New in Paperback: Alex’s Wake by Martin Goldsmith

Survivor guilt is the tragic thread that winds through much of Alex’s Wake: A Voyage of Betrayal and a Journey of Remembrance (Da Capo) by Martin Goldsmith (The Inextinguishable Symphony). A single paragraph in the introduction sums that feeling up almost too eloquently:

With the help of my wife and my therapist, I came to recognize a rhetorical question that hung over me like the mist that follows in the wake of an ocean liner: “How can I ever be truly happy, how can I ever deserve happiness,” I would say to myself, “when my grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz?”

In some ways, that is the theme of Alex’s Wake: the author’s coming to terms with the loss of several family members under horrific and inhuman conditions. Appropriately for this particular trip, the author quotes Martin Buber as the first chapter ends: “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

If Alex’s Wake is not sunshiny reading, it is definitely thought-provoking and carefully researched. Goldsmith brings us the Holocaust in a way you've not seen in textbooks as the story he tells reverberates through his own consciousness. The horror, yes. And the guilt.

It is not a spoiler to tell you that Goldsmith does find a bright point when a memorial plaque to his grandfather becomes the touchstone that allows the grandson freedom from at least some of the guilt he has been feeling.

There’s certainly been no shortage of Holocaust recollections, but this is an especially good one. Available now in paperback, and you can find it here. ◊

Non-Fiction: Fully Charged by Tom Rath

Tom Rath creates self-help books aimed at the Ted Talk generation. Millions of people have read -- and apparently benefited from -- Rath’s nine books to date including Eat Move Sleep, How Full Is Your Bucket and Strengths Based Leadership.

Newly out, Are You Fully Charged? (Silicon Guild) challenges you “to stop pursuing happiness and start creating meaning instead, lead you to rethink your daily interactions with the people who matter most, and show you how to put your own health first in order to be your best every day.” Rath sums up the premise early on:

When you are fully charged, you get more done. You have better interactions. Your mind is sharp, and your body is strong. On days when you are fully charged, you experience high levels of engagement and well-being. This charge carries forward, creating an upward cycle for those you care about.

Rath says that he and his team “reviewed countless articles and academic studies, and interviewed some of the world’s leading scientists. We identified more  than 2,600 ideas for improving daily experience.” As they worked through these various items, they discovered that “three key conditions differentiate days when you have a full charge from typical days.”

The three key conditions are as follows:

• Meaning: doing something that benefits another person
• Interactions: creating far more positive than negative moments
• Enrgy: making choices that improve your mental and physical health

Are You Fully Charged i filled with the positive forward moving energy that is Rath’s trademark. No matter what you do with the information in the book, you can’t help but feeling engaged and energized while reading. There’s a reason he’s sold so many books. This is well thought out, positive stuff. ◊

The Performance Paleo Cookbook: Recipes for Training Harder, Getting Stronger and Gaining the Competitive Edge by Stephanie Gaudreau

You’ve heard to it referred to as the Caveman Diet. And, no: you don’t eat cave men. Rather, at its simplest, on the Caveman Diet you don’t eat things that would have been available to prehistoric humans, avoiding foods like dairy products, grains, legumes, processed oils and refined sugars. Plus you eat meat. A lot of meat. No vegetarians need apply. The goal is to lose weight, increase energy levels and detoxify the system. This is not the place for those who choose diets for ethical reasons. Results are the thing. Results that are sleek and firm and strong. Full stop.

In The Performance Paleo Cookbook (Page Street), author Stephanie Gaudreau takes all of this to new levels. This is not Paleolithic Diet 101. Rather Gaudreau’s book focuses on using food as fuel to bring your personal machine to whole new performance levels. For a first take on high performance eating, you could take a run at a book Gaudreau co-wrote in 2014: The Paleo Athlete: A Beginner’s Guide to Real Food for Performance. Nor was she even then a newcomer to the Paleo diet. Her web site, Stupid Easy Paleo has been running hard since 2011 (ancient history in the Paleo diet world). Gaudreau’s mandate with the book is very similar to that of the web site: simple, easy-to-follow recipes that “stay true to the roots of Paleo” along with great resources for a paleo lifestyle.

Gaudreau knows her stuff and it shows. The Performance Paleo Cookbook is filled with nutrient-dense recipes you are unlikely to find anywhere else. Imagine Blueberry Pork Patties. Curried Lotus Chips. A Swiss Chard Salad that is beyond belief and a whole lot of desserts that will put wanna-be cave people into dinosaur heaven.

This is great stuff. True to form, Gaudreau makes something that can seem complicated quite simple. And in The Performance Paleo Cookbook she does it beautifully and with style. A great (and perhaps necessary) addition to the gym rat’s cookbook shelf as well as those considering new options for age old questions. ◊

Linda L. Richards is editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.

New in Paperback: The Last Pirate by Tony Dokoupil

If you missed The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuna (Anchor Books) when it first came out in the spring of 2014, you have a great chance to catch it now in paperback. If you enjoy memoirs featuring larger-than-life characters and strong hits of comedy with all of life’s drama, you’ll enjoy Tony  Dokoupil’s account of growing up as the son of the 1980s dope king of Miami, Anthony Edward Dokoupil.

Dokoupil ran the US operations of one of the largest marijuana rings in the 20th century. By several accounts, “Big Tony” was personally responsible for the distribution of at least fifty tons of the stuff.

“Little Tony” writes beautifully. A senior writer for NBC news, Dokoupil the journalist examines his memories and incorporates deeply personal stories into a tale that reflects not only the story of his own family, but provides an interesting and sometimes even illuminating tale about how drugs have fit into the American picture.

If you smoked Columbian weed in the 1970s and 1980s, I owe you a thank-you card. You paid for my swim lessons, bought me my first baseball glove, and kept me in the best private schools in south Florida, alongside President George H.W. Buch's grandsons, at least for a little while.

It is this personal voice that elevates The Last Pirate beyond a simply  interesting story about a colorful and somewhat tragic character. As the book begins, Dokoupil describes the end of his father’s drug dealing days in colorful strokes:

Each day ended with the ocean smeared purple, the men holding their ladies close, and the kids clustered on the bow, dreaming of shipwrecks, pirates, and buried treasures. Thew old around was fenceless and so was the future. But the Old Man was restless in this paradise. He had broken a cardinal rule of dealing and become an addict himself. Coke and hookers mostly. He left the party early in search of both.

 Dokoupil has spun pure gold. Moving, sometimes funny, gorgeously etched and compellingly told. Whatever you come to The Last Pirate expecting,  Dokoupil delivers more. ◊


Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.

Biography: The Good Luck Cat by Lissa Warren

Depending on who you listen to, the Internet is alternately ruled by cats or made of them. Either way, it is well established that denizens of the Internet like a good cat tale. And, honestly, they don’t get much better than what can be found in Lissa Warren’s The Good Luck Cat (Lyons Press).

