Biography: Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life by Michael Greenberg

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life by Michael Greenberg. Says Leach:

By the time he wrote Hurry Down Sunshine, a memoir of his daughter’s descent into mental illness, Michael Greenberg had been plying his trade, with intermittent success, for over two decades. Sunshine changed all that, catapulting Greenberg to enormous fame. Literature, it seems, is no longer sufficient diversion: we have become a society in love in other people’s suffering. We want the real, the screams and rants, the pills and pains, the hospitalizations and ensuing insurance battles. And Greenberg, who has spent his adult writing life searching out such stories, suddenly had an awful tale crash into his family like a bomb. Voilá.

The full review is here.

Review: The Love Children by Marilyn French

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Love Children by Marilyn French. Says Leach:

Marilyn French spent the bulk of her writing career beneath the shadow of her magnificent first novel, the semi-autobiographical The Women’s Room. Published in 1977, the book is no less searing today than when it first appeared. And while it afforded French deserved fame, the five works of fiction that followed were uneven, ranging from excellent -- The Bleeding Heart, Her Mother’s Daughter -- to the downright bad: Our Father, My Summer with George. The Love Children, French’s final novel, falls on the weaker end of this mighty woman’s output.

The full review is here.

Review: Swimming by Nicola Keegan

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Swimming by Nicola Keegan. Says Leach:

Philomena Ash, of Glenwood, Kansas, is a swimming prodigy. She’s tall and strong, with enormous feet and broad shoulders. Her coaches watch and whisper as she steadily breaks Kansas swim records like bundles of dried twigs. By the time she’s sixteen, the word Olympics is being whispered. But other things are going on.

The full review is here.

Review: A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach looks at A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias. Says Leach:

Yglesias’s unabashedly autobiographical novel is an homage to his wife, artist Margaret Joskow, who died of bladder cancer in 2004. By turns heartbreaking, amusing, depressing, and joyous, A Happy Marriage is the evocation not only of the couple’s 27 years together, but of Margaret herself, a vibrant, imperfect, loving woman.

The book shifts between the couple’s first three weeks together, with their amusing if agonizing attempts to negotiate dating’s formalities, and their final three weeks of married life, when Margaret, decimated by cancer, is saying her final goodbyes. The contrast of the healthy, beautiful young Margaret and the bald, shivering shadow enduring horrible suffering is a shattering one, made more poignant by Yglesias’s painful attention to detail.

The full review is here.

Fiction: The Lie by Fredrica Wagman

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Lie by Fredrica Wagman. Says Leach:

The Lie opens with 17-year-old Ramona Smollens sitting on a park bench, smoking. Her father, the monstrous Nathan Smollens, has been dead exactly one week.

Ramona is joined by Solomon Columbus, an older man who offers her another cigarette. The two begin talking, with Ramona mesmerized by Columbus’s thick peasant hands, culminating in ten “astonishing penis fingers.” Their conversation continues even as the withering August heat gives way to a torrential rainstorm. The couple talk and smoke through the pelting rain, finally returning to the house where Ramona now lives with her mother, the self-absorbed, obnoxiously rude Trixie. The couple brush off her jeering welcome, working their way to the attic, where they spend four days making love and exchanging confidences.

Written in broken, elliptical prose, bristling with bold print and exclamatory remarks, The Lie is reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates’s more incantatory, dark works.

The full review is here.

Review: A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach looks at A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert. Says Leach:

Dorothy Trevor Townsend is starving herself to death. Her cause is not anorexia, but suffrage. The year is 1914, and though a war is on, the brilliant Townsend is doing her best to make a statement, to be heard of above the horrible din of war. She is willing to die for her cause, heedless of her children, Evelyn and Thomas, of her lover, William Crawford, of her mother, who will be stuck with her orphaned children. Dorothy dies for her cause, and is immortalized on a commerative postage stamp, a burden or honorific to be borne by her descendants.

Author Kate Walbert has created an interleaved narrative of five generations of Townsend women, moving across time from England to San Francisco to New York City. In each era another Townsend finds herself fighting for her place among men.

The full review is here.

Review: Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips. Says Leach:

Read this book slowly. You’ll want to speed up, because you’ll want to know what happens next, but you’ll be making a mistake. Set over three days in Korea, Winfield, West Virginia and Kentucky, Lark & Termite is comprised of slowly unfolding sentences that, for all their southern drawl, are honed down to essentials: the way a stray cat’s underbelly sounds dragging along dead grass, the rattle of freight trains, the muffled sounds of tunnels, the secrets families keep. Read too quickly, and you’ll miss something crucial.

