Nonfiction

When I spent my junior year in Paris, I used to walk about the city on Saturdays with my Guide Michelin.  It was like having an erudite friend who knew all there was to know about the history and architecture of this magnificent city.  “Look up and note the sixteenth-century drainpipe in the form of a gargoyle.” Michael Kimmelman’s book, The Intimate City, offers similar companionship for those exploring another magnificent city, our own New York.

As architectural critic of the Times, Michael got the idea during COVID of taking walks around the city with a succession of “cicerones,” a charming old term for knowledgeable guides.  This book originates in those walks. Among his walking companions are Eric Sanderson, who led the Mannahatta Project, which dove into the ecological complexity of the city, the author Suketa Mehta, who brought an immigrant’s perspective to the exploration of Jackson Heights, and the…

The Aviator and the Showman by Laurie Shapiro ’81

This intensively researched book puts to rest some of the myths surrounding Amelia Earhart and, by virtue of going into every detail of extant data, shows us that this story is of two intertwined lives. Amelia Earhart is a household name, but many of us know little about George Putnam, her husband. He was the showman, the wizard manipulating the legend from behind the curtain. Though many of his contemporaries found him unpleasant, he knew how to play the game of getting publicity for Amelia, and for making her the central woman in the history of aviation.

Amelia was an early feminist. Terribly ambitious, she worked to make a name for herself and to break new records. She wanted to be the female Lindy and indeed was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Her last trip, of course, is…

A Steinway on the Beach, Wounds and Other Blessings by Roger Rosenblatt ‘58

A Steinway on the Beach is a series of meditations, whimsical musings, free associations, and questions, both answered and unanswered, on the theme expressed in the subtitle, that misfortunes may be fortunate. At the center is the author’s mind as it meanders, fueled by events (such as the piano, which astoundingly washed up on the beach) and remembrances both of lived events and of all the lore – literary, biblical and historical—that this mind (and heart) has absorbed.  Although the form feels free and somewhat random, a closer look confirms that the topic of how the hurtful and the helpful, both always present, are emmeshed in each other.

One insight came from Lewis Thomas, the renowned father of another Friends writer, Abigail Thomas ’59. He called our very existence a “wonderful mistake.” It is a tenet of…

The Inner Coast by Donovan Holn ff.    Donovan proves that it is not the subject matter that counts in the creation of a great essay. Rather it is a mind pitted against a puzzle. In the tradition fathered by 16thcentury Montaigne, the essays in this book invite you to examen with the author from every angle you could possibly dream up some topic – tools, rust, water, mammoths that are really mastodons, Thoreau, family, America -- and find new connections and new hidden truths.  French students will remember (I hope) that an essay is an attempt, and in the case of the essay as a genre, it is an attempt to get at the essence of something.

The essay “Waterworks” is devoted to just this kind of approach to water – water in history, water in literature, water in nature, water in science, water unregulated and harmful, and water…