16 Booklist August2017 www.booklistreader.com
my writing good enough? Am I loving and
loved, loyal and worthy? The answers have
been amassed over the years, but more questions crop up for every one that’s resolved.
For its wisdom and compassion, honesty and
courage, Stielstra’s stellar essay collection is a
lifeline and a microscope, a means of examining the dread of whatever one finds daunting
and a manner of exorcising demons through
the sheer power of commitment and desire.
—Carol Haggas
Poetry
A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears
and Laughter.
By Nikki Giovanni.
Oct. 2017. 128p. Morrow, $19.99 (9780062399458);
e-book, $12.99 (9780062399472). 811.
Giovanni (Chasing Utopia, 2013) has been
writing clarion poetry for 50 years, keeping
pace with what has changed and what hasn’t
in the lives of African Americans, women, and
others who have been discriminated against,
marginalized, or unjustly maligned. She is a
poet of distilled thought, direct address, blue-sy beats, and jazzy swerves. Here she laughs
about age, shrugs off illness, and revisits her
past with serious intent. In the stunning and
sorrowful “Baby West,” Giovanni remembers
childhood traumas and how she “repressed”
her tears. Now, she declares, “I am trying to
learn / How to cry” because “crying cleanses.”
As Giovanni embraces experience—“we cannot undo / the past”—she recalls her civil
rights picketing and sitting-in, praises African
American newspapers, and places hip-hop
firmly in the continuum of African American
culture. She also pays tribute to family and
friends, including other poets, especially the
late Maya Angelou. Ultimately this is more a
book of gratitude than tears as Giovanni gives
thanks for love and friendship, good food and
nature’s beauty, school and football, and that
empowering force, poetry. —Donna Seaman
Half-Light: Collected Poems,
1965–2016.
By Frank Bidart.
Aug. 2017. 736p. Farrar, $35 (9780374125950); e-book
(9780374715182). 811.
Given his acknowledgement of Robert Lowell as a major influence, much of Bidart’s work
is, as Lowell’s was characterized, confessional.
He reports what was wrong
with his parents, who weren’t
up for family life because of
his mother’s shaky mental
health and his father’s wom-
anizing, neither of which
Bidart could forgive. This
lack of forgiveness seems to
be what merits confessing,
In the non-confessional remainder poems, he
is even more a teller of tales, all from Roman,
Renaissance, Mongol, and modernist-art his-
tory and lore. Four of these long poems are
called “hours of the night,” referring to the
ancient Egyptian myth holding that, while it
is dark, the sun god “must / journey through /
THE WORLD THAT IS BENEATH THE
WORLD,— / . . . must / meet, once again,
the dead.” Bidart’s poems strive, more than
anything else, to present particular voices
speaking, which accounts for their distinctive
punctuation (e.g., “,—”) and idiosyncratic
interior capitalization, more than to express
meaning. But meaning there is, of course, con-
cerning love, death, conflict, ambition, and
disappointment, found between lacunae and
jump cuts like in a Godard movie or an Eliot
poem. —Ray Olson
So Where Are We?
By Lawrence Joseph.
Aug. 2017. 80p. Farrar, $23 (9780374266677). 811.
The factual horror the news delivers each day
finds a different order in Joseph’s finely crafted
sixth collection. Opening with “A Fable,” a
love letter of sorts to post-9/11 New York—
“But is there a more beautiful city—parts / of
it, anyway?”—Joseph explores the geography
of our current state of affairs while looking to
history as a guidepost. In “Syria,” the speaker
reports journalistically on the war, yet the misery becomes tactile, personal, lyrical. This poet,
a lawyer by training, knows how to shape an
argument, writing about Detroit, where he
was raised, in “Here in a State of Tectonic Tension,” citing the evidence of a once-great city’s
fall and destruction. In “Made of This, Sensory
Fact,” Joseph presents delicate stanzas made up
of short lines that cast a spell of passion and
sensuality. These powerful poems reach across
time and distance, public and private, fact and
feeling to trace the unity of the human experience. —Raúl Niño
Geography & Travel
A Taste of Paris: A History of the
Parisian Love Affair with Food.
By David Downie.
Sept. 2017. 304p. St. Martin’s, $26.99
(9781250082930). 394.1.
Avid Francophile Downie (A Passion for Paris,
2015) appears to be deeply acquainted with ev-
ery Parisian bypath and companionably guides
the reader through them with an emphasis on
culinary history as well as contemporary res-
taurants in which the influence of the past can
be found. Starting with the years during which
the Romans dominated the little town that
would grow into Paris, he moves through the
ages, lingering affectionately in the eighteenth
century and tossing in literary references as well
as more strictly food-related ones. An “unapol-
ogetic gourmand,” Downie enjoys spending
time browsing through old cookbooks, “my
mouth watering no matter how bizarre the
recipe,” and particularly relishes detailing elab-
orate, multicourse menus. While Downie may
not be temperamentally suited for writing a
strictly chronological history, most readers will
enjoy his free associative jumps into seemingly
unrelated areas of French history and life, and
no one will mistake his love for his adopted
country. —Margaret Quamme
History
100 Amazing Facts about the Negro.
By Henry Louis Gates.
Oct. 2017. 496p. illus. Pantheon, $40 (9780307908711).
973.0496.
The initial, 1957 edition of 100 Amazing
Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof by
journalist and black history devotee Joel A. Rogers was derived from his weekly “Your History”
(later called “Facts about the
Negro”) columns for the
Pittsburgh Courier, which
ran from 1934 until the year
of his death, 1966. Now, renowned historian Gates picks
up the baton, updating the
book’s 100 “amazing facts”
with recent research, including, in a nod to his PBS documentary series,
Finding Your Roots, for which he wrote the companion volume, genealogical and DNA studies
and conclusions. Presumably, Gates retains
Negro because Rogers used it and for the word’s
original intent to refer to the African diaspora.
Indeed, this fresh investigation relays centuries
of events in the lives of numerous historical
figures of African descent not only in the U.S.
but also in Europe, Central America, and the
Middle East. This compilation of portraits of
select soldiers and saints, authors and athletes,
royalty and rebels, and escapees and entrepreneurs, provides a much needed foundation for
historical and cultural identity. By setting this
new standard, Gates paves the way for future
editions exploring achievements in science and
technology and the visual and performing arts.
—Valerie Hawkins
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Scholar,
writer, filmmaker, and public intellectual
Gates has tremendous presence and his latest
book will be strongly promoted.
Alone: Britain, Dunkirk, and Defeat
in Victory.
By Michael Korda.
Sept. 2017. 564p. illus. Norton/Liveright, $29.95
(9781631491320). 940.54.
There is already a sagging shelf of weighty
tomes on the British Expeditionary Force’s
evacuation from Dunkirk in May 1940—
as well as a new movie on
the topic—but room must
be made for Korda’s fine
combination of gripping history and fascinating memoir.
Korda wrote about his famous family (his father was
a film editor; his uncle, a
film director; and his aunt,
the actress Merle Oberon) in the best-selling
Charmed Lives (1979), and he revisits them
here but in a very different context, contrast-
