Books of 2021: Best Biography/Memoir

Continuing the week of book reviews, we get to stuff I would actually recommend.

Perhaps I am getting more selective with age.  Perhaps I just had a good year picking books.  Evidence points to the former.  For the last three years, the proportion of books in my highest category (highly recommended) has averaged just over 60%.  For the ten years prior to that, I average 49% at that rating level.

There's so much good non-fiction this year that I have to break it up.  Today, non-fiction starts with a post dedicated to biography and memoir.  The four books here take four different forms: biography, auto-biography, poetry collection, and essentially comic book essay collection.

The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis, 2017

Having read Danny Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarized his decades of work with Amos Twersky, I had no idea that Michael Lewis had written a book about the two men and their work.  I discovered that he had in the most 2020-21 way possible.  On one of countless pandemic neighborhood walks, I spied Lewis's name on the spine of a book in a Little, Free Library.  Being no fool, I snatched it up and kept walking.  My brother-in-law, Graham Hennessey, endorsed the book when I snapped a pic of the cover.  

I read Thinking, Fast and Slow because so many other books and articles I had read recommended it.  Kahneman and Twersky were a most unusual academic pair, a psychologist and an economist respectively, who worked out new scientific approaches to old issues in economics by introducing psychology.  They turned on its head the foundational economic idea that people act in rational ways to increase individual utility.  Although Lewis - in an afterword - praises their academic papers as more open to the general reader than most and asserts that Kahneman tried to make Thinking, Fast and Slow more accessible still, I can testify that it took some determination for this reader to get through that book. Lewis describes how the unlikely pair found each other and their specific method of working: spending hours in a room together talking.  The Undoing Project covers the arc of their friendship, working relationship, findings, and the mostly-positive recognition they received for those findings.  Lewis being Lewis also explains their work more clearly than they did for the general reader.  It was fun to recall or relearn the things Kahneman and Twersky concluded in little Lewis-bomb nuggets.

Beastie Boys Book, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, 2018

Having been 13 years old when Licensed to Ill was released, I always considered myself smack dab in the intended market for the Beastie Boys phenomenon.  My parents didn't try to get me to stop listening to any other music; I marshaled the surprisingly-persuasive argument that the Beastie Boys references they'd learned about from James Dobson were about violence (guns like all rappers rapped about), and not sex.  They allowed me to keep listening.  My knowledge of Beastie Boys as a band and as people waned after their peak, but the minutiae I did encounter always intrigued me - one of them had playwright parents; they were much smarter than "Fight for your Right to Party" would make you think.  The buzz about Beastie Boys Book came from respected quarters.  Adam Yauch died tragically young from a rare form of cancer, and the surviving Beasties wrote this book, honestly as an homage to a guy who sounds incredibly brilliant and unique.  The book, too, is unique: 550 pages with lots of full bleed photos, it's a kind of a mix tape with Mike D and Ad Rock passing the author torch back and forth (and making little notes on each other's essays.)  Notebook pages and other scraps of evidence of their creative process also get reproduced here.  The book is rounded out by essays by people in the Beasties universe in one form or another.  The book is so long, but the writing is totally crisp, and I learned a ton about what only die-hard fans would know about the band and its members as people.  It also made me nostalgic for the grittier New York City that I visited in the '70s-'90s (barely scratching its surface).  It's hard to imagine Beastie Boys springing up without the New York terroir of artistic foment and cross-cultural influences.  The book captures the punk rock ethos that these white hip hop artists never actually shed.

I Was a Bell, Soledad Caballero, 2021

We met our neighbor and frequent CSA-crate-subscription-sharer Soledad Caballero when her husband Richard Heppner and Paige worked together at ReedSmith.  A literature professor at Allegheny College, she also write poetry.  Like, serious poetry.  This debut collection focuses on her family's escape from their native Chile when Pinochet was torturing people and making everything awful.  The poems beautifully and poignantly capture Soledad's uprooted childhood to move to Oklahoma for her father's advanced degree.  The poems illuminate the pain of rupture, the alien experience of immigration to a place so different - the shock of snow emerges as a frequent theme - and the knowledge gathered over a lifetime of the darkness her family escaped.  All of that said, there are moments of sweetness, human kindness, community, and even humor here.  Thoroughly edifying.

I Will Judge You by your Bookshelf, Grant Snider, 2020 

My sister- and brother-in-law, Lauren and Mike Jackson, gave me this book.  It's a comical graphic essay collection on reading and writing by an orthodontist/comic book artist/writer.  Snider groups his observations and assertions into several loose themes that he couches as confessions, including: "I read in social situations" and "I like to sniff old books."  It's a quick read that inspires my own confession: I pad my annual book stats by reading short books in December.  Snider captures the dilemmas that readers and writers face, mostly the finitude of time, and the vagaries of motivation. It made me think about my reading and aspire to do more of it.