It’s time to celebrate Spring—warm sunshine, flowers, birds and new books! Here are a few of the titles I am excited about this month:
The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance by Ross King
The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings, as well as a history dominated by artists and their patrons mainly The Medici family. Equally important for the centuries to follow Florence’s manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars, and booksellers, who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and, through the discovery and diffusion of ancient knowledge, imagined a new and enlightened world.
At the heart of this activity, was Vespasiano da Bisticci. Born in 1422, he became what a friend called “the king of the world’s booksellers.” At a time when all books were made by hand, over four decades Vespasiano produced and sold many hundreds of volumes from his bookshop, which also became a gathering spot for debate and discussion. Besides repositories of ancient wisdom by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, his books were works of art in their own right, copied by talented scribes and illuminated by the finest miniaturists. His clients included a roll-call of popes, kings, and princes across Europe who wished to burnish their reputations by founding magnificent libraries.
Vespasiano reached the summit of his powers as Europe’s most prolific merchant of knowledge when a new invention appeared: the printed book. By 1480, the king of the world’s booksellers was swept away by this epic technological disruption, whereby cheaply produced books reached readers who never could have afforded one of Vespasiano’s elegant manuscripts.
The political, intellectual and religious turmoil of the Renaissance is encompassed by Ross King in this ode to books and bookselling. The Bookseller of Florence tells the world-changing shift from script to print through the life of an extraordinary man long lost to history. Vespasiano knew the importance of reading and discussing the classic teachings. His bookselling was a wonderful commission to seek manuscripts and produce a work of art for an individual customer. My bookselling was to find works like Ross King’s to share with a wide community of readers.
Whereabouts: A novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri’s narrator, a woman questioning her place in the world, wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.
We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change.
This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By putting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.
During a publisher Zoom interview with Jhumpa Lahiri, I learned about her passion for the Italian language. She made me realize the importance of translation as she talked the need to constantly promote other languages and views and in her case learning Italian also taught her how to write. Now I also want to read The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories that she edited.
World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, and Laurie Woolever
Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. His travels took him from the hidden pockets of his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai to Tanzania’s utter beauty and the stunning desert solitude of Oman’s Empty Quarter—and many places beyond.
In World Travel, a life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun, and frank travel guide that gives readers an introduction to some of his favorite places—in his own words. Featuring essential advice on how to get there, what to eat, where to stay, and, in some cases, what to avoid, World Travel provides essential context that will help readers further appreciate the reasons why Bourdain found a place enchanting and memorable.
Laurie Woolever worked with Bourdain for nearly a decade on his shows and cookbooks. They had discussed an outline for this book, which sadly became only one meeting. “It is a hard and lonely thing to coauthor a book about the wonders of world travel when your writing partner, that very traveler, is no longer traveling the world.” Thankfully she proceeded.
Supplementing Bourdain’s words are a handful of essays by friends, colleagues, and family that tell even deeper stories about a place, including sardonic accounts of traveling with Bourdain by his brother Chris; a guide to Chicago’s best cheap eats by legendary music producer Steve Albini; and more. The best part of this travelogue is “Cited Quotes” found at the end. Each Bourdain quote is given the show, season and episode for those fans who want to relive the adventure with Bourdain himself.
At the end of the nineteenth century, women across the United States went undercover, risking reputation and often their own safety—working in sewing factories to monitor conditions, fainting in the streets to test public hospital treatment, and infiltrating orphanages—to expose on the papers’ front pages the often substandard conditions under which ordinary Americans lived and worked. Intrepid reporters whose in-depth narratives were published in weekly installments, these “girl stunt reporters” changed laws, helped launch a labor movement, championed women’s rights, and redefined the role of journalism for the modern age. By 1900, more newspaper and magazine bylines belonged to women than by men.
The newfound source of these sensational stories was a group of women journalists that flocked to city newspapers whose editors were searching for innovative writing to draw new readers in. Editors like Hearst and Pulitzer sought articles that reflected the many changes occurring in American society, exposing its ills and feeding its hopes. These journalists represented a new woman, an independent spirit moving from farms and small towns to big cities, finding jobs and living on their own. Yet the dramatic adventures the journalists undertook for the sake of their exposés often represented a freedom they didn’t really have. After all, there were no laws protecting them from sexual harassment or marital rape, and they could not vote.
Sure enough, within a decade, these trailblazers faced a public backlash for stepping outside the lines of feminine acceptability. Accused of practicing “yellow journalism,” their popularity waned until they were finally stamped out by efforts to brand them as unworthy of public attention. But the influence of these women on the field of journalism would be felt across a century, from the Progressive Era “muckraking” of the 1900s to the personal “New Journalism” of the 1960s and ’70s, to the “immersion journalism” and “creative nonfiction” of today. Bold and brave, these groundbreaking women changed how people would tell stories forever.
This is a fascinating history of journalism. I was hooked from the prologue about the 1888 reporting for the Chicago Times’ by The Girl Reporter. She wrote about visits to over 200 doctors as she sought advice about abortion. To this day her identity is a mystery, although Todd does her best to figure out who she was.
Now is the season to watch the skies for returning birds. For those seeking information on the science and wonder of global bird migration, A World on the Wing is the answer.
Bird migration entails almost unfathomable endurance, like a sparrow-sized sandpiper that will fly nonstop from Canada to Venezuela—the equivalent of running 126 consecutive marathons without food, water, or rest—avoiding dehydration by "drinking" moisture from its own muscles and organs, while orienting itself using the earth’s magnetic field through a form of quantum entanglement that made Einstein queasy. Crossing the Pacific Ocean in nine days of nonstop flight, as some birds do, leaves little time for sleep, but migrants can put half their brains to sleep for a few seconds at a time, alternating sides—and their reaction time actually improves.
These and other revelations convey both the wonder of bird migration and its global sweep, from the mudflats of the Yellow Sea in China to the remote mountains of northeastern India to the dusty hills of southern Cyprus. This work of nature writing from Scott Weidensaul also introduces readers to those scientists, researchers, and bird lovers trying to preserve global migratory patterns in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges.
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