Salon.com > Nonfiction

Salon.com > Nonfiction http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “Why won’t you answer me?” http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/why_wont_you_answer_me/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/why_wont_you_answer_me/#comments Sun, 20 May 2012 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12922722 Children can ask a lot of very annoying questions. Starting at about 2 years of age, they begin barraging their parents with endless queries, from "Are we there yet?" to "Why is the moon round?" -- questions that often seem more like desperate ploys for parental attention than anything else. And, to make things worse, cooperative parents are often treated to a relentless barrage of follow-up questions, many of which involve one word: "Why?" Is this process infuriating? Yes. But is it crucial to their development? Far more than most of us think. And furthermore, the frequency and form of those questions can tell us a lot, not only about how children learn but also about cultural and class differences in America.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/why_wont_you_answer_me/feed/ 17 “Farther Away”: Franzen on Wallace http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/farther_away_franzen_on_wallac/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/farther_away_franzen_on_wallac/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911069 Jonathan Franzen wants you to like him. In "Mr. Difficult," a 2002 New Yorker essay, Franzen identifies two types of authorship: the Status model, devoted to the pursuit of difficult art at the expense of commercial gain, and the Contract model, which privileges the enjoyment and connectedness of the reader. Franzen is, in his own estimation, "a Contract kind of person." His novels don't ask more of the reader than she is willing to give in turn. "[T]o build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn't want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/farther_away_franzen_on_wallac/feed/ 16 “When women were birds”: Reading blank journals http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/when_women_were_birds_reading_blank_journals_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/when_women_were_birds_reading_blank_journals_salpart/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911092 If you are a reader who cares about nature, wilderness, our place in nature, writing and nature, how to choose a course of action when something you care about is threatened, the lifelong search for voice, and what it means to be a woman in this world, you will have crossed paths with the work of Terry Tempest Williams. Perhaps you grew up reading Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder and Bill McKibben and, loving their work, still felt something missing -- that your relationship with these issues was not fully rendered. Then you discovered Williams, and, not unlike Alfred Stieglitz’s famous response when he first saw Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, you might have breathed: "At last! A woman on paper!"

A woman on paper.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/when_women_were_birds_reading_blank_journals_salpart/feed/ 1 “Drop Dead Healthy”: A failed addition to “shtick lit” http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/drop_dead_healthy_a_failed_addition_to_shtick_lit/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/drop_dead_healthy_a_failed_addition_to_shtick_lit/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12865671 In "Memoir: A History," Ben Yagoda defines "shtick lit" as "[b]ooks perpetrated by people who undertook an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it." He identifies "Walden" as the earliest example of the genre, which would seem to establish a respectable pedigree, but the word perpetrated leaves little doubt as to Yagoda's opinion of more recent efforts. He can't be alone in casting a skeptical eye on shtick-lit superstar A. J. Jacobs, the Esquire writer responsible for "The Know-It-All" (shtick: reading the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" in its entirety), "The Year of Living Biblically" (shtick: following every biblical injunction to the letter for 12 lushly bearded, annoying months), and now "Drop Dead Healthy," evidently a reboot of Remar Sutton's out-of-print "Body Worry."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/drop_dead_healthy_a_failed_addition_to_shtick_lit/feed/ 13 “A Slave in the White House”: James Madison and his slaves http://www.salon.com/2012/04/15/a_slave_in_the_white_house_james_madison_and_his_slaves/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/15/a_slave_in_the_white_house_james_madison_and_his_slaves/#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12865441 When James Madison died, he still owned about 100 slaves. He freed none of them, not even Paul Jennings, his valet. Jennings could read and write, and in fact published the first White House memoir, declaring that Madison was "one of the best men who ever lived." Modern biographers of Madison, such as Richard Brookhiser and Jeff Broadwater, have frankly acknowledged the shocking truth that such a politically astute and sensitive founding father utterly failed to address the problem of slavery seriously. But most, including not only Mr. Brookhiser and Mr. Broadwater, but also Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Andrew Burstein, and Nancy Isenberg, treat the issue of slavery as a thing apart, in separate chapters, instead dealing with the place of the "peculiar institution" in Madison's life in the years after he left the presidency.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/15/a_slave_in_the_white_house_james_madison_and_his_slaves/feed/ 7 “Swim”: Our strange love of water http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/swim_our_strange_love_of_water/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/swim_our_strange_love_of_water/#comments Sat, 14 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12861101 For nearly all of the 15,000 miles I have swum so far in my life, I have followed a black line in a pool. It's hard to explain how simultaneously dull and exciting it has been. My days as an elite swimmer ended just after college, but my love of the sport, that sport, my sport, has always remained. The feel of water-saturated air or the smell of chlorinated water or wintergreen oil (used in rubdowns before competition) sends an endorphin shot into my brain like nothing else ever will.

