend’s abandoning her baby while in the grip of drugs, that’s a small complaint. Clancy has written a breezy, funny memoir with a wonderful cast of characters and a terrific sense of place.

Tara Clancy is only 36, but she manages to make her 1980s childhood feel like a long-lost era. In The Clancys of Queens, she gives us a coming-of-age memoir defined by the distinctive neighborhoods she grew up in: Broad Channel, Queens, a “bread crumb of an island” where her Irish-cop dad lived; Bellerose, her grandparents’ Italian-American enclave; and tony Bridgehampton, Long Island, where Clancy spent half her weekends with her mom and Mark, her mom’s well-to-do boyfriend.
NonfictionArts & CultureArt

Monet’s last works

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

If you imagined Claude Monet at work on his late masterpieces, the Water Lilies, you might picture him seated in his garden in Giverny, France, placidly dabbing blues and purples onto canvas, capturing watery impressions with ease. The portrait that Ross King offers in Mad Enchantment is far more complicated. In 1914, Monet was 73 and the world’s highest-paid artist. He’d already spent several years painting views of his pond, but now he envisioned a grouping of massive canvases that would evoke a “watery aquarium.” It took him the rest of his life.

King, the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and The Judgment of Paris, has done his research—the book contains 40 pages of endnotes—but he spins a readable narrative. Mad Enchantment tells the story of Monet’s efforts to bring his vision to reality, even as the Great War and all its privations interrupted. King details Monet’s struggles, how he approached technical concerns such as displaying the enormous canvases in an oval gallery, and how he coped as his “prodigious” eyes began to fail. And contrary to popular belief (and Monet’s claims), he didn’t just dash off his paintings en plein air—he reworked them at length in his studio, often adding layers of paint.

This is also the story of Monet’s enduring friendship with Georges Clemenceau, who led France in the Great War. It was Clemenceau who persuaded Monet to donate his unfinished Water Lilies to France and to complete them (and to stop being a pain in the behind about it, as Clemenceau termed it). King uses the lens of this friendship to show Monet’s often-cantankerous personality (“frightful old hedgehog,” Clemenceau called him) as well as his abiding love for his family and friends.

 

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

If you imagined Claude Monet at work on his late masterpieces, the Water Lilies, you might picture him seated in his garden in Giverny, France, placidly dabbing blues and purples onto canvas, capturing watery impressions with ease. The portrait that Ross King offers in Mad Enchantment is far more complicated.
NonfictionMemoir

Millionaire misery

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

One’s 30s might seem a little early to write a memoir, but Sam Polk has done a lot of living in his 35 years. For the Love of Money opens with the moment in 2011 when Polk learned that his annual hedge-fund bonus would be $3.6 million—and he was furious that it wasn’t twice as much. He then backs up to describe the steps and missteps that brought him to that point. 

Polk and his twin brother, Ben, grew up in a tumultuous household in Los Angeles where there was never enough money and their narcissistic dad held sway, often abusively. Overweight and socially unskilled, both brothers were bullied until they took up wrestling, a pursuit that led Polk to Columbia University. But at Columbia, Polk descended into binge drinking, drug use and bulimia. After breaking into a dormmate’s room and stealing pot, he was asked to leave the university. 

Still, Polk was competitive and ambitious, and he managed to get hired as an analyst at Bank of America, where he traded bonds and credit default swaps (CDS), and then snagged a trader position at a premier hedge fund. He’d “made it”—still in his 20s, he had an enormous Manhattan loft and a beautiful girlfriend. But he slowly came to terms with ambition’s underside: his addiction to drugs, alcohol and porn, estrangement from Ben and crippling envy. With the help of a counselor and his first boss, now a mentor, Polk gained sobriety and repaired his relationships. 

Polk’s redemptive one-step-forward, one-step-back story, along with his insider’s view of Wall Street and the larger issues of income inequality, make for a memoir that’s not only revealing but also timely.

