As we work our way up to 2024 and the start of the Wafer-Thin Books reading group, I want to encourage folks to dig into their archives and suggest titles you think other readers might find worthwhile. To that end, I will be posting a few lists of my own recommendations, including some I’ve written about on NeglectedBooks.com. To start the ball rolling, here are ten nonfiction books, all under 150 pages long and all ones to which I can give two thumbs way up.
- • A Mother in History by Jean Stafford (1966)
- A Mother in History centers on three visits made by Jean Stafford to Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, in her little Fort Worth duplex in 1965. Stafford, who was better known as a fiction writer, may have taken the assignment for a piece originally published in McCall’s magazine out of a morbid fascination. Marguerite Oswald was quickly typecast as an eccentric in the media frenzy that followed her son’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the job was very much out of Stafford’s line. She had little prior experience as a journalist: it was only after the first day with Marguerite that she thought to rent a tape recorder and even then it took the combined efforts of both women to get it working.
- In many ways, A Mother in History is an early and overlooked example of New Journalism. Stafford writes in first person, puts herself into the middle of the story, and makes no effort to hide her opinions:
“And as we all know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.”
“I had not heard that President Kennedy was dying,” I said, staggered by this cluster of fictions stated as irrefutable fact. Some mercy killing! The methods used in this instance must surely be unique in the annals of euthanasia.
- • Under Gemini by Isabel Bolton (1966)
- Isabel Bolton was almost 80 when this elegaic 1966 memoir of her early life with her identical twin sister, Grace was published. It’s short, poetically succinct, and restrained. Yet it has an emotional power distilled through decades of living with loss and countless retellings of the story, including a fictional version — In the Days of Thy Youth — in 1943.
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When I evoke those hours of childhood to live in them once more, it is not myself I see before me–it is she, the living image of myself, and there I stand revealed in all the sharp intensity of what the moment brought of pain or joy or curiosity or wonder or decision. I see my own face, my own dark eyes and hair, I hear my voice, my intonations and tricks of speech.
What happened to one of use happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind. It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours.
- • The Big Love by Mrs. Florence Aadland (1961)
- “There’s one thing I want to make clear right off: my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.”
- The world can be divided into two groups: those who gag at that line and those who glory in it. In October 1957, one-time dashing and successful actor Errol Flynn spotted Beverly Aadland among the extras on a studio set, took her out to dinner, and raped her. Well, in those days, he would have said he seduced her, but by Florence’s account, she tried to fight him off. She was then 15 years old.
- The Big Love reminds me of a Ben Vaughn lyric: “My poppa told me son, and you know he might be right/That girl, she ain’t no vision, boy, she’s a sight.” Only in this case, we’re talking about Florence Aadland, who manages, via ghostwriter Tedd Thomey, to slash through no only several personal agendas in this account of her daughter’s relationship with Flynn, but to expose one or two Freudian ones, too. Personally, I think it’s an American classic of some kind. My mother would certainly call it “Nothing but a big, stinky bag of trash.”
- Now available from Spurl Editions.
- • Brown Face, Big Master by Joyce Gladwell (1969)
- Brown Face, Big Master is a restrained, subdued memoir by the mother of best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, marked more than anything by a pervasive sense of humility. It is not at all an evangelical account: Joyce Gladwell’s own faith came to her gradually, over the course of many years, and with more than a few set-backs, and she makes no claims or and sets no expectations for others. In that respect, it is an account of one person’s faith that even non-believers can appreciate.
- • And So Did I by Malachi Whitaker
- If And So Did I were to be published afresh today as the work of a woman in her late thirties with a number of well-received short story collections behind her, I have no doubt that it would be quite successful in its sales and critical reception. Thanks to Wild, Eat, Pray, Love, The Argonauts, and dozens and dozens of other books, the world is ready–indeed, seems insatiable–for memoirs written by women with strong and distinctive voices.
Instead, when it was published in early 1939 in an England finding itself in a world of increasing uncertainty and dread, it received from an anonymous reviewer in The Spectator one of the most ruthless drubbings ever seen in print:
And So Did I (Jonathan Cape, 7s. 6d.) is a dangerous attempt to make new ground. It consists, apparently, in damp comments and scrappy reminiscences written at odd moments during her life in Yorkshire, and huddled together inconsequently into a full-size book. The result, from a conventional literary point of view, is worthless.
