NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Andrea Roach

I am reading Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, a memoir about generations of family and place (New Orleans, pre & post-Katrina, and their family homes). One of the things that I like about this book is the artful way the author brings the reader into what could be an extremely confusing story, with so many characters and the landscape of New Orleans, by initially laying it out like a map: this is where my neighborhood and my house fit into the history of NOLA, and here’s a blueprint of my relatives leading to me. She refers to Katrina as The Water and so, like the Yellow House, makes it its own complicated character. It’s a multilayered achievement that connects history, politics, race, culture, disaster, and identity, while also telling the ways in which we become our homes and our homes become us. I’d recommend!

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. Grove Press, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Andrea Roach is a writer of memoir, essays, and creative nonfiction. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and was a finalist for The Writer’s Room of Boston Fellowship Award.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Kelsey Owen

Lately, I’ve been finding solace in rereading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Written to be read like a novel, Eggers’s genre-splicing memoir follows him through becoming a parent by proxy to his eight-year-old brother after the sudden losses of both parents.

What’s so enduring about this book is how, on the surface, Eggers embodies the pessimism and acid-reflux-irony of postmodernism, but he swiftly and frequently undercuts his own nihilism by exalting the constructive power of familial bonds and solidarity between characters—or, real people. Character-ish people. The narrative style itself draws on the ironic, self-aggrandizing voices of writers like David Foster Wallace, sharing the same undercurrent of desire to locate and create meaning in the seemingly vapid and obscene.

Eggers’s competing aspirations to distinguish himself from others and assimilate into something greater than himself makes his journey both intense and darkly humorous, but Eggers’s often last-minute refusals to abandon the silver-lining, his enduring sentimentality amid existential and physical destitution, never fail to lead you back out into the sun.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Vintage, February 2001.

Reviewer bio: Kelsey Owen is an editorial assistant at Under the Gum Tree.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Evan White

I’ve been reading the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. What I like about the book is this: the story of a young, gay black man growing up in the south could go any number of expectedly tragic ways. And in the hands of a lesser writer, a story like Jones’s might have fallen prey to the unrelenting misery that is so often a substitute for poignancy. As it stands, however, How We Fight for Our Lives clips along without stopping to cry, and it’s this clear-eyed observation—this cataloguing of experience, and, by implication, the self—that makes Jones’s story by turns shocking, elegiac, and revelatory. Plus, he’s funny.

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. Simon & Schuster, October 2019.

Reviewer bio: Evan White is a graduate of the University of California, Davis. White co-founded Absurd Publications and published the anthology, All the Vegetarians in Texas Have Been Shot, in addition to the creative journal The Oddity.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Katie Anderson

The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary is a beautifully written series of letters about the evolution of humankind published in 1793. Karl von Eckartshausen describes the “mystery of the New Man” as the synthesis of an alchemical union between man and spirit, or man and God. This transformative art he explains must occur as the mystery teachings from ancient Greece, through a series of stages. This formula espouses an evolution of knowing thyself outwardly, then inwardly.

Eckartshausen illustrates the formula for the transformative art as one that confers wisdom at successive levels, but not as an undertaking belonging to an elite group. He had envisioned it as a spiritual pursuit that the whole of humankind would enter, not a secret practice known only to men in the lodges and salons of the eighteenth century. Eckartshausen uses biblical symbolism and allegory to express the philosophy of an esoteric spiritual counsel 55 years before the advent of Spiritualism and 102 years before Theosophy. This “interior community of light” in union with humankind, produces the illuminated community. Two archetypes embody the exoteric and the esoteric, the Priest and the Prophet, whose union produces the archetype of the illuminated man.

People are looking towards traditional and alternative forms of spirituality to find inner peace of mind. This is in response to the constraints of shelter orders and social distancing measures in place to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. Quarantine has stripped away human social interaction, but it also has dissolved our illusions. We’re no longer comfortably numb. When there isn’t anyone to talk to, we listen to the silence and talk to ourselves. What might we learn in the interim?

The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckartshausen, edited by Isabel de Steiger. William Rider & Son, Ltd, 1909.

Reviewer bio: Katie Anderson is a historian and writer living in Troy, Missouri.  Her work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer and The Far Shining One.

Guest Post by Leland Davidson

As COVID-19 has ravaged this world effecting many emotionally and physically, the emotions of how governments are handling are telling as well. Two books show a serendipitous attitude we are dealing with today as a society, while also showing history repeating itself.

