You can sense Robert Caro’s disappointment after he asks a group of CUNY Newmark Graduate School journalism students if they’ve seen a typewriter before and nearly every hand shoots up. The typewriter he is standing over is a Smith Corona Electra 210, a model practically synonymous with him. It is—no surprise—no longer being made. Caro has several backups, which he scavenges for parts, but is down to 10. If, that is, you don’t count the one that has now become a museum display and, at the same time, a kind of metaphor for Caro himself.
The typewriter also marks Caro’s first lesson to the 20-odd graduate students who are crowded around him. Caro, the most influential biographer of the last century, is leading them through selections from his archive, which has recently gone up as an exhibition at the New York Historical Society. It is likely the first permanent public exhibition of an archive devoted to a living author in the country. (Everyone, it should be noted, was vaccinated and masked except for Caro—his bifocals fog up—and this was late October, before micron.)
“When I was six years old, I tried kimchi at the United Nations school,” said Yoon. “I liked it; in Cameroonian cuisine, our food isn’t usually spicy, but we do always have a pepper paste which is super spicy that is always on the table. My mum ate a lot of spice, and as a child, I knew how to take spice early in life. Kimchi is served on the side of all the meals of Korean cuisine, just like the African pepper.”
What she didn’t know at the time was how much this small encounter would eventually stir up a passionate interest in Korean cuisine as an adult. Yoon has led an interesting life. As a daughter of a diplomat, she moved to America from Cameroon at six years old. As an adult, she’s had a variety of interesting jobs ranging from television host to cultural activist. Now, she’s the author of a new memoir, The Korean: Single and Obese: Then Kimchi Changed Everything! A deeply personal book, it tells the story of Yoon’s unique connection to Korean cuisine and how it literally saved her health.
It was a twist of fate that would shift the course of “Sea State,” the book Lasley ended up writing about her six-month stay in Aberdeen. What she’d intended to be a purely journalistic endeavor became something else — an investigation-memoir hybrid, infused with the details of an affair that threatened to derail her both personally and professionally.
The emotional center of this book is a mother’s love for her son, and whether that is enough to be triumphant over addiction. This is not a process novel revealing the daily grind of recovery, but instead an emotional experience driven by motherly love. Bright Burning Things contains few surprises, but the prose is clean and crisp, the narrative moves steadily along, and ultimately appeals to our desire to see the story through.
Our holiday stories are so cloyingly flavored with sugar plums that Claire Keegan’s Christmas novella tastes especially fresh. At the opening of “Small Things Like These,” one immediately senses that Keegan is breathing something vital into the season’s most cherished tales, until, as gently as snow falling, her little book accrues the unmistakable aura of a classic.
Whereas “The Hill We Climb” was a celebration of what with effort is possible, Gorman’s newest work, the poetry collection “Call Us What We Carry,” redoubles back on what ails us in the first place. The objects of her gaze are America’s refusal to own and atone for its history, the ominous changes to our climate and the coronavirus pandemic and its politicization. Gorman’s words read like that of Lady Liberty in a pointed argument with white supremacy or of the ultimate public defender trying to release us from captivity: “There is no one way to count who & what counted most to us in that dark.”
It’s nice to meet you pheasant, says
the pheasant, or he would if he
were not stone-dead with his
two feet tied together by a