We are in the holiday season, a perfect time to curl up with a book on a cold night. In this review, we will look at an eclectic mix of stories that are sure to inspire, teach, and provoke discussion, from novels to biographies and history books, even a cookbook, they're perfect for you or to leave for a loved one under the tree. Darby Kane's new novel, What the Wife Knew, followed by Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, by Ann Powers; Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, by Tiya Miles; The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, by Olivia Laing; Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius, by Carrie Courogen; Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America, by Hasia R. Diner; and The California Farm Table Cookbook: 100 Recipes from the Golden State, by Lori Rice.
What the Wife Knew
By Darby Kane
William Morrow Paperbacks; paperback, 368 pages; $18.99
Darby Kane is a former defense lawyer with a dual writing personality. Pretty Little Wife was her debut thriller, and it was a Book of the Month pick, a #1 international bestseller, and was optioned for an Amazon TV series starring Gabrielle Union. Some of her romantic suspense has been written under the nom de plume of HelenKay Dimon, with stories centered on family hijinks with a blend of suspense and romance.
Kane's new novel is a twisty domestic thriller about a wife wondering who tried to kill her husband before finally succeeding, mainly because that was supposed to be her job.
Renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Richmond Dougherty is an infamous tragedy survivor and a national hero. Now, he is dead due to a fall down the stairs, but his neighbors are quick to point a finger at his new wife, Addison. He was only married to this woman for 97 days, and had two suspicious "accidents" before this fatal fall/
Law enforcement closes in on Addison, now a very rich widow, and people in town are also increasingly hostile. Sides are being taken, and Richmond's first wife, his high school sweetheart Kathryn, the mother of his children, is leading the way.
Addison is more determined than ever to forge ahead on the path she chose years ago, and it will take more than faceless threats to stop her. The plan she had to marry Richmond, then ruin him, may have been derailed by his passing, but there's no doubt she is not through with him yet.
Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
By Ann Powers
Dey Street Books; hardcover, 448 pages; $35.00
Ann Powers is a music critic who has worked for NPR for the past decade, and has written extensively on music and culture and appeared regularly on the All Songs Considered podcast. Powers had also written for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and her books include a memoir, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, and Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music.
In the new biography, Traveling, Powers sets out to understand Joni Mitchell, one of the most celebrated artists of her generation, through her myriad journeys. Mitchell's life and music has inspired fellow musicians, from James Taylor to Prince, and others, who have dissected her music and her life in their writing.
Mitchell has never stopped moving and never stops experimenting, which has led Powers to conduct extensive interviews with her peers in the music world and archival research to chart the course of her musical evolution. That has ranged from early folk to jazz fusion to experimentation with pop synthetics.
Powers follows the winding road of Mitchell's collaborations with other greats, and the loves along the way, through her remarkable return to music-making after she suffered an aneurysm that nearly took her life in 2015. Through wide-ranging musings on Mitchell's life and career, Powers reconsiders the role of the biographer, and the way it runs alongside the reality of a fan.
"Mitchell's music chases and challenges society's assumptions about what a woman and an artist can be," Powers writes. "Any singular view of her artistry, and her influence, diminishes it. I'm taking Mitchell's lead on this: 'I feels sometimes like I'm a multiphrenic person,' she once said, apparently inventing a term psychologists would later use to describe the condition of having 'many selves and self-representations that conflict.' Mitchell put it more plainly: 'Will the real me stand up, you know.'
"My goal has been to follow Joni Mitchell as she's drifted and flown and to chart the rhythms of her inquiries. Her self-conception begins in movement: When asked to define herself, she rarely calls herself a musician first, saying that since she was a child she's been a dancer. And a painter. Shimmying with the boys and the bad girls in a Saskatoon dive, wrecking her stockings. Reaching her arms overhead to make brushstrokes on a canvas, opening up unimagined vistas with a smear of paint. A portrait hardens and becomes lifeless when its maker loses track of the breather, the living presence of her subject - a constantly shifting thing, blurry then focused then dissolving then clear, then different, the light has changed - and strives for something absolute. A mapmaker must be open to new routes. People are not definitive; neither is any one story. That is the point of Mitchell's songs. Life is stranger and bigger than that. And people, even geniuses, are smaller: human, always incomplete. Every legend is also one of us."
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Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
By Tiya Miles
Penguin Press; hardcover, 336 pages; $30
Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University, the author of five prizewinning works on the history of slavery and early American race relations, including the New York Times bestseller All That She Carried, and a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship recipient.
Night Flyer is Miles' new book, in which she examines the life of the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, one of the most celebrated, but rarely understood figures in American history. It is the debut title of of the major new Significations series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that has leading thinkers reckon with the life, work, and significance of Black cultural figures.
Miles goes past the myths of Tubman as a superwoman in the cast of characters that could be called the abolitionist avengers. This is a multifaceted portrait of a freedom fighter, and a woman full of faith who believed in a possibility of a more equitable future who acted on those visions, bringing the human side out of a cultural icon.
This engrossing biography begins with Tubman as a little girl nicknamed Minty, an enslaved child who was only given a brief spell of innocence. Then, her triumphs and hardships are followed through to the winter of her wisdom years spent taking care of others in upstate New York.
