My Favorite Autobiographies of 2022

 

    On October 24, 2022, the world lost a giant, even though he only stood 4' 11". Leslie Jordan was an absolute joy to watch in everything he did as an actor and performer, and, by all accounts, he was an absolute joy to everyone who ever worked with him or spent any time around him. We listened to his most recent autobiography, How Y'all Doing? this year and his first book My Trip Down the Pink Carpet last year, and we enjoyed every second of it. I highly recommend the audio versions with Leslie narrating.

    Penny Marshall's autobiography, My Mother Was Nuts, was originally published in 2012, and it's another audiobook must - I mean, how could you not want to listen to Penny Marshall tell her own story. And who knew that Laverne Defazio was the Queen of the entertainment world? Be prepared for lots and lots of namedropping, but it's not just namedropping. These are real stories, real truths, about herself and her friendships and relationships. (Did you know she dated Art Garfunkel?) It was a very fun listen.

    Mel Brooks is an absolute national treasure, and it will be a dark day when he passes. We also listened to his autobiography, All About Me. Not surprisingly, the book is kind of a frantic ride through his professional career, with each chapter  basically dedicated to a particular work or job, and it is much heavier Mel's professional life than his personal live, but that's OK. If you're a fan of Mel Brooks' work, there is so much to learn here.

    One theme that runs through all these books is friendship. All of these people were (are) fantastic friends and loyal forever. They all believed in helping their friends whenever and however they could, and their friends, returned their love and loyalty.  

    Essayist and humorist David Sedaris returned to top form this year with his release of Happy Go Lucky. I've always been a huge fan of Sedaris, but I honestly haven't loved his last few books. Happy Go Lucky is a return to his best. While he may not be everybody's cup of tea, and his stories about his and his family's weirdness to the nth degree may seem unbelievable, or at least a little exaggerated, his stories are always funny, tragic, insightful, provocative, and evocative all at the same time. In this book, he really focuses on his father who died recently in his late 90s. This is another author who was made for audiobooks.

    Let's go a little more historical for the last recommendation, An Englishman in the Seminole War. John Bemrose arrived in America, alone at the age of 16, in 1831. He found himself headed south to the wilds of Florida and enlisted in the Second Seminole War. In the 1860s, he wrote a series of letters to his son in which he recounted his life in service. They are full of detail about battles and personalities in the war. The letters were kind of forgotten until his great grandson rediscovered them and edited them to create this book. It's a great memoir of a period and events which most Americans know little of. Randal Agostini did an excellent job of editing and transcribing the letters; it reads well.

 

 

My Top 10 (+ a bonus) Reads of 2022

     Here are my favorite books of the year, in no particular order. Some were published in 2021 or 2022, others earlier, but something in 2022 inspired me to read them this year. 

    Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr's Live and Win the 1960 Election is about an incident that I never really knew about, even though it took place in my home state of Georgia just a few years before I was born.  It's all about the first time that Reverend MLK Jr was arrested and jailed. It all started with a miscarriage of justice in Decatur Georgia (ironically one of Georgia's most "woke" cities today). The young Reverend was just beginning to acquire a national reputation after serving as one of the leaders of the successful Montgomery Alabama bus boycott. He and his family moved back home to Atlanta. One day in Decatur, an Atlanta suburb, he was pulled over for a traffic violation. He produced his valid Alabama driver's license, but he was arrested and convicted for not having a license. To avoid jail time and further complications, he followed his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty, not fully realizing that any future arrest would void the agreement, and he would then face the possibility of prison time. A few months later, the students of Atlanta's Historically Black Colleges and Universities were applying pressure on the city's department stores and restaurants to desegregate, using picketing and sit-ins. Despite his reluctance to get involved and risk what would be his first major arrest, King decided to join the students. He was arrested, setting into motion the steps toward having his probation revoked and being sent to the Georgia State Prison, where there was a high probability that he would be murdered. While all this sounds local, the Kenedy and Nixon presidential campaigns saw a chance to win black support by intervening on his behalf, but it also meant a risk of alienating white southern voters. The book shares the behind the scenes maneuvering that took place, and the impact that it all had on the election. It's one of those pivotal moments in history that could have gone either way.

