Articles

Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES

This readable and gripping account tells the history of diethylstilbestrol (DES), the first synthetic chemical to be marketed as estrogen and one of the first to be identified as a hormone disruptor (a chemical that mimics hormones). The U.S. government failed to regulate it even though researchers knew that it caused cancer and disrupted sexual development. It instead has used scientific uncertainty to delay regulation, and, consequently, these chemicals are everywhere in our bodies and ecosystems. Doctors prescribed it for millions of women, initially for menopause and then for miscarriage, and farmers gave the hormone to cattle to promote rapid weight gain. The residues of DES and other chemicals in our food supply are changing human, livestock, and wildlife ecosystems in frightening ways. The book argues that the FDA must regulate such common synthetic chemicals, extending the discussion to contemporary chemical use like that of BPA (Bisphenol A).

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

From School Library Journal: "In a not-too-distant future, the United States of America has collapsed, weakened by drought, fire, famine, and war, to be replaced by Panem, a country divided into the Capitol and twelve districts. Each year, two young representatives from each district are selected by lottery to participate in the Hunger Games. Part entertainment, part brutal intimidation of the subjugated districts, the televised games are broadcasted throughout Panem as the twenty-four participants are forced to eliminate their competitors, literally, with all citizens required to watch. When sixteen-year-old Katniss's young sister, Prim, is selected as the mining district's female representative, Katniss volunteers to take her place."

Toni Morrison, Home

From PBS: "In her new novel, Home, author Toni Morrison tells the story of a soldier, Frank Money, who joins the Army—absorbing the atrocities of war—and then returns home after his service in the Korean War only to be greeted with both the institutional and casual realities of daily prejudice."

Carolina de Robertis, Perla, and Max Holland, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat

I just read Perla by Carolina de Robertis, and I think it is perfect for summer reading as it weaves intrigue and history into a moving story of love and a search for truth. Set in a Buenos Aires still deeply enmeshed in the aftermath of the dirty wars, where desaparecidos still haunt families, and written in clear evocative prose, Perla stayed in my mind long after I had read the last sentence. If you are not drawn to fiction, then Max Holland’s Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat fits the bill with its incisive and thoroughly researched backstory of the Watergate scandal and its aftermath.

Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and Law in the North American West

This summer I look forward to reading Nayan Shah's new book Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and Law in the North American West. Shah's study focuses on the heterogeneous populations that migrated to the West and the forces—both legal and social—that attempted to contain them. His book makes clear everyday people's ability to combat these structures and in so doing establish new forms of belonging that transcend borders, both physical and metaphorical. Nayan Shah imagines a different kind of past that has the potential to help us envision a more emancipatory future.

Marge Piercy, Sex Wars

One of my favorite historical novels is Sex Wars by Marge Piercy. Piercy (known for her great historical novel on World War II, Gone to Soldiers) researches intensively and captures her characters in memorable ways. Sex Wars focuses on the lives of Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in New York City during the Gilded Age. Though I would never recommend assigning this book to high school students, I regularly recommend it to fellow adults for its superior explanation of the politics of gender and sexuality in the era just after Reconstruction, when Congress denied women rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Do take the "R rating" for adult content seriously: Woodhull and her sister in fact started the first brokerage house owned by women, but they were not tame characters (think "free love") and Piercy has some provocative (and not-based-in-fact) theories about why Comstock pursued the prudish policies he did. Read—and enjoy—at your own risk!

Laura Furman, The Mother Who Stayed: Stories

Laura Furman, former Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Texas at Austin, has produced a stunning new collection, The Mother Who Stayed. The nine-story structure is an obvious fragmentation, but one with embedded patterns: each of the three narrative triptychs has a recurring female character.

First is Rachel, whose stories are imbued with longing since she was a teenager when her mother died. In "The Thief," adult Rachel mentions her mother’s death and then remembers being falsely accused three years after that of stealing a string of pearls. Following an interrogation by the owner's insurance agent, she stood in the apartment building's lobby, watching the agent waiting for the elevator. Rachel recalls: "I waited also, hoping that when the elevator doors parted, someone I loved would emerge, walk straight past Mr. Martino and across the lobby to embrace me. When the elevator came, I turned and left the building, out onto Eighty-Sixth Street and into the rest of my life." A child alone, accused: is there any question about the quality of those subsequent years?

The second trio of stories revolves around a pretty, narcissistic writer, Marian Foster Todd, who is an incarnation of Katherine Anne Porter. The stories are not only intriguing because of their associations with Porter; they interact like a sonata’s thematic variations, building on and reflecting each other. Secrets are revealed, a Texas literary icon is paid tribute, and four female characterizations adeptly reflect the complexity of human fallibility.

