Month: November 2024

American magazine and newspaper editor Adam Moss stepped back from the corporate life and, among other things, started to learn to paint. Then he grew curious about the very act of creativity and embarked on a fascinating journey, interviewing over forty creators. The result is the sumptuously designed semi-coffee-table-book-sized The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. Unlike most such books, Moss was not satisfied with the myths spun by many creators and dug in deep. He also scanned broadly, including not only writers, artists, poets, and filmmakers, but also crossword puzzlers, sand castle builders, designers, and comic creators. The result is the most revelatory and engrossing book of this type I have ever come across. Laid out on the page almost like a magazine, we get in-depth explorations of specific books/poems/sculptures/plays/etc., using fascinating heaps and notebooks of retained early draft materials. Every one of the forty-three chapters can be reread endlessly with profit, but check out in particular choreographer Twyla Sharp, Veep showrunner David Mandel, legendary nonfiction writer Gay Talese, author Michael Cunningham, and David Simon re The Wire. Throughout, the author writes fluidly and with affection, weaving in his own creative efforts and personal reflections on what he and the reader might be concluding about the magic and toil of creativity. The Work of Art will not only be prescribed reading for many courses, it is, indeed, a work of art in its own right, and a rollicking fine read at that.

Richard Osman struck fame with his Thursday Murder Club cozy mystery series, now four books’ strong. His new series, in a genre one might call cozy thriller, kicks off with We Solve Murders and it is a treat. A female bodyguard teams up with her ex-cop father-in-law and a famous writer to find out why a series of influencers have been murdered. The new series is as wryly comedic and skillfully written as TMC but differs in being more propulsive plot wise and less concerned with his characters’ non-plot lives, so it has a very different feel. Indeed the plot is preposterous, full of outrageous McGuffins and segues that could derail any normal novelist. Yet somehow Osman keeps delighting with lovely one-liners and deft action. Situating the storyline within the milieu of global money laundering adds spice to the story. As befits its genre, very little explicit violence takes place, but this seems to only add to the adroitness of the writing. Overall, We Solve Murders is another Osman triumph and streets ahead of most humorous thriller fare.

Before They Vanish: Saving Nature’s Populations — and Ourselves is an evocative, rather gentle collaboration of three scientist friends, centered naturally on legendary biologist Paul Ehrlich. The book’s central thesis is that humanity, at this juncture point of the threat of species’ extinctions amidst the Anthropocene, concentrates far too much on the global, final extinction of given species, something that blinds us to the fact that long before the last Swift Parrot (to use an example close to my heart) is seen no more, geographically distinct populations of that species have already disappeared. Two consequences: we act too late and we ignore the catastrophic thinning out of ecosystems of intrinsic and practical value. The authors write lovely, precise prose and they write of their encounters with the many examples of threatened populations across mammals, birds (my favorite chapter), vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, and microbes. An impassioned case is put for action for selfish reasons (the human race needs a biodiverse, teeming globe to survive) but also for intrinsic reasons (the ethics of caring for our world’s species). A wide-ranging chapter on actions to stave off what can seem inevitable doom includes countrywide protection of species and land/water tracts; more science, more education; regulation, regulation, regulation (in opposition to the seemingly endlessly greedy pillagers); culling ferals, especially cats; last ditch rescue efforts, translocation, and de-extinction. Before They Vanish is essential reading, a treasure of learning and a call to act.

Eric Maisel stands, depending on your experience of him, as just another How-to-Create self-help guru or as a deep-thinking treasure. I am definitely in the second camp and over decades have read and benefitted from most of his many books. Lately his interests have slid sideways from mine and I have paid little attention, until this sparkling recent release: Choose Your Life Purposes: A Step by Step Guide to Self Awareness, Empowerment, and Success. In one sense there is little new here: his central existential notion, that one makes (rather than discovers) one’s meaning in life, is here presented in much the same form as it was in Deep Writing, the book that set me off on a writing path. But what looms large in Choose Your Life Purposes is Maisel’s intoxicating style and spirit. I had grown stale with my own foundations. Now, with the help of this life-refreshing tonic, I’m recasting my entire approach to work, life, grief, and the universe. I am recharging at a fundamental level. So … this “review” is scarcely a review in the normal sense. If you are skeptical of the book’s title and the broad-brush description I sketch above, nothing I tell you will entice you toward Choose Your Life Purposes. But if you’re in the market for a brilliantly expressed guide to replenishing the underlying wellspring of your life, look no further.

Melbourne novelist Mark Mupotsa-Russell’s debut, The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt, is an entertaining thriller riffing on a much-loved theme, the assassin trying to go straight. When Olivia, a renowned killer now wife and mother, experiences a violent family tragedy, she seeks to exact revenge without pulling an actual trigger, as an expression of karmic balance. But of course the world is complicated … This plot notion is a splendid one and the action rocks along, so that the thriller feels like a one-sitting read, but two awkward features hamper readerly identification with the characters. First, the story is told in that often-used first-person voice that takes extraordinary skill to bring off, and second, the character interactions often feel forced, designed to bend with the storyline. If the cover and blurb appeal, by all means sink into The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt, but I expect this author’s sophomore novel to be much stronger.