The author’s father was gifted a retirement companion, a Korat cat called Ting with whom he would bond and who would, in many ways, become the very heart of the family. Warren covers the introduction of the cat into the family with affection, while explaining her own long-standing affinity for cats:

Bilbliophile. Ailurophile. I like books and cats. Lovers of the written word do seem naturally drawn to cats. Perhaps it’s because reading is a solitary activity but feels less so when a cat’s bside you. Not even my favorite books could hold my attention like Ting, though, with her delicate purr and appreciative licks -- and propensity for trouble. I don’t know what it is about cats that makes people like them better when they’re naughty. But they are, most certainly, the biker boyfriend of the animal world: You know you should stay away, but you can’t.

Ting’s incorporation into her new home was rapid and complete. More than a decade later, Warren’s father died of a heart attack. Less than a year after that, his constant companion, Ting, was diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition. Warren and her mother determined to fight for the little cat’s life, unwilling to lose yet another member of their small family. And it is work that prepares the two women for yet another diagnosis still to come.

The Good Luck Cat: How a Cat Saved a Family, and a Family Saved a Cat is gorgeously written and generously shared. And it is a beautiful tribute not only to a beloved and much missed father, but also to feline companions everywhere who give far beyond the obvious to the people who adore them. ◊

Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.

From Behind Prison Walls

Since its completion in 2002, the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention camp--an American military prison located inside the older Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, on an island off the southeastern coast of Cuba--has reportedly received 779 male inmates. Hundreds of detainees have since been sent to other destinations. But not until now has a “Gitmo” inmate released a book about his experiences at that facility. As The Christian Science Monitor explains,

Canongate has just announced that it will publish “Guantánamo Diary,” the prison memoirs of Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the first Gitmo account to be released by a detainee still imprisoned at the camp.

“Guantanamo Diary” will be published simultaneously around the world on Jan. 20, 2015, as part of an international campaign to free Slahi, who has been held at the camp since 2002 despite never having been charged with a crime. Little, Brown has acquired the U.S. rights to the book, The Bookseller has reported.

The memoir details the harrowing conditions to which Slahi was subject, including beatings, sexual humiliation, and round-the-clock interrogation. Slate published an excerpt of the memoir last year.

The Monitor’s Husna Haq tells more here. And copies of Guantánamo Diary, edited by Larry Siems, can already be ordered here.

My TV Book Addiction

(Editor’s note: Perhaps not surprisingly, author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg -- who’s concocted scripts for such TV series as Diagnosis: Murder, Spenser: For Hire and Monk, and penned more than a dozen Monk TV tie-in novels -- is a big fan of television history books. In the piece below, he assesses the strengths [and often multiple weaknesses] of several entries in that specialized genre. He wants it known that he purchased all of these books. They were not provided to him for review.)

I have an addiction -- I love books about television, even if they are about shows I don’t like or have never watched. I buy them on the off-chance I will learn something about the business, or about production, or about writing that I didn’t know before. I especially like books about old TV shows, because then I also learn something about television history. I’m telling you all of this so you’ll understand what possessed me to buy Jonathan Etter’s 640-page book devoted to Here Come the Brides, a boring, utterly forgettable Western series that lasted a mere two seasons in the late 1960s and is known, if at all, for a catchy theme song (“Seattle”) and for featuring Bobby Sherman and David Soul among its cast.

I don’t care about the show -- the few episodes I’ve seen were lousy -- but I really liked Etter’s Gangway, Lord: The Here Come the Brides Book: A Behind-the-Scenes History of the 1968-70 ABC-TV Series from those crazy folks at BearManor Media (they’ve got to be crazy to publish books like this … but I love them for it). So why did I like the book if I could care less about the show? Because it’s packed with fascinating information about other shows. For instance, William Blinn, the creator of Here Come the Brides, spends a lot of time here talking about writing the TV series Bonanza and Shane, and that’s great stuff. And Brides star Robert Brown talks about almost starring in Hawaii Five-O, and his work on the unsold pilots The Yellow Bird, with Carroll O’Connor, and Colossus, with William Shatner, among others. So it’s for those golden nuggets that I was willing to slog through seemingly endless, pointless chapters about actress Bridget Hanley (who?) and her marriage to director E.W. Swackhamer, or the tragic details of Mark Lenard’s multiple melanoma that took his life long after the series was over. This book desperately needed a good editor, but I’m glad it didn’t have one, because it’s the stuff that had nothing to do with the show -- the stuff that should have been cut -- that I liked best. If you are one of the dozen living fans of Here Come the Brides, you will absolutely love this book. Every episode is examined in-depth and every regular and guest cast member, and almost every crew member, with the possible exception of the caterer, is interviewed about his or her life and career.

Here’s the irony, though, of my liking a book so much about a show that I could care less about: I bought David R. Greenland’s The Gunsmoke Chronicles: A New History of Television’s Greatest Western, also from BearManor Media, because I love Gunsmoke (1955-1975), and yet I got nothing out of it at all. It’s a pointless book, a bland rehash of material presented better, and in more depth, by other books about the show. Oddly enough, Greenland acknowledges that fact in his preface: “By 2006, three books about the show had reached the marketplace, and even I conceded that the world did not need another.” Yet, he wrote one anyway, and shouldn’t have bothered, because he adds nothing new or particularly interesting to our understanding of the series. It’s filler masquerading as content. Unlike the Here Come the Brides book, there’s no gold here about other shows to make it a worthwhile purchase. Skip it.

Martin Grams Jr.’s The Time Tunnel: A History of the Television Series (BearManor) is much like the book on Here Come the Brides. It’s a massive work (nearly 600 pages in length) about a TV failure (The Time Tunnel lasted a single season, from 1966 to 1967) that’s packed with lots of interesting information … about director-producer Irwin Allen and his other shows and about the TV landscape of the late 1960s. Everything you could possibly want to know about Time Tunnel is here, from the original pitch to information on all of Allen’s attempts to do another time-travel series after it was cancelled; from the number of pages shot on a particular day to the cost of individual props; from the notes written by ABC-TV censors on each script to lists of the stock music cues in each episode; from exhaustively detailed synopses of each broadcast episode to detailed descriptions of the episodes that weren’t shot. There’s almost too much stuff. It’s as if Grams decided he had to put every single fact that came across his desk into this book just because he had them. The upside is that there’s something for everybody here, whether your interest is in TV production accounting or screenwriting. The downside is that it makes for tedious reading, even if you are really into the show or into TV history.

