Now raise the squeaky red curtain as, for the 80th straight month, I'm sharing a review of books I just read and enjoyed...
Neil
1. Dancing In The Streets: A History of Collective Joyby Barbara Ehrenreich. Rich Aucoin is a Canadian musician who puts on orgasmic, sweaty, high-energy shows full of dancing, confetti, and … carnival … in the truest sense of the word. We struck up an online friendship after I learned he was using quotes from my book on resilience in his performances. He suggested a while back that I read this book – so I did that thing where you buy it and let it marinate on your bookshelf for a few years. I then got another out-of-nowhere prompt to read it from Jonathan Haidt recently and then I knew: It was time. There’s word of mouth and then there’s word of mouths, right? So, if Sex At Dawn (04/2022) is the long evolutionary history of sex then this book is the long evolutionary history of dancing – or, more generally, “collective effervescence”, as Émile Durkheim calls it, which Barbara Ehrenreich cites, in this thorough, iterative, pace-by-pace introspection of our human compulsion to moooooooooove. From "Dionysus to the Grateful Dead", as the cover blurb says. “Why should humans be rewarded so generously for moving their bodies together in time? We are also pleasurably rewarded for sexual activity, and it’s easy to figure out why", she says on Page 26. But ... dancing? Why do we feel the need to dance? To share in collective body-moving joy? In the “She Don’t Use Jelly” encore, in the drumbeats before the playoff game, or even in the galvanizing closing words of a speaker at the end of a supply chain conference. We’re up, we’re crying, we’re cheering, we’re moving, we’re doing all this – why? Well, back to Barbara, “to be ‘outdanced’ is to risk reproductive failure” for the simple reason that for much of our history “early humans probably faced off predatory animals collectively – banding together in a tight group, stamping their feet, shouting, and waving sticks or branches.” Do you buy this? We do still sort of do this. Bear swings by we’re told to exaggerate our height – swing sticks, make ourselves big! "Predators might be tricked by synchronous behavior into thinking that it faced – not a group of individually weak and defenseless humans – but a single, very large animal.” Could today’s dancing be part of yesterday’s evolutionary success story? Yes, says Ehrenreich! And then for much of the book, she goes on to share how the higher-level we – structures we created around church, governments, and civil structure – sought to stamp out “collective effervescence”, because it’s hard to control and helps the masses accomplish massive things, only to have our endlessly dancing ways blow back and back and back again. Ehrenreich shares how “ancient Greek elite did not abandon the old ecstatic rituals but simply took them underground” with sixth-century BCE groupings that “drew on social elites, whose members gathered periodically for secret rites apparently aimed, above all, at engendering collective ecstasy.” From there through the advent of the church to the “riots” of 50s rock-and-roll to the “carnivalization” of professional sports, this is a well-strung-together cultural portrait that feels something like walking down a long wall reading a thoughtful museum exhibit. Down with virtual! Up with live! For the rest of our days may we all seek to organize, participate, and join in-person "collective effervescence." Highly recommended.
2. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novelby Ocean Vuong. A first-person coming-of-age story of a gay Vietnamese boy in Hartford, Connecticut finding and losing love in fleeting glances. Maybe that’s what the one-line movie summary of this book will say in TV Guide. But if they make this into a movie – and it sure feels like they will – then it will lose some of its soul. Because this is really a 240-page poem where “The room is silent as a photograph” and “The bus’s lights make it feel like a dentist’s office gliding through the wet streets” and “A handful of straggling stars were biting through the sky’s milky haze.” I mean, maybe if it's in some Terrence Malick Tree Of Life way – maybe. But it’s a poem. I found it both a fast read – no giant halting words type thing – and a slow read – with at least one sentence per paragraph demanding an instant slow-mo second read. The novel is written with an interesting conceit: as a long confessional letter safely written by the now-slightly-older protagonist to his non-English-reading mother. Telling her everything. About beauty, hardcore sex, horrible overdoses, devastating grief – everything. I’ll just add: The book opens very abstractly and I mention this in case, like me, it takes you a while to push through the first few chapters and start hitting the more chronologically meaty middle. It still jumps around after, and there are some exotically abstract asides, but settles. Get to the settling! Make the push. An absolutely exquisite novel awaits.
