To death, one man through his sundered hulks…”
—Dylan Thomas
These lines make me want to read and write about “big questions.” This year’s book list will, I hope, capture that aim while not neglecting the need for joy and entertainment. After all, Thomas continues:
“The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults.”
Science and Nature
Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha MukherjeeDr. Mukherjee (doctor of philosophy and medicine) has already achieved more in any one of his several fields than most of us can claim in a single arena: hematologic research, columns in The New Yorker and The New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize and other literary awards, and three books offering exhaustive looks at cancer, genetics, and, his latest, the cell. Each book takes a wider and wider look at medicine and biology, and each provides readable yet substantial explanations of extremely difficult material.
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores
Just recently, Martha’s Vineyard newspapers reported that a coyote had swam the few knots that separate the island from the U.S. mainland. But Flores wasn’t surprised, because he has tracked the history of the coyote as it swam rivers, even the Mississippi, in its interwoven human-canid history. Far from viewing the coyote as a menace—only two human deaths over the many centuries in which humans have “exterminated” millions of coyotes—Flores argues this animal is as skilled at mastering new territory as we are, through some remarkable adaptations.
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle
Bittle seems to have taken Carneades’ Are All Lives Equal? (see below) seriously, as he examines “the first flock of canaries in the coal mine of climate change.” From storms obliterating segments of the Florida Keys, fires in the Pacific Northwest, and increasing drought in the West, Bittle points to the communities that will be the first to abandon uninhabitable areas for life and work—and the economic consequences of these changes, which will eventually overwhelm the capacity of persons, companies, and governments to mitigate them. He offers some practical consequences: the “Rust Belt” will be less affected than most of the historically attractive coastal communities, while the Southwest will no longer be a haven for retirees. But he warns “we will still need to undo the misdeeds of the hubristic society that thought it could control the forces of nature.”
Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind by Sue Black
A leading British anatomist and forensic anthropologist, often working on the sort of postmortem analyses seen in TV mysteries, Black has received numerous awards, including Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and is president of St. John’s College, Oxford. With all this, she is capable of writing books that offer comprehensible, compassionate, and occasionally caustic observations on the ways life and death reveal themselves in our mortal remains, two of which won the British Gold Dagger for mystery-related nonfiction. Along with her detailed analysis of the body, head to foot, she offers this wise saying, ”Assumption is the mother of all mistakes.”
The Elephant in the Universe: Our One Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter by Govert Schilling
Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey
Philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” Modern theorists explore two similar topics: the 95% of our universe that remains unobservable, and the nature of consciousness in an otherwise material world. Schilling’s The Elephant in the Universe covers the first of these topics. Dark matter, he tells us, “challenges our imagination…it must exist in order for our universe to be,” yet no person or instrument has discovered its nature. In fact, like any good mystery, the search for dark matter has only added a second culprit, if that is the right word: dark energy.
Closer to home is the matter of consciousness. How can eyes, ears, and the rest of our senses, which are made up of the same stuff as our bodies, give us all the vivid experiences that happen “inside our heads,” the qualia of perception, to use its technical name? Humphrey, a neuropsychologist with philosophical leanings, breaks the problem into two components: Is it possible to perceive things outside us without consciousness, as amoebas and other primitive life forms seem to do, and if so, when and how did the ability to be sentient, that is to know and contemplate what we are seeing, develop? The fact that most of us never ask this question is what drives Humphrey’s exploration.
Let me warn you that these two books are no easy reads, despite the impressive narrative skills of their authors. Why could they be, since they confront two of the great “hard problems,” as playwright Tom Stoppard terms them?
Fiction and Mystery
Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York by Francis SpuffordSpufford, a nonfiction writer-turned-novelist, takes us 200 years back in time to a mysteriously named “Smith,” who arrives in New York on “All Hallows, 1746” and presents a letter of credit to a Manhattan trader. As the trader awaits confirmation of the bill, a series of adventures and misadventures occur, plunging Smith into the depths, from a debtors’ prison to a trial for murder, raising him up, then down again. In the final pages, we and the New Yorkers discover how Smith intends to use the money.
The Great Mistake: A Novel by Jonathan Lee
Also belonging to the “Old New York” genre, mixing history and mystery, this novel’s protagonist, Andrew Haswell Green, once known as “the Father of New York,” was murdered in 1903 on Park Avenue, a crime never solved. But the book opens with this death, then follows Green’s long life back through time, depicting his era and imagining his inner life, in as complete a rags-to-riches story as those of better-known moguls of the age. It’s both lively fiction and the tale of a man whose largesse and political influence included helping create Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the New York Public Library, and, “the great mistake” of combining Manhattan and Brooklyn into what would become the nation’s megalopolis.
Victory City by Salman Rushdie
Forty years after the stunning Midnight’s Children, named the “Booker of Bookers” in the prize’s 25th year, time spent in part evading an Islamic fatwa and surviving a fanatic’s attack, Rushdie returns to his roots, creating a “magical realist” story centering on a single memorable Indian character, female this time, who lives and rules over a subcontinental kingdom for many centuries. This return to his earlier style, and this choice of a feminine protagonist, will be welcome to both old and new admirers.
The Books of Jacob
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel
Books by Olga Tokarczuk
A novelist and clinical psychologist, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature for her richly imagined stories of Polish history and culture, of which The Books of Jacob, a sweeping story of Jewish life in middle Europe over several centuries, earned her the opprobrium of some Polish ultranationalists but is unmatched in its power and vividness, and its length, being quite symbolically, one page longer than Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. For a less daunting read, Drive Your Plow blends mystery, astrology, and the poems of William Blake, events in a rural Polish village over one season.
