In the past, the book-selling empire, with 600 outposts across all 50 states, was seen by many readers, writers and book lovers as strong-arming publishers and gobbling up independent stores in its quest for market share.
Today, virtually the entire publishing industry is rooting for Barnes & Noble — including most independent booksellers. Its unique role in the book ecosystem, where it helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in physical stores, makes it an essential anchor in a world upended by online sales and a much larger player: Amazon.
“Take My Hand,” the latest journey by novelist and professor Dolen Perkins-Valdez into historical fiction, is a jewel of a book but not an easy one to read. The author of the 2010 bestseller “Wench” and “Balm” (2015) was inspired by the groundbreaking prosecution of the former U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare after it failed to protect thousands of poor, Black and mentally challenged girls and women from surgical sterilization without their consent.
Heavy lifting. But Perkins-Valdez uses her inestimable talent of braiding memory with fact to take readers deep into the late stages of the civil rights movement through the intertwining stories of 23-year-old Civil Townsend — a new, gung-ho nurse working at a family planning clinic and the slightly bougie daughter of a doctor and a complicated artist from Montgomery, Ala. — and her first patients, India and Erica Williams, poor rural Black girls who are 11 and 13. India, not even menstruating yet, and her sister are secretly surgically sterilized under Civil’s watch.
The thoughtful, hybrid style, mixing the personal and theoretical, that characterized Maggie Nelson’s earlier books—such as The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007) and The Argonauts (2015)—continues in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, published last year. The book, she tells us, grew out of a desire to understand freedom; it came from questions that arose as “an unexpected subtext” to her 2011 book, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, which considered representations of cruelty and violence in art. “I had set out to write about cruelty,” she writes in the introduction, “then found, to my surprise, freedom coming through the cracks, light and air into cruelty’s stuffy cell.”
Thirty-five years on, what to do with a life this well told is a conundrum biographers can’t avoid. Sturgis is the first to accept that he isn’t here to tell a new story. Neither does he defend a new position. His self-assigned task is to comb, to mend, to retell. In tandem with a “growth in knowledge about the incidents of Wilde’s life,” he proclaims, “it has become more and more apparent that Ellmann’s book — for all its many and great virtues — is not quite satisfactory.” (A handlist of corrections to Ellmann’s book, compiled by the German scholar Horst Schoeder, takes up more than 300 pages in its expanded edition in 2002.) Sturgis describes scholars having to “correct or amend the picture framed for them by Ellmann.”
As imperfect as Hunt's book is, though, it also feels like a book that will last as a polestar for writers in years to come. It's a handbook for writing about loss and death that isn't sunk in morality and sentiment. It offers us permission to use the oddest, unlikeliest pieces of ourselves as object lessons in mortality. And it's an example of how to write about the subject with verve and openness. "Everywhere we walk or swim is a cemetery," she writes. But, she's quick to add: "Everywhere is sacred."
Does the pattern that was you have a chance
against the universal disassembling?