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      2 Books Chock-Full of Worthwhile Ideas

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      A study of human fatigue; a cranky travel memoir.The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA, via Art Resource, NYDear readers,If the retail price of a book were pegged to the number of high-quality ideas it contained, the two books below would sell for downright goofy sums. And by the same logic, a book that contained zero ideas or — worse — lazy or unsupported ones would owe the reader money for squandered time. This is my platform. Vote Molly for president.—Molly“The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity,” by Anson RabinbachNonfiction, 1990Why did Red Bull sell 12.7 billion cans of energy drink last year? Why is it a common and accepted practice to track one’s daily steps? Why did a German chemist named Wilhelm Weichardt attempt to invent a vaccine for fatigue in the early 20th century and — crucially — if he was successful, where can we present our upper arms for immediate injection?These questions are answered in “The Human Motor,” if only implicitly as regards the first two. Rabinbach, who died recently at the age of 79, had loftier concerns than the state of Red Bull’s market share.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Book Club for Bewildered Democrats

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      One thing is even more demoralizing than President Trump’s apparent lawbreaking and kowtowing to Vladimir Putin. It’s that weeks of outrages have not significantly dented Trump’s popularity.Trump’s favorability ratings ticked down slightly in recent days but remain higher now than when he was elected in November. So let’s acknowledge a painful truth: Now that American voters have actually seen Trump trample the Constitution, pardon violent insurrectionists and side with the Kremlin against our allies, after all this, if the election were held today, Trump might well win by an even wider margin than he did in November.Democrats have been ineffective so far at holding Trump accountable, and he will do much more damage in the coming years unless we liberals figure out how to regain the public trust.Maybe Trump’s overreach will catch up with him. But a Quinnipiac poll last month showed the lowest level of approval for Democrats (31 percent) since Quinnipiac began asking the question in 2008.Part of the problem, I think, is that many educated Democrats are insulated from the pain and frustration in the working class and too often come across as out of touch. Instead of listening to frustrated workers, elites too often have lectured them, patronized them or dismissed them as bigots.That sense of our obliviousness is amplified when Trump takes a sledgehammer to the system, and we are perceived as defenders of the status quo. This will be a challenge to navigate, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Let Students Finish the Whole Book. It Could Change Their Lives.

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      Veronyka JelinekIn her memoir, Dorothy Allison writes, “Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.”Throughout my teaching career at independent schools, which began during the Clinton administration, I’ve also been telling students that reading a story all the way through is an act of love. It takes stillness and receptivity to realize this, it takes a willingness to enter the life of someone you’ll never meet, and it requires great practice.It’s easy to join the hand-wringing chorus, blaming TikTok’s corn drill challenge, Jake Paul and their ilk for the diminuendo of Dickens. But we cannot let reading become another bygone practice. In their more than eight hours of screen time a day, on average, students navigate a galaxy of mediated experiences; schools need to be a bastion of the analog experience of the physical book.The study of English involves more than reading. It includes written expression and the cultivation of an authentic voice. But the comprehension of literature, on which the study of English is based, is rooted in the pleasure of reading. Sometimes there will be a beam of light that falls on a room of students collectively leaning into a story, with only the scuffing sounds of pages, and it’s as though all our heartbeats have slowed. But we have introduced so many antagonists to scrape against this stillness that reading seems to be impractical.The test scores released at the end of last month by the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal disturbing trend lines for the future of literacy in our country. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” on reading skills, meaning they were unable to determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument. This was the worst result in the exam’s 32-year history. To make matters worse, or perhaps to explain how we got here, the assessment reported that in 2023 only 14 percent of students said they read for fun almost every day, a drop of 13 percentage points since 2012.In its attempt to make English more relevant, the National Council of Teachers of English — devoted to the improvement of language arts instruction — announced in 2022 that it would widen its doors to the digital and mediated world. The aim was to retreat from the primacy of the written word and invite more ideas to be represented by images and multimedia. “It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master,” the council said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Beartooth,’ by Callan Wink

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      In Callan Wink’s new novel, two brothers struggling to make ends meet are forced to turn to shady ventures.BEARTOOTH, by Callan WinkAny reader seeking a refreshing corrective to the soap opera version of the American West offered by Paramount’s TV hit “Yellowstone” would be well advised to pick up Callan Wink’s new novel, “Beartooth.” Although both are set in Montana, their perspectives are radically different.Whereas “Yellowstone,” channeling “Dallas” and “The Godfather,” focuses on a rich and powerful ranching clan that defends its immense landowning interests through coldblooded violence and high-level political skulduggery, “Beartooth” shows us the struggles of two ordinary members of the rural precariat: the brothers Thad and Hazen, trying without much success to make ends meet after the death of their father. There are no prize stallions, private helicopters or cowboy hats to be found in “Beartooth” and no patriotic paeans to private property either.Wink offers instead a rawer, much less melodramatic version of the contemporary West in which the main challenge is not to conserve power and perpetuate a dynasty but to put new tires on the old truck, fill the propane tank for winter and fix the leaking roof.Plunged into debt by the cost of their father’s medical treatments, Thad and Hazen, who usually get by cutting and selling wood, are forced to resort to more lucrative but less legal ways of earning money. The novel opens with them hunting black bears out of season in order to harvest their gallbladders for the Asian market, a scheme suggested by a sinister local fixer called the Scot.As the story develops, the growing conflict between Thad and the Scot, an odd character who has a murderous past, wears a kilt and plays a set of bagpipes he has fashioned himself from bog oak and elk hide, generates most of the novel’s dramatic energy, while the sudden and unexpected arrival of the brothers’ previously absent mother, a hippyish van dweller named Sacajawea (after Lewis and Clark’s guide), provides a more emotionally nuanced domestic subplot.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 83, Anne Tyler Has a New Novel. She’d Rather Talk About Anything Else.