But Malachi Whitaker herself is such good company that whether or not one is in sympathy with her efforts to escape the mundane, And So Did I is never less than vivid and amiable. “I like to read what other people have written,” she writes, “in the hope that I can get a glimpse of the garden enclosed, through a tiny peephole”:
For I do believe that everybody owns the equivalent of a garden; a place inside themselves that they know has something really good in it; something from which they can give.
How could anyone consider that worthless?
- • Log Book, by Frank Laskier (1942)
- This slim book–just 119 pages–contains some of the simplest and most powerful writing I’ve ever come across. Born and raised in a house just up the street from the Liverpool waterfront, Frank Laskier ran away to sea when just fifteen. Aside from a short stint when he tried life ashore and ended up in jail for burglary, he spent much of the next dozen years filthy and miserable at sea or drunk and violent in port.
- Then, sometime in late 1940, his ship, Eurylochus, was attacked and sunk by an merchant raider, the Komoran, off the coast of West Africa. Laskier’s foot was blown off by a shell, and he and the other thirteen survivors spent three days adrift in a life raft before being rescued by a Spanish trawler. This book is searingly candid and utterly self-effacing, which leaves the reader, in the end, with tremendous admiration for Frank Laskier as a human being.
- • The Biography of a New York Hotel Scrub by Ada Blom (1909)
- This is probably my favorite accidental discovery in the Internet Archive. A self-published booklet — hardly even a book — written by a self-taught Swedish immigrant woman who spent years working lowly jobs in Manhattan, The Biography of a New York Hotel Scrub offers the reader a narrative voice as unique and unforgettable as Molly Bloom’s in the soliloquoy at the end of Ulysses:
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When I start in to criticise a person I always begin at the lower, and, firstly, he wore commonplace, soft-leather shoes. I find these new styles abominable. It is something radically wrong about the man who wore them. I’ll climb a little. Then there comes an evening shirt, stiff and stately. Then there is the head to describe, and I commence with the ears. The ears were deceiving, though. I’ll tell you that some other time. Blonde, curly hair, having the latest style of tint. The forehead was innocent and humorous — eyes with a sad longing in them like some little children have when they are out for mischief.
- • Solitary Confinement by Christopher Burney (1952)
- Solitary Confinement is Christopher Burney’s account of the 526 days he spent in Fresnes prison, outside Paris, after being captured by the Germans as a suspected spy in 1942. Contrary to what you might expect, though, this is not a Wooden Horse/Escape from Colditz book of British derring-do and ingenuity. Escape was never a serious consideration for Burney, something he chides himself for rather late in the narrative.
- Instead, he fully expected something worse than solitary confinement, and even pictured the firing squad he’d face if his real identity as a spy were found out. What makes Solitary Confinement stand out among war and prison memoirs is that Burney focuses, to the exclusion of almost all extraneous details, on the mental and emotional experience of his long stretch in solitary.
- Ted Gioia recently wrote of Solitary Confinement, “Many books have been written about the joys of the contemplative life. But I only know of one written by a prisoner in solitary confinement.”
- • Risk by Rachel Mackenzie (1971)
- Risk, Rachel MacKenzie’s brief account of her hospitalization and initial recovery from open-heart surgery to repair an aneurysm of the left ventricle of her heart is just 59 pages long. Adapted from an article she published in The New Yorker in November, 1970 as “fiction,” it’s a model of the ultra-efficient narrative. There is nothing unnecessary in her account. A student of the progress of heart surgery could easily trace the entire course of her diagnosis, examinations, surgery, and post-operative difficulties, including the game of drug roulette her cardiologist plays until settling on Dilantin as the most effective treatment for arrhythmia, yet no individual element of her medical care gets more than a few lean paragraphs’ attention. Not surprisingly, MacKenzie spent decades applying the same editorial scissors to the work of other writers at The New Yorker.
- • In the Land of Pain by Alphonse Daudet, translated by Julian Barnes (2002)
- In the Land of Pain is Julian Barnes’ translation, with extensive annotations, introduction and afterword, of La Doulou (literally, The Painful), which was published in the 1920s, nearly three decades after Daudet’s death. The book is merely a collection of notes, written over the course of over a decade, while Daudet suffered increasing pain and debility from the ravages taken on his body and mind by syphilis in its tertiary and terminal stage–or, as the Kirkus Reviews reviewer put it, “a 19th-century account of slow death by syphilis.”
- One could hardly come up with a less attractive description. And yet, In the Land of Pain almost radiates with Daudet’s humanity and good humor. Henry James once wrote that Daudet had “an extraordinary sensibility to all the impressions of life and a faculty of language which is in perfect harmony with his wonderful fineness of perception,” and these qualities are on ample display in this slender little book.
