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By Sean Clark, on May 21st, 2012 Author: Jenny Lawson
2012, Putnam
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir, Humor
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
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Jenny Lawson is an insane person. It’s a wonder her husband hasn’t drowned himself. Of course, when you’re talking about a memoir by someone who has zero historical impact on the world, insane is good, because insane is entertaining.
Here’s the plot of Lawson’s book: she grew up, went to college, got married, had a kid. She and her husband both work from home in Texas. And occasionally she’ll do weird things like buy a giant metal rooster welded together from oil drums. She’s got a thing for taxidermy (note the dead rat Hamlet on the cover). There aren’t any lessons to be learned from her, or deep insight to be gleaned. Luckily, she is very funny. Lines that seem to come out of left field are plentiful, like this:
I just bought a fifty-year-old Cuban alligator dressed as a pirate.
…
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By Sean Clark, on April 23rd, 2012 Author: Dirk Hayhurst
2012, C Hardcover
Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Dirk Hayhurst’s previous outing, The Bullpen Gospels, was a success largely due to its ability to relate a deeper life story through the framework of a minor league baseball season. The book was not without its flaws; namely, it didn’t have much of a narrative arc. Still its effortless humor and sentimentality made for a charming memoir that was one of my favorites of last year.
Out of My League, a direct followup, addresses the shortcomings of its predecessor, but falls a little short of recapturing what worked so well before. It’s a very good book, just one that suffers from trying a little too hard.
…
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 8th, 2012 [This heartbreaking portrait of an Indian slum is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Katherine Boo
2012, Random House
Filed under: Nonfiction
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
In the forty-odd years since New Journalism broke down the walls between reporter and subject, the first-person voice has become a plague in the world of nonfiction.
In certain situations, stories can benefits from reporters’ active involvement—like, say, if the reporter is Hunter S. Thompson and whatever he’s doing is more interesting than whatever he’s supposed to be covering.
But usually, these days, the word “I” points to some weakness or flaw in the writing: a lack of solid material, or a lack of effort on the part of the writer. By explaining how he came to find certain subjects, he can gloss over whether or not those subjects are crucial—or even important—to the story at hand.
For example, in a recent issue of the New Yorker, a piece about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker included mini-profiles of two signature-gatherers for the petition to recall Walker. The writer, William Finnegan, finds his first signature-gatherer, Joanne Staudacher, seemingly at random, and then latches onto another one through her. Finnegan writes:
Staudacher said that her hero was another Oshkosh circulator, known as Fighting Bob. I asked to meet him. Staudacher contacted him, and Bob—Bob Bergman—and I rendezvoused in downtown Oshkosh. Indoors.
This paragraph is mostly fluff, but it uses the writer’s personal experience as connective tissue between the two circulators. Why did Staudacher call Bob her hero? How had they met? Are either of these people central in any way to the signature-gathering? Are they average gatherers or did everyone else have a different experience?
The sentences describing how Finnegan moved from Staudacher to Bob obscure a lot of those points, and they make it feel like Finnegan talked to precisely two gatherers. But there are worse ways this technique, in the wrong hands, impacts journalism. From the next paragraph in the same article:
[Bob] had collected, he told me, eight hundred and thirteen signatures to recall Walker …
By sliding in that “he told me” Finnegan distances himself from the facts of the situation and from having to, like, count signatures. He also makes that statistic entirely worthless as a piece of reportage. That “he told me” translates to “I didn’t confirm.” It’s accepted laziness, and it’s become pervasive in today’s journalistic landscape.
So it’s refreshing and engaging to read a nonfiction book from which the author has absented herself entirely, leaving only hard-won facts to take her place.
…
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By Marc Velasquez, on October 28th, 2011  Author: Jerry West
2011, Little, Brown and Co.
Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
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As a player, Jerry West won an Olympic gold medal and an NBA championship.He scored more points than any Laker not named Kobe Bryant ever has, and is in the Basketball Hall of Fame. As an executive, he put together the “Showtime” Lakers of the 80s, traded for Shaq and Kobe in the 90s, and turned the lowly Memphis Grizzlies into a playoff team in the 00s. He has been immortalized as a bronze statue in both Morgantown, WV (where he played in college) and Los Angeles. His silhouette became the NBA logo.
Despite this long, illustrious, and successful career, West is so emotionally crippled by loss that his autobiography, West by West, reads as if Glass Joe wrote it. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on October 20th, 2011  Author: John Paul Stevens
2011, Little, Brown and Co.
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
| Informative... |
9 |
In case you hadn’t heard, it’s Supreme Court Season again, which means our nation’s top judges are now hearing cases that will affect your life. Holding top billing, we have The State of Florida (and 26 other co-signing states) v. the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will test the constitutionality of last year’s controversial healthcare overhaul. But this is only one case of many, and, as Atlantic legal correspondent Garrett Epps points out, the majority of the cases the court will hear this session “have huge practical impact but are devoid of drama.”
You might say the same thing about Five Chiefs. Without an ounce of sensationalism or any inflammatory rhetoric, it offers an insider’s perspective on the deliberative processes of our nation’s foremost deliberating body. Stevens presents a historical survey of the Court under each of its seventeen Chief Justices, focusing on the five who sat during the years he was personally associated with the Court, from his clerkship in 1947 until his resignation in 2010.
It’s an eye-opening look at how the Court actually works, from the influence of the Chief’s management style to the long-standing traditions meant to foster cordiality between people who are paid to argue with each other. Five Chiefs won’t keep you up at night, but it will make you think about how we decide some of the most important questions facing the country today… so maybe it will keep a you up at night. …
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By Sean Clark, on October 3rd, 2011 
Author Jeff Ryan
2011, Portfolio/Penguin
Filed Under: Nonfiction.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
| Fanboyism... |
9 |
Ninetendo’s Super Mario character is easily the most iconic video game character ever created. Mario games were and are still to some extent so popular that you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s never heard of them.