The full review is here.

Review: The Believers by Zoë Heller

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Believers by Zoë Heller. Says Leach:

Heller’s fine novel takes on the Litvinoff family, a tribe of New Yorkers utterly certain in their beliefs until, abruptly, they aren’t.

Patriarch Joel is a famous radical lawyer known for defending controversial individuals, most recently an American Muslim suspected of Al Qaeda ties. Joel, an ardent socialist and judgmental moralist, glories in his outsider status, gleefully scanning the morning papers for disparaging publicity.

Joel’s English-born wife, Audrey, fled her humdrum life as a typist to marry this American hotshot. Shy, overwhelmed by America, she constructed a protective carapace, a sharp-tongued, fiercely leftist character that has hardened into a vicious woman.

The full review is here.

Review: Will Marry for Food, Sex, and Laundry by Simon Oaks

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Will Marry for Food, Sex, and Laundry by Simon Oaks. Says Leach:

I have no idea what possessed Mr. Oaks to pen his self-help ode to marital bliss. He is not a psychologist, MSW, or therapist of any sort. He is an ex-race car driver, and though he alludes to work many times in his deeply silly book, he never specifies precisely what he does. Perhaps he feels his nine -- nearly ten -- years of marriage qualify him to pen such a manual. Perhaps I feel my 16 years of marriage qualify me to say unkind things. Never mind. Down to specifics.

The full review is here.

Review: The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. Says Leach:

Wolitzer’s terrific novel follows the lives of four women who have left the workforce to raise children. Amy Lamb, Jill Hamlin, Roberta Sokolov and Karen Yip are all talented, highly educated, happily married New Yorkers when their babies arrive. And those babies change everything. Suddenly the twelve-week maternity leave is insufficient; each woman, with varying degrees of remorse and financial security, leaves the workforce to tend her offspring.

Wolitzer’s over arching theme is the arguable failure of Feminism: yes, women can now be nearly anything they wish (glass ceiling notwithstanding), but somehow somebody forgot about childcare. Yes, men are getting better about equal parenting, but the workforce in general is achingly slow to accommodate those women who, at the height of their careers, are also anxiously feeling their biological clocks ticking. So the hot young lawyer/doctor/statistician/artist “drops out.” It’s only temporary, she reassures herself. Besides there is the child, or children, who, when small, demand every waking (and often sleeping) moment.

The full review is here.

Holiday Gift Guide: Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

Emily Perkins isn’t widely known in North America, which is a shame, as Novel About My Wife (Bloomsbury), her fourth book, is amazing. Tom Stone, a foundering screenwriter, is trying to piece together what went wrong with his wife Ann, who we know at the outset is dead. We don’t know the how she died, or why, but as this almost gothic story unfolds, it’s impossible to put down until we learn the truth.

Ann is everything Tom is not: a beautiful, unconventional Australian, a talented sculptress with a past she refuses to discuss. Tom, is English and more conservative than he’d like to admit, less fortunate in his field and besotted by his red-headed wife. Their relationship is intensely, almost violently sexual in ways Tom chooses to overlook. He also overlooks the jagged scar on Ann’s upper arm, a past pregnancy (aborted), and her literally insane response to Australian Film Producer John Halliburton, whom Tom is longing to work with.

The couple extends themselves financially, purchasing a large fixer-upper in the seedy London neighborhood of Hackney. Ann becomes pregnant, reason for joy, but she also beings unravelling, certain she is being stalked and that malevolence lurks in their crumbling new home. Even the birth of son Arlo fails to calm her increasing hysteria, leading to an inexorable ending.

Perkins’ takes a wry view of English life, of the young couple scrabbling madly for real estate, the right cars, the properly-kitted-out strollers, drinks in the right bistros. That these couples must live beyond their means, chased by envy, is a matter of course, and many American readers will nod in grim recognition. But it is Perkins’ chilling rendering of Ann, mercurial, moody, ultimately unknowable, that truly frightens. Ann’s fears overwhelm both Tom and the reader, moving a novel of domestic unrest into the realm of true horror: hitting us, literally, where we live.

