On my walk home from acquiring the books, through the low winter fog, the rapidity and sureness of this exchange — knowing that another young woman from here would have Didion’s writings on hand and at the ready — struck me as some flesh-and-blood example of just how fused the author’s legacy had become with the particularities of the Golden State, the ones she spent her entire life chronicling. I recalled a well-known passage from the middle of Where I Was From , where she dispassionately examines the inherited, and slightly brutal, regional conduct: “If my grandfather spotted a rattlesnake while driving, he would stop his car and go into the brush after it. To do less, he advised me more than once, was to endanger whoever entered the brush, and so violate what he called ‘the code of the West.’”
Here she tells the journey of her son, Christopher, nicknamed “Tophs,” from confusing doctor appointments during his infancy to his uneasy equilibrium as an active, differently-abled boy. “This Boy We Made” blows up the stale formulas of trauma memoir, implicating us in Harris’s most intimate and terrifying moments, and those of her family, with candor and cool precision. Her book also serves as an allegory of sorts: a Black woman grapples with enduring racial disparities in health practices and outcomes, the stark divides both in and out of clinical settings.
Volcanoes need a new agent. Whenever an eruption starts somewhere on Earth, we’re barraged with news of destroyed buildings, closed airspace, evacuated people and, at worst, injuries and deaths. These extreme impacts do happen during some eruptions, but as any volcanologist would remind you, volcanoes spend most of their lives not erupting. Yet these geologic wonders are still painted as villains in the media, in movies and in books. Robin George Andrews might be that agent volcanoes need to change their public persona, as his new book, “Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About Earth and the Worlds Beyond,” tries to rehabilitate their image and set them as vital features on and off the Earth.
My father threw his language overboard,
a bag of kittens, waterlogged mewling:
small hard bodies.