This coexisting love and addiction to both the sport and the pastime of swimming is what Lynn Sherr has attempted to capture in her new book, "Swim: Why We Love the Water."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/swim_our_strange_love_of_water/feed/ 2 The year of the baseball book http://www.salon.com/2012/04/09/the_year_of_the_baseball_book/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/09/the_year_of_the_baseball_book/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12816821 A simple and unsettling calculation reveals to me that this year marks the 40th anniversary of my coming to New England and setting up shop as a Red Sox fan. How innocent I was in that distant day: how little I understood the faces etched with pain, the haunted eyes, the lips that writhed in uttering "Yankees." It did not take long to become afflicted by the same symptoms and, in my time here, certain Yankee-related events have been so traumatic that they are best designated by numerals alone: 1978 and 2003. The ALCS of 2004 (when the Red Sox came from a 0-3 game deficit to vanquish the evil ones) changed the region's mental landscape -- as, of course, did the subsequent World Championship(s). Since then, Yankee hating has become more of a pleasant pastime than a crippling mental and spiritual disorder.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/09/the_year_of_the_baseball_book/feed/ 2 Recovery’s new poster boy http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/recoverys_new_poster_boy/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/recoverys_new_poster_boy/#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2012 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12815001 Two years ago, Bill Clegg's first memoir dropped like a bombshell on the New York media world. "Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man" chronicled the handsome and hugely successful book agent's descent into a harrowing crack addiction that cost him his career, his boyfriend and his savings -- and left him broke and in rehab. In one harrowing part of the book (excerpted in New York magazine) Clegg decides to blow off a first-class flight to Berlin after a week without sleep for a crack binge and sex with the cabbie driving him to his airport hotel. Staring at his pile of drugs, he wrote, "I wonder if somewhere in that pile is the crumb that will bring on a heart attack or stroke or seizure. The cardiac event that will deliver all this to an abrupt and welcome halt."

In the years since the events of the first book, Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery. (He is also the rumored muse for "Left-handed," a recent book of poetry by Jonathan Galassi, and the supposed inspiration for one of the lead characters in "Keep the Lights On," Ira Sachs' well-reviewed new film about a troubled gay relationship).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/recoverys_new_poster_boy/feed/ 26 Secrets of creation http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/secrets_of_creation/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/secrets_of_creation/#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12817051 In his new book of collected essays, "Magic Hours," Tom Bissell writes that literary and artistic success have always been, overwhelmingly, a matter of luck. The works of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, though great, are known today as classics because of the slightest, fortuitous turns of circumstance – turns entirely beyond the authors’ control. "Moby-Dick" was met with near universal scorn, until it was found by a sympathetic critic in a used bookstore in 1916, 25 years after Melville’s death. A remaindered copy of "Leaves of Grass" was also happened upon – this time bought from a book peddler and given to a critic as a gift.