Shrines of Gaiety: A Novel by Kate Atkinson
Atkinson is a novelist of remarkable variety, the author of such time-bending fiction as Life After Life and A God in Ruins, the Jackson Brodie mystery series, and such offbeat novels as Shrines of Gaiety (English Writer Graham Greene would have called them “entertainments”), which captures the low-life of London in the post-World War I ‘20s. Gaiety centers on one of those “shrines,” part of a shady nightclub empire owned by a successful madam.
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
Powers is a novelist whose books treat widely varying subjects, researching each until he can speak sure-handedly about everything from environmental issues to cosmology to neuroscience. In The Time of Our Singing, he takes on the combined subjects of classical music and 20th-century racism, following two brothers and their parents, as both generations encounter racial barriers that challenge their exceptional gifts. From Marian Anderson’s bravura performance on the Washington Mall to the riots post-exoneration of the police in the Rodney King case, Powers covers decades of progress and stagnation through the lives of one Black family.
Death of a Dissident by Stuart Kaminsky
Many mystery readers know Martin Cruz Smith’s series of novels about Arkady Renko, a tough and honest policeman laboring in the ideological and individual corruption of Modern Russia. But the late Kaminski leads readers to the equally dystopian Soviet Union era. In the introduction to this first book in his series—there are 16—his detective, Porfiry Rostnikov, is ordered to find the murderer of a man on the very night before he’s to appear before a Stalinist show trial. The job places Rostnikov in equal danger from both the killer and the machinery of the Kremlin.
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty
A Long Long Way
Books by Sebastian Barry
Although tiny by world standards, Ireland has produced numerous prominent authors, from Jonathan Swift to W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. Playwright and novelist Barry, whose works are as rooted in Irish culture and history as any of his predecessors’, is taking his place on that list. Several of his books, including the two mentioned here, are set in the Ireland of the early 20th century, and cover the country’s turbulent times toward the end of its colonial period. Eneas tells the story of a youth “born with the century” who finds himself exiled because of the civil conflicts that led to Irish independence in 1922, while A Long Long Way is set in World War I, when Irish soldiers fought and died for a country not yet free, under the banner of its colonizer. Barry captures the wit and the language of Ireland in a great literary tradition and develops these stories to conclusions similar in their facts, but utterly contrasting in their emotions.
History and Philosophy
Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. ZelizerIt’s more than a quarter century since James W. Loewen published Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, an indispensable guide to American history. Loewen left us in 2021, but fortuitously last year, a cadre of prestigious scholars, the majority of whom hold positions at America’s great universities, have succeeded Loewen’s pioneering voice in exposing nearly two dozen historical distortions, from “vanishing Indians” to imperialism to American exceptionalism. Among the major surprises: “America first” appeared as a nativist rallying cry in the 1850s and has for 175 years been an exclusionary totem.
Are All Lives Equal? by Carneades
Authors have adopted pseudonyms for many reasons: disguising gender, avoiding political retribution, or just because it seemed “a good round English name” (George Orwell). “Carneades” (the name is borrowed from a late classical philosopher) explains that he consults to entities such as The World Bank, which might not be pleased with his arguments here. He shows through numerous “thought experiments,” that decisions from where to put toxic waste to what places need to be protected from global warming, are made on economic bases: Put waste in the poorest countries and protect coastlines inhabited by the richest. But these views, as he puts it, are economically “horrifyingly accurate.” His proposal is that we measure lives not by their comparative economic value, but by the degree to which each person would be willing to pay to protect their life or welfare, divided, as it were, by their ability to pay. Therefore, if the billionaire and the wage worker would each be willing to spend say 50% of their wealth to avoid a risk, those percentages would count as equal.
American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795 by Edward J. Larson
When politicians are demanding that schools minimize teaching about America’s history of slavery, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Larson has provided a landmark work exhaustively demonstrating that the Revolutionary era was also the time when African slavery was embedded in the new nation’s DNA. From challenges to slaveowners in courts and from early abolitionists to travelers like J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s observations on American inconsistency, to the disappearance of Crispus Attucks from the story of the Boston massacre for nearly three-quarters of a century, Larson provides irrefutable evidence of the centrality of slavery and racial thinking across the colonies and the new nation.
Memoir and Poetry
The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found by Frank BruniBruni is a familiar name to readers for triple journalistic careers, as food critic, movie reviewer, and now a wide-ranging op-ed reporter. Though I have been reading his articles for years, I only learned during a visit to a local bookstore that six years ago Bruni suddenly lost sight in his right eye. His memoir of that experience and his conversations with numerous others who have coped with similar challenges are a constant inspiration, beginning with the moment of his trauma: “I went to bed with more grievances than I could count. I woke up with more gratitude than I can measure.”
Archaic Smile; Hapax; Olives; and Like, collections by A.E. Stallings
Stallings, a Georgia-born, Oxford educated Gen-Xer, has become a renowned classicist, a longtime resident of Athens, the director of that city’s poetry center, and the author of these four volumes of poetry that reshape numerous classical stories from a feminist perspective. Arachne, for example, thinks her presumed punishment as a spider merely an alteration: “The moon once pulled blood from me. Now I pull silver,” while Penelope is less than delighted at her husband’s long-delayed return: “Kill all the damn suitors/If you think it will make you feel better.”
Additional Summer Reading Recommendations
Would you like even more literary inspiration for your precious time off? Find it in the summer reading edition of Looking Ahead by NAIS President Donna Orem. This year’s installment highlights books that touch on our lives—for example, how we communicate and how we use technology. Some of the books go back in history, some look ahead, some probe inside our bodies and minds, and others examine the wider world around us.As a bonus, this edition also includes lists of the top sellers from the NAIS People of Color Conference and Annual Conference bookstores, as well as other picks from NAIS staff members. And don’t forget to post your own recommendations in the NAIS Connect online communities!