3. The Skullby Jon Klassen. What % of stories you read with kids have happy endings? Or even watch with kids onscreen? Most, right? Some triumphant bugle-blaring before the parade outside the underwater castle maybe or a chubby three-foot king suddenly getting de-hypnotized and allowing the attractive white couple to marry. Jon Klassen (This is Not My Hat) is one of the few artists sitting pretty firmly in the children’s literature genre while also sitting pretty firmly in the “you have no idea where this is going” genre. I love him for that. Few years ago Jon took a trip up to Alaska for a library reading and thumbed through a fifty-year-old book of folktales before he went on stage. A short tale called “The Skull” stuck with him and, after tossing it around his mind for a year, he reached out to the library and asked if they might find the book since he hadn’t written down the title. They did! “Librarians are really good at that,” he writes in the Author's Note. But! When it was sent back to him it was stretched into something different than he remembered. “I like folktales because that is what is supposed to happen to them,” he writes. “If you read a book once and put it back on the shelf, and a year from now someone asks you how this story went, the same thing will happen: your brain will change it.” The result here is a stunningly crafted 10ish minute read (100 pages but like 28-point font) that is unlike almost anything coming out right now for kids. Otilla is running through the woods – away from an unnamed something – when she stumbles upon a “very big, very old house” where, after knocking loudly, “in a window above the door, she saw a skull looking at her.” The skull walks and talks and it gives her a tour of its house, lets her crash for the night, and then, in a dramatic Tarantino-esque climax, is chased by a headless skeleton who Otilla, uh, pushes off the roof before crushing its bones into dust and burning it into ashes and throwing it down a bottomless pit. Dark! But almost … refreshingly so? The drawings are sideways-sunset entrancing and details are so well thought throughout.
4. The Song Of Significance: A New Manifesto For Teamsby Seth Godin. Seth turns 63 in a couple of weeks and he’s evolved into a kind of enlightened Yoda of the business set. His conversations with Tim Ferriss are turning into after-the-music-goes-down by-the-fireplace style dinner chats and his blog posts, which he’s written daily without a day off for decades (and I thought 1000 was a lot!), are part siren-song, part orthogonal-made-you-think thoughts, and part dramatic call-to-action. Just before writing this book, he cobbled together a group of volunteers globally to create the wonderful The Carbon Almanac (10/2022), and when I sent him a letter from my city councilor enthusiastically supporting my pitch to ban gas-powered leaf blowers (inspired by Seth!), he wrote back just so positively, so happily. “This is thrilling," he said. "My friend Dan Pink tells me they've already banned them in DC." Changing the world and seeming content while doing it? He's figured something out. Now: What’s the book about? Significance. In the post-AI world we’re going to need significance – meaning – to inspire, engage, collaborate, and perform at our highest level. Gallup reports that 87% of the global workforce is not engaged. “I don’t know where you work,” Jerry Seinfeld once said. “But I know you hate your job.” Seth surveyed 10,000 people in 90 countries to describe the conditions of the best they ever had and the top four results were “I surprised myself with what I could accomplish”, “I could work independently”, “The team built something important”, and “People treated me with respect.” (“I got paid a lot” was #12 on the list, right between “I traveled” and “I got to tell people what to do.”) He then puts forward a 2x2 with four kinds of work: bottom-left quadrant is “Low Stakes, Low Trust” Impersonal (AI, freelance marketplaces, ‘lowest bidder’ mechanical Turk stuff), top-left quadrant is “High Stakes, Low Trust” Surveillance (certification, verification abound), bottom-right quadrant is “Low Stakes, High Trust” Comfort (familiarity, the village, jam jars at the end of the driveway), and the ultimate top-right quadrant is “High Stakes, High Trust” Significance with work that “creates human value as we connect with and respect the individuals who create it.” Like most of Seth’s books, this one appeals to fractured attention spans (like mine) with 144 riffs spread across 187 pages. They read like blog posts enmeshed under a big bright light pointing the way forward for managers, leaders, and coaches of all stripes. A fantastic read.