 

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

One’s 30s might seem a little early to write a memoir, but Sam Polk has done a lot of living in his 35 years. For the Love of Money opens with the moment in 2011 when Polk learned that his annual hedge-fund bonus would be $3.6 million—and he was furious that it wasn’t twice as much. He then backs up to describe the steps and missteps that brought him to that point.
NonfictionMemoir

Libyan life and exile

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In The Return, Libyan novelist Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men) tells the harrowing story of his search for his father, Jaballa Matar. Early in Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, Jaballa served as a U.N. diplomat, but he was soon accused of criticizing Qaddafi and forced to flee to Cairo with his family. In 1990, while Matar was at university in London, Jaballa was kidnapped by Egyptian secret police and sent to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Matar’s narrative roams through time, moving from his 2012 visit to see family in Tripoli and Benghazi after Qaddafi’s downfall (Matar’s first visit in 33 years), to the distant past—when his grandfather fought against the brutal Italian occupation of Libya. He recounts his efforts to gather scraps of information, meeting with former prisoners who might have seen Jaballa. 

At times, the memoir reads like a spy novel: In the 1980s, Qaddafi’s spies kept tabs not only on Jaballa but also on family members, following Matar’s brother when he was at boarding school. Decades later, Matar connected with Qaddafi’s “reformist” son Seif, who’d promised him an answer about what had happened to Jaballa. Seif put Matar through a series of phone calls and clandestine meetings in London hotels, mixing threats and compliments, meetings that ultimately proved fruitless.

The Return beautifully chronicles the vagaries of life as an exile and the grief of wondering about a father’s suffering. Yes, Matar’s memoir is sometimes bleak in describing the Qaddafi regime’s decades of bizarre repressive actions. But it also offers a portrait of a loving family and a needed window into Libya, not only its troubles but also its beauty, and the many kindnesses Matar encountered there.

 

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

In The Return, Libyan novelist Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men) tells the harrowing story of his search for his father, Jaballa Matar. Early in Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, Jaballa served as a U.N. diplomat, but he was soon accused of criticizing Qaddafi and forced to flee to Cairo with his family. In 1990, while Matar was at university in London, Jaballa was kidnapped by Egyptian secret police and sent to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.
NonfictionMemoir

A charming look at an American childhood in France

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Fans of Thad Carhart’s bestselling 2001 memoir, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, will be glad to know that his latest book, Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France, offers a similar mix of memoir, history and wonderful digressions about France.

Carhart spent several years of his 1950s childhood in the village of Fontainebleau, France, where his Air Force pilot dad served as a staff officer at NATO (then headquartered at Chateau de Fontainebleau). Finding Fontainebleau’s main narrative follows the family, five kids ages 2 to 12 and their beleaguered parents, as they settled into an immense old house next door to the chateau. Carhart recounts adjusting to to French Catholic school, both its strictures—including Saturday classes—and pleasures—1950s French schoolboys were as crazy for marbles and coonskin caps as American boys. The family’s daily life mixed French and American: They shopped for food at the traditional outdoor market and boulangeries as well as the American military commissary, and had wine delivered (35 cents a bottle); and they piled into their Chevy wagon, heading to Paris for Carhart’s dad’s fencing competitions, and on near-disastrous camping trips in the French countryside and in Spain and Italy.

The book’s other narrative gives us a lively history of Chateau de Fontainebleau, built in 1137 as a hunting lodge, then added on to by successive kings, queens, and two Napoleons. Carhart takes us into closed-off rooms, where architects, carpenters, and other craftsmen work at restoration. He sees the rambling chateau, with its idiosyncratic additions, as a more fitting symbol of France than the more well-known Versailles.

Throughout, Carhart turns his observant eye on small, sometimes odd-seeming details—the once-ubiquitous Turkish toilets in cafes, the uniquely French method of taking household inventory, French cars of the 1950s. These lovely digressions, along with Carhart’s own family’s story, illuminate French culture in an appealing way. 

Fans of Thad Carhart’s bestselling 2001 memoir, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, will be glad to know that his latest book, Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France, offers a similar mix of memoir, history and wonderful digressions about France.

NonfictionMemoir

A journalist’s frank account of illness

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her closely observed memoir, A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles: A True Story of Love, Science, and Cancer, journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams reports on two years in her family’s life, during which she was treated for stage 4 melanoma. Williams first wrote about her disease in a New York Times Modern Love essay, in which she detailed her split from her husband Jeff and their journey back to coupledom. This book expands on that essay, focusing on the small ups and grueling downs of these two years.

