NONFICTION: PECKING AWAY AT MEMORIES
The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, the Gladyses & Babe By Alice Walker
Domestication has obvious, mutual benefits for animals and humans, with each helping the other to survive and thrive. But sometimes the relationship goes beyond practical to become, at least for humans, emotional or even spiritual. The latter is the kind of bond that Alice Walker describes in “The Chicken Chronicles,” a nonfiction account of her experiences taking care of (or as she describes it, being “Mommy” to) more than a dozen chickens.
Walker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author best known for her novel “The Color Purple,” decided to raise chickens because, she writes, “I realized I was concerned about chickens, as a Nation, and that I missed them. (Some of you will want to read no further.) I also realized I ate so many eggs, I should get to know the chickens laying them.”
The book is rich with offbeat, unexpected details about the way the birds roost, how they establish their strict pecking order, and the strange things they’re drawn to, like a shiny bauble or a shoelace. But ultimately, it’s not really a story about chickens. It’s about the childhood memories that the birds allowed Walker to unlock and the new perspective they gave her on everything from the ethics of eating meat to the true nature of dying.
The book’s success hinges largely on Walker’s tone. There is deep sincerity in her gratitude and affection for her flock, along with an equally keen awareness that the idea of having a transformative relationship with chickens may sound a bit odd. It’s this ideal blend between earnestness and self-deprecation that makes the book so engaging.
— Sarah Halzack, Washington Post
NONFICTION: MARITAL EXAMINATION
Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses & Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules By Pamela Haag
Pamela Haag has a Ph.D. from Yale. She’s married, she tells us, to an extremely amiable and fiercely intelligent scientist, and she has a son she dotes on. She’s also consumed by endless curiosity about American marriage. One of her virtues (not as easy to practice as it sounds) is to focus on stuff that’s been simmering along right under our noses for at least a couple of decades. Some of these ideas are elusive and subtle.
In a flat-out brilliant chapter, Haag examines the new “Workhorse Wife” and the “Tom Sawyer Husband”: A woman fights like a demon to liberate herself, get an advanced degree and begin working 18-hour days. She’d been kept from the marketplace, the courtroom, the operating room forever; now she finally has her turn to participate! And how can her loving, liberated husband best support her? By doing some of the things that she might ordinarily do around the house, he decides: make gourmet meals, devise innovative lunches for the kids, read to improve his mind so that he might be an entertainment to her and an ornament around the house. Pretty soon, feminism on her part has morphed into moocherism on his: “The husband pretends to work; the wife pretends to believe him.”
Norman Mailer had a slightly different take on it: “Men’s lives as breadwinners are so dreary. Why would women want that?” Maybe women weren’t thinking too clearly, but it’s too late now. We have developed an institution of “low conflict, melancholy marriages,” where couples accept their lot but are too polite to say very much about it.
We long to escape the dreariness we ended up with. But in order for that to happen, marriage itself, and the narratives we’ve told ourselves about it, will have to change. In her last pages, Haag offers some valuable and innovative suggestions. You might owe it to your marriage to read them.
— Carolyn See, The Washington Post
