reviews
NONFICTION ALL JOY AND NO FUN By Jennifer Senior
THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY THOREAU
Henry’s journey to Walden Pond
Ecco $26.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780062072221 Audio, eBook available
FAMILY
REVIEW BY CATHERINE HOLLIS
Wild, irregular and free, Henry Thoreau cut a distinctive figure in 19thcentury Concord, Massachusetts, whether carving “dithyrambic dances” on ice skates with Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne or impressing Ralph Waldo Emerson with his “comic simplicity.” More at home in the woods than in society, Thoreau began the first volume of his celebrated journals with a simple word that also functioned as his motto: solitude. But Thoreau was hardly a recluse, as accomplished nature writer Michael Sims shows in The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, an amiable and fresh take on the legendary sage of Walden Pond. As a friend, brother and teacher, Thoreau had many relationships that were critical to his development as a writer and thinker. Whether unconsciously imitating the speech of his beloved mentor Emerson or grieving the death of his brother John, Thoreau was as capable of deep feeling for humans as he was of delighting in the mouse, the fox and the New England pole bean. By Michael Sims By focusing his book on the young Henry, Sims gives us an animated Bloomsbury, $27, 384 pages portrait of an uncertain writer and reluctant schoolmaster. He portrays ISBN 9781620401958, eBook available the questing, struggling, stubborn Henry, constantly asking “what is life?” and finding it, most often, in the woods and on the rivers. Henry’s twoBIOGRAPHY week boating trip with his brother John on the Concord and Merrimack rivers shows Henry at his best, singing and paddling and living off the land like the Native Americans he so admired. Henry’s tracking abilities—his sharp eye for an arrowhead or a long-abandoned fire pit—were developed by studying the land as intently as he translated Pindar or Goethe. His time living in the woods led him ever closer to an appreciation for reading the landscape, as in his months-long winter project to study the ice and plumb the depths of Walden Pond. As in his well-received 2011 portrait of E.B. White, The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Sims has found another subject who brilliantly bridges the worlds of nature and thought. Like White, who visited Walden Pond in 1939 to pay tribute to his predecessor, Thoreau found in plants and animals and seasonal cycles his most enduring material. Similarly, Sims has once again proven himself to be a distinctive writer on the subjects of human nature and humans in nature.
GLITTER AND GLUE
R E A D M O R E AT B O O K PA G E . C O M
By Kelly Corrigan
24
Ballantine $26, 240 pages ISBN 9780345532831 Audio, eBook available
MEMOIR
Cheryl Strayed wrote about how the death of her mother changed her life in the best-selling Wild. In a similar and yet very different vein, Kelly Corrigan writes about the effects of her mom’s presence in a wonderful new memoir, Glitter and Glue. In an earlier book, The Middle Place, Corrigan paid tribute to her larger-than-life father, “Greenie.” In contrast to her optimistic cheerleader of a father, Corrigan’s mother has
always been a practical, worrying realist. As this steadfast woman once explained to her daughter, “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” Corrigan remembers as a child longing for a more lively, upbeat mom, but over the years, she’s come to realize what an essential and anchoring influence this glue has been, especially now that she’s a mother herself. Corrigan first began truly appreciating her mother in 1992, when she ran out of money during an aftercollege backpacking trip around the world. She ended up as a nanny for John Tanner, an Australian widower with two children: 7-year-old Milly and 5-year-old Martin. There was also a handsome stepson in his early 20s named Evan, who adds a romantic interest to Corrigan’s Down Under adventure. As Corrigan takes on a motherly role for the Tanner children, she constantly thinks about their late
mother, a cancer victim, as she gains new insight into the challenges her own mother faced raising Corrigan and her two brothers. As she eloquently explains: “God knows, every day I spend with the Tanners, I feel like I’m opening a tiny flap on one of those advent calendars we used to hang in the kitchen every December 1, except instead of revealing Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, it’s my mother. I can’t see all of her yet, but window by window, she is emerging.” Young Corrigan set out on her journey in search of adventure, but along the way learned that many of life’s greatest rewards occur during everyday moments at home. And while this is indeed a “quiet” book in contrast to Strayed’s wild exploits, Glitter and Glue is both riveting and highly readable. Framed by a tight structure and compelling writing, this memoir is refreshingly nondysfunctional.
What are the effects of children on their parents? Academics have long studied the question, and most readers have some back-of-thehand knowledge of the subject. But rarely have those two groups been in conversation—until now. Jennifer Senior successfully connects a barrage of scholarship with the real experiences of moms and dads, and the resulting book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, is completely fascinating. Chapters are organized loosely by stage of childhood, explaining how each stage impacts parents. Infancy leads to sleeplessness, toddlerhood to constant negotiation, middle childhood to overscheduled lives, and so on. Senior is a skilled writer who can take the reader into a particular scene, say, a kitchen in Brooklyn. But she can also beautifully gloss a complicated academic text and then pull out a quote so lovely you want to tack it on your wall. Senior is a terrific guide to the subject, in part because she’s not afraid to offer a dissenting opinion. Take the oft-cited studies of parents who report less happiness with the birth of each successive child. Such studies, Senior argues, leave a lot out. Yes, life with children might not be much fun. But there’s something different to be had with children: meaning, connectedness, legacy. Joy. Parents are in it for the long game. As the mother of a 3-year-old, I found myself underlining passages that begged to be shared with friends. Did you know, for instance, that the average toddler only listens 60 percent of the time? You, too, might see your situation reflected in these pages. In short, All Joy and No Fun is a terrific read that speaks to something so present, yet so intangible: how each generation of children inevitably and irrevocably changes the generation of parents who bore them.
—ALICE CARY
— K E L LY B L E W E T T