Audiobooks weren’t just tolerable alternatives to wood-pulp-and-ink tomes. In many ways they actually expanded my enjoyment of books. Rather than listen curled up in an armchair, I could pop in earbuds, walk the mile from our house to Lake Michigan, and spend hours by the water with Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys playing in my ears. There is an emotional heft to hearing Trevor Noah’s memoir in his own voice as he cycles through phrases in Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, and other tribal languages that I would have lost on the page.
“There was a sense of longing for childhood and longing for those experiences of going down to Pier 39,” Rice told me about the feelings a recent trip to the city evoked in him. “I still have a picture they took as you got on the ferry: I’m about 4 years old in this big puffy jacket. … I guess I’ve always had this sense of connection with it.”
It’s a connection many who were raised in the Bay Area feel to the landmark, and it feels totally authentic in the novel.
The poems in “The Hurting Kind” embody such an existential tension: the terror of dislocation and loneliness, the intention to record (or see) things as they are. Broken into four sections, each representing a season, the book offers reflections on nature; on love and family; and most particularly on isolation, including that of lockdown. “I am the hurting kind,” Limón acknowledges in the exceptional title poem. “I keep searching for proof.” For proof, yes — proof of life, for one thing, but also proof of living, the commitment to face each day, each circumstance, as it comes.
And so we are off, on a thrilling and often terrifying ride through transplantation and the theories and techniques that made it possible. It begins in Renaissance Italy, where the push for rhinoplasty came not from kings but from the general populace, who had perfected skin grafts long before the European medical profession — such as it was. (The “Sushruta Samhita,” a 500 B.C. Sanskrit text that Craddock cites, described skin grafts, among hundreds of other surgeries.) Craddock’s tantalizing opening assertion is that late-16th-century specialists were merely catching up with farmers, who had long ago learned a way to graft skin from an arm to a nose, masking nasal bridge collapses caused by syphilis or mutilation from duels, both common. “In Italy, skin grafting had evolved as a peasant’s operation, linked culturally and technically to the farmer’s procedure of plant grafting.”
Now, at 58, he might just have invented a whole new style of celebrity memoir. Good Pop, Bad Pop is described in its subhead as An Inventory, which is a polite way of describing a glorified attic clearance. Cocker confesses to being an inveterate hoarder of tat and ephemera, compulsively squirrelling away all kinds of apparently random objects. Over an itinerant musical life, these were transported from property to property in black bin liner bags, before being stuffed into the cramped loft space of a Victorian London house for over 20 years whilst the now celebrated pop star went off to live in Paris, marry and start a family.