The sky is grey, the ground is white, there’s a warming fire in the living room fireplace. Sure, I like a brisk winter walk, to ice skate, to ski. In Chicago, there are many days too cold to go outside for long. So we turn to books.
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man who Left Newark for the Ivy League, by Jeff Hobbs. Robert Peace is a whip-smart young black man with an imprisoned father and a mother who works long hours to ensure her son’s education. She sends him to a Catholic prep school for boys, where he thrives, winning the school’s top prize, learning to swim, becoming a collegiate water polo player. He has multiple offers from Ivies — but not the money to go, even after scholarships — when a wealthy benefactor steps up and pays his entire Yale tuition. (That act made we weep, on an airplane.)
Always there is the lure of drugs: using and selling. Peace smokes pot to quiet his mind; he sells pot to make a buck. He makes a lot of bucks, and it is that attraction — easyish money — that leads to Peace’s youthful death, at 30.
His is a stunning fall from a lofty place. Peace earned degrees in molecular biophysics and biochemistry; he researched cancer cells working in Yale labs. After graduation, he taught science and coached water polo at his Newark prep school. Most everyone — including this reader — assumed he’d apply to graduate school, or join a company that would pay for his schooling. Instead, he hustles: he tries to flip houses in Newark and other cities, he creates a potent strain of marijuana, he travels. His travel bug is so bad he takes a job with the airlines — on the tarmac, loading luggage — so he can get free “buddy†tickets.
Handsome, charming, a dutiful son and grandson, a solid friend: Peace is likable; it’s hard to let him go.
Bravo to author Jeff Hobbs — a novelist, white, from the suburbs — who installed himself in Newark’s poorest, drug-riddled area to tell the life story of his Yale roommate Robert Peace. This is a magnificent work of nonfiction: a rich, smart, layered read.
The Transcriptionist, by Amy Rowland. I like to read novels set in New York and this one had the added of allure of its setting, at a large newspaper. Lena Respass is the last transcriptionist at the paper, working alone, away from the newsroom. Reporters call in their stories, she listens and transcribes. Understandably, their words invade her.
Lena is an odd duck. She lives by herself in a boarding house for women on Gramercy Park. (Does such a place still exist?) She has no friends. A reporter woos her, awkwardly. A blind woman she meets briefly on the bus later climbs into the lion’s cage at the Bronx Zoo, to her death. Clumsily, Lena pursues the story of that woman.
I was haunted by this novel even though it didn’t really hang together. The reporters — especially Katheryn Keel — aren’t fully drawn, while Lena is overwrought and precious. This read like a fable, until its unlikely Hollywood ending.
Euphoria, by Lily King. Hooked, page one: It’s the 1930‘s and two anthropologists, Nell and Fen, leave a hostile settlement, she with broken eyeglasses, he pointing out dead babies in the bush. From there the two — loosely based on the life of Margaret Mead and her husband Reo Fortune — meet up with Andrew Bankson, the third in this triangle, based on the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson.
This is historical fiction of high order: I gobbled up Nell’s field work about a matriarchal society in New Guinea and savored the welcoming home she creates within their exotic community. It seemed magical.
There’s trouble: Fen risks his life and that of a tribes man to gain possession of an icon, while Nell takes up with Bankson.
All of Nell’s relationships are smart and sexy: with her husband, the native women, her lover. She is remarkable: a scholar, a best-selling author, an adventurer, a feminist. Did she have to die at sea?
A page-turner for the bookish.