Publicists regularly ask me to read and review books. I rarely bite. When I do, I typically gobble it up. That’s how I consumed Ronald Gruner’s Covid Wars, America’s Struggle Over Public Health and Personal Freedom. It’s a page turner, with helpful graphics.
It’s been five years since the first days of the pandemic, and it’s time to review what went well (President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed) and what went poorly (misinformation and mistrust). I’d argue that we’re all suffering a kind of PTSD from the shock of lockdowns, the deaths of 1.2 million Americans, its toll on doctors and nurses, its lingering presence.
This is an important read that never bogs down. Gruner writes with ease and authority. This is 265 pages of American history.
Manhattan in the late ’70’s? Of course I’ll read a book set during that time, because I was there, as a student. The city was different. Less sparkly. More affordable.
Adam Ross’s Playworld, is a novel of that time, told by 14-year-old Griffin Hurt.
The child of a former ballerina and a voice-over actor, Griffin is a television and film star. Even so, he still has to go to school (private, which he pays for), share a room with his brother, join the wrestling team, and pine for same-age girls.
Gumming this sweetness is his sexual abuse by the wrestling coach in the (sorry) bowels of the school, and an “affair” with a married woman who’s friends with Griffin’s parents. Their trysts, in the backseat of her silver Mercedes sedan, are believable for the time. It’s as though everyone’s parents checked out during the ’70’s.
This is a 500-page novel. I loved the all of it.
For a Columbia University book club, we read Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. (We choose a country or region then pick representative fiction, classic, and non-fiction.) For India, this was the non-fiction.
Boo is a Western journalist married to an Indian. Her work has always focused on poverty, and the ways out of it. In this, she tasks herself with telling the story of the people of Annawadi, a settlement beside the luxury hotels that serve Mumbai airport. (Its title comes from a colorful billboard that borders the slum.)The book begins with the immolation of a one-legged woman, who accuses neighbors of the crime. Prison, everyday theft and corruption, young suicides, a water tap that runs dry. Education and entry-level jobs at the hotels are a way out. But the ones who thrive know or learn how to rig the system.
This is an unforgettable read. At our book club, we talked about journalist and subject: what do the slum dwellers get out of telling Boo their stories? Is there hope?
My friend Suzanne, just back from Austria, pressed this on me. The World of Yesterday is Stefan Zweig’s memoir of Vienna from the turn of the century to the early days of World War II. Zweig was poet, dramatist, journalist, translator. Vienna was a place of beauty, industry, intellectualism, operas, coffee houses. (This book inspired Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel.)
Between the wars, Europe was the author’s playground: he and other artists moved easily between Vienna, Paris, and London. Zweig is something of a Zelig, spending time with James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and others.
I was most touched by Zweig’s status during World War II. “The fall of Austria brought a change in my private life…I lost my Austrian passport and had to apply to the British authorities for a white substitute document, a passport for a stateless person…I had to ask for the favour of receiving this English document issued to me as an alien, and it was a favour that could be withdrawn at any time….Yesterday I had still been a foreign guest with something of the status of gentleman, spending his internationally earned money here and paying his taxes, but now I was an emigrant, a refugee.”
Zweig and his wife committed suicide in February, 1942.