Still, a few stalwart souls continue to practice this old art. Today, by most industry estimates, 20 shops in the United States specialize in headstone carving. Among those shaping the future of this anachronistic sector are millennial and Gen Z carvers, some continuing family traditions and others starting new firms.
Sam Pink makes it look easy and it isn’t. Over some dozen books of poetry, stories, and prose, he’s refined a spare but precise style that reads like truth. He gives alley dwellers, dishwashers, and city wanderers the dignity and gravitas that other writers normally reserve for the upper echelon. Pink continues to write about these kinds of people with care in his recently released novel, Ketchup, one of his best books so far.
In her debut memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley C. Ford narrates her family’s peculiar brand of unhappiness (much to her mother’s chagrin; “Why can’t you ever write about the happy times we had? We had happy times too,” she complains to her daughter upon reading her work). Ford’s father is sent to prison when she is still a toddler. She grows up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with her mother; younger brother, RC; and grandmother. Along the way, two half-siblings her mother has with an on-again, off-again stepfather join the family. Ford executes her task with both unstinting honesty and rare tenderness toward the deeply flawed, but steadfast, circle of adults who raised her. The resulting portraits, of her mother and grandmother, in particular, are remarkably vivid and humane, haunting the reader long after one has closed the book’s pages.
Though its subject may sound familiar, journalist and talk-show host Tamron Hall's debut novel As the Wicked Watch is a singular thriller that brings the vulnerability and systemic neglect of Black girls as victims of violent crime into vivid relief.
That's an ambitious agenda, and fiction is a distinctly different mode of storytelling from news reporting, even if taking big issues and making them personal is second nature for the Emmy Award-winner. But the novel's storyline proves perfectly tailored to Hall's experience and skill set.
Although its social, economic, and political consequences have had a major impact on the modern world, the theory and practice of meritocracy has lacked a good history—until now. The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge fills that gap. The author is an editor and columnist at The Economist, the influential London-based weekly magazine that calls itself a newspaper, and the co-author of a number of well-regarded books, most recently Capitalism in America, written with the former chairman of the American Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan. Wooldridge’s wide-ranging, informative, and often provocative book depicts the traditional world in which personal background and connections counted for everything, the traces and harbingers of the meritocratic idea that appeared before the French Revolution, and its progress thereafter.
Go ahead, take it, the observable universe.
Take its buying, sighing, and dying rituals:
around here, we let the dead bury the dead.