As I said, I love BearManor Media; it, and to a lesser degree, McFarland & Co., are my pimps. BearMedia publishes TV books that no right-minded publisher would ever touch. Who else would release books about the Western Temple Houston or the sitcom Good Morning, World, two shows that barely survived for a single season each back in the 1960s (and that I’ve never even seen)? You could probably fit all the potential readers of these last two books comfortably in a motor home for a dinner party.

Jeffrey Hunter and Temple Houston: A Story of Network Television, by Glenn A. Mosley, is a mess of a book (though it’s much better than his volume about the TV series The Deputy). As the title suggests, this work isn’t quite sure what it’s about. Is it about actor Jeffrey Hunter? Is it about Temple Houston (1963-1964)? Or is it about network television? Basically, it’s three lengthy magazine articles -- one on the very short-lived Temple Houston, one on the aborted Robert Taylor Show and one on Jeffrey Hunter’s disappointing career, all of them stitched together into a thin, and yet very padded, book. Still, the stories of Temple Houston and the never-aired Robert Taylor Show are fascinating, and with a cover price of just $14.95, this book is well worth the time for any student of TV history to read.

The more apt title for this book might have been A Perfect Storm of Bad Decisions. It recounts how Warner Bros. chose to replace the president of its TV division with actor-director Jack Webb, how NBC decided to cancel the drama The Robert Taylor Show four episodes into production without ever airing an episode, and how the network’s determination to rush Warner Bros./Four Star’s Temple Houston into production to fill the void, doomed them all. Mosley sums it up in his introduction.

In making the decision in the manner that it did, NBC effectively sealed the fate of two television franchises. The Robert Taylor Show would never see the light of day and, in the end, Temple Houston hardly stood a chance. NBC, Warner Brothers, and even Four Star would all end up in weaker positions as a result … Temple Houston has most often been dismissed as simply a failed, one-season Western on television. Fair enough -- so it was. But the story of Temple Houston is more than that; it is also the story of the intersection points between careers, Hollywood Studios, and network television.

And it’s a great untold story, one full of mistakes that neither NBC nor Warner Bros., or any other network or studios for that matter, learned from … and so were doomed to repeat many times over. There’s a lot of filler in this 154-page work, but on the strength of the Temple Houston and Robert Taylor Show stories alone, I recommend it for your TV reference book library.

Sadly, I can’t be as complimentary of Good Morning, World (BearMedia), by Tim Colliver, who wrote this very thin, heavily padded book because the short-lived, 1967-1968 CBS sitcom about a radio station inspired him to become a DJ. The problem is, that show just wasn’t very good and there wasn’t anything remotely interesting about it on any other level. As both Joby Baker, the long-forgotten star of the series, and the author of the book put it:

[Baker] also thought the scripts could have been better … a lot better.

“The reason I had trouble memorizing the lines is that they were horrible fucking lines.” … Throughout the course of the series, Baker thought the scripts were “corny” and the show “not really funny at times.” In all fairness, in looking back on the episodes now that they are on DVD, he was on to something.

Which begs the question, why write a book about a lousy show? Or better yet, why read one? My answer to both questions is: don’t. ◊

(This review has been edited from a two-part post that appeared originally in Lee Goldberg’s blog -- part I here, part II here.)

Going to Extremes

Having long been intrigued by historical arctic adventure tales, I listened enthusiastically this last Saturday as National Public Radio host Scott Simon interviewed Hampton Sides, author of the new non-fiction work In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (Doubleday). Sides, who was previously best known for his epic tale of the Old West, Blood and Thunder (2007), spent three years researching and writing In the Kingdom of Ice, which tells of a hopeful but doomed, 1879 expedition to the North Pole, financed by loopy newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett and led by Jeannette Captain George Washington De Long.

Earlier today, the Amazon blog Omnivoracious hosted another interview with Sides. Two parts of that exchange between Chris Schluep and the author convinced me this book must soon be added to my library.

CS: Describe your research. Was there a key piece that made you think "now I know how to frame this book"?

HS: In the early going of my research, I lucked into one of those priceless situations that I think all of us historians dream about: An invitation from a little old lady to come sift through a trunk full of yellowed letters that she had literally rescued from her attic. In this case, the trunk contained the personal papers of Emma De Long, the wife of the Jeannette expedition’s captain, George De Long. Once I read the stuff, I knew that I’d found a powerful new way to frame the book: It was not just an adventure tale, but a love story as well. Emma De Long’s letters to her husband, and his letters to her, are elegant, eloquent, and moving, and as the drama unfolds, they become truly heart-wrenching. Really, that trunk full of papers formed the emotional spine of the book. …

CS: Did your work on the book lead you to draw any conclusions about climate change?

HS: Yes. One of the big problems that climate change researchers have grappled with is finding a way to know what the polar ice cap truly looked like a century ago in order to compare it with today’s Arctic ice conditions. To understand that, you’d have to go back in history, build a research station, and dangerously trap it in the drifting icepack for years.

As it happens, the Jeannette kept meticulous records of the ice as it drifted two years, and a thousand miles, across the frozen sea. After the ship sank, De Long’s men lugged dozens of heavy meteorological logbooks containing troves of information about the icecap and Arctic weather -- the hard-won product of their daily labors for two years. When they reached Siberia’s shores four months later, De Long buried those logbooks in the sand, and miraculously, they were later found by Navy rescuers, eventually ending up in the National Archives in Washington, where they’ve gathered dust for 135 years. Over the past year, however, NOAA scientists have digitized those logbooks, and have been analyzing De Long’s data. The story they tell is a sobering one: The polar ice cap, at least in that 1,000-mile swath of the High Arctic, has shrunk, weakened, and thinned far more dramatically than anyone realized.

You can enjoy reading Omnivoracious’ entire interview here.

New in Paperback: Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson (Moonlight Hotel, The Man Who Tried to Save the World) brings the gravitas of an accomplished novelist and war correspondent to Lawrence in Arabia (Anchor Books).

This is a stellar look at some of the major issues in the Middle East and the influence that early 19th century outsiders, including Lawrence of Arabia’s TH Lawrence, had on the direction in which the modern Middle East was formed.

The writing here is breathtaking (and the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013) and the research it must have taken actually set me aback: this is an intricate work, well beyond the scope of anything you’re imagining.

As a biography of Lawrence, it would have been superb, but Lawrence in Arabia is so much more: offering an illuminating visit to a time and events that still cause ripples across the region and with a contradictory character whose actions continue to cause controversy 80 years after his death. ◊


Aaron Blanton is a contributing editor to January Magazine. He’s currently working on a book based on his experiences as an American living abroad.

Non-Fiction: Keep Your Brain Young by Fraser Smith and Ellie Aghdassi

Keep Your Brain Young (Robert Rose) was hanging around my desk for a while before I realized it was, among other things, a cookbook. “You are what you eat,” reverberated through my mind.

