Hammerhead: The Making of a Carpenter

Nina MacLaughlin has a stable job at a Boston newspaper when she decides to hang it up and do something, possibly anything, else with her life. Not having so much as wielded a hammer before, she accepts a job as a carpenter's assistant and embarks on the life of a journeyman carpenter, learning to tile bathrooms, build decks, and renovate entire rooms. In describing and understanding the metamorphosis, MacLaughlin relies on the words of those as varied as Greek mythology, Studs Terkel, Virginia Woolf, and Pliny the Elder.

Although it sounds like the plot of a promising novel, Hammerhead is actually MacLaughlin's memoir. Beautifully written, and wise beyond its years, Hammerhead has the goods to make any reader question the decisions they've made thus far, and whether they're the right ones. In the opening chapter, MacLaughlin writes, "Inertia and fear and laziness, the three-headed dog that keeps us from leaving situations that have passed their expiration date..." and I was hooked. How better to describe the reasons that keep many of us where we are.

This sentiment is book-ended by what can by a question that many of us, I'm sure, have asked ourselves on occasion: "How do we decide what's right for our own lives? The question never gets easier to answer. If we're luck and we pay attention, pieces here and there will start to fit together." Her words put me in mind of Abraham Verghese's beautifully blunt prose in Cutting for Stone where he writes, "We come unbidden into this life and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot."

Both authors, certainly, make the reader question choices, priorities, and the related decisions. I don't plan to leave my job and become a carpenter anytime soon, but I admire MacLaughlin's ability to create a new life while also - as evidence by both the writing of her memoirs, as well as the authors she chose to include within its covers - creating space for the old one. Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Call the Nurse: True Stories of a Country Nurse on a Scottish Isle

Call the Nurse is Mary J. MacLeod's delightful memoir of working as a district nurse on one of the Inner Hebrides islands in the 1970s. That latter part is actually shocking, as many of the homes have only just gotten electricity, and some are still without indoor plumbing. Although she is practicing decades later than James Herriot, the conditions she encounters are so similar that I had to actively and repeatedly remind myself that they were not, in fact, contemporaries.

Part of what makes Call the Nurse so delightful is the style in which it's written. I often felt as though MacLeod were next to me, reminiscing for my benefit alone. Her folksy, yet unmistakably British, language and approach is also very much in keeping with Herriot's style - as well as that of Jenny Lee, whose memoirs were adapted for the excellent Call the Midwife television series.

As with both Lee and Herriot, MacLeod's caseload offers a mixture of grace, humor, and tragedy, with a good measure of resilience and hope. The people of the Inner Hebrides are unquestionably self-sufficient, used to doing for themselves. In bad weather, the only off the island is by helicopter; in terrible weather, one must manage on one's own. Her work as a nurse offers MacLeod a glimpse into her patients' inner lives, as well as myriad social issues from the land clearances (still only one or two generations removed for the very oldest residents) to lingering wartime trauma, incest, alcoholism, and murder. All of these MacLeod treats beautifully.

Since finishing Call the Nurse, I've learned of a sequel, Nurse, Come You Here, which I am now patiently waiting to read as soon as my turn is "up" at the local library.

Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

Gary Krist's Empire of Sin is an exploration of New Orleans's bad old days as a wild west style outpost of vice and damnation. The meat of the book is the thirty or so years between the Gilded Age and Prohibition when New Orleans was the original good times city, a hotbed of prostitution, liquor, gambling, and - just for good measure - jazz. Here Krist presents a veritable panoply of larger-than-life characters, male and female, who figured into the scene. Readers are treated to the rise, and often fall, of many of the early jazz pioneers (fun fact: many of their nicknames and favored lingo feature in one of my son's favorite bedtime reads, Jazz Cats, acquired in NOLA when he visited earlier this year). For example, we see Louis Armstrong grown from a young boy to an acclaimed musician.

As for murder, there was, evidently, the Mafia for that. Empire of Sin opens and ends with some of the more salacious murders of the period, many of which are still officially unsolved, although Krist presents convincing arguments in the Afterward for who he believes is responsible.

Empire of Sin is fine American history, along the lines of Empire of Mud or City of Scoundrels. Those who enjoy the finer points of more obscure history will find plenty to love here.