Review: The Complete Robuchon: French Home Cooking for the Way We Live Now by Joël Robuchon

Today in January Magazine’s cookbook section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Complete Robuchon: French Home Cooking for the Way We Live Now by Joël Robuchon. Says Leach:

Okay, so I’m a coddled, spoiled, Berkeley tree-hugger type of eater. Not only do my vegetables come from a farm, so does my meat. And though I pay slightly less for farm-driven, high-end organic food than I would at the market, that cheaper price comes at the expense of choice. For this year, tomatoes, corn, and fresh fava beans are a memory. The first acorn squash of the season rests in the fridge, awaiting transformation. Likewise, our monthly meat box offers no lamb or vitello (humanely raised calf), but we’re awash in ground beef, steak and two pounds of ground goat.

In other words, I am hamstrung -- albeit willingly -- by seasonality, a commitment to local eating, and the preparation of nightly meals (which often morph into the next day’s lunch).

Cookbooks, of course, are a tremendous source of creativity when faced with a pound of ground goat. So much the better if that cookbook is French. So it was I welcomed Rubochon’s 832 page missive into the house.

I was in for a few shocks to my delicate ecosystem.

The full review is here.

Review: The Book of New Israeli Food by Janna Gur

Today in January Magazine’s cookbook section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Book of New Israeli Food by Janna Gur. Says Leach:

To her credit, Gur doesn’t attempt to delve deeply into the complex cuisines of this tiny country. (For the bible on Jewish cuisine, see Claudia Roden’s magnificent Book of Jewish Food.) Instead, she gives us tastes, with explanations all along the way. For example, I had no idea why the many Israelis I know are all salad freaks. I learned that every meal -- including breakfasts and snacks -- includes some kind of salad, most often chopped cucumber, tomato, onion and garlic. The variations on this “Israeli Salad” are endless. I also learned why the Israelis I know are indifferent to red meat: Israel is not cattle country. Instead, the nation thrives on chicken, turkey and lamb. And eggplant. It’s safe to say Israelis view eggplants the way Americans view potatoes: a foodstuff as essential as water.

The full review is here.

Review: Zen and Now by Mark Richardson

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Mark Richardson. Says Leach:

The best possible way to read Richardson’s book is to first re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you are between 40 and 60, chances are you still have a battered paperback copy around -- perhaps the edition with the blue cover (the one my parents had), the orange cover (mine), or Richardson’s pink one. If you are like many of us, you read the book well over 20 years ago, with intermittent comprehension. If at all possible, go back and reread. You will be amazed at how relevant Pirsig’s book remains. You may even be pleased at how much more you understand about his inquiry into Quality. Broken into layman’s terms, Pirsig felt anything worth doing merited one’s full attention; that even the dullest tasks, when carefully attended to, might well elicit better methods. In Pirsig’s pre-computer, pre-Internet, pre-mobile phone world, technology was already demonized. Pirsig argued that technology itself was not to blame for degraded values. Rather, our use of it -- rather, misuse -- lay at the root of societal disintegration.

In other words, hang up and drive.

The full review is here.

Review: Reading the OED by Ammon Shea

Today in January Magazine’s art & culture section, Diane Leach reviews Reading the OED by Ammon Shea. Says Leach:

I planned to begin by writing that Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED is THE book for word lovers. I ran to look up the word for word lovers (lexiphiles? vocabularians?) but immediately ran into what I always called “the dictionary problem.” That is, if you don’t know the word, or know it but cannot spell it, you’re out of luck. Thanks to Ammon Shea, I now know the technical term for my the dictionary problem is onomonomatia: vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word. If you are true wordarian, or whatever, there is the OED online, which will solve this problem for you via its search engine, provided you are willing to subscribe. Or you may follow Ammon Shea’s example. Wordarian to end all wordarians, Shea read the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover, the way others might take on Swann’s Way. Caveat Emptor: The Oxford English Dictionary runs 21,730 pages, requiring 20 volumes. The set weighs 137 pounds. Start making shelf space, and working with free weights, now.

The full review is here.

Review: New England White by Stephen L. Carter

Today in January Magazine’s crime fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach looks at New England White by Stephen L. Carter. Says Leach:

Yale University law professor Stephen L. Carter is obsessed by power, particularly of the backroom variety. In New England White, his thickly layered whodunit (originally published last year, but only recently released in paperback), he pits Julia Veazie Carlyle and her husband, Lemaster, against a shadowy, frightening group out to quell the release of certain information, which has ramifications all the way up to the White House. That the shadowy and powerful are a tiny African-American elite adds a level to this mystery that many others lack: a glimpse into a world rarely seen by whites.

The full review is here.

