Recently Reviewed: From Airplane Obsession to Accomplices
Highlights from our Monday Book Review newsletter.
SKY DADDY, BY KATE FOLK
In her insightful review of an original novel, critic Anna E. Clark writes, “Nothing feels less subversive today than the quasi-spirituality of self-realization. We are all on our journeys, all trying to live our best lives, all trying to believe in the beauty of our dreams. But what if those dreams are really, really weird? This is the shrewd conceit of Kate Folk’s loopy, compassionate, surprisingly poignant first novel, Sky Daddy, the story of Linda, a young woman who wants nothing more than to marry an airplane.” When a coworker who hosts a Vision Board Brunch coaxes Linda to set an intention around romance, something shifts, and Linda becomes more determined to achieve the culmination of her sexual fantasies—dying in the plane she loves as it crashes.
POETS SQUARE: A MEMOIR IN THIRTY CATS, BY COURTNEY GUSTAFSON
Courtney Gustafson’s video of cooking a miniature Thanksgiving meal for feral cats in a colony outside her house went viral on social media. The large following she gained resulted in her and her boyfriend being able to buy the house they had been renting and her ability to care for 30 or so feral cats, as Gustafson’s literary memoir, Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats, recounts. However, critic Ilana Masad emphasizes the memoir’s broader theme of care, writing, “Poets Square is about one woman’s journey to working in what is most easily explained as ‘cats? Her job is cats,’ but it’s also about creating community and recognizing that we could do a much better job of caring for one another if only given the space, resources, and social permission to do so.”
SISTER, SINNER: THE MIRACULOUS LIFE AND MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON, BY CLAIRE HOFFMAN
“Could there be a more fitting metaphor for Southern California’s parallel cultures of reinvention and erasure, the storied impermanence of the place?” critic David L. Ulin asks in his feature about Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, an “excellent” biography of evangelist Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, who was a massive celebrity during her time and yet has been almost completely forgotten. In the book, author Claire Hoffman brings McPherson to life by accounting for her idiosyncrasies, contradictions, and complexities and, ultimately, reclaiming her. “There were not,” Hoffman told Ulin, “a lot of opportunities for women who were ambitious.… I think, truly, she believed in every cell of her being that she was a messenger for God, and the confidence that gave her is incredible.”
RUTH ASAWA AND THE ARTIST-MOTHER AT MIDCENTURY, BY JORDAN TROELLER
“What if ground zero for an essential strain of 20th-century modern art wasn’t Paris 1907 (Pablo Picasso’s disjointed nudes) or New York City 1947 (Jackson Pollock’s drips) but rather San Francisco 1967, where Ruth Asawa made intricate sculptures alongside her six children in her Noe Valley home?” asks thoughtful critic Bridget Quinn in reviewing Jordan Troeller’s “remarkable” biography of Asawa. Among female artists, Asawa and her circle stand out for consciously aligning themselves with motherhood. Together, they created a new vein of modernism, one that Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury investigates, Quinn convinces us before further delving into the ramifications of that choice. She asks, “What might change for us if this new vision of modernism, of art, of genius, was honored and enacted? Everything.
THE LAST GREAT DREAM: HOW BOHEMIANS BECAME HIPPIES AND CREATED THE SIXTIES, BY DENNIS MCNALLY
In The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, San Francisco author Dennis McNally addresses a potential gap in cultural history. We know many of the big names of the counterculture, of course, but what about the lesser-known hippies who enriched the movement? Culture critic Chris Vognar writes of McNally’s chronicle of an era, “The real pleasures of the book…lie in accounts of artists, thinkers, and activists who didn’t cross over into the mainstream current.” Vognar concludes that the book “might be most commendable for what it isn’t: a misty-eyed rant about why things used to be so much better.… The greatest hits are here. But so are the deep cuts.”
THEIR ACCOMPLICES WORE ROBES: HOW THE SUPREME COURT CHAINED BLACK AMERICA TO THE BOTTOM OF A RACIAL CASTE SYSTEM, BY BRANDO SIMEO STARKEY
In Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System, Southern California writer and former law professor Brando Simeo Starkey includes penetrating legal analysis of how the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments was contorted by the United States Supreme Court. Critic Walton Muyumba describes the book as “a devastating cross-examination of the Supreme Court…arguing that the ostensible guardian of justice has functioned, since its inception, as a conservative steward of the U.S. caste system.” He elaborates, “[Starkey’s] critique redeems what [James] Baldwin termed the ‘unwritten and despised’ history of Black resistance to judicial betrayal. By foregrounding that resistance, Starkey demolishes the myth of color-blind jurisprudence.”•
Writer’s Room: Friendship As a Prism
A Peter Matthiessen Primer
A Wild Life
The Black Hole at the Center
