Spring Books

Also: Baseball's historians, the films of Eric Rohmer, leaving California, and more.

Every couple of months I kick around the ole Web for forthcoming titles that look interesting and post them here. It has been a while since I’ve done this, so I decided to have a look yesterday morning, and I was surprised by the number of books that struck my fancy. I am not recommending all of the titles below—I can’t recommend any of them, in fact, since I haven’t read them—but they are ones that seem interesting (to me, at least) or that might spark debate.

This is not a comprehensive survey of forthcoming titles, whatever that would mean, and I have almost completely ignored categories like literary fiction and theology. I am not paid by any of the publishers below, but I would take their money if they offered it. All links are to Bookshop.org so you can feel good about yourself if you buy any of these books online, not that it will help your local economy in any real way.

First up, birds! I haven’t read a lot of Amy Tan’s work—part of The Joy Luck Club (I didn’t finish it) and a couple of short stories—but her forthcoming book on the birds in her backyard (with accompanying sketches) looks interesting. It’s called The Backyard Bird Chronicles (Knopf, April 23), and in it, Tan  “maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches.” More: “In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the world: Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.”

Let’s hope she keeps any lecturing about misinformation to a minimum and focuses mostly on the birds.

An interesting book to pair with Tan’s—or perhaps to read instead of it—might be Kenn Kaufman’s The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness (Avid, May 7). Here’s the jacket copy: “Raging ambition. Towering egos. Competition under a veneer of courtesy. Heroic effort combined with plagiarism, theft, exaggeration, and fraud. This was the state of bird study in eastern North America during the early 1800s, as a handful of intrepid men raced to find the last few birds that were still unknown to science. The most famous name in the bird world was John James Audubon, who painted spectacular portraits of birds. But although his images were beautiful, creating great art was not his main goal. Instead, he aimed to illustrate (and write about) as many different species as possible, obsessed with trying to outdo his rival, Alexander Wilson. George Ord, a fan and protégé of Wilson, held a bitter grudge against Audubon for years, claiming he had faked much of his information and his scientific claims. A few of Audubon's birds were pure fiction, and some of his writing was invented or plagiarized. Other naturalists of the era, including Charles Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon), John Townsend, and Thomas Nuttall, also became entangled in the scientific derby, as they stumbled toward an understanding of the natural world . . . Here, renowned bird expert and artist Kenn Kaufman explores this period in history from a new angle, by considering the birds these people discovered and, especially, the ones they missed. Kaufman has created portraits of the birds that Audubon never saw, attempting to paint them in that artist's own stunning style, as a way of examining the history of natural sciences and nature art. He shows how our understanding of birds continues to gain clarity, even as some mysteries persist from Audubon's time until ours.”

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There were quite a few books of history that looked interesting. William Hogeland may be a bit late to set the record straight on Alexander Hamilton, but in typical dad fashion, that won’t stop him from trying anyway. His book is called The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding (FSG, May 28). Here’s the blurb: “‘Forgotten founder’ no more, Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name. Millions imagine knowing the man. But what did he really want for the country? What risks did he run in pursuing those vaulting ambitions? Who tried to stop him? How did they fight? It’s ironic that the Hamilton revival has obscured the man’s most dramatic battles and hardest-won achievements—as well as downplaying unsettling aspects of his legacy.”

Also in history, Richard Brookhiser looks at the American Revolution from the perspective of the life and work of the painter John Trumbull in Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution (Yale, May 28): “John Trumbull (1756-1843) experienced the American Revolution firsthand—he served as aid to George Washington and Horatio Gates, was shot at, and was jailed as a spy. He made it his mission to record the war, giving visual form to what most citizens of the new United States thought: that they had brought into the world a great and unprecedented political experiment. His purpose, he wrote, was ‘to preserve and diffuse the memory of the noblest series of actions which have ever presented themselves in the history of man.’ Although Trumbull’s contemporaries viewed him as a painter, Trumbull thought of himself as a historian. Richard Brookhiser tells Trumbull’s story of acclaim and recognition, a story complicated by provincialism, war, a messy personal life, and, ultimately, changing fashion. He shows how the artist’s fifty-year project embodied the meaning of American exceptionalism and played a key role in defining the values of the new country.”

