I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50 Annabelle Gurwitch Blue Rider Press/Penguin Random House, 2014; 256pp “Maintaining a sense of humor is the final frontier or at least our saving grace as we age.” Every seven and a half seconds, an American turns fifty. In her latest hilarious book, I See You Made An Effort, actress and writer Annabelle Gurwitch opens up about the many implications that passing over the threshold of fiftydom has had for her. Whether it’s the unfortunate synchrony of menopause and raising an adolescent boy, the temptations and pitfalls of having work done, or the increasingly depressing career options left open to her in the film and TV industry, she has a brilliantly funny story or flight of fancy to reassure you that with a little laughter we can all get through this together. As subject matter, ageing offers boundless opportunities for excruciating self-revelation. Gurwitch never misses a trick, whether discussing the leakage she experiences when trying out her son’s trampoline or her tentative steps onto the slippery slope of cosmetic surgery. “I’ve filled, frozen and ultrasounded,” she writes, “all in the name of what is often referred to as ‘maintenance.'” Trouble is, she adds, once […]

Daydreams of Angels: Stories Heather O’Neill Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 368pp   A girl and a boy sit in a kitchen listening to their grandfather’s absurd stories of Christmas past, when potatoes had eyes and lions could speak. “It was harder to tell the difference between when you were asleep and when you were awake. Children would sit and slap each other in the face, trying to wake one another out of a dream when things weren’t going right.” In Heather O’Neill‘s strange and fabulous new collection, Daydreams of Angels, we too find ourselves in the liminal territory between dream and reality (whatever that may be). Hers is an imaginary world where tigers and wolves prowl the streets, where a soldier shot fifteen times can be revived by a toymaker and a child playing Bartók, where ascetic twins shipwrecked on a cello case can become international causes célèbres. Beautiful, witty and deeply Freudian (there’s even a Québécois wolf-boy), these stories are truly fairytales for adults. O’Neill lays out her cards right from the start. In “The Gypsy and the Bear“, the characters in a child’s fantasy are abandoned mid-story when the boy is called to lunch. In the midst of life, they find themselves, like Dante, […]

Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home Joe Klein Simon & Schuster, 2015; 320pp The mind, body, and spirit of the American soldier are at the heart of Joe Klein’s moving new book, Charlie Mike. Told in a brisk, anecdotal style, it’s the story of the men and women who came home from Afghanistan and Iraq. They came home to a country ever-more disenchanted with their mission, to families who didn’t understand them, to friends who didn’t want to see them, and to a Veterans Administration insufficiently equipped to help them readjust. Since 2001, the American soldier has existed at a point where politics, ethics, and civics meet, and has had to bear too much the burden of representation. Some of those whose lives Klein captures conform to type, but others do not. We meet men and women who joined up for all kinds of reasons, political and otherwise. Their attitudes towards the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are multifarious and complex; their experiences of those wars left them in very different physical and emotional shape. What unites them is their civic spirit, the adrenaline-boosting, community-building, get-shit-done-lust that they all seem to leave the armed forces with. Their lives back home continue to be lived at full volume, at a higher frame […]

The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky PublicAffairs, 2015; 400pp One of the most remarkable features of Emma Sky’s gripping account of her experiences during the Iraq War is the fact that she was there at all. Time and again, visiting officials — Colin Powell, Tony Blair, David Miliband, Barack Obama — were bewildered to find a slight, British woman embedded in the highest ranks of the US military. Yet over the course of several extended tours of the country, that’s where she found herself. (You’d think one tour would be sufficient, but I imagine it’s hard to resist emails from four-star generals asking for your help.) When, in January 2011, she was called before the Chilcot Inquiry, Sky saw immediately that her story required a step back to take in: I had been opposed to the war and naturally suspicious of the military. Yet I had volunteered for three months to help get Iraq back on its feet — and within weeks of the fall of Saddam I had found myself governing a province. By the time I left Iraq many years later, I had served as the political adviser to American generals through the surge […]