For some ambitious writers and creators, this can be reason for panic, as it was for Bissell as a young man. But over the course of "Magic Hours’" sharply observed, lushly descriptive and often extremely funny pages, Bissell (a former Salon writer and the author of "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter") presents a case for art-for-art’s-sake, regardless of what may come. And, though Bissell has no aspirations to be included in the “how-to” genre of nonfiction, "Magic Hours" subtly discloses a type of directive for new and young artists making their way. Quite simply and hopefully, it seems to be: tell the truth about yourself and everything else, and pay attention.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/secrets_of_creation/feed/ 8 “Thomas Hart Benton: A Life”: Great art or populist trash? http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/thomas_hart_benton_justin_wolff/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/thomas_hart_benton_justin_wolff/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12787901 Artists' reputations rise and fall, but few have gyrated as wildly as that of the painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton. In the 1930s he was acclaimed as the greatest artist in America, with his face on the cover of Time. Later he was ridiculed as a populist throwback, a stumbling block on the road to abstract expressionism. But recently scholars and curators have given the artist a second look -- and have reread him as a critical component of American art history, not just a crowd-pleaser. This first biography of the painter, by Justin Wolff, continues the Benton revival. And among artists, he needs a biography more than most -- for "Benton's art, as rich and dynamic as it may be, is not as paradoxical as the man was."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/thomas_hart_benton_justin_wolff/feed/ 6 “Butterfly in the Typewriter”: The story of a great novel http://www.salon.com/2012/04/01/butterfly_in_the_typewriter_cory_maclauchlin/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/01/butterfly_in_the_typewriter_cory_maclauchlin/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12767621 Go a little distance through the world with a copy of John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" in your hand and you'll find that it operates less as a book and more as an unpredictable engine of friendship, allowing you to share moments of irruptive collegiality with complete (and sometimes less-than-complete) strangers. The effect, for reasons of local patriotism, is especially strong in New Orleans, where "A Confederacy of Dunces" enjoys a particular favor among pickpockets, drunken academics, and garrulous persons riding the bus. But it can happen anywhere. A few weeks ago I mentioned the book in passing to my seat neighbor on a transatlantic flight, and within minutes we were swapping lines -- "lascivious, gyrating children!," "my valve is closing!" -- and snuffling with air-conditioned mirth.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/01/butterfly_in_the_typewriter_cory_maclauchlin/feed/ 8 “Zona”: A tribute to a Soviet film http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/zona_geoff_dyers/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/zona_geoff_dyers/#comments Sat, 31 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12767321 Toward the middle of "Zona," Geoff Dyer's book-length treatment of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Stalker," the author quotes the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The passage, taken from the obscure theorist's intensely intimidating, 700-page "Phenomenology of Perception," is direct and affecting, as though it were written by Kafka. It reads in part, "once I was a man, with a soul and a living body and now I am no more than a being.... I hear and see, but no longer know anything.... I now live in eternity."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/zona_geoff_dyers/feed/ 6 “Devil in the Grove”: A chilling civil rights case http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/devil_in_the_grove_gilbert_king/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/devil_in_the_grove_gilbert_king/#comments Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12767111 In July 1949, a young white couple, Norma and Willie Padgett, told police that 17-year-old Norma had been raped by four black men near Groveland, Fla., setting in motion one of the most dramatic civil rights cases of the 20th century. Gilbert King's "Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America" re-creates an important yet overlooked moment in American history with a chilling, atmospheric narrative that reads more like a Southern Gothic novel than a work of history.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/devil_in_the_grove_gilbert_king/feed/ 10 “When I was a Child I Read Books”: Biblical prose http://www.salon.com/2012/03/25/when_i_was_a_child_i_read_books_biblical_prose/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/25/when_i_was_a_child_i_read_books_biblical_prose/#comments Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12722481 Whence came Marilynne Robinson? The author of Pulitzer-winning "Gilead" (2004), two other novels, and a remarkable body of nonfiction bears little resemblance to anyone else writing today. Critics reach for "biblical" to describe Cormac McCarthy's prose, but the word is more aptly applied to Robinson's, in which complexity and clarity walk hand in hand. (Robinson herself feels a larger debt to Cicero.) A Publishers Weekly review of her new essay collection, "When I Was a Child I Read Books," remarks Robinson's interest in "the Big Themes," the winking capitals there to remind us that while deep curiosity about God, the soul, religion and the significance of mankind may not be unique to Robinson, it isn't something we ought to expect from our literature as a matter of course. Most striking of all is Robinson's mental work ethic. She seems to be incapable of a lazy conclusion.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/25/when_i_was_a_child_i_read_books_biblical_prose/feed/ 5 “Reagan and Thatcher”: Rethinking the special relationship http://www.salon.com/2012/03/24/reagan_and_thatcher_richard_aldous/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/24/reagan_and_thatcher_richard_aldous/#comments Sat, 24 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12723621 "Mr. President, the prime minister is on the phone." So said the White House butler to Ronald Reagan on Oct. 25, 1983, during a briefing on the United States' impending invasion of Grenada. Margaret Thatcher was upset that Reagan had disregarded her advice against attacking the Caribbean nation (and Commonwealth member), where Marxist rebels had staged a coup. By invading, Reagan sought to check leftist advances and perceived Soviet influence in Latin America. He excused himself and took the call in the next room. In "Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship," Richard Aldous describes what happened next, based on interviews with the meeting's attendees. They heard a series of "But Margaret"s on Reagan's end, followed by long pauses in which Thatcher presumably hectored the president just as she hectored everyone else. Reagan returned to the briefing looking sheepish and said, "Mrs. Thatcher has strong reservations about this." Yet the invasion went ahead as planned. In fact, he could not bring himself to tell her that it had already begun.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/24/reagan_and_thatcher_richard_aldous/feed/ 10 The truth about creativity http://www.salon.com/2012/03/24/the_truth_about_creativity/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/24/the_truth_about_creativity/#comments Sat, 24 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12722401 Why did Bob Dylan compose the classic "Like a Rolling Stone" only after he had become so disgusted with his own music that he was planning to quit the business permanently? How did Silicon Valley become a hub of innovation while other genius-packed cities did not? And what does the placement of a company's bathrooms have to do with the number of innovative products it makes?