The third and final three stories are about Dinah, who was abandoned by her mother as a girl, and in the title story, is a recent widow. Never knowing why her mother left, Dinah longs for a connection to the author of a set of 1874 diaries she's discovered. In interviews, Furman has said that her inspiration was several diaries she found in her own attic. Mother and daughter relationships are an obvious thematic concern in this book. But time is the real subject. Besides the diary entries, there are historical reports, research discoveries, and Dinah, like an archaeologist, uncovering the remains of the diary writer’s house.

Patrick Hamilton, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

Hamilton wrote two plays called Rope and Gaslight, which were filmed by Alfred Hitchcock and George Cukor, respectively. These plays made Hamilton wealthy, but you would never know it from reading his novels. He writes about people clinging at the edge of society, desperate and unlucky people who seem to be slowly losing in a struggle against their own doom. At the same time, these characters are full of life, full of schemes and hopes and deep, complicated emotions. The main characters in Twenty Thousand Streets are named Bob, Jenny, and Ella. Bob is a waiter at a London pub. He is in love with the very pretty Jenny, who is a prostitute. Ella, a plain but witty and sensible girl, is the bartender at the pub and is in love with Bob. Bob dreams of rising in the world and carefully saves his salary for the publications he thinks will help him. Ella wants a home and a family. Jenny wants money the easy way. Out of this very basic, even clichéd situation comes a vivid novel that is full of surprises, of humor, and of suspense as we see how those dreams are either thwarted or, what can be worse, fulfilled.

Stephen King, 11/22/63

Stephen King may not be everyone's idea of a serious writer, but he has produced a serious book. 11/22/63 is a meticulously researched, deeply satisfying novel that focuses less on JFK and more on the story of King's protagonist, thirty-five year-old high school English teacher Jake Epping, who goes back in time to try to prevent Kennedy's assassination. But the past, as Epping comes to realize, is obdurate. King is a master of horror, and a pronounced evil lurks at the heart of 11/22/63. King has infiltrated Lee Harvey Oswald's mind, deftly exposing the ordinariness of the assassin's misanthropy. This "banality of evil," as Hannah Arendt has described it, is precisely what makes Oswald so terrifying. And he's not the only murderous person in the book. One of the unexpected pleasures of King's novel is seeing his genuine warmth for Texas, particularly small-town Texas. The novel doesn’t shy away from the problems of the time, including racism, but King manages to create something that few Northeastern writers have ever managed: an optimistic yet believable portrait of the state.

Nigel Slater, Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch

For all those who cultivate home gardens, have ever dreamed of cultivating a home garden, or just love cooking and eating vegetables, I recommend Tender: A Cook and his Vegetable Patch. British food writer Nigel Slater writes with gentle wonder about tending his London garden and preparing his bounty for the table. Each vegetable entry—from asparagus to zucchini—offers a mix of lush description, gardening advice, cooking tips, and recipes. The color photographs of Slater’s yield—in the garden and on the plate—are luscious. While it is a long way from Slater's wet and cool London plot to my own dry and hot one in Dallas, I turn to this book for information and inspiration in all seasons. It abounds with lessons in the arts of coaxing, waiting, and savoring that are essential for every gardener and cook, accomplished and aspirational alike.

Stephen Prothero, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World

This book provides basic, useful, and enlightening information about the world's prominent and influential religions.

Bryan Burrough, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

Burrough offers an entertaining look at the influence four Texans had on history, culture, the state, and the nation. 

Jordan Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt

In this volume, Schwarz tells about the people who saved capitalism and transformed the United States during the New Deal.

Ignacio M. García, United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party

I would like to recommend the first book that I wrote as a history scholar, United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party. While I know it is presumptuous to recommend one's own book, I do so because recently I had to read it again for a larger work I'm doing, and rediscovered what it is to write with passion. Other works, possibly better, have come out on the topic but mine remains in my own mind the most passionate and the one that best describes the feelings of everyday people that arose during the Chicano Movement in Texas.

Voltaire, Candide; Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; and Graham Greene, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man

I plan to reread some oldies, and here are the four I've chosen for the first three weeks: Voltaire's Candide, Conrad's The Secret Agent, and Greene's The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. The rest of the summer, I'll be reading at two German universities and teaching creative writing (Graz Universität). No idea what I'll find there.

Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes

This is a fascinating and very well-written family memoir in which the author, a world-renowned ceramist in England, traces the history of his forebears, the Ephrussi family, one of Europe's most prominent Jewish banking dynasties in the nineteenth century, from their origins in Odessa in Russia, to Paris and Vienna, where the family fortune is ultimately destroyed by the Nazis following the Anschluss. De Waal is entrusted with a collection of rare Japanese netsuke (miniatures carved in wood or ivory) collected by his great-great uncle in Paris and passed down to his great grandmother in Vienna, which provides a leitmotif for the story. It's a rich retelling of family history with a very keen eye for fine art, objets d'art, and architecture as well as the increasing prejudice against prominent Jews in Austria in the decades before the Nazis’ rise to power.

Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

The Paris Wife, a novel by Paula McLain, stands like a mirror reflection of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, in the same way that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead mirrors Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hadley Richardson narrates her experience as the Paris wife, who stands by unknowingly and then helplessly as her friend Pauline Pfeiffer moves in upon the Hemingway marriage, displacing Hadley and baby Bumby, by cheering on the baser aspects of Hemingway's antagonistic feelings about writers who have helped him along the way. She recreates the harsh life of penniless expatriates in Paris, the holidays in Spain and Switzerland, and the hospitality of Gerald and Sara Murphy, who are savaged as "pilot fish" by Hemingway. This novel is not a payback for Hemingway's abandonment; rather, it is a loving and sorrowful reflection upon his overwhelming admixture of genius and anxiety.

Américo Paredes, Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border

From the University of Texas Press: "In an illustrious career spanning over forty years, Américo Paredes has often set the standard for scholarship and writing in folklore and Chicano studies. . . . Paredes's books are widely known and easily available, but his scholarly articles are not so familiar or accessible. To bring them to a wider readership, [editor] Richard Bauman has selected eleven essays that eloquently represent the range and excellence of Paredes's work."

James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? 

Shapiro is a noted Shakespeare scholar (he also wrote A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599). Professor Shapiro and myself both believe that William Shakespeare wrote his works and not such alternate Shakespeare authorship candidates such as the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and many others. I can also recommend Lapham's Quarterly, a prize-winning quarterly on many subjects.

Robert Caro, Master of the Senate

This is the third volume in Caro’s series on LBJ. It's ironic that I'm recommending this one rather than his new one, but this book provides a rich view of history, government, and human behavior.

James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Prounouns: What Our Words Say About Us

This might be perceived as self-serving, but I found The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us to be quite interesting. Riveting really.

In the summer of 2012, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Book Club has selected two titles that, though written by British authors, are closely tied to the arts of Japan.

Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

An aging artist is caught between two manifestations of Japan: the imperial movement that led his nation into World War II and the devastation of postwar Nagasaki. Ishiguro’s protagonist lives in a culture with strictly defined roles, and tries to reconcile "what is" with "what could be." The psychological repercussions are profound when it comes to actions that cannot be undone and of words spoken that cannot be unspoken. At the MFAH, tours will highlight works in the museum’s Arts of Japan Gallery and the highly anticipated exhibition Unrivalled Splendor: The Kimiko and John Powers Collection of Japanese Art (June 10 through September 23, 2012).

Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes

This is the true story of a collection of 264 netsuke—decorative Japanese toggles—inherited by the author. Originally designed as kimono accessories, these small, beautiful objects were enthusiastically collected in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. Among the most ardent collectors was De Waal’s great-great-grandfather, the scion of a fabulously wealthy banking family and a great patron of the arts. De Waal follows the path of the collection throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the family’s struggles during World War II, when their once-legendary wealth is reduced to a few possessions, including the prized netsuke. At the MFAH, tours will focus on the passion to collect and philanthropy in the arts.

Book discussion guides (in PDF format) that link the books with art at the museum are available for download at www.mfah.org/bookclub. Tours for individual readers or existing book clubs, will run from July through September 30.

Julia Alvarez, A Wedding in Haiti, and Dagoberto Gilb, Before the End, After the Beginning

I have the perfect summer reading sandwich for you. Grab a glass of tea with menta from your garden, settle into your hammock, and start reading. Dagoberto Gilb's exquisite book Before the End, After the Beginning can form the bread; read the first five short stories, then make a wonderful filling with Julia Alvarez's A Wedding in Haiti, and then the last five stories from Gilb's collection. Yummy! Warm your palate with these stories from their experiences of family, friends, and memories.

These two sandwich-size books are easy to hold and read; they are seductive, yet both are quite provocative. In my opinion, the styles of both books are unique yet different from the writers' previous books. They are both concise in their writing, raw with the emotions exposed, and their identities are divulged as they cross into different contextual settings. Gilb has always had that straightforward staccato articulation that sets a great rhythm and momentum, while Alvarez's use of detail or journalistic reflections gives us great visual descriptions that put us next to her as she moves along in her storytelling.