Review: The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso. Says Leach:

Sarah Manguso is a poet, and if the beautiful, terse sentences in The Two Kinds of Decay are any indication, she is a fine one. In this short, sharp memoir, Manguso describes the head cold she caught in February 1995. She was 21 years old, in college, second soprano in a choir scheduled to perform Gregorio Allegri’s “Miserere” on March 5, 1995. She managed to keep her cold in check until after the concert, where the choirmaster praised her work. She went home for spring break and began a nightmare of illness that would last for next nine years.

Sarah Manguso has chronic idiopathic demyelinating poliradiculoneuropathy. In layman’s terms, this means her immune system secretes antibodies, which travel to the peripheral neurons, eat away the protective sheath covering the nerve cells -- myelin -- then eat the cells, which sometimes recover, sometimes not. Symptoms include numbness and tingling in the extremities, paralysis, and the inability to breathe.

The full review is here.

Review: Comfort: A Journey Through Grief by Ann Hood

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Comfort: A Journey Through Grief by Ann Hood. Says Leach:

In a world overrun with memoirs, parsing the good from the overwrought, the treacly, or even the completely faked can be nearly impossible. One need only look at the Frey hoopla (surely I wasn’t the only person, way back when, who questioned his claims of Novocain-free dental work?) to know that a genre capable of giving readers so much has taken some dents lately. The garbage, replete with talk show spots and new age affirmations, rises right to the top, while the finer works -- raw, honest, refusing ersatz comforts -- fall from sight, read by only a sleuthing few. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking transcended all that, but then again, she’s Didion.

Enough soapbox. Ann Hood’s Comfort is about the death of her five-year-old daughter, Grace, who contracted a full-body strep infection that killed her in three days. Comfort was excerpted in a book I reviewed a few months ago, Nell Casey’s An Uncertain Inheritance. At the time I wrote:

You have Ann Hood writing about the Strep infection that carried off her daughter Grace in three days. Grace was five. I have no idea where Hood found the strength to write this essay. Be sure you’re at home when you read this one. And make that drink a double.

Indeed, do read this at home -- at 188 pages, it is an evening or two’s reading -- have that drink nearby (Hood drank single malt whiskey, a fine choice), and keep the tissues handy.

The full review is here.

Review: While They Slept by Kathryn Harrison

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, Diane Leach reviews While They Slept by Kathryn Harrison. Says Leach:

Kathryn Harrison has spent her writing life parsing her difficult childhood. Born to unmarried teenage parents in 1962, the infant Kathryn was “ransomed,” as her mother put it, to her maternal grandparents. Her father was banished. Her mother, openly relieved at recovering her youthful freedom, moved into an apartment and spent little time with her daughter. What time she did spend was fractious, critical and unkind. The appearance of Harrison’s father, when the author was 20, seemed a dream come true: the man adored her. In fact, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. The ensuing incestuous relationship shattered Harrison’s already fragile sense of self. Years later, she documented the episode in her infamous memoir, The Kiss.

The Kiss was followed by the essay collection Seeking Rapture and the wrenching The Mother Knot. In each, Harrison uses her elegant prose style like a scalpel, prising apart the layers of damage in an effort -- seemingly largely successful -- to heal herself. Now happily married to writer Colin Harrison and a devoted mother of three, Harrison has not outrun her demons as much as recognized their destructive capabilities, arming herself for their periodic onslaughts. Yet she retains a grim fascination with dysfunction, murder, trauma. How do people survive? Or not? It is this overarching interest that leads her to the Gilley family.

The full review is here.

Review: Around the World in 80 Dinners by Cheryl and Bill Jamison

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, Diane Leach reviews Around the World in 80 Dinners by Cheryl and Bill Jamison. Says Leach:

Cheryl and Bill Jamison are best known for their numerous cookbooks, many focused on grilling and outdoor cookery. As an urban dweller lacking a barbeque, I’d never read much of their work, and looked forward to their travelogue, a jaunt from Bali to Brazil celebrating their 20th anniversary.

I was sorely disappointed. What could be an informative, amusing journey though oft-neglected spots -- been to New Caledonia lately? -- is instead a slog through miserably bad writing interspersed with flat attempts at humor and a more than few trumpetings of the Jamison horn.

The full review is here.

Review: Out of the Frying Pan by Gillian Clark

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, Diane Leach reviews Out of the Frying Pan by Gillian Clark. Says Leach:

Clark, chef/owner of Washington D.C.’s Colorado Kitchen, had an immensely interesting book in her. Unfortunately for us, she didn’t write it, opting instead for a candy-floss memoir comparing the challenges of single parenthood to the brutalities of professional cooking.