Prior to that I’d thought it was just my editor’s barb that I was no longer as young and sharp as I was when I started writing for January Magazine many moons ago and high time I began looking for ways to keep the old thinking machine sharp and strong.

And then I peeked inside.

This book offers the promise of protecting, repairing, and enhancing your mental health while coincidentally improving your general physical well-being.

Which sounded like a good start.

Before we get to food, of course, there’s a whole lot about the diseases associated with aging, how they progress and what causes them. Don’t kid yourself: this is not cheery stuff, but as Smith notes at the very beginning of Keep Your Brain Young: “It is a fact of life -- we are all going to age.” I would add, “If we’re lucky.”

Part 2 of the book deals with “Smart Nutrients,” how to get them and what the lack of them can cause. Then the “12-Step Healthy Brain Diet Program,” which leads quite naturally to Part 5: “Menu Plans and Recipes for a Healthy Brain” which is a good two thirds of the book.

In addition to recipes, meal plans are included and encouraged, but the recipes take center stage. Nutritional information is included on each recipe page as is a detailed ingredients list and clear instructions.

Keep Your Brain Young is a useful and informative book both for those dealing with specific age-related ailments as well as those many of us who are enjoying the privilege of growing older. ◊

New in Paperback: Blue Plate Special by Kate Christensen

PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author, Kate Christensen, delivers a stirring ands sometimes heartbreaking read in Blue Plate Special (Anchor).

Ostensibly a memoir about “the transformative nature of food,” Christensen’s first work of non-fiction is so much more than that. Despite the addition of a decent helping of interesting recipes, Blue Plate Special delves deeply into the psyche of a brilliant and complicated author. Perhaps even more deeply than Christensen initially intended or planned.

Christensen deals with her father’s violence, her own abuse by a high school teacher and her subsequent sexual confusion that was the result. Though this material is so moving -- and brilliantly handled -- it’s difficult to see beyond it when you look back, there truly is so much more, much of it viewed through an interesting lens of food.

The author was born in 1962, and so we travel with her through the 1970s, 80s and beyond, indulging, experiencing and even weeping with her through glorious meals and all types of experience.

Christensen demonstrates that she is not only a writer with a great deal to say, she says it so beautifully we don’t want the journey to end, even when it’s difficult to watch.

A note: there was an elegant postscript to the book in Elle magazine earlier this year where the author shares the resolution to the story of her sexual abuse. It’s a resolution that occurred after and because of the publication of the book. If you’re wondering if Blue Plate Special is a book you’d like to read, that article will convince you. As always, Christensen is stunning. ◊


Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.

Non-Fiction: Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America by Kevin Cook

(Editor’s note: This review comes from New York writer Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine.)

For the last 50 years, the March 13, 1964, rape and murder of bar manager Kitty Genovese outside her Kew Gardens, Queens, apartment was as durable and persistent an urban legend as they come. The young woman’s grisly death -- witnessed by 38 of her neighbors, who turned a deaf ear to her screams as her killer took more than 30 minutes to dispatch her, as The New York Times belatedly averred -- resounded in the world of social science, and focused scrutiny on the perceived callousness of inner-city culture.

Kevin Cook’s new book, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America (Norton), reveals that while some of the facts of the case are indisputable, most of them aren’t. Much of the myth-building was the result of yellow journalism. Pundits blamed the lack of response to this woman’s brutal slaying on urban alienation, and called it a kind of irresponsible complacency on the part of a stressed and apathetic public that was becoming overwhelmed by political assassination, the Vietnam War, race relations and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Now, after half a century, Cook has come along as a myth-buster to set the record straight.

It could be said that the murder of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was more the product of a typewriter than a knife. Barely mentioned at first in the New York dailies, Kitty Genovese was dead and buried for a fortnight by the time the Times’ newly promoted metropolitan editor, Abe Rosenthal, heard the story from his city’s recently appointed police commissioner, Michael Murphy. Murphy related some specious information about the tragedy, that it had been witnessed by 38 neighbors who had chosen to do nothing. The ambitious Rosenthal, who knew good copy when he saw it, sent a reporter to Kew Gardens to flesh out the story. The Times ran its piece on the front page; and while it was riddled with errors, it was accepted as the truth.

Cook reports differently.

As he explains, it took killer Winston Moseley, then a 29-year-old machine operator, a full half-hour to do away with Kitty Genovese. While many people heard her desperate cries for help, most of them thought some kind of domestic dispute was in progress, and ignored it. Moseley actually left the scene once to move his car in order to avoid detection, after a neighbor yelled for the attack to stop. He returned to find that Kitty had staggered to her apartment entrance. He then attempted to rape her. There were no 38 witnesses, as the Times reported. There was only one indisputable eyewitness, a craven alcoholic who opened his door and looked down to witness the rape in progress. This is a far cry from the Times’ assertion that it took a village to commit a murder.

Cook goes to great pains and uses much detail to describe a nation undergoing change, and not for the better. He’s equally meticulous in setting the scene of Kew Gardens, which -- though only minutes away from Times Square and the center of the universe -- is at heart a small American town with neighbors who know each other, leave their doors unlocked and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. It was the type of place where people looked out for each other. But then the snake entered the garden and, in a way, the homicide became a teachable moment for the nation, one that persists to this day.

The tale of 38 witnesses persisted, too, even among responsible scientists. Using this false premise, socials scientists devised the “Genovese syndrome,” also known as the “bystander syndrome,” a condition wherein the larger the number of witnesses present at a crime, the fewer the chances that anyone will intervene. Personal culpability, in effect, is diluted in a crowd.

Everyone knows how Kitty Genovese was slain, but few know how she died. The implication of all accounts is that Winston Moseley left her to bleed to death and that she perished alone. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The police were called and responded, and Kitty died in the arms of a neighbor who attempted to keep her alive until help could arrive. Kitty Genovese, who suffered horribly in the hands of Winston Moseley, was not handled very gently by The New York Times, either. ◊

Non-Fiction: The Science of Shakespeare by Dan Falk

Out in time to celebrate the 450th birthday of the Bard, author, science writer and broadcaster Dan Falk’s The Science of Shakespeare (Gooselane/Thomas Dunne) takes a sharp and engaging look at the science that formed and informed William Shakespeare’s still-beloved works as well as the science that was informed by him.

Falk’s books are accessible. I mean, they are also so much more, but that’s probably the best place to start. Falk tackles potentially mind-numbing topics and makes them not only understandable but enjoyable.

His first book, Universe on a T-Shirt, was about the quest for a unified theory of physics.

Next up, In Search of Time explored the physics and philosophy of time. These are the sort of science-to-philosophy journeys on which careers are made… and broken. But it’s that accessibility factor -- combined with real passion and knowledge -- that make me think Falk will end up in the former category.