Because Gilb's short stories are so powerful in their simplicity, you need some time to breathe. Alvarez's descriptions of a friendship with a sister country she hardly knew gives you respite. Gilb's first story, "please, thank you," seems to be a personal account of his months of recovery and relearning after a debilitating stroke that also affected his writing hand. It is a forceful stream of thought written in lower case as Dago struggles with typing using one finger and the protagonist deals with the indignity of having to relearn everything after his stroke. Then, stories follow about bad friends, bad experiences, a lovely, sad birthday, and then, a coming-of-age story, "Uncle Rock," and his love for a young boy's mother. A relationship that embarrasses little Erick, magnifies his insecurities, and compounds his understanding of adults; so bona fide that even at our age it can still make us squirm. 

What I love about Julia Alvarez at this point in her life are her reflections on her personal life as she describes her present life crossing different types of borders as she goes from the Dominican Republic to Haiti with her husband, coping with her aging parents in the midst of Alzheimer’s, and assuming the role of madrina to a young Haitian couple. The book is so filling for it is written like a diary recounting all the adventures that take place surrounding the wedding, the young marriage, the coming of age of Piti, the groom and father, and all the people that flow in and out on a daily basis. And then, an earthquake in Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world, so horrific an event that a comment often heard, "We are thankful and we are in mourning," makes sense.

It could be called a travel book, but it is a story. As Alvarez puts it: "Like the Ancient Mariner, we feel compelled to tell the story over and over again. As a way to understand what happened." So descriptive, so real, so insightful, we are also thankful and we also mourn how people's lives are affected as we read and cross the same borders that Alvarez illustrates.

And now, before the end, Gilb's final five short stories, which explore the borders of the Southwest and Texas, of maleness, of feelings, of baseball and beautiful women, of tragedy and of hope, of Latino, Chicano, and U.S. culture, of limits and frontiers, and most of all, of reaching for the sun. The book is just like the photograph in the cover—a maguey—tall, spiky, succulent, and with all that is needed in life contained within. Put a slice in your sandwich or, better still, finish off with a shot of tequila or mescal. 

Patrick O’Brian, HMS Surprise

I recommend HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian. It's part of a series of historical novels concerning the Royal Navy in the era of the Napoleon. (The recent film Master and Commander was based on them.) The novels tell the story of a friendship more than anything else—between Jack Aubrey, a naval captain of great prowess as a sailor, and Stephen Maturin, a physician and intrepid intelligence agent. This novel is the third in the series and my favorite. 

Zachary Lazar, Evening’s Empire

Recently I read a fascinating, incredibly well-crafted memoir by Zachary Lazar, who teaches at Tulane, called Evening’s Empire. A carefully researched book about his father's murder, and a captivating timepiece of the 1960s and 1970s, this book gripped my attention for days, carrying me away into a son's loving curiosity about what on earth happened in his family. It left me feeling tenderly uplifted, grateful again for the power of writing to broaden our lives. The paperback's afterword is a stunning bonus.

Uwem Akpan, Say You’re One of Them

If you're looking for something unforgettable to read this summer, I'd pick up Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan. I found this novel-size collection of five stories a breathless read, impressively fresh, innocent as an abused child, and cruelly honest. All five stories were told from a child's voice, but this is no light romp through children's literature. Akpan, an African Jesuit priest, has captured in his eloquent prose a child's-eye view on the world, but tragically, it is a senseless world—thick with religious wars, ethnic tensions, and killings between neighbors. All told from young people's eyes (from seven to eighteen years of age,) these stories leave us in love with the children on these pages, and aghast at the horrors of their daily lives. For those raised in the comfort of the middle- or upper-class U.S., this book is a wake-up call to our planet's violence against children. But the most tragic realization of all settles quickly on the reader: this is not fiction. It's the reality of the world today.

Leigh Keno and Leslie Keno, Hidden Treasures: Searching for Masterpieces of American Furniture 

As something of an obsessive personality myself, I always enjoy books by and about people with abiding, consuming passions. I've read quite a few accounts over the past year of wonderfully eccentric birdwatchers, but nothing quite intrigues me like collectors, especially those enamored of art and antiques. The Keno twins, made famous by their appearances on PBS's Antiques Roadshow, are just my type: fascinated by fine American furniture from the time they were schoolkids, one ended up at Christie's and the other at Sotheby's. Their memoir of discovering and bringing to market exceptional Newport highboys and Philadelphia armchairs is part detective story, part American history lesson, and part tutorial on connoisseurship. Above all, it is an engaging glimpse into the lives of two individuals absolutely obsessed with rare, beautiful things.