Nintendo has a talent for that kind of ubiquity (cf. the Wii’s popularity with senior citizens), and on Mario’s shoulders the original Nintendo Entertainment System made “Nintendo” synonymous with “videogame” for a decade or more. Unless you were one of those kids with a Sega (sorry), your house was probably as likely to have an NES as a VCR. If it didn’t, you certainly had friends who had one.
Someone gave my grandfather an NES when I was 4 or 5. It had Super Mario Bros. (like lots of other adults he pronounced it Mare-E-Oh which drove me nuts), the combo pack with Duck Hunt and Track Meet (remember that weird PowerPad?). I was soon obsessed. More than two decades later, Nintendo games still have a significant claim on my leisure time staked out. I likely play more video games than most people my age–but that’s hard to guess, because in the past few years the rise of geek chic has made videogames socially acceptable.
So essentially, this book is a history of a toy company that’s been siphoning my money for almost 30 years and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come. It makes for an interesting story primarily because (and I’m admitting a weakness here) of how hard it is for Nintendo to do wrong by loyalists like me (I have a Virtual Boy in my closet). It’s a curious success they have, one I’m sure other companies wish they could achieve. I certainly don’t have the same rabid devotion to Random House. …
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By Sean Clark, on September 20th, 2011 Author: Zecharia Sitchin
2004, Bear & Company
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Historical, Sci-Fi.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
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Not that I buy into them, but pseudo-documentaries like the kind often played on The History Channel are a guilty pleasure of mine. Sitchin’s books (there are many) were mentioned in one I’ve been watching recently called “Ancient Aliens.” That show’s title pretty much sums up Sitchin’s thesis: aliens used to live on earth, and live amongst humans as gods.
Sitchin’s clearly a smart guy. He reads multiple languages (including Sumerian), and has spent a lot of time studying ancient artifacts. His basic supposition is that if Homer’s Troy (long thought by scholars to be a mythical place, until its excavation around the turn of the 20th century) can transcend myth, there’s no reason to outright discredit the rest of his rendition as untrue just because we don’t believe it. Hence there were really gods and demigods involved in the politics of men. …
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By Sean Clark, on July 29th, 2011 Author: Jess Martin
2011
Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Short-run
Get a copy from Harvard Book Store
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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A self-published memoir by a twenty-something detailing that horrible, floaty time between college graduation and embarking on some sort of path into adulthood? You can’t get much lower on the list of books I’d expect to like. Despite that, when Jess Martin released her book through the Harvard Bookstore (where we run the paperback versions of our own literary ventures), I supported a local artist* and read it all the same. I’m really glad that I did. It is, by any measure, a very good read.
The plot, much like the point in her life Martin relates, appears pretty directionless at first. She writes about finishing college and returning home to her parents, where she intended to collect herself before stepping out into the real world. But she finds herself stymied and winds up napping on the couch and emailing the occasional resume.
As the book goes on, Open-Eyed Sneeze reveals a lot of gears turning: it’s at once wacky family drama, a coming of age from a second childhood, and a microcosmic metaphor, all speaking to a generation of talented young adults for whom college degrees are inflated and the job market is deflated. …
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By Aaron Block, on July 20th, 2011 [This comic book history/treatise/memoir is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
 Author: Grant Morrison
2011, Spiegel & Grau
Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Graphic Novel
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
In Supergods, a nonfiction exploration of superheroes as a fictive phenomenon, comic book writer and artist Grant Morrison argues that Superman is humanity’s greatest accomplishment. From anyone else that might be considered a cynical statement; of all the scientific and artistic achievements, across centuries, nothing scores higher than a gaudily costumed, flying strongman born in a medium that’s not even 100 years old?
But Morrison is absolutely sincere—he contends that superhero comics are not just entertainment for children and fodder for blockbuster movie adaptations, but windows into a separate reality populated by gods that fight intensely pitched battles for good, of which Superman is the best and brightest.
Morrison’s is a delightfully optimistic premise, doubly refreshing when considered next to the daily articles and blog posts about the imminent death of the comic book industry. Those writers worry (rightfully so) about relevance, demographics, and market share, while Morrison knows that the stakes are actually much higher. How appropriate that a book about the history and potential of superheroes aims to save the world. …
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By Aaron Block, on July 15th, 2011 Author: Susan Whitall
2011, Titan
Filed Under: Biography, Nonfiction.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
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Towards the end of Fever, author Susan Whitall describes a public feud in the late 60s between soul singer Joe Tex and James Brown regarding Brown’s sobriquet, “Soul Brother No. 1.” Tex argued that title really belonged to Little Willie John, who at the time was serving a sentence for second-degree murder, and openly campaigned against Brown’s using it. Obviously Tex lost, and Brown tossed the phrase atop a pile of bragadacio that also includes “Godfather of Soul,” “Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” and “Mr. Dynamite.”
Fever is a more detailed and nuanced extension of that argument. Whitall, who evidently worked closely with the John family, especially Willie’s sons Kevin and Keith, mounts a campaign to install John in the soul music pantheon, alongside acknowledged greats Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and James Brown. He certainly deserves renewed attention—while the other three are staples of oldies radio formats, Willie John’s voice has long been relegated to a kind of cult status, the stuff of record collectors, critics, and nostalgics. The oversight is unaccountable, given how exciting and advanced John’s records are, and how many singers and musicians cite him as a formative influence. …
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