As she begins treatment, Williams’ father-in-law succumbs to lymphoma, and her childhood friend Debbie undergoes surgery for advanced ovarian cancer. Williams is frank, funny and crass in describing these developments, as well as indignities like an infected head wound after surgery to remove her first melanoma. She and Debbie share a wisecracking philosophy: “I’m just over hearing people without cancer tell [us] how we’re supposed to do it,” Williams says. “Like there’s always supposed to be a struggle or a fight, and it’s supposed to be courageous. You know what? Bite me.”

“God, I can’t stand that battling talk,” Debbie replies. “Don’t assume I’m a warrior because I got sick.”

Williams also tenderly describes how her husband Jeff and their two school-age daughters cope and change, and she illuminates the recently revived field of immunotherapy. As a patient at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Williams qualifies for a phase-1 study of two new immunotherapy drugs. These save her life: After three months of treatment, the metastases in her lungs and back disappear, as do all signs of melanoma.

Williams often mines her cancer journey for comedy, but the scenes that stayed with me were quiet moments, such as when she drives away after visiting Debbie, not knowing if it’s the last time she’ll see her old friend. In the crowded cancer-memoir genre, this book holds its own.

In her closely observed memoir, A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles: A True Story of Love, Science, and Cancer, journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams reports on two years in her family’s life, during which she was treated for stage 4 melanoma. Williams first wrote about her disease in a New York Times Modern Love essay, in which she detailed her split from her husband Jeff and their journey back to coupledom. This book expands on that essay, focusing on the small ups and grueling downs of these two years.
NonfictionParenting

A father’s quest to connect

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

For journalist Ron Fournier, connecting with his youngest child, Tyler, wasn’t easy: Tyler hated sports, which his dad loved, and he was socially awkward, which made Fournier cringe. His warmhearted memoir, Love That Boy, details a father’s journey to understand and bond with his son, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the relatively late age of 12.

One thread of the memoir follows father and son on a series of post-diagnosis road trips. Tyler loves history and Fournier is a former White House correspondent, so they visit presidential house-museums—the White House; Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill; the Adams home in Quincy; Jefferson’s Monticello. Fournier tries to connect the dots for Tyler: Roosevelt suffered asthma and was bullied as a child but grew up to be wildly popular, he tells him. “You’re trying too hard,” Tyler says.

Divided into two parts, “What We Want” and “What We Need,” the memoir is also a familiar meditation on parenting—our outsize expectations for our kids’ success, popularity and happiness. To get at these issues, Fournier interviews other parents, some who have a child with Asperger’s or depression, others who call themselves tiger moms. Fournier intersperses these with his family’s story, including the slow path to Tyler’s diagnosis and one daughter’s adolescent struggles. He’s clear-eyed about his own shortcomings—he repeatedly put work ahead of family, and his anxious expectations for his college-age daughters, Holly and Gabrielle, led him to give them wrong-headed advice (which they wisely ignored).

Fournier also secured substantial visits with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he vividly describes the former presidents’ empathy and generosity with Tyler, who didn’t make those visits easy. But Love That Boy is most affecting when we see how far Tyler has come since his diagnosis and how far his father has come as well.

 

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

For journalist Ron Fournier, connecting with his youngest child, Tyler, wasn’t easy: Tyler hated sports, which his dad loved, and he was socially awkward, which made Fournier cringe. His warmhearted memoir, Love That Boy, details a father’s journey to understand and bond with his son, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the relatively late age of 12.
Nonfiction

Alice Robb

Interview by Sarah McCraw Crow

Alice Robb’s book Why We Dream explores the science behind dreams and what we can learn from them.

What was the biggest surprise for you as you wrote Why We Dream?
I knew that sifting through the vast amount of dream research that’s been done—and figuring out what was truly scientific and what wasn’t—would be a challenge, but the surprise was that I couldn’t always draw a clear line between the two. One scientist I met has done important research, but he is also open to the idea that dreams can predict the future. The psychologist who developed the method of dream groups that I’ve seen to be effective also did a lot of studies on dreams and telepathy. I found that I had to be open-minded.