In some ways The Science of Shakespeare is really about the history of science, but spun onto the axis of William Shakespeare. It’s a team up that works. What Falk is looking at here are the connections between the Bard and the beginnings of the scientific revolution and, as posited by Falk, how that combination changed the world as we know it forever.

The Science of Shakespeare is a triumph. A personal and yet informative look at science, literature and physics. This is great stuff. ◊

New in Paperback: Butterfly People by William Leach

Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World (Vintage) isn’t really about butterflies. Well, it is. But, also, it is not. More to the point, though, it sears deeply into the lives of middle class America in the 19th century when a newly industrial population began having the leisure to explore the natural world in ways that hadn’t been possible ever before.

The capture and collection of these “flying flowers” became a national pastime, heralding a time of change in America in every imaginable way. But first -- and at the heart -- the creatures who moved so many to such passion. Author William Leach, a one-time collector himself -- understands better than most and draws us a picture:

In the nineteenth century, many Americans … encountered the butterflies, among the most evolved in terms of beauty, by some accounts, of all creatures. By beauty here is meant not merely the wings, however beautiful they may be, but the metamorphosis (from the Greek for “changing form”) and life history of the insect from the egg and caterpillar to the pupa and adult, as well as the butterfly in relation to a world full of other life.

Columbia University history professor Leach has proven himself to be an able storyteller before. His Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993) was a National Book Award finalist.

I loved Butterfly People for Leach’s deft ability to bring a whole time and culture to vivid life. As with the best of history, Butterfly people not only brought a whole period to fascinating life, it made me examine aspects of myself and my attitudes to the natural world though a lens that had been altered, perhaps forever. ◊


Aaron Blanton is a contributing editor to January Magazine. He’s currently working on a book based on his experiences as an American living abroad.

Art & Culture: The Rude Story of English by Tom Howell

In author Tom Howell’s opinion, before he got to it, there were two main problems with the officially stated story of the English language. First, because of a development time that stretches over hundreds of years and many countries, there is no central hero. Two, previous histories had been too busy being polite to get down to the nitty gritty essential to doing the story justice.

In The Rude Story of English (McClelland & Stewart) Howell fixes both errors. And judging from the sparkling result, he was just the right guy for the job because it is, in many ways, a flawless book. Taking what in other hands has often been tedious, uninteresting and even (by way of omission) inaccurate, Howell creates a book not only dead interesting, it’s also Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy funny. Howell knows how to tell a story. For one thing, he begins at the beginning:

The story of the English language is actually quite cool. It contains some sad parts, but these are well dispersed among moments of beauty, hilarity, pauses for thought, lessons for us all, and ambiguous moral themes. It is, as the saying goes, all over the place.

Howell takes care of the lack of a central hero for his story in the style of the very best storytellers: he makes one up. We meet Hengest in 449 AD, a fearsome Germanic warrior who trips onto English soil… and swears. We meet Hengest throughout history, a familiar character in the always changing landscape of language.

Even if you think you know something about the history of the English language, you’ll learn a lot from Howell’s book. More: you’ll learn it with enjoyment and even laughter. ◊


David Middleton is the art and culture editor of January Magazine.

Best Books of 2013: Non-Fiction

This is the Non-Fiction segment of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2013 feature. You can see our picks for the Best Crime Fiction here, while Best Cookbooks are here and Best Books for Children and Young Adults are here. Still to be posted are our selections of the Best Fiction published during the last 12 months. -- LLR

Jones Atwater is a musician, sports fanatic and struggling author. He lives in Ohio with his Fender Stratocaster, Pearl, and his cat, Rhea.

• 27: A History of the 27 Club Through the Lives of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse by Howard Sounes (Da Capo)
I’m still not sure if 27: A History of the 27 Club made this best of list for me because the book was so very good or for all of the emotion it churned up in me while reading it. Either way, this is one I’ll be thinking on and touching back on for a long time to come. Sounes’ book examines the lives and losses of the half-dozen artists who were, unfortunately, part of this group. London author Howard Sounes (Down the Highway, Charles Bukowski and others) finds the connections between these tragic figures. It’s a tragically wonderful read.

• A North Country Life by Sydney Lea (Skyhorse)
Vermont poet laureate, Sydney Lea, puts both his talent and his love of the sporting life front and center in A North Country Life. This is not a politically correct look at the world out of doors. Lea is a lifelong hunter and fisherman whose appreciation for outdoor life is unhampered by contemporary social mores. So imagine Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, but overlaid with poetic language. And guns. It’s a reach. It’s a stretch. And provided you’re not a PETA sympathizer, it’s a lovely book.

• Strange Rebels by Christian Caryl (Basic)
There are banner years. Years that make all the difference. Years that somehow count more than others and, according to journalist, scholar and all around brainy guy Christian Caryl, 1979 was the nexus. As Caryl points out, in 1979, after 37 years in his comfy chair, the Shah of Iran “got on a plane and left his country, never to return.” Also in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister just a few months after Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping had “heaved himself into the top job” in China. These and other things combined for irreversible change. As Caryl tells us, “Like it or not, we of the twenty-first century still live in the shadow of 1979.” Strange Rebels is both dense and staggeringly eye-opening. This is both a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking book.

• The Golden Age of Maritime Maps by Catherine Hofmann, Helene Richard & Emmanuelle Vagnon (Firefly)
Not everyone knows this about me, but I’m an absolute map geek. It goes back to childhood when I could spend hours on the backseat of the family sedan with a roadmap, imagining where all the roads led and how far they could take me. I had a similar feeling (a similar rush?) from The Golden Age of Maritime Maps. These, however, are very special maps. Charts, actually, of the Portolan variety. Portolan comes from the Italian portolano, which means related to ports or harbors. They came about during the 12th century and are drawn on parchment and crisscrossed with lines indicating compass directions. They were used by European sailors exploring the world right up until the 18th century. This is much more than a book of maritime maps. It is, in essence, a book of the art and charts of the European maritime community between the 13th and 18th centuries and it’s a wonderful thing, indicating magical lost and imagined places as well as what was known of the world at the time. I think I’ll be “reading” this one forever.

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Aaron Blanton is a contributing editor to January Magazine. He’s currently working on a book based on his experiences as an American living abroad.

• David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (Little, Brown and Company)
Malcolm Gladwell is so well known, his name has pretty much become a household word. And, if not him, then his 2000 book, The Tipping Point, certainly has. Like all of Gladwell’s books, David and Goliath mixes up history, psychology, and even a touch of philosophy to force us to scratch our heads and rethink the way that we look at pretty much everything around us.

