reviews THE LYNCHING By Laurence Leamer
Morrow $27.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780062458346 Audio, eBook available HISTORY
NONFICTION lawyers like Dees: One of Donald’s killers was eventually executed and his accomplice imprisoned. The SPLC’s lawsuit bankrupted the Alabama Klan. As for Shelton, before his death in 2003 he despaired, “The Klan is my belief, my religion. But it won’t work anymore. The Klan is gone. Forever.” Today, the Klan still exists. The Lynching reminds us why that matters. —PRISCILLA KIPP
Robert Shelton, George Wallace and Michael Donald may no longer be in the news, but they are forever entwined in this riveting account of a racist murder in the Deep South. The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan, by journalist and author Laurence Leamer, recounts 19-year-old Donald’s horrific death in 1981 at the hands of Alabama Ku Klux Klan members. The book is also a deftly researched history of the civil rights movement. Most vividly, it is the story of Morris Dees, born poor and white in solidly segregated Alabama, who abandoned his inherited segregationist leanings to become a civil rights attorney and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC’s civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America led to an unprecedented $7 million judgment against the group. Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Klan, was driven to rage when murder charges against a black man resulted in a mistrial. Underlings turned hate into action: Two Klan members randomly selected, beat and strangled Donald, unlucky enough to be walking alone one night. They hung his body from a tree on a residential street. Wallace, about to win his fourth term as governor, had imbued his state with racist rhetoric, and the United Klans of America were his devoted supporters. They had met the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s with bombings, beatings and murders, and their power, like Wallace’s, remained largely unchallenged. Despite landmark civil rights legislation, with Donald’s murder, it appeared nothing much had changed in Alabama. Yet times had changed, thanks to
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DOUBLE CUP LOVE By Eddie Huang
Spiegel & Grau $27, 240 pages ISBN 9780812995466 Audio, eBook available CULTURE
It’s fitting that Eddie Huang’s follow-up to the bestselling Fresh Off the Boat—adapted into a TV series—opens as he phonetically transcribes a Charlie Parker sax riff. Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China is a foodie travelogue and comic tour de force, but it’s also something of a word-jazz concerto. The setup is simple: Feeling pressured by his success, Huang ventures to Chengdu to cook with street vendors and dig further into the roots of the food he’s known for. He also plans to fly his girlfriend out and propose. Huang’s hip-hop patois infuses his writing, whether he’s describing a bout of chili-induced diarrhea (and there are several) or exploring the difficult family dynamics that shaped him as a young man. He captures the pressures of the kitchen, which are even greater while he’s in China, since as often as not he’s cooking in a converted closet, battling chili fumes along with carbon monoxide. Huang’s romance takes some unexpected twists (on his way to propose he is almost left behind at a rest stop where he’s once again paying for his gastronomic bravery), but Double Cup Love has more to offer than that. The rooftop parties and underground
clubs, chewy intestines and all that swagger reveal a family story that’s tender at the core.
her past and finds purpose in this next phase of her life. —AMY SCRIBNER
—HEATHER SEGGEL
THE HOUR OF LAND LIVING WITH A DEAD LANGUAGE By Ann Patty
By Terry Tempest Williams
Viking $25, 256 pages ISBN 9781101980224 eBook available
Sarah Crichton $27, 416 pages ISBN 9780374280093 Audio, eBook available
MEMOIR
NATURE
In this gorgeous collection of 12 essays, published to mark the Ann Patty was at loose ends after centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams being forced into early retirement from her high-powered job in book provides a poetic and searing portrait of the land and, by extension, publishing. It was 2008, the recesof America itself. sion was grinding everything to a Philanthropists loom large in the halt, and suddenly Patty, the editor of the bestselling Life of Pi, was rat- history of our national parks and Williams draws them in compeltling around her home in upstate ling detail: Teddy Roosevelt riding New York. She joined Match.com, read piles of books and weeded her out to North Dakota wearing spurs garden. But something was missing he bought at Tiffany’s, Laurance Rockefeller donating his family’s from this new life. ranch to Grand Teton National Park “I took on more and more uninand having every object meticspiring freelance work and honed ulously cataloged (including the my gourmet cooking skills,” she positions of ashtrays) so the ranch writes in her lovely new memoir, could be recreated later. She deLiving with a Dead Language. scribes the difficult test that would“With the companionship of too many glasses of wine, I could while be tour guides in Gettysburg must take (since 2012, only two have away hours comparing recipes, shopping, and preparing meals. . . . passed). There’s the pleasure of journalism, the unexpected detail I gained ten pounds.” that never disappoints, the feeling Worried that she would become of seeing something from an inside “a drunk, a bore, a depressive,” angle. But there’s poetry, too. Patty decides to study Latin at The intimate moments Williams nearby Vassar College. She is the experiences in these parks, often oldest student—by far—and her accompanied by beautiful photogclassmates don’t quite know what raphy, speak to the reader—what to make of her, mostly choosing it’s like to witness the body of a biinstead to gaze at their cellphones son eaten by other animals on the until class starts. But slowly, Patty plain; what kind of lichen grows on decodes the language and learns the chilly tundra; what oil-soaked some things about herself in the sand feels like between the toes. process. “To bear witness is not a passive Look, I know what you’re thinking: a book about a retiree studying act,” she writes. Williams’ reverent eyes catalog Latin in Poughkeepsie. Titillating! But Patty brings humor and clarity how humans have impacted the to her storytelling, and she paints a wilderness, but The Hour of Land vivid picture of her hours toiling in is a hopeful book. “We are slowly a musty college classroom. Anyone returning to the hour of land,” she who loves words and language will writes, “where our human presence can take a side step and respect the recognize him or herself in these pages. Through the study of a dead integrity of the place itself.” — K E L LY B L E W E T T language, she makes peace with