5. Our Missing Heartsby Celeste Ng. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick: “The scary dystopian realities of The Handmaids Tale, 1984 and my own nightmares of an even more segregated, AI-infused-post-pandemic-fear-laden society echoed in my mind as I read this book. And great acts of love and courage that characters, based on real events, performed amidst extreme challenge and tragedy in The Underground Railroad, The Book of Negroes, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz swelled in my heart. The world Celeste Ng creates in her most recent novel doesn’t feel so far from our current reality and the way her vivid characters behave in the face of discrimination and inhumane acts where children are separated from parents is believable, heartbreaking, and inspiring. If you, like me, love themes of what connects us, what could pull us apart, us versus them, unbreakable bonds, courage in the face of tragedy, and heroic acts in desperate times, I think you’ll love this book.”
6. Sparrow Envy: Field Guide To Birds And Lesser Beastsby J. Drew Lanham. Professor J. Drew Lanham of Clemson University defines birds as “Worship-worthy, feather-bearing, winged beings, most of which fly. With abilities to sing in harmony with themselves, move by the millions in murmuration as a single entity and traverse hemispheres guided by stars, they are what humans would be if they could” and then defines birder as “Me.” A slim volume of bird poetry (like the title track Sparrow Envy) and little bits of artistic field guides around birding and nature, more generally. Playful tone throughout including the Appendices “Nine Rules for the Black Birder” (also a YT video) and “New Names for Plural Birds” which opens with “A Hemorrhage of cardinals / red-staining the backyard / A Consideration, Council / or Congress of crows; / call them anything but murderers, please / A Whir of hummingbirds / A Riff (or Mood) of any bird that’s blue”. A great complement to his wonderful memoir The Home Place (04/2023).
7. Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan. Do you remember when Deep Impact and Armageddon hit theaters at the same time and it was kind of hilarious? Same thing with Dante's Peak and Volcano. What’s up with the “two things that kind of look like each other appearing at once” phenomenon? I thought about those movies over the past few months when I noticed that almost every window display suddenly had two new thick books … by music personalities … about creativity … with plain giant circle rings on the cover. I haven’t read Rick Rubin’s yet but this Nick Cave book – it’s a stunner. “This is a book about Nick Cave’s inner life” says the jacket and that’s about as understated as it could be given this thing reads like the ultimately well-crafted podcast. A long, meaty, thoughtful Q&A conducted over many phone calls during the pandemic by expert British journalist Seán O’Hagan, along with Nick Cave, who just has one of the vastest, deepest, tidal-wave minds. I didn’t know much about Nick Cave before reading this book – beyond the fact that I loved “Into My Arms” years ago and occasionally had a “Red Hand File” email from him shared with me – so it was gratifying discovering this book was less memoir (they don’t talk about his upbringing, really) and much more a 65-year steeping philosophy examining our relationship with, amongst other things, creativity, doubt, grief, family, and resilience. Nick has had one of those incredible lives from many perspectives including giant artistic success, deep personal tragedy (including his 15-year-old son falling to his death off a cliff a few years before these conversations), and a truly vast style of living (geographically, relationshippy, religionny, creatively, etc) and, yeah, the way he navigates them is almost … otherworldly? Sort of how George Saunderswrites about writing. On the creative impulse: “You have to operate, at least some of the time, in the world of mystery, beneath that great and terrifying cloud of artistic unknowing. The creative impulse to me, is a form of bafflement and often feels dissonant and unsettling. It chips away at your own cherished truths about things and pushes against your own sense of what is acceptable. It’s the guiding force that leads you to where it wants to go.” On certainty: “The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority.” On skepticism: “I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own skepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window-shopping and just stepped through the door.” On loss: “We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time – that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.” To me, the book reads like some kind of cousin to Cheryl Strayed’sTiny, Beautiful Things (10/2020), with emotional depth, and punctuated by incredible stories throughout too, like this one, about small things that stay with you as you’re grieving. “There’s a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton called Infinity, where I would eat sometimes. I went there the first time I’d gone out in public after Arthur [his 15-year-old son] had died. There was a woman who worked there and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her. I was standing in the queue and she asked me what I wanted and it felt a little strange because there was no acknowledgement of anything. She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally. She gave me my food and I gave her the money and – ah, sorry, it’s quite hard to talk about this – as she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand. Purposefully. It was such a quiet act of kindness. The simplest and most articulate of gestures, but, at the same time, it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me – you know, because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe.” Want to stir up emotions you didn’t even know you had? While exploring and wrestling with your own feelings and thoughts about creativity, grief, religion, and philosophy? Well, my friends, look no further than this mesmerizing and heart-stirring gift.