    The Dead Are Arising is the Pulitzer prize winning biography of Malcolm X, reflecting years of research and many, many interviews of those people who knew him. The book paints more a complete picture than previous biographies, and even more than The Autobiography of Malcolm X because, as the book points out in numerous instances, The Autobiography is not entirely truthful or totally forthcoming. It's an excellent  biography.

    Gangsters vs Nazis and The Bastard Brigade are both about little-known aspects of World War II.  Gangsters tells the story of Jewish, Irish, and Italian crime families in the US that took up the fight against pro-Nazi groups and agents working in the US during the years leading up to the war. With a little prodding from government officials and agencies, gangsters saw it as their patriotic duty to infiltrate Nazi sympathizer groups and physically bust up rallies and demonstrations. The Bastard Brigade is about a group of scientists and commandos who were recruited specifically to go behind enemy lines to investigate and sabotage the German efforts at atomic research and to see just how close the Germans were to developing atomic weapons. Along the way they captured, interrogated, and brought to America various physicists and researchers whose work eventually was a great aid to the United States space program. There are great stories of cloak and dagger shenanigans - often involving famous scientists whose names you heard in your high school chemistry and physics classes.

    I read Under the Banner of Heaven because of the recent TV series, but the book was published in 2003. The author investigated and juxtaposed two histories: the origin and evolution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS Church) and a modern double murder committed in the name of God by two brothers , who subscribed to a fundamentalist version of Mormonism. The book is a deep dive into the history and beliefs of both the orthodox LDS church and the fundamentalist offshoot church to which the brothers belonged and that the LDS church condemns. The Icepick Surgeon is written by writer and podcaster Sam Kean, and it's a collection of stories about quacks, doctors and research who used insane methods in the name of science. These are mostly horrible and unbelievable vignettes in scientific history that you won't be able to put down, as disgusted and angry as they make you.  River of the Gods is a new book by Candice Millard, a great nonfiction author. It's all about one of the biggest quests of the 19th century, as far as western Europeans were concerned, the discovery of the source of the two Nile tributaries. Millard's account of the expedition led by Richard Burton is fascinating, and, again, there's an awful lot about the behind the scenes relationship of Burton and his partner and rival John Speke.

    Facing the Mountain and The Eagles of Heart Mountain are two really great takes on one of America's saddest moments, the Japanese-American internment/incarceration in concentration camps during World War II. They are two more books that will, and should, really anger readers, but the story must be told. Horrible things happened as native-born and Japanese-born Americans were ripped from their homes and businesses and forced to spend years in concentration camps. Eagles takes the unique perspective of telling the story through the lives of high school boys who found a way to cope with their incarceration through football. I'm not a sports man and would usually never pick up books about sports, but this book held my interest nevertheless.  Facing is the story of the Japanese- American unit, the Fighting 442nd, the most decorated unit in American military history. Brown tells their heroic story and the historic story of the men who fought against the absurdity of the US government that drafted men for service to the same government that had destroyed their lives and their families' lives and the same military that kept them at gunpoint behind barbed wire fence.  All were heroes, and more Americans should know the story.

   

    Finally, anyone who knows me knows that I love learning food history and foodways, so my last two books should come as no surprise. Adrian Miller's  Soul Food is an exploration and deep dive into the history of soul food, told in an interesting way. Miller concentrates on several soul food staples and traces their history and development from their African origins through all the changes and evolutions in the American South.  Koshersoul is so good, just so good. Chef Michael Twitty is a scholar and chef that writes from a unique perspective as a Jewish, gay, African-American. His first book, The Cooking Gene, talks about southern food or soul food through the African diaspora prism. This book applies the same great writing and analysis to the intersection of African, soul and Jewish foods. These books are must-reads for those who are interested in culture and food.