Don’t get me wrong. Clark is a highly intelligent, educated woman who left a career in marketing to pursue her love of cooking, putting herself through culinary school in her early 30s. Anybody with the guts to do that deserves kudos. When that somebody has two small daughters and a hard-drinking husband soon off the scene, more power to her. But instead of digging deeply into the experience of being a female chef -- challenge enough in the masculine world of professional cooking -- she focuses on what readers of cookery memoirs will recognize as the usual suspects: shady investors, drug-addled cooks, sous chefs who honed their knife skills in prison.

The full review is here.

Review: Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff. Says Leach:

Reading Our Story Begins was often painful, reminding me as it did Wolff’s fellow travelers, Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus, those masters of domestic disaster. Our Story was especially reminiscent of Carver, who mined a similar geographic landscape and counted Wolff as a friend. Not to say that Wolff copies either man; rather, that the three make their business the pain and bewilderment arising between ordinary people, often families. Wolff’s people, like Dubus’ and Carver’s, lead largely unhappy lives of struggle and fear. Some are strapped for cash, while others are plain in over their heads. The stories investigate what they hide in life’s interstices, and what happens when things snap.

The full review is here.

Review: The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu. Says Leach:

The Corpse Walker is comprised of 27 stories of Chinese life told by those living “on the bottom rung.” The notion of a “bottom rung” is anathema to Communist Chinese, who insist everyone lives prosperously thanks to the Party. Liao, who collected these tales orally over several years, demonstrates this is far from the case. We hear from 27 people, including a professional mourner, a human trafficker, a public restroom attendant, a composer, a teacher and a retired party official. Their stories are a near-identical recitation of horrors: starvation, arrests, beatings, denunciations by neighbors, friends, and relatives at the endless “speak bitterness” meetings held by party officials. We hear about the famine that left people killing their youngest daughters and eating them, correctly observing that the children would have starved anyway. We hear from the mortuary worker who prepared many bodies for cremation, bodies missing chunks of flesh consumed by villagers so crazed with hunger they were willing eat of deceased neighbors. We hear from the retired party official, who witnessed peasants eating white clay, falling ill, and ingesting tung oil as a curative. We read of wholesale destruction of temples and ancient religious statuary.

Liao intends to inform as well as sicken us. He succeeds, but at a cost, for the book ultimately collapses beneath the weight of its message.

The full review is here.

Review: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach looks at Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. Says Leach:

And Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is the literary equivalent of Château d’Yquem. For those of us worrying as the greats age -- Atwood, Oates, Roth -- wondering who might fill the gap, Lahiri is cause for hope. She gives strength to those of us quietly waiting for the pomo moment, with its eponymously named characters, drawings, and blank pages, to pass, for she need not resort to their trickery. Hers are perfectly placed words lining themselves into elegant sentences whose subject matter: family, mothers and daughters, assimilation, alcoholism, children, marital love -- touch us all.

Lahiri’s Bengali heritage informs her work, communicating worlds through the smallest of details. Saris fight slacks, a mother’s accumulated gold, intended for a future daughter-in-law, is lost to that most American of addictions, alcoholism. Food is a lush battleground of dals, rice, chocoris, bitter melon and Darjeeling tea. The drinking of tea or coffee represents more than taste; one is tradition; the other, cultural abandonment.

The full review is here.

Review: You Must Be This Happy to Enter by Elizabeth Crane

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews You Must Be This Happy to Enter by Elizabeth Crane. Says Leach:

I had a mixed reaction to this book. Few writers today are offering stories with titles like “Sally (Featuring: Lollipop the Rainbow Unicorn)” or admitting, in the press materials enclosed with the book, that she wanted to focus on happiness, which, as literary topics go, is not too cool.

Crane’s characters, to borrow Emily Dickinson’s term, are slant. Really, really slant. Take “Betty the Zombie,” a woman bitten by a zombie in a Minnesota Fabrics store. Betty’s zombiedom leads her to begin eating the neighbor’s pets, and in one case, a small child. In an effort to break this disconcerting habit (and not gobble husband Ed), Betty agrees to participate in a reality television show housing troubled women who work intensively with life coaches. Despite her disintegrating body and garbled zombie speech, Betty discovers her inner crafter, works through her zombie issues, and gets her very own reality telelvision show.

The full review is here.