• The Heir Apparent by Jane Ridley (Random House)
Published in the UK in 2012 as Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, this revisionist biography of the playboy prince is a fantastic and entertaining study of Queen Victoria’s misunderstood son. No stranger to terrific biographies (her previous efforts include portraits of Disraeli and architect Edwin Lutyens) The Heir Apparent gives a very good overview of European politics and Britain’s place in that. There are some real surprises here. Notably that the prince who was seen as an overfed and indulged dilettante was a surprisingly good king, though it was not properly recognized in his lifetime. The American publication of this book in the birth year of the new Royal heir seems too good a coincidence to pass up. Especially since the reading of one helps with the understanding of the other. Bertie was a colorful character whose life could be (and often has been) reduced to useless cliche. Ridley goes so much further and deeper here, revealing the foppish yet ultimately effective monarch he became.

• Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer by Timothy Brook (Anansi)
The most surprising thing about Mr. Selden’s Map of China is that it didn’t see more light in 2013. This is an actual great book by the author of the ground-breaking Vermeer’s Hat (2008). This new book unravels the mystery of  a map of China created in the 1650s and discovered in the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 2009. The map was so modern-looking, it was initially suspected it might not be genuine. But it was no forgery. And, more, it showed some real surprises. Brook is a history professor who is the award-winning author and editor of over a dozen books about China. This one is slightly less accessible than his most famous work, but it his studious (yet lucid) approach that really satisfies.

• Wilson by A. Scott Berg (Putnam)
For a long time I felt as though I didn’t know enough about Woodrow Wilson. Truly: as though there were just more to know. For me (and I suspect for many others) it takes a really terrific biography to get me going in deeper and that’s always been lacking in the case of the 28th president of the United States. No more. Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author, A. Scott Berg, takes on this wonderful study of this much underestimated president with aplomb. As Berg points out, 90 years after his death, Wilson’s reputation only continues to grow even though, as Berg points out, “Everything about Woodrow Wilson is arguable, starting with the date of his birth.” This is a lush, insightful and startlingly complete portrait of a much misunderstood president.

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Lincoln Cho is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in the Chicago area where he works in the high tech industry. He is currently working on a his first novel, a science-fiction thriller set in the world of telecommunications.

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven: (Or, How I Made Peace with the Paranormal and Stigmatized Zealots and Cynics in the Process) by Corey Taylor (DaCapo)
We already knew Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor could write. Back in 2011 he wowed his fans with Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good. Yes, that book was memoir. But it was more, as well. This new book takes that original concept and amps it up. Way up, in fact. Here again, Taylor himself is the lens, but we’re looking way beyond the man and his music now. In fact, we’re looking beyond this very life. In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven, Taylor takes us on a tour of his personal paranormal: the oddities he’s encountered, some unexplained things that have happened near him and how, in many ways, he’s made peace with the bizarre and unknown. It’s an odd book to try and categorize or even talk about.

• Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch (Henry Holt)
This is, of course, a biography of jazz legend Charlie “the bird” Parker, but it also chronicles the trajectory of African American culture in early 20th century America. This is a tragic, joyous jazz biography by someone who knows this beat. Author Crouch is a poet, music and cultural critic, syndicated columnist, novelist and biographer. His other works include Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz and the novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome? This is not the first book on Parker but it is certainly the best.

• Official Truth: 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera by Rex Brown and Mark Eglinton (DaCapo)
Official Truth is a proper rock biography, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Some readers will find it a little too gritty and a little too real and, certainly, the F-bomb gets thrown around sometimes more than one would ever have thought possible. But it’s a portrait, of sorts. And if you ever thought the world of a rock god was sexy and golden, read Official Truth and think again.

• Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian and a Futurist Journey Through Steampunk into the Future of Technology by James H. Carrott and Brian David Johnson
Over a beer historian James H. Carrott and futurist Brian David Johnson ask themselves: What can steampunk teach us about the future? What happens when we look backward in order to look forward? Over the next couple of years the pair traveled the world asking that question. And, face it, if it should be anyone asking this stuff, it’s these two. Johnson is a futurist at Intel where he does “future casting” to “provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing.” Carrott, meanwhile, has brought humor and theater into his work as a historian and he was for a time global product manager for Xbox 360 hardware. They are geek princes, clearly. Exactly the correct duo to set upon this journey.

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David Middleton is the art director of January Magazine as well as a highly acclaimed photographer and graphic designer.

• Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History
by Eduardo Galeano
What an extraordinary book. The author of Memory of Fire and Open Veins of Latin America has written tiny, resonant vignettes for every day of the year. This is the history of the world in prose, with obscure historical moments illuminated by a writer quite worthy of the task.

• Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel (Basic Books)
Math at the same place in our minds and hearts as art? Music? Literature? How can that be? Yet that’s just what mathematics professor Edward Frenkel tries (pretty successfully) to convey. “There’s a secret world out there,” he says. “A hidden parallel universe of beauty and elegance, intricately intertwined with ours.” Will Love & Math change your life and worldview? Depending on the place you now stand, it really just might. My one wish? Where was this book when I was in junior high?

• Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick by Jeremy Dean (DaCapo LifeLong) 
This is a much better book than you’re expecting. The title puts one in mind of pop psychology and change for the sake of change -- but really, nothing could be further from the truth. Author-psychologist Jeremy Dean is interested in the way we process things and why we love the things we love. Though Dean is currently working towards a doctorate in psychology, his voice is casual, friendly and smart. More importantly for a book of this nature, he knows how to break his material down and present it in a way that is not only logical, but also stays interesting and connected: quite often not the case with books of this nature. In the end, Making Habits, Breaking Habits is an entertaining and deeply interesting book. And a huge bonus for some readers: it actually has the potential to totally change your life.

• Sign Painters by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon (Princeton Architectural Press) 
Sign Painters is about a once vibrant industry that has been sublimated by the sterility of the computer, but it also is about the resurgence of this once highly valued art form. How the men and women who do it, do it for the enjoyment of taking time to create and craft something that’s genuine and beautiful and at the same time functional. Filled with examples of their work, some simple some highly detailed and complex and all of them real art, Sign Painters is an ode to a bygone era that still has some teeth and to the men and women who are helping to keep the art form from being completely forgotten.

• This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me) by Bruce McCall & David Letterman (McLelland & Stewart/Blue Rider)
Yes. In case you’re wondering it is that David Letterman. Teamed here with artist-turned-writer Bruce McCall in an elegantly created and stated spoof of a travel book for the impossibly glamourous escapes of the monetarily overloaded. Subtitled “Billionaires in the wild,” it might also be “billions gone wild” with the world’s longest fireplace, a five star treetop restaurant in the Amazon, an artificial iceberg, a yacht fit for an ogliarch and a visit to Godlandia. And lots more. All shared in Architectural Digest-style complete with (sometimes crude-but-effective) illustrations of all this silly duo has conceived.