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      While many of her contemporaries are playing canasta, she’s releasing her 25th book. There’s no mystery to it, Tyler says: Start on Page 1, then keep writing.Anne Tyler and I sat facing one another on a couch overlooking a man-made pond at her retirement community outside of Baltimore. She moved there in 2022 and likes the place well enough, with its woodsy walking trails, salt water pool and art studio.But when I asked Tyler, who is 83, what clubs or activities she’s joined at the sprawling facility, her answer was an apologetic “Nothing?”Tyler is too busy writing books. Her 25th novel, “Three Days in June,” comes out on Feb. 11, and she’s already percolating another.“I absolutely have to pick up a pen every weekday morning,” she said, opening a drawer to show her collection of Uni-Ball Signos in black ink. “They’re non-friction. I used to wear a Band-Aid on my finger, and now I don’t need one.”This is what passes for a revelation from Tyler, who rarely gives interviews and gracefully dodges questions about work. It’s not that she’s secretive or superstitious about her “craft” (a word she’d never use in this context). She just doesn’t understand what the hoopla is about: She established a writing routine and stuck with it, simple as that.Tyler has now been a fixture of the literary world for more than 60 years.When her first book, “If Morning Ever Comes” was published in 1964, the Times’s critic described it as “an exceedingly good novel, so mature, so gently wise and so brightly amusing that, if it weren’t printed right there on the jacket, few readers would suspect that Mrs. Tyler was only 22.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Test Your Knowledge of Famous Author Couples

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      Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. Ahead of Valentine’s Day, this week’s installment celebrates romantically linked authors and poets of the past and present literary world. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do some further reading. More

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      Book Review: ‘After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart,’ by Megan Marshall

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      The standout essays in Megan Marshall’s “After Lives” recall her troubled father and the fate of a high school classmate.AFTER LIVES: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, by Megan Marshall“All biography is autobiography,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, but most biographers are marginal by definition: parasites or scavengers, “the shadow in the garden,” to quote a godfather of the genre, James Atlas, in turn quoting his thorniest subject, Saul Bellow. When they step out of the margins it’s often because something has gone wrong.In 2017 the highly esteemed biographer Megan Marshall, who won big prizes for her books about long-dead Margaret Fuller and the Peabody sisters, tried interlacing strings of her own life story with that of her former poetry teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, and was thanked with mixed reviews.Now Marshall is making another halting run at memoir, with a modest collection of essays on topics including her paternal grandfather, who worked for the Red Cross in France after the First World War and photographed the burial of young American soldiers; a run of left-handedness on her mother’s side of the family; and a trip the author took to Kyoto during typhoon season. This is not a typhoon-like book that will knock you over with its coherence, but irregular winds blowing this way and that, some hotter than others.The most compelling essay, “Free for a While,” is about Jonathan Jackson, the 17-year-old killed in a shootout that made front-page headlines in 1970. He had taken courtroom hostages in an attempt to force the release of his older brother George Jackson, the author of the best-selling Black Power manifesto “Soledad Brother,” from prison. Jonathan happened to be Marshall’s classmate at Blair High School in Pasadena, Calif., which canceled her planned salutatorian’s speech devoted to him (she managed to barge up and speak anyway).To read her account of the boy she knew as “Jon” getting laughs playing Pyramus from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in their A.P. English class — “Tongue, lose thy light; Moon, take thy flight. Now die, die, die, die, die” — two weeks before his death, and to discover the devastating origin of the essay’s title, is to yearn for an entire new suite of intellectual property — book, play, movie — devoted to this family. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trading Hope for Reality Helps Me Parent Through the Climate Crisis

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      When I gave birth to my first child, in 2019, it seemed like everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. He came out white and limp, his head dangling off to the side. People swarmed into the hospital room, trying to suction his lungs so he could breathe. Hours later, my husband and I stood in the NICU, looking down at this newborn baby, hooked up to wires and tubes.We had spent months talking about how to protect him from various harmful influences, and here we were, an hour out of the gate, dealing with a situation we hadn’t even considered. Had his brain been deprived of oxygen for too long? Would there be lifelong damage?That night in the hospital, I learned the first lesson of parenting: You are not in control of what is going to happen, nor can you predict it. This applies to your child’s personality, many of his choices and to some extent his health. It also applies to the growing threat of climate change.The climate crisis is bad and getting worse. Here in Oregon, we’ve endured several severe heat waves and wildfires in recent years. As the impacts compound, it’s clear a lot of people around the world — many of them children — are going to suffer and die.Globally, one in three children is exposed to deadly heat waves, and even more to unclean water. A study estimated wildfire smoke to be 10 times as harmful to children’s developing lungs as typical pollution. Researchers also concluded that nearly every child in the world is at risk from at least one climate-intensified hazard: extreme heat, severe storms and floods, wildfires, food insecurity and insect-borne diseases.If you are someone like me who has children and lies awake terrified for their future, you should not let hopelessness about climate change paralyze you. In fact, I would argue that right now the bravest thing to do — even braver than hoping — is to stop hoping.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More