Review: The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro. Says Leach:

I’ve always envied people like Alice Munro, who can trace their lineages, who know their family names -- Laidlaw, in this case. By reading Church histories, Munro found ancestors dating back to 1799. Possessed of a whitewashed Jewish name, an Ellis Island name, I can only go back to 1899, when my mother’s grandparents emigrated from Romania to Montreal. The rest -- names, birthplaces, the fate of those left behind -- is forever unknown.

Not so Munro’s family, who emigrated to Canada. A splinter group settled in America, specifically Joliet, Illinois, but only briefly. Few records remain.

So Munro took history and mingled it with imagination, fleshing out her ancestry, peopling the book with oft-told family stories. She is likely the only one who could parse truth from fiction, but that’s fine. More important is how good these stories are, how they evoke the pioneer life of Canadians, which is neatly excised from all American histories of colonialization and immigration.

The full review is here.

Review: Good Food Tastes Good by Carol Hart

Today, in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Good Food Tastes Good by Carol Hart. Says Leach:

Where the self-help market was once awash in love books -- how to fall in, how to fall out, how to survive or thrive, we are now deluged with treatises dwelling on another unavoidable human pastime: eating. The average reader cannot walk into a bookshop, open a paper, or log online without falling over the latest gastronomic advice. Eat organic. Eat local. Eat low-fat. No butter! Margarine is poisonous! Eat carbs. Avoid carbs. No sugar! No red meat! Eat more leafy greens, except the bagged ones contaminated by e.coli. Eat more fish, but memorize your Monterey Bay Aquarium do’s and don’ts card, lest you buy fish nearing extinction, high in mercury, or otherwise toxic.

No question about it: food is a fraught issue.

Science writer Carol Hart enters the fray with Good Food Tastes Good. She contends that Americans are conditioned to ignore fresh, tasty foods in favor of boxed, canned, ultraprocessed products manufactured by a handful of megacorporations. The evil media has drilled into us that fresh foods like spinach or peas are just plain yucky, that the fresh ham from your local farmer is bad for you (ham fat!), that life is better if you never cook at all. Off you go to Food Mart, where, ever gullible, you buy wilted, sprayed produce shipped from Chile or February’s pallid greenhouse tomatoes.

The full review is here.

Review: Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff and Final Exam by Pauline Chen

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff and Final Exam by Pauline Chen. Says Leach:

Reading two memoirs about death within two days, whilst bedridden from chronic illness arguably isn’t an effective method for rapid recuperation. The reader may instead extrapolate her readings to her own (momentarily) failing body, or find so much pain, both within and without, unbearable. But Rieff and Chen’s books are such fine contributions, so beautifully, movingly written, that they did what great books do best: they made me forget myself.

Rieff is Susan Sontag’s son. His memoir of her final battle with the cancer is eloquent, elegant and pained. Three years after the death of one of our great intellectuals, her son remains in a state of deep, guilty grief. His is not a year of magical thinking; it is a lifetime ration, and we can only hope writing this book gave him some solace.

While Pauline Chen’s Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality…

… shifts the perspective from family member to doctor. Like Rieff, Chen faces death uneasily, casting about for the right words, the right gestures, the right decisions. But where Rieff is unable to draw meaningful conclusions, Pauline Chen is more fortunate. A surgeon specializing in oncology and liver transplants, her memoir examines the ways the medical profession and its practitioners are taught to manage -- or not -- the lives and deaths of their patients.

The full reviews are here.

Review: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair: An Everyman’s Library Original by Irène Némirovisky

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair: An Everyman’s Library Original by Irène Némirovisky. Says Leach:

These four early works explore the great conundrum of Irene Némirovsky’s work: her apparent disdain -- even revulsion -- for her fellow Jews.

By now the amazing and sad story of her masterwork, Suite Française, and ensuing revival of her work is well known. Sandra Smith has since ably translated those works that eluded English readers: Fire in the Blood (a separate volume), The Ball, Snow in Autumn and The Courilof Affair.

The cumulative impact of these collected works is mixed: Némirovsky’s facility with language and her ability to capture humanity, notably greedy humanity, is well evidenced. So is the bewildering manner in which she wrote of her religious brethren: many are called “little Jews,” given “hooked” or “beaked” noses, and in all cases are presented are unsavory characters ever grasping for more wealth. That said, her prescience is chilling. The subject matter turns on those areas she knew best: those fleeing a war-torn homeland -- in this case, Russia -- the ensuing griefs of assimilation and homesickness in a new land, Anti-Semitism and, ironically enough, bankers specializing in oil. Her themes, now over 70 years old, could not be more timely.