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Tom Nolan, who reviews crime fiction for The Wall Street Journal, is also the author of Ross Macdonald: A Biography and Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet: His Life and Times.

• Beatles vs. Stones by John McMillian (Simon & Schuster)
Consumer culture has been fueled for eons by dualistic rivalries: Ford vs. Chevy, Fitzgerald vs. Hemingway, Artie Shaw vs. Benny Goodman, Dodgers vs. Giants -- and, as Georgia author John McMillian documents in this entertaining and informative study, Beatles vs. Stones. There’s pop history and world history here, trivia and philosophy, all seen through the prism of Liverpool vs. London. Here’s a post-Beatles quote from John Lennon to whet your appetite: “I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after, on every f----n’ album and every f----n’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. He imitates us.”

• Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout (Gotham Books)
Every great man, Orson Welles said, needs at least six biographers. Welles has had at least that many, and so has jazz titan Duke Ellington (a one-time Welles collaborator). So why the fuss over this newest life-story of the pianist-composer-bandleader written by Terry Teachout (whose recent Louis Armstrong book became the essential volume about that jazz icon)? Because Duke is, in its author’s words, “not so much a work of scholarship as an act of synthesis” -- an indispensable collation and reshaping of all previous studies regarding one of America’s most gifted, vexing, charismatic, and brilliant musical figures.

• Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux by Boris Kachka (Simon & Schuster)
One could quibble with this book’s subtitle -- might not the firm of Knopf perhaps be even more celebrated than the esteemed FSG? -- but this reader would be hard-pressed to find any other fault with debut New York author Boris Kachka’s supremely readable account of the rise and rise of a publishing house as well-known and well-regarded in literary circles as the authors it prints (among whom are a great many Nobel Prize-winners). While the main players here -- including legendary editor Robert Giroux and aristocratically outspoken boss Roger Straus -- hold center-stage, their all-star supporting cast includes such leading lights as Susan Sontag, Edmund Wilson, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion and -- yesss! -- Tom Wolfe!

• Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon; foreword by Booker T. Jones (Bloomsbury)
The South has been producing great music journalists almost as long as it’s been making great music. One of the best is Robert Gordon, who has written a knowing, comprehensive, fact-filled, story-rich, thrill-thick history of the Memphis record-label Stax, whose “product” -- made by such artists as Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, Otis Redding, the Staple Singers, Wilson Pickett and Isaac Hayes -- captured the sound and stirred the spirit of social change and sweet soul music in the 1960s and ’70s. Within these pages is an absorbing, sometimes jaw-dropping saga of inspiration, dedication, political segregation, creative integration, trust, betrayal, faith and perfidy that, once begun, is pretty darned hard to put down.

• Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt (Simon & Schuster)
Singer Linda Ronstadt, a convincing and compelling performer who sold millions of records from 1967 into the 21st century, was a musical chameleon: segueing with apparent ease from folk-rock to country-rock to New Wave, the classic American songbook to traditional Mexican canciones, Cajun ballads to Gilbert and Sullivan. Her charming, unassuming memoir traces the singer’s many artistic enthusiasms back to a childhood in a gifted family where much music was heard and performing was encouraged. Everything she later did on stage and disc drew on that heritage of authenticity and honesty -- the same qualities which inform this lovely book.

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J. Kingston Pierce is the editor of The Rap Sheet, the senior editor of January Magazine and the lead crime-fiction blogger for Kirkus Reviews.

• All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt by John Taliaferro (Simon & Schuster)
Indiana-born John Milton Hay experienced the most uncommon of lives. He was employed as one of the private secretaries to President Abraham Lincoln, published notable poetry and one novel, married into great wealth, served for years as editor of the New York Tribune newspaper and was eventually tapped as U.S. secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Along the way he helped give Lincoln his public writer’s voice, was instrumental in the building of the Panama Canal, opened China to global commerce, became acquainted with such notable personages as Mark Twain and Henry Adams, was talked about at various points as an ideal Republican Party presidential candidate (though he was never interested in running) and kept more than a few secrets -- both governmental and personal. I’d been looking for years to find a proper biography of this history-shaping man; I am pleased to finally have happened upon Taliaferro’s.

• The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin
(Simon & Schuster)
When President Theodore Roosevelt decided -- against pretty much all advice, save for his own -- not to run again for the White House in 1908, he thought he was turning over the Republican nomination to the ideal candidate: his friend the U.S. secretary of war, William Howard Taft. Indeed, Taft went on to win that year’s national contest. However, the notably hefty Taft soon disappointed Roosevelt for numerous reasons, and the two men found themselves on opposite sides during the 1912 presidential race -- their rivalry opening the door for Democratic New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson to slip through and become the 28th president of the United States. Drawing on myriad sources (including the diaries of two first ladies), Goodwin re-creates the bumptious Roosevelt and the comparatively sober Taft, and enriches her narrative with a look back at the “muckraking press” of that so-called Progressive Era, which was determined to institute the sorts of broad institutional reforms that had been endorsed by Roosevelt himself.

• Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman (Ballantine)
Journalism was very much within the male realm during the 19th century. Yet a widely publicized and much-promoted ’round-the-globe race was completely a women’s endeavor. The New York World’s best-known daredevil reporter, Nellie Bly (the pseudonym of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane) departed Manhattan in November 1889 to try and beat the trip time imagined by Jules Verne in his novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Shortly thereafter, Cosmopolitan magazine assigned one of its own feature writers, Elizabeth Bisland, to head in the opposite direction about the earth in hopes of topping the travel records of both Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg and the manifestly corporeal Bly. As newspaper readers everywhere kept track of their often circuitous paths, these two women did their best to surmount obstacle after unexpected obstacle, and -- more in Bisland’s case than Bly’s -- appreciate the diverse cultures through which they were spinning headlong. Goodman (whose previous work, The Sun and the Moon, was among my favorite books of 2008) does an exceptional job here of presenting the two competitors as characters and of framing their adventure as an important landmark in the history of female journalists.

• Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P.T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison by Michael Daly (Atlantic Monthly Press)
It’s truly a jumbo-sized yarn that Daly delivers here. By turns humorous, heartwarming and horrifying, it encompasses everything from the first elephant debarking in the United States in 1796, to the 19th-century rise of American circuses, the invention of “pink lemonade” (believe me, you don’t want to know its founding ingredients) and the zealous rivalry between pioneering electricity entrepreneurs Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. However, the thematic and emotional center of this book is occupied by a female Asian elephant, Topsy, who came to the United States in 1877. Over the years, she, like so many other imported proboscidians, was cruelly mistreated by handlers, one of whom actually broke her tail in a wrathful thrashing. Nonetheless, it was Topsy who was eventually (and quite unjustly) declared a killer, and whose fate -- she was electrocuted at Coney Island, New York, on January 4, 1903 -- marked a low point in American animal history.