One of these is The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, which gives a in depth story and research on Ebola. The book is based around different stories detailing where it came from, how it spread, and close call to a pandemic that almost ravaged the United States. What makes this book so chilling are the stories that took place in the 1980s and 90s in the continent of Africa and United States, but are detailed examples of what we are seeing today. These stories range from the beginning of the disease’s origins showing how messing with nature can cause a pandemic, or how nonuse of safety measures will help spread the disease. This book is a chilling narrative of how history, disease, and panic is not new, which should be a lesson for all.

Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker details the history of blood transfusion in England and France in the 1600s, going into detail of its history and the people involved in its transformation. Showing medical science experiments of the time may seem crazy today, but it is still relevant in modern thinking. With current news stories of people selling snake oils or ways to cure COVID-19, we see similarities in the core belief of the time that blood from a cow transfused with a sheep will make a monster. The book shows how scientific, political, and religious clashes of the 1600s mimic today’s clashes. Tucker details the narrative that stopping science and medical experiments will not only stop breakthroughs but keep humans in the dark instead of forward thinking to a better life.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Penguin Random House, June 1999.
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker. W. W. Norton & Company, May 2012.

Reviewer bio: Leland Davidson, a native of East Tennessee, holds an M.A. in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence from Heller School at Brandeis University, 2020.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Richie Swanson

Ever dreamt of saving turtles squashed on highways? Of creating clean water and carbon sequestration? Of undoing the havoc humanity has wrought upon nature? Then read Wading Right In. It interprets crucial science for the layman and sometimes reads like a novel, depicting wetland-loving characters irrepressibly driven to protect nature. Some wetland lovers save and incubate eggs from road-killed diamondback turtles and release hatchlings into the wild. Another knocks on doors with a rare spadefoot toad in hand and convinces a landowner to conserve its habitat. Another invents tidal gates made of olive barrels to restore a city’s impounded (and dying) saltmarshes. Others restore an eroding island, unloading 500 barges of sand and gravel by hand, growing their own native vegetation and enlisting 350 ninth graders to help plant a shoreline.

The wetland-loving scientists present themselves with humor. One describes sinking into freezing mud in the dark until a professor pulls her out. The book reveals nature’s genius: a fishing spider the size of a human hand has a waxy coating and hairs on legs that allows it to zoom through water as it turns prey five times its weight into “a sushi smoothie.” Wetland plants create their own air pipes and oxygen pumps, and beavers build mud piles and secrete scents that enable other beavers to know their nutritional health and kinship connections.

Authors Ashworth and Koning discuss the science of ecosystem services to assess mitigation, the legal process of compensating wetlands loss in one place by creating wetlands in another. The assessment involves water filtration, flood control, carbon storage, shoreline protection and species diversity—not dry details but valuable tools for activists. This book inspired me as much as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson.

Wading Right In: Discovering the Nature of Wetlands by Catherine Owen Koning and Sharon M. Ashworth. The University of Chicago Press, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Richie Swanson’s novel First Territory depicts the Yakama War 1855-56. His short stories about Indian-white relations and bird-related nonfiction are republished from journals at richieswanson.com.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by C.L. Butler

Have you ever read a book and felt that it was actually a call to action? I have been fortunate enough to be able to take refuge in art while social distancing. I’ve read a variety of different books written by authors ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Bram Stoker. One book that stood out to me was Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race. Oluo tells of her personal experiences as not only a Black woman, but also a queer woman, single mother, middle class, biracial feminist. I found this intersectional approach to be a metaphoric glass of ionized water. It’s the refreshing kick in the ass that society needs in order to come to terms with progress.

By adopting a multilayered intersectional lens, Oluo allows the reader to fully explore numerous alternate perspectives beyond their own. Oluo asserts that societal norms and social constructs including, but not limited to, patriarchy, misogyny, and heteronormativity dictate the world around us. In reading the book, I felt that the author had a true understanding that these topics are uncomfortable which provides an authentic vulnerability rather than a purely academic narrative.

Oluo provides a conversational manual for all backgrounds. She also owns her personal privileges throughout the book. Her work challenges skeptics to not only hear, but also feel her point of view. After reading So You Want to Talk About Race my eyes were opened even wider. We all need the dosage of reality that Oluo offers being a queer female of color.

So You Want to Talk About Race is the perfect read and cultural model for a 21st century audience. This book illuminates the aspects of patriarchy running rampant throughout various institutions. I highly recommend to it anyone looking to do more for inclusion.

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Seal Press, January 2018.

Reviewer bio: C.L. Butler is an African American poet, historian, and entrepreneur from Philadelphia based in Houston, TX. In 2017 his poem ‘Laissez Faire’ was published by the University of Houston-Downtown Bayou Review. In 2019 he published academic research with the Journal of International Relations & Diplomacy.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.