Other works of history that caught my eye were:

Victor Davis Hanson’s The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation (Basic, May 7): “In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again.”

Michael A. Cook’s A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (Princeton, May 7): “This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.”

Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France (Basic, May 21): “The definitive history of the Capetians, the crusading dynasty that made the French crown the wealthiest and most powerful in medieval Europe and forged France as we know it today.”

Roger Crowley’s Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (Yale, May 14): “The story of the sixteenth-century’s epic contest for the spice trade, which propelled European maritime exploration and conquest across Asia and the Pacific.”

And Andrea Di Robilant’s This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World (Knopf, June 18): “In the autumn of 1550, a thick volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans, with startling wood-cut maps of Africa, India and Indonesia, was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). The editor of this remarkable collection of travelogues, journals and classified government reports remained anonymous. Two additional volumes delivered the most accurate information on Asia and the “New World” available at the time. The three volumes together constituted an unparalleled release of geographical data into the public domain. It was, Andrea di Robilant writes, the biggest Wikileak of the Renaissance. In This Earthly Globe, di Robilant brings to life the palace intrigues, editorial wheedling, delicate alliances and vibrant curiosity that resulted in this coup by the editor Giovambattista Ramusio.”

I had marked Peter Ackroyd’s The English Soul: Faith of a Nation (Reaktion, May 15) as something of possible interest, but I read this review and decided, nah.

In the category of “books about books,” we have: James Patterson and Matt Eversmann’s The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: Their Stories Are Better Than the Bestsellers (Little, Brown and Co, April 8): “This ‘celebration of the world of books’ (Kirkus) serves up ‘comfort food for bookworms’ (Publishers Weekly) in true stories from the booksellers and librarians.” And Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives (Basic, May 28): “The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture's most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it.”

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As far as literary works go, I am most looking forward to Alan Jacob’s “critical” edition of W. H. Auden’s The Shield of Achilles (Princeton, May 7): “As Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden’s collection ‘is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.’ Describing the book’s formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why The Shield of Achilles should be seen as one of Auden’s most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.”

The Shield of Achilles was published in 1955 at the height of Auden’s influence (he would serve as the Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1956 to 1961). Jacob’s critical edition could be paired with Nicholas Jenkins’s study of Auden’s early poetry and life called The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England (Belknap, June 11). Here’s the jacket copy: “From his first poems in 1922 to the publication of his landmark collection On This Island in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. His early works are prized for their psychological depth, yet Nicholas Jenkins argues that they are political poems as well, illuminating Auden’s intuitions about a key aspect of modern experience: national identity. Two historical forces, in particular, haunted the poet: the catastrophe of World War I and the subsequent ‘rediscovery’ of England’s rural landscapes by artists and intellectuals. The Island presents a new picture of Auden, the poet and the man, as he explored a genteel, lyrical form of nationalism during these years. His poems reflect on a world in ruins, while cultivating visions of England as a beautiful―if morally compromised―haven.”

I’m maxed out on George Orwell books, but I’ll mention this one in passing: Laura Beers, Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (Norton, June 11): “In Orwell’s Ghosts, historian Laura Beers considers Orwell’s full body of work―his six novels, three nonfiction works, and brilliant essays on politics, language, and the class system―to examine what ‘Orwellian’ truly means and reveal the misconstrued thinker in all his complexity. She explores how Orwell’s writing on free speech addresses the proliferation of ‘fake news’ and the emergence of cancel culture, highlights his vivid critiques of capitalism and the oppressive nature of the British Empire, and, in contrast, analyzes his failure to understand feminism.”