Laissez les bons temps roulez!

A Man of the People

One of my reading goals this year was to read more broadly, particularly fiction. (Turner House, Native Roots, and Salt Houses are other examples of work that may or may not have jumped to the top of my reading list without this impetus.) In any case, that was one of my motivations for reading Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People, set in 1960s Nigeria in the immediate post-independence years.

The protagonists in the story are M.A. Nanga, a former school teacher and current Minister of Culture (and the self-styled Man of the People), and Odili, Nanga's former student and a current school teacher. Idealistic Odili is more than a little disillusioned with the state of affairs in Nigeria, an attitude which sets him on a collision course with his former teacher and mentor, Nanga. Ultimately, Odili decides to run for Nanga's seat, a decision that sets in motion the events that will lead to revolution.

Published on the eve of Nigeria's first coup in 1966, there's more than a hint of real events in Achebe's drama. That said, I had a hard time really getting into A Man of the People. One of the biggest reasons for this is the dialogue, much of which is written in pidgin. (This is not a slight - characters are regularly referred to as speaking pidgin in the book.) While I was always able to get the gist of the conversation, frequently I wasn't able to get anymore than the gist, and I often felt like I was working really hard just to get the gist.

Two stars.

The Tilted World

Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly's The Tilted World is a peak into small town Mississippi circa 1927, and the town is in the midst of a crisis. Set against the backdrop of historic flooding and Prohibition, federal agents Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson arrive in fictional Hobnob, Mississippi, to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents. Before they can begin that task, though, they must decide what to do with the baby they find abandoned nearby.

When their first choice turns out to already have triplets at home, and laughs at the idea of adding to her brood, they're satisfied with the recommendation to home the boy with Dixie Clay Holliver...who just happens to operate the biggest still in the county, and whose husband is the last person to have seen the two agents whose disappearance sent Ted and Ham to this part of the country.

Soon, though, as the river continues its merciless rise, events bigger and greater than bootlegging and revenuers take center stage. While some of the men fill sandbags at quickly as possible, others debate the wisdom of blowing the dam, thereby saving New Orleans, and potentially, hitting pay dirt in the process. Naturally, Dixie Clay and Jesse Holliver are at the center of the action, if not always in accord, and their paths intersect frequently and dangerously with Ted and Ham.

Franklin and Fennelly do a great job depicting the urgency and confusion around the flood. I was reminded often of scenes from The Johnstown Flood and Washed Away, both of which are non-fiction accounts of flooding. If none of the characters in The Tilted World had quite the depth and dimension of, say, those who people the pages of Pachinko, they were still generally well-developed and felt true tot heir time and place. The Tilted World will probably not make any of my "best of" lists for 2018, but it's a solid read, nonetheless, and a quick one - perfect for a day at the beach or on the place.

Three stars.

Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life

I spend a lot of time in neurology world these days. My son has more neuro-related diagnoses than I have fingers (yes, literally), and we are always looking for anything can make his - and our - life even a little better.

What Max Lugavere and Paul Grewal provide in Genius Foods is a clear and concise guide to how different foods affect the brain and how to maximize diet for the best neurological outcomes. They basically start with the ketogenic diet (a bear of a regimen, and I bow down to those with medication-resistant disorders for whom it's the only way of managing seizures, for example), and then build it into a more manageable plan that most anyone can aspire to. It is, admittedly, aspirational: even with my son's conditions, I don't see us ever going full-on Genius Plan, and we're more highly motivated than most in this area.

That said, there are plenty of key takeaways that make this a valuable read for anyone looking to improve brain health. The first and most obvious are to minimize sugar and carbohydrates. Beyond that, we should all be eating more avocados, eggs, olive oil (extra virgin, please), and coconut (oil and fruit) than we are. The coconut oil test, the results of which were published in a medical journal, were particularly impressive. You better believe my little mister is going to be getting a daily helping of coconut oil from now on. (I mixed it into his oatmeal this morning...like I said, we're not ever going to be exclusive Genius Plan people.)

Genius Foods is also a good reminder of the things that are food and the things that we pretend are food. In that sense, it's a cross between The Food of a Younger Land and Salt, Sugar, Fat. As with those, I dare you to read this and not make any changes to your diet.