NONFICTION: ESSAYS
The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti (Faber & Faber)
Sheila Heti wanted to write about her friend Misha Glouberman. The Canadian performance artists had collaborated on a few projects; not only did she find that he was a “force of reason in any situation,” she felt the “world should have a book about everything he knows.”
The result is this glorious collection of essays, all in Glouberman’s words, shaped by Heti. They are about living in the city, making friends in the city, compromising in the city and having fun just about anywhere. There’s something deeply hip and also endearing about Glouberman’s observations. For example, it’s OK not to make eye contact in the city, he believes, because a city is “a place where you can be alone in public, and where you have that right.”
Or, “(I)t’s a real shock to discover that making friends doesn’t take care of itself in adulthood. . . . It’s useful to remember that friendship needs an activity associated with it,” he says, or, if you are “an ambitious sort, you can try to create your own world around you, and maybe have a party at your house every two weeks.”
NONFICTION: MEDICAL MEMOIR
Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life by Sandra Beasley (Crown)
Sandra Beasley cannot do without her body’s worst enemy: food. Even a birthday party is a challenge. Eating ice cream could make her throat swell, and being kissed by someone who’s eaten cake could leave hives on her cheek. The refrain at young Sandra’s parties was the oddly cheerful “Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl” — the title of her honest and amusing medical memoir. This birthday girl doesn’t kvetch, though she has every right to. She doesn’t consider herself a victim, just someone who has to experience the world differently from the rest of us.
Beasley, an award-winning poet, is allergic to a full menu of foods: “dairy (including goat’s milk), egg, soy, beef, shrimp, pine nuts, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, macadamias, pistachios, cashews, swordfish, and mustard.” There are 12 million Americans with food allergies, with reactions that range from an annoying itch to anaphylactic shock, the cause of death for 150 Americans each year.
Beasley diligently recounts the history and science of food allergies, but she’s most engaging when she weaves in her own story. Born in 1980, she didn’t benefit in early childhood from the increased awareness of food allergies that came in the 1990s — and she suffered frequent attacks. A mere taste of a food might make her vomit. “I grew up thinking in terms of not the reaction, but a reaction, perhaps as many as one a week,” she writes.
Despite all her challenges, Beasley lives with gusto, not fear. “My job is to center on staying safe in this world, but my job is also never to assume the world should revolve around keeping me safe,” she writes. “We have more important things to worry about. Don’t kill the birthday girl. The gifts are wrapped and the piñata waiting. We have a party to get to.”
NONFICTION: STAR STRUCK
The Sun’s Heartbeat: And Other Stories From the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet by Bob Berman (Little, Brown)
Into this sweaty season lands “The Sun’s Heartbeat,” a deeply enjoyable book by astronomy writer Bob Berman that sheds light on “the sole source of our life and energy.” Berman (no relation) begins his narrative with the sun’s birth and ends, billions of years hence, with its eventual fate as a cold, dark globe “smoother than a billiard ball.” In between, he explores the star’s history, its impact on our daily lives and how we have viewed it through the years. He comes across as the world’s most enthusiastic science teacher, writing with infectious energy about how humans went from the geocentric days of Aristotle to the current heliocentric understanding, and along the way he documents the missteps and odd ideas that sprang up. The most entertaining theory was suggested in 1798 by an accountant who said that the sun was made of ice — in part because when you climb a mountain, it gets colder rather than warmer, and everybody knows it’s supposed to get warm when you get closer to something warm.
The sun brings death, as well as life, and Berman doesn’t shy away from this symmetry. In exploring the “biological mechanism by which the Sun commits murder,” he discusses skin cancer and methods of prevention. But it isn’t as simple as just staying out of the sun, because our skin needs those ultraviolet rays to produce cancer- preventing vitamin D. (Humanity has never spent as much time hiding from the sun as we have over the past few decades, thanks to air conditioning, the proliferation of cars and fear of skin cancer.)
Berman writes that “everything about the sun is either amazing or useful.” It’s hard not to enjoy a book when someone says that and does his cheerful best to back it up.