I’m also maxed out on Franz Kafka, but maybe you’re not, so: Karolina Watroba, Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (Pegasus, June 4): “This groundbreaking study of Franz Kafka’s legacy—to be published during the centenary of his death in 2024—explores Kafka’s life and influence in an entirely new and dynamic way . . . Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a fellow of Oxford’s All Souls College, will tell Kafka’s story beyond the boundaries of language, time, and space, traveling from the Prague of Kafka’s birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are, in part, homages to the great man himself.”

Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey studies Jane Austen’s endings in Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness (Johns Hopkins, June 11): “How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers' thirst for romance? In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Austen scholar Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist's books in the first full-length study of Austen's endings. Through a careful exploration of Austen's own writings and those of the authors she read during her lifetime―as well as recent cultural reception and adaptations of her novels―Brodey examines the contradictions that surround this queen of romance.”

And I am intrigued by Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess (Metropolitan, April 2) in which she apparently pushes back against “the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation.”

I didn’t care for Evelyn McDonnell’s biography of Joan Didion last year, but maybe—just maybe—Cory Leadbeater’s memoir about his nine years working for the writer will be better. It’s called The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion (Ecco, June 11).

I probably won’t like Olivia Laing’s new book The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (Norton, June 25) at all, but I may read it anyway simply because I met her once over twenty years ago at a conference in Fribourg (of all places!) on modern poetry (of all things!) before she had ever published a book. Here’s the marketing copy for Garden : “In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.”

Philosophy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I am looking forward to Antoine Compagnon’s brief introduction to Pascal called A Summer with Pascal, which as been translated by Catherine Porter (Belknap, May 7): “Compagnon provides a bird’s-eye view of Pascal’s life and significance, making this volume an ideal introduction. Still, scholars and neophytes alike will profit greatly from his masterful readings of the Pensées―a cornerstone of Western philosophy―and the Provincial Letters, in which Pascal advanced wry theological critiques of his contemporaries. The concise, taut chapters build upon one another, easing into writings often thought to be forbidding and dour. With Compagnon as our guide, these works are not just accessible but enchanting. A Summer with Pascal brings the early modern thinker to life in the present. In an age of profound existential doubt and assaults on truth and reason, in which religion and science are so often crudely opposed, Pascal’s sophisticated commitment to both challenges us to meet the world with true intellectual vigor.”

Canuk Charles Taylor will be publishing his follow-up to The Language Animal in May. It’s called Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Belknap, May 21): “The Language Animal, Charles Taylor’s 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor’s exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language.”

Will Evan Dalton Smith’s biographical memoir on Andy Griffith be any good? I don’t know, but I would be willing to give it a try. It’s called Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father’s Journey (North Carolina, May 28): “For Smith and many generations in North Carolina, Andy Griffith was like the air—everywhere, all the time, a part of daily life. Even after he left the state, Smith always felt the pull of home and the lingering ghost of Andy alongside it. This is an exploration on celebrity and the self, on home and what that means when you leave it, and why we love and admire the people we do—even if we’ve never met them—all told through the entwined lives of iconic actor Andy Griffith and writer Evan Dalton Smith. It is through Smith’s telling of Griffith’s life that he finds his own story, one that is both informed by and freed from the legacy of one of North Carolina’s most famous sons.”

Finally, I hate to call your attention to a book that deals with politics, even indirectly, but the following seems like an important book that will likely please no one, including me: Doriane Lambelet Coleman, On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach (Simon and Schuster, May 21): “In a book that is equal parts scientific explanation, historical examination, and personal reflection, she argues that denying biological sex and focusing only on gender would have detrimental effects on women’s equal opportunity, on men’s future prospects, and on the health and welfare of society. Structural sexism needed to be dismantled—a true achievement of feminism and an ongoing fight—but going forward we should be sex smart, not sex blind. This book is a clear guide for reasonable Americans on sex and gender—something everyone wants to understand but is terrified to discuss. Coleman shows that the science is settled, but equally that there is a middle ground where common sense reigns and we can support transgender people without denying the facts of human biology.”

That’s it for now. Maybe I’ll do a separate post on poetry. If you have a book of poems coming out soon, or know of someone who does, send me a note.