What is it about lucid dreaming that draws people to conferences to learn about it?
In a lucid dream, you are aware that you’re dreaming and might be able to exercise some control over what happens in the dream. I think part of the appeal of lucid dreaming is that it’s an opportunity to experience an unusual state of consciousness in a completely natural way. And you have to sleep anyway!

Why We Dream describes how dreams can give us insight into personal problems, as well as ideas for creative projects. But in order to get those insights, we first need to remember our dreams. What do you suggest to improve dream recall?
Keeping a dream journal is an easy and effective way to remember more of your dreams. When people start to keep a dream journal, their dream recall skyrockets, even those who think they never remember their dreams. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I write up my dream in the notes app on my phone, just some bulleted notes to help me recall and write about later. I also keep a long-running document on my computer with many thousands of words. Other people speak their dreams into a voice recorder or use a pen-and-paper journal. The other advice I’d give is when you go to bed, think about how you’re going to write in your journal the next morning. Setting the intention will reinforce the habit of remembering and writing.

What has changed for you since you began working on this book?
I always had pretty vivid dream recall, which made me interested in dreams in the first place, but now I remember dreams pretty much every night, and overall my ability to recall dreams has improved a lot. One thing I wasn’t anticipating: I used to have pretty bad insomnia, and although I still wake up sometimes, I feel much more calm about it. This is partly from learning about how sleep patterns have varied over the centuries; the idea that we need one eight-hour chunk of sleep to be rested is new.

Where does Sigmund Freud fit in to the way we understand dreams?
Freud is so highly associated with dreams in the popular imagination. When I told people I was writing a book about dreams, Freud would often be the first name to come up. Freud is almost a bridge between old and new; he did help bring dreams into a scientific paradigm, but a lot of his ideas have not been supported and have become cliches. Some of his work probably ended up being detrimental to the field of dream research.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Why We Dream.

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Don Razniewski.

Alice Robb’s book Why We Dream explores the science behind dreams and what we can learn from them.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Miss Benson’s Beetle

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Rachel Joyce’s first novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), follows main character Harold on an improbable long walk across England as he comes to terms with his failures. Similarly, Miss Benson’s Beetle, Joyce’s fifth novel, tracks main character Margery Benson as she aims to make her own unlikely journey to an island called New Caledonia in the southwestern Pacific, to track down an elusive golden beetle.

In 1950, the war is over, but rationing and shortages continue in London. Margery is a lonely 40-something soul, teaching home economics to snarky high school girls. When the girls go too far in making fun of her, Margery snaps and flees the school, snatching a pair of lacrosse boots in fury and frustration, an act that reminds her of her long-deferred goal of finding the golden beetle of New Caledonia.

But it’s a preposterous dream. Margery has no academic credentials, no passport, no knowledge of New Caledonia and no money. Nevertheless, she persists, planning her journey and interviewing assistants. What follows is an epic, obstacle-filled journey from London to Australia and at last to New Caledonia, which in 1950 is a French colony. Margery and her assistant, Enid Pretty, arrive on the island woefully underprepared for the final part of their quest.

Miss Benson’s Beetle balances the light— including comic moments that highlight the discrepancies between stolid Margery and flighty Enid—with the dark, such as Margery’s trauma-filled youth. As with Harold Fry, the main character’s inner journey is the real one. Margery finds human connection she didn’t know she was missing and, through that connection, a deeper purpose in life. The novel also has a marvelous, economical way of contrasting the drab gray of postwar London with the vivid colors, sounds and smells of New Caledonia.

Joyce’s fiction has been slotted into “uplit,” a publishing term for novels that contain some dark moments but ultimately offer an uplifting ending. For readers who seek escape, Miss Benson’s Beetle is just right.

Rachel Joyce’s first novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), follows main character Harold on an improbable long walk across England as he comes to terms with his failures. Similarly, Miss Benson’s Beetle, Joyce’s fifth novel, tracks main character Margery Benson as she aims to make her own unlikely journey to an island called New Caledonia in the southwestern Pacific, to track down an elusive golden beetle.

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