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Sienna Powers is a transplanted Calgarian who lives and works in Vancouver, B.C. She is a writer and conceptual artist.

• In Antartica: An Amundsen Pilgrimage by Jay Ruzesky (Nightwood Editions)
There is a sort of profound poetry of a spiritual kind in Jay Ruzesky’s memoir of arctic exploration. Poet and English professor Ruzesky connects his own Arctic journey with that of his distant cousin, Roald Amundsen who in 1911 became the first human to set foot on the South Pole. In 2011, Ruzesky followed in Amundsen’s path, and the book is about that, but also so much more. It’s about heroes and discovery and, yes, it’s even about literature. It’s a wonderful

• The Girl from Station X by Elisa Seagrave (Union Books)
While her mother battled Alzheimer’s, Elisa Seagrave had the unenviable task of sorting through her mother’s things. Here she came upon diaries describing an unremarkable girlhood and a young adulthood beyond anything her adult daughter could have imagined. Marked by tragedy, shaped by war, and buoyed by a courage her daughter hadn’t known existed, the secret life that emerges from the diaries is shrouded in mystery and surprises. Seagrave’s treatment of the material is interesting. Rather than publishing the diaries intact, Seagrave comments throughout. What emerges is almost a conversation -- though clearly one for our benefit. But what does this mean, Seagrave wonders. Or, doesn’t mother do well here? What emerges is almost life a mother revealing herself quite fully to her child and presenting us with a surprising and bittersweet wartime adventure.

• The Imperfect Environmentalist by Sara Gilbert (Ballantine)
Yes: the author is that Sara Gilbert: the actor who played the daughter on the hit comedy series Roseanne. This book has nothing to do with any of that. Less than nothing. Gilbert is a passionate environmentalist who has created a lucid, plain-language and eco-friendly guide to doing something for the planet, even if you can’t afford any time at all. Subtitled A Practical Guie to Clearing Your Body, Detoxing Your Home and Saving the Earth (Without Losing Your Mind), Gilbert walks us through all (and I mean all) of the basics in order to help us make informed choices about all of the possibilities in terms of the environmental concerns of the day. Composting, gardening, buying furniture, air travel, dental care… you name it. If it’s of environmental concern, Gilbert has probably covered it: lightly but intelligently and in a way you’ll understand. This is a book that may well make a difference.

• Women of the Frontier: Sixteen Tales of Trailblazing Homesteaders, Entrepreneurs, and Rabble-Rousers by Brandon Marie Miller (Chicago Review Press)
The book is part of the Chicago Review Press Women of Action biography series, intended to introduce “young adults to women and girls of courage and conviction throughout the ages.” And though the book is considered to be juvenile non-fiction, readers of all ages will enjoy these fascinating accounts of these female forebears who made a difference. I loved Women of the Frontier completely. Miller brings her subjects to perfect life, recreating a time when even simple acts could be difficult and have great impact. It’s tough not to feel inspired and uplifted by her stories.

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Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and the author of a dozen books, the most recent of which is the mystery novel Death Was in the Blood.

• Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas by Eric Fischl (Crown)
Much to my surprise, Bad Boy ended up being one of my reading highlights of 2013. Artist Eric Fischl’s memoir is touching, sweet, inspiring, sad, moving, more. It’s everything a memoir should be. Fischl’s art came of age in the turbulent, decadent 80s and the artist spends a fair amount of time with us in New York in that decade of almost violent artistic change: the drugs, the friendships and what it was to be a rising star in that place and time. Throughout the book, Fishchl’s own words are peppered by sidebars written by friends and family. His wife, celebrated landscape artist April Gornik, painters Ross Bleckner, Julian Schnabel, Bryan Hunt and others, writer/actor Steve Martin and even tennis great John McEnroe, with whom Fischl swapped tennis lessons for painting lessons for many years. Fischl emerges from this self-portrait as the truly great talent we know him to be. Fischl writes at one point. “If there’s been any theme uniting the stages of my life and my art, it’s been that theme of redemption -- the recovery of openness, intimacy and trust.”

• Dead Interviews edited by Dan Crowe (Anansi/Granta)
The interview is a real and distinct skill. It calls on you to give the best of yourself in order to get the best from your subject. I’ve done more than my share but, unlike the contributors in Dead Interviews, I always had the advantage of working with living subjects. For these interviewers, that is never the case. Here then are 13 skillful interviews conducted by some of the most brilliant literary talents of our time with some of the most distinct historical figures of all time. Douglas Coupland chats with Andy Warhol. Joyce Carol Oates goes deep with Robert Frost. Michel Faber spends time with Marcel Duchamp and Ian Rankin has the pairing we would dream for him: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “However it happens,” editor Dan Crowe writes, “putting words into the mouths of someone who is no longer with us finds its way naughtily, inevitably, into the actual ‘life’ of the subject.” True or not, this is delicious stuff.

• Free Magic Secrets Revealed by Mark Leiren-Young (Harbour)
There are certain voices that just resonate for each of us. Mark Leiren-Young’s is one of those that resonate in that way for me. I’ve said it before, but I go all fangirl reading his stuff. I just like the way he lines words up. His work almost always makes me smile and, more often than not, laughter springs forth at some point. Leiren-Young won the Stephen Leacock Medal for humorous writing for his debut work, Never Shoot A Stampede Queen. As much as I enjoyed that book, I liked this one even better. In some ways, Free Magic Secrets Revealed is a more universal coming of age story, albeit with a geeky bent. Here Leiren-Young is remembering his teenage years: yearning to be a writer and influenced by Heavy Metal, Star Wars and Doug Henning. Young Mark and a friend band together to perform Henning-inspired magic tricks in order to find success and get the girls. This is funny, poignant stuff.

• How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields (Vintage)
This is one of those wonderful works about books and writing that feels life a conversation with a long lost friend. One part memoir and several parts essays about the books that have touched him, Shields (The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Reality Hunger) gives us an earnest take on books, life and everything. If, as Shields posits in his opening line, “All criticism is a form of biography,” then there’s a lot of both in How Literature Saved My Life. Shields is a terrific writer, and he does quite a lot of that here.

• Pukka’s Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs by Ted Kerasote (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
In February of 2013 I lost my beloved canine companion, Jett, to arthritis and old age. She was 13. No matter how long I would ever have had with her, it would not have been enough time. I was gutted. The very week we said good-bye to Jett, Pukka’s Promise landed on my desk. Since (for reasons that now escape me) my pet name for Jett had long been “Pooka,” the arrival of the book at that moment seemed both an omen and an affront. I knew that this book by the author of Merle’s Door would be wonderful. I knew I would weep. For many months after Jett’s death I was ready for neither of those things. And then I was. And I found I had been correct.