These questions –- and many more like them -- are at the heart of Jonah Lehrer's new book "Imagine: How Creativity Works." The journalist and author of "Proust and the Neuroscientist" and "How We Decide" has taken on one of the most deceptive and beguiling problems in the science of mind, what he calls "our most important talent: the ability to imagine what has never existed." His investigation into how we invent new things, and why some people and communities are more creative than others, takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through the work of social scientists and neurological researchers -- but also into the lives and insights of inventors and engineers, writers and salespeople, musicians and magicians, teachers and students. The result is a bracing, entertaining and counterintuitive guide to an aspect of ourselves that often seems an unsolvable mystery.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/24/the_truth_about_creativity/feed/ 5 Are the French better lovers? http://www.salon.com/2012/03/20/are_the_french_better_lovers/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/20/are_the_french_better_lovers/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12699441 "Obama Begs U.S. Not to Embarrass Him in Front of French," read the Onion headline during last year's state visit by Nicholas Sarkozy. Once again, the fake newspaper got the real story: Americans tend to feel that whatever we do, the French do it better, or at least cooler. French women, a popular weight loss guide has it, don't get fat. A recent Wall Street Journal article caused a sensation by explaining why French children are better behaved and more self-sufficient than American children. And of course, when it comes to love and sex, the French are our touchstone for sophistication: just compare the Lewinsky affair to the funeral of François Mitterand, where his wife and mistress stood side by side.

"The Paradox of Love," the latest book-length essay by the prominent French intellectual Pascal Bruckner, confirms most of these American assumptions about France. Among the many subjects of Bruckner's highly readable meditation is a section titled "Europe, the United States: Different Taboos," in which he marvels at the parade of American sex scandals -- Clarence Thomas, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer. All this "strikes French people as grotesque," Bruckner writes. "On the moral level... one can only urge Americans to learn from the Old World how to be temperate."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/20/are_the_french_better_lovers/feed/ 15 “Turing’s Cathedral”: Gods of the digital universe http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/turnings_castle_george_dyson/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/turnings_castle_george_dyson/#comments Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12681461 In early 1947, Jack Rosenberg, a bored researcher in Princeton University's Physics Department, heard about an intriguing new job opportunity. As he told George Dyson, the author of "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe:" "I was informed that at the Institute for Advanced Study, a famous scientist was looking for an engineer to develop an electronic machine of a sort no one but he understood."

That "famous scientist" was a Hungarian émigré mathematician called John von Neumann, and the electronic machine he was developing at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was, of course, the computer, the central product of today's networked society. And it's this story, of von Neumann's attempt to assemble a team of the world's most brilliant 20th-century scientists at IAS, that forms the central narrative in this sparkling new book by one of America's most talented historians of technology.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/turnings_castle_george_dyson/feed/ 10 The secrets of domestic life http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/if_walls_could_talk_lucy_worsley/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/if_walls_could_talk_lucy_worsley/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12470181 I have never understood the snobbish condescension so many people affect toward reality shows. There are some excellent ones out there, and for years I have been an avid fan of the type that features historical reconstruction. My enthusiasm began a decade ago with the riveting "1900 House," in which a late-Victorian London row house was fitted out with period furnishings and fixtures, and a modern family had to try living in it -- and cooking, cleaning, and washing in it. This was followed by the even more wonderful "Colonial House," in which contemporary Americans took up residence in an exact re-creation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and "Frontier House," where intrepid volunteers lived and worked Laura Ingalls Wilder-style in log cabins. One lesson I learned from every one of these shows was that the feminist revolution could never have occurred without the industrial revolution -- and specifically not without the invention of the clothes-washing machine, the gas cooker, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/if_walls_could_talk_lucy_worsley/feed/ 3 “Revelations”: The Bible’s scariest book http://www.salon.com/2012/03/04/revelations_the_bibles_scariest_book/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/04/revelations_the_bibles_scariest_book/#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12473081 Hallucinogenic and ominous, the Book of Revelation has inflamed the Western imagination for over 1,500 years, inspiring everything from cheesy horror movies to panics over bar codes (the Number of the Beast!). By citing the final book of the New Testament, doomsaying Christian cranks have blamed hurricanes on sex and labeled President Obama the Antichrist, but they're only the book's most extreme fans. Revelation, the preeminent apocalyptic prophecy of the Abrahamic tradition, has, according to Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles, set the tenor of our times. Not bad for a text that almost didn't make it into the Bible in the first place and that some Christians still refuse to acknowledge as scripture.

Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton best known for her hugely popular 1979 book, "The Gnostic Gospels," singles out this controversial text for extended scrutiny in her new book, "Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation." Although not as (ahem) revelatory as that career-making early work, "Revelations" is an elegant, sensitive effort to place the Book of Revelation in its mystical, historical and -- above all -- political context.

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