Miles looks are the values Tubman lived by, and the tactics she employed in order to save many lives, through the lens of two themes central to her worldview: spirituality, because Tubman believed it was God's mission for everyone to live in freedom, and she felt enlisted in the higher cause; and ecology, her belief in the integrity of relationships among all natural beings.
"How do we tenderly hold an elusive woman like Harriet Tubman, a woman whose national memory has been weighted down by myth and lore?," Miles writes. "I think we begin by centering the things she held most dear - faith, family, and community...
"Harriet Tubman was one of a kind - singularly special and part of a cultural collective. Unique in nature and nurture I a way that every person is, she also shared a broader experience with captive Black women of the nineteenth century. While we cannot plumb the depths of her personality, due to the passage of time and limitations of the historical method, we can glean from extant sources that Tubman persistently demonstrated spiritual attunement, fluid intelligence, relational loyalty, emotional yearning, material longing, and aesthetic enjoyment - complex and at times competing characteristics filtered through her life experiences of love, loss, suffering, and illness."
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
By Olivia Laing
W.W. Norton & Company; hardcover, 336 pages; $27.99
Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic who has authored seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather, and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and the winner of the 2019 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
The Garden Against Time is Laing's latest book, an intoxicating investigation of paradise inspired by the restoration of her own garden. It has been honored as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024.
Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants, in 2020. This work provoked a crucial question for this time, who gets to live in paradise, and how to share in it while there's still time.
It is a work that weaves together real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing delves into the shocking cost of making paradise on Earth.
The thing about gardens is they don't always show larger patterns of privilege and exclusion, but they also can be rebel outposts and communal dreams. They can be new modes of living, such as William Morris created a fertile vision of a common Eden, while Derek Jarman conjured an improbable queer utopia on the beach at Dungeness. The result, as Laing shows, can be a glowing tapestry that's full of life, one that shows the abundant possibilities of gardens.
"I have a dream sometimes, not often," Laing writes. " I dream that I am in a house, and discover a door I didn't know what there. It opens into an unexpected garden, and for a weightless moment I find myself inhabiting new territory, flush with potential. Maybe there are steps down to a pond, or a statue surrounded by fallen leaves. It is never tidy, always beguilingly overgrown, with the corresponding sense of hidden riches. What might grow here, what rare peonies, roses will I find? I wake with the sense that a too-tight joint has loosened, and that everything runs fluent with new life.
"For most of the years that I have had this dream, I didn't have a garden of my own. I came to home ownership late, renting until I was forty, and only rarely in flats with outdoor space. The first of these temporary gardens was in Brighton. It was so narrow I could almost touch both fences at once, dropping away over the crest of the Downs in three precipitous terraces, culminating in a greenhouse with a rampant grapevine, inhabited by a golden-eyed toad.
"I planted calendula there, pot marigold, which according to the sixteenth-century herbalist Gerald would 'strengthen and comfort the heart very much.' I was training to be a herbalist and my head was full of plants, and entanglement of natural forms. The study of botany was an education in looking. It made the ordinary world more intricate and finely detailed, as if I had acquired a magnifying glass that trebled the eye's capacity. Each plant was so interwoven into human history that to study it was to tumble down a conduit through time."
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius
By Carrie Courogen
St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 400 pages; $30.00
Carrie Courogen is a writer, editor, and director whose work has appeared in print and video, in publications including Glamour, Vanity Fair, and Paper Magazine.
In Courogen's new, engrossing book, Miss May Does Not Exist, she has written a riveting biography of Elaine May, comedian, director, actor, and writer who is one of America's greatest comic geniuses. She is most remembered for being one-half of the legendary comedy team known as Nichols and May, as she revolutionized the comedy sketch with Mike Nichols.
That was the start of May's illustrious career before she set out on her own. After an unsuccessful stint on Broadway, May headed west to Hollywood, where she directed "A New Leaf," "The Heartbreak Kid," "Mikey and Nicky," and the legendary "Ishtar." She also became a script doctor on classic films including "Heaven Can Wait," "Reds," "Tootsie," and "The Birdcage."
While May is known for all this renown, she also is very reclusive, to the point her biography on a comedy album with Nichols simply said, "Miss May does not exist." Hence the title of this book, and the guidepost for Courogen to fill in the blanks May has kept that way for years, creating a window into how women were mistreated and held back in Hollywood.
Through countless interviews, Courogen showed that this is a love story about a genius who was not easy to work with, nor love, and frequently often punished for those things, in spite of how she revolutionized the way people view comedy, acting, and the meaning of a film or play.
Courogen writes of her attempts to get in touch with May for this book, "Years ago, Elaine explained the difference between romance and comedy: Comedy, she said, was more like real life. This story isn't a romance. This story, like life, is a comedy, one entirely of Elaine's own making, not dissimilar from the ones she wrote, where trust is withheld and betrayal seems a given, where the truth is buried under a million little lies and aspirations fall short. Elaine was never going to go on the record honestly about her life; she'd always find a way out, while still trying to have things on her terms. Always directing, even in absentia.