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In other news, Marisa Gerber writes about Karen Kropp, the owner of the used book store Book Rack in Arcadia, who can no longer afford to keep the store open or stay in California:

Slowed down by the consumer shift to online shopping and further decimated by cratering sales during the pandemic, the shop held on by a thread in the months since Kropp cashed out her life insurance policy to keep it afloat.

“The miracle is coming,” Kropp often assured herself. “When you’re in a bookstore, you have to be a dreamer.”

But the miracle never came, and Kropp, who turns 79 later this year, knew that even if she couldn’t really afford to, it was time to retire.

She plans to live off her monthly Social Security check — around $1,200 after insurance premiums are deducted — and can’t afford to stay in Southern California. Instead, she will move in with her younger sister in Albuquerque once she finishes clearing out the shop.

In The Atlantic, Adam Rubenstein writes about what it was like to work for The New York Times as someone “with a background writing for right-of-center publications.”

Fans of the thriller Saltburn are trespassing on the property that was used in the film: “In real life, the 127-room limestone building is actually called ‘Drayton House’ and can be found in Northamptonshire, England. The property’s owner, Charles Stopford Sackville, told the British tabloid, the Mail on Sunday, that he did not find the amount of interest in his property ‘flattering’ and that security now patrols the estate after dozens of trespassing incidents. ‘How would you feel if people were taking pictures outside your house?’” And get paid by a film company for its use? Probably not that bad, actually.

John P. Rossi writes about baseball’s historians: “Hemingway said that all American literature derives from one book, Huckleberry Finn. In like fashion, all serious study of baseball—and, by extension, all other American sports—dates from the work of one man, Harold Seymour.”

Mary Poppins is now rated “PG” in the UK instead of “U” because of the use of the word “Hottentots.”

Matt Miller reviews Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s In Thought, Word, and Seed: “Like Kriner, I am an English professor with agricultural pretensions. We’re not an uncommon type . . . yet it’s a combination that introduces certain difficulties. Farming well asks one to be a placed person, but a role in the professoriate requires mobility. Faming well involves one in creating a local, low culture, but English professors too often serve as priests of an international and deracinated high culture. Farming well requires attention to one’s physical surroundings, but work as an English professor tends to direct one’s attention insistently to ‘the life of the mind.’ As farmers and gardeners, as neighbors and friends, we live in the world, buffeted by emotion and touched by the weather. As professors, too often, we feel our only job is to read.”

The films of Eric Rohmer: “Over the course of his filmmaking career, Rohmer attended assiduously to the religious conundrums, ethical confusions, and, above all, amorous longings of comely, chitchatty young people. His best films are the so-called Six Moral Tales, including The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), La Collectionneuse (1967), and the world-famous art house sensation My Night at Maud’s (1969), starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis, who, having set his cap for a proper young woman he encounters at Mass, finds his views needled by wayward nonconformist Maud (Francoise Fabian) . . . Born in Tulle, France, as Maurice Schérer, Rohmer first came to attention as a member of the fraternity of French film critics notable for their insurrectionist instincts. At Cahiers du Cinema, the journal he contributed to and later edited, Rohmer and fellow aesthetic revolutionaries Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol waged war on the prestigious, officially sanctioned cinema of France and took up arms for the far more déclassé but infinitely more expressive films coming out of Hollywood. ‘No, Hitchcock is not simply a technician, but one of the most original and most profound authors in the whole history of cinema,’ Rohmer wrote . . . Yet, by the time that he made his first feature film, 1962’s The Sign of Leo, Rohmer had largely submerged his radicalism — as well as his enthusiasm for punchy, forceful directors like Hitchcock — in lieu of a style notable for its plainness and patience.”

The early life of Elizabeth I: “She had barely known her parents, but their shadows defined every aspect of her life. Her half-siblings, Mary and Edward, were her closest family, yet in different ways they were a threat to everything she stood for. Her upbringing was a blur of governesses, stepmothers and tutors. By the end of it, Elizabeth trusted no one.”

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Pučišća, Croatia. Image via Wikimedia Commons.