The full review is here.

Review: Slash by Slash with Anthony Bozza

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Slash by Slash with Anthony Bozza. Says Leach:

Initially I was dubious. Many rock biographies (Danny Sugarman’s Wonderland Avenue and Jimmy McDonough’s abysmally written Shakey: the Biography of Neil Young come to mind) suffer from awful writing by those “close” to the band. But co-author Anthony Bozza takes an admirable step back, allowing Slash’s voice, intimate, direct, highly colloquial, to roll right in your ear. What comes through is a largely easygoing, earthy guy. Slash ain’t Hegel, but to borrow a quote from Paul Simon, he can read the writing on the wall.

The full review is here.

Review: An Uncertain Inheritance edited by Nell Casey

Today, in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family edited by Nell Casey. Says Leach:

Editor Nell Casey set herself an unpleasant task: that of collecting war stories, a few from the victims, but most from their parents and children and spouses. In light of the ageing population, giving rise to the expression “sandwich generation,” and an appalling war with an even more appalling number of casualties who will need caregiving for the rest of their lives, this book could not be more timely. That doesn’t make it any easier to read. An Uncertain Inheritance is not the sort of book one gives as a stocking stuffer. Instead, you give it to the friend who is caring for her demented parent. She doesn’t have time to read it now, but she will, someday. The book may not make her feel better -- nothing will -- but it will make her feel less alone. You can feel less alone and not feel better. Trust me on this.

The full review is here.

Review: Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler

Today, in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler. Says Leach:

The adage of making silk purses from sow’s ears has lost its oomph for a generation of foodies raised on Fergus Henderson. Instead we might say a crispy pig ear salad cannot be got from the frozen foods section. So it is with Jenni Ferrari-Adler’s anthology, which borrows both concept and title from the late, great Laurie Colwin’s essay, which you can find in the magnificent Home Cooking. If you haven’t read Home Cooking, or its sequel, More Home Cooking, I suggest you drive to your nearest independent bookseller and purchase both books immediately. Now. This minute.

The full review is here.

Review: Vanilla Bright Like Eminem by Michel Faber

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Vanilla Bright Like Eminem by Michel Faber. Says Leach:

Some years ago my husband and I read Jane Smiley’s Greenlanders, her attempt at Norse Saga. Character after character abruptly died by falling through the ice. It became a joke between us: whatever happened to so and so? He fell through the ice and died.

The characters in Michel Faber’s Vanilla Bright are about to fall through the ice and die. A very few survive their falls, somehow bobbing to the surface, stunned, badly foundering as loved ones stand by, numbly unable to assist.

Faber is rare in that he moves easily across genres, which become, beneath his amazing pen, visitations to places we are hard pressed to name.

The full review is here. January Magazine’s 2002 interview with Faber is here.

Review: The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, January contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones. Says Leach:

Judith Jones hails from another era, one where garlic-fearing bluebloods hired cooks who served fish on Fridays and no upright person consumed French food, a cuisine that, with all those sauces, surely had something to hide. Daughters, after educations at Spence and Barnard, were expected to make good marriages and carry on the family lineage. Jones managed to escape this almost-forgotten mold, moving to Paris after college, where she hung out with an artistic crowd who loved foods that gave her mother fits: oysters (which, young Jones assures writes her parents, “had no ill effects”), entrecote, chicken liver pate, and the unpasteurized cheeses still widely feared on North American shores.

The full review is here.

Review: Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky. Says Leach:

Returning, momentarily to transplanting oneself -- as Joyce did for Dublin, Hemingway for Michigan, and later, Paris. Némirovsky did not -- could not transplant herself. The author was Jewish, and instead, with merciless acuity, documented the shrinking world around her. With Hitler’s troops drawing near Paris, Némirovsky and her family fled to Issey-l’Evêque, where she wrote the stunning Suite Française and possibly reworked drafts of Fire in the Blood. In 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. She was 39 years old. Her husband Michel was also killed. Their daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, were passed hand to hand, hiding until the war’s end. For their entire lives -- Denise is now elderly, Elisabeth deceased -- Némirovsky’s daughters carried their mother’s unopened suitcase, assuming it contained diaries. Finally the women decided to donate their mother’s papers. Denise began typing the handwritten papers therein, finding the handwritten Suite Française and bits of Fire in the Blood. Suite Française was published to deserved acclaim in 2006. After some searching, Fire in the Blood, which Némirovsky had distributed in bits to various friends for safekeeping, was pieced together and now appears in English, beautifully translated by Sandra Smith.