"'A romance means it can't happen,' Elaine insisted. 'It never happens that way.' She was right. It would have been romantic if Elaine had agreed to talk after all, but it wouldn't have been truthful. Truthful, that one word on which all of Elaine's work has always been predicated, was what mattered more than anything. You sort of can't help but love her for remaining silent; speaking would change the narrative, would go against everything she appears to be. (And even if she did, how much could we really trust what she told us?) Her voluntary absence, her unwillingness to alter her behavior, isn't just perfectly her, isn't just truthful. It's comedy."
Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America
By Hasia R. Diner
St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 288 pages; $30.00
Hasia R. Diner is a professor emeritus of American Jewish History and former chair of the Irish Studies program at New York University. She has authored numerous books on Jewish and Irish histories in the United States, including We Remember with Reverence and Love, which was honored with a National Jewish Book Award and the Saul Veiner Prize for most outstanding book in American Jewish history.
In the remarkable book Opening Doors, Diner tells the extraordinary story of how Irish and Jewish immigrants worked together to secure legitimacy in the U.S. This goes against the dominant theme that various ethnic groups that arrived in America at the turn of the 20th century viewed each other as hostile, and in battle for limited resources, which led to open fights in crowded neighborhoods of major cities, including New York, Chicago, and Boston.
In reality, the relationships that prevailed between Jewish and Irish Americans were overwhelmingly cooperative, and the two groups depended on one another to secure stable and upwardly mobile lives in their new home.
The Irish arrived in the 1840s, a generation ahead of the arrival of the first Major waves of Jewish immigrants in the 1880s. This meant that the Irish had already entrenched themselves in positions of influence in urban governments, public education, and the labor movement.
Jewish newcomers saw the value in aligning themselves with another group of religious outsiders who were able to stand up and demand rights and respect despite widespread discrimination from the Protestant establishment. The Irish also realized that they could protect their political influence by mentoring them in how things were done in America.
"In this historical encounter, millions of women and men, had they stayed home, back in Ireland and eastern Europe, would never have spun into each other's orbit," Diner writes. "They never knew each other before and had no real idea of the other's existence.
"But America, the world's largest receiver of immigrants, with individuals streaming in from multiple places, brought them together. Here, they lived in overlapping spaces, encountering each other in apartment buildings, on streets, in schools, shops, and workplaces. American conditions shaped that meeting, and despite their differences, particularly in religion, circumstances on the ground threw them together, and they forged a singular relationship...
"Jews and Irish figured they needed each other. The Irish reckoned they could keep power and serve their own interests by mentoring and guiding these relatively poor Yiddish speakers seeking to navigate the intricacies of American life. Irish politicians, for example, showed up to lead the Jews to the polls, introduce them to the American art of voting, and teach them how to become members of political clubs and then run for office. Irish women and men encouraged Jews to found unions and sustain the labor movement in which the Irish predominated, and the Irish women who made up the majority of the public-school teachers in the big cities literally taught Jewish youngsters - and by extension their parents - how to be American, providing them the skills they needed to facilitate their movement out of the working class."
The California Farm Table Cookbook: 100 Recipes from the Golden State
By Lori Rice
Countryman Press, an imprint of W.W. Norton; paperback; $24.99
Lori Rice lives in Central California and works with agricultural boards throughout the state as a writer, recipe developer, and photographer. She is the author of Food on Tap and Beer Bread, and she is the winner of a 2019 IACP Award for food writing.
In the wonderful new book, The California Farm Table Cookbook, Rice celebrated the culinary contributions the largest state in the country. It features innovative newcomers in the farm-to-table world, alongside family farms that have been in operation for generations.
California produces nearly half of United States-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables, so if your enjoy strawberries, almonds, and tomatoes, there's an excellent chance you're having one from there. Rice showcases this by bringing you in to the independent farm community through their dishes, and stories that take you from salty waters and sandy beaches to rolling fields and rustic mountains.
Each chapter is devoted to one of the state's bountiful ingredients, featuring charming farm profiles, menus for seasonal get-togethers, and stunning photos to go along with it.
Rice writes of her love for the Golden State's food scene, "When my husband and I moved to California in 2012, I brought with me my insatiable desire to see where food comes from. My curiosity for knowing the origins of our food and drink are even stronger than my interest in exploring those ingredients in the kitchen. I quickly learned that there was no better place for someone like me to land.
"The journey began in the Bay Area and living within walking distance to what I still consider the best farmers' markets in the country. It was followed by five years in the Central Valley with walnut and orange trees around every corner. Now, on the Central Coast, I get to immerse myself in a top wine region while exploring the foods that we pull from our waters and those that are nurtured on the expansive land of our ranches.
"The beauty of and accessibility to the foods and drinks we have here will never be lost on me. Quite frankly, I don't think I will ever get over it. In December, I browse farmers' market aisles with a skip in my step, asking vendors the names of blood orange varieties. I pull my car off on the side of the road to capture photos of pomegranates and persimmons in the fall. I stop to marvel at trees loaded with lemons during neighborhood walks in late summer."
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