The full review is here.

Review: Crescent City Cooking by Susan Spicer

Today, in January Magazine’s cookbook section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Crescent City Cooking by Susan Spicer. Says Leach:

Susan Spicer is proprietor of New Orleans restaurants Bayona and Herbsaint. With her long-awaited cookbook, I was hoping for a taste of a now lost New Orleans. I opened Crescent City with a mixture of sadness and anticipation. What was still there? What had been lost?

The full review is here.

Review: Run by Ann Patchett

Contributing editor Diane Leach spends some time with Ann Patchett’s latest work of fiction, Run. Says Leach:

It is testimony to her talent that Patchett can take what often feels like an unwieldy or unworkable plot and render it seamless. Both Magician and Bel Canto wind lovely, aching stories about the possibilities of love and its ability to transcend conventional boundaries. Taft is weaker, but never for a moment does protagonist John Nickel forget the limitations imposed by race.

The full review is here.

Review: At Large and at Small by Anne Fadiman

Today, in January Magazine’s art & culture section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews At Large and at Small by Anne Fadiman. Says Leach:

Certain women, myself amongst them, fall for a certain kind of man: irresponsible, plain of face, depressed, tending toward drug and/or alcohol addiction. All too often these types are charismatic and given to poetry. Thus Fadiman’s passion for Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lamb, who cared for his sister Mary after she fatally stabbed their mother, penned many an essay while toiling in positively Dickensian conditions at the East India House, where he (poorly) tallied figures. Like his sister, he battled insanity, though somewhat more successfully.

The full review is here.

Review: The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. Leach says:

What kept me going were Dillard’s sentences. She is -- or was -- one of the best in the business. Dillard’s prose is breathtaking; her metaphors, to borrow from her lexicon, enough to knock you out. The sea is “a monster with a lace hem.” Pete’s “fondness for humans did not extend to girls, who were less interesting than frogs, and noisier.” Lou “opened her days like a piñata.

The full review is here.

Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, Diane Leach reviews Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. Says Leach:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle chronicles the Kingsolver-Hopp family's resolution to step off the petroleum grid for one year, eating only local, sustainably produced meats, fruits, and vegetables either from or near their Kentucky farm.

The journey begins literally, with the family -- biologist Steven L. Hopp, Barbara, 19-year-old Camille, and nine-year old Lily -- packing up their Tucson home and reverse migrating to Hopp's land. There the family cultivates vegetables and fruits, culls morels from a back field, and tends the asparagus patch. Lily raises chickens, displaying astonishing business acumen and a sure hand at her egg-selling enterprise. Bread and cheese making follow; amazingly, Kingsolver manages to breed turkeys.

The full review is here.

Review: Heat by Bill Buford

Today, in January Magazine’s cookbook section (though it could have just as easily slotted into biography), Diane Leach looks at Heat by Bill Buford. Says Leach:

I learned many things from Bill Buford’s Heat. The first is that I could never cook professionally. The second is how to prepare polenta correctly. But let us begin with the first. Bill Buford arguably already led a life many would find enviable. Having started Granta magazine in the UK, he came to the United States and began working at The New Yorker, where he held the powerful post of fiction editor. But like many of us approaching middle age, he found himself longing to do something else. In his case, this something else was cooking for Mario Batali, he of Iron Chef, Molto Mario and a few dozen famous restaurants.

You can read Leach’s review here.

Review: Julia Child by Laura Shapiro

Today, in January Magazine’s biography section, Diane Leach reviews Penguin Lives: Julia Child by Laura Shapiro. Says Leach:

Almost all foodies know some of the story ... Child’s love affair with French food, and by extension, French life. Her training at Cordon Bleu, her pivotal friendships with Louise Bertholle and Simone Beck (Simca), relationships culminating in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volumes that rescued American foodways from a wasteland of frozen stringbean casseroles.

The full review is here.

Review: Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach reviews the first English translation of Anna Gavalda’s Hunting and Gathering. Says Leach:

Perhaps I am too much of a cynic; perhaps my tastes are too dark. But Gavalda is a fine writer whose earlier work plumbed the depths of quiet desperation (not necessarily just the English way). But not here. Hunting ends in grand style, leaving writers like Frances Mayes and Diane Johnson in plumes of garbure-scented dust. Love, an inheritance, passionate sex, babies, a chic gastropub, a house in the country: check each box, for all apply.

The full review is here.