Bloomberg Businessweek is the happy marriage of the internet’s eclectic fizz and actual journalistic skill. The result is that the business world becomes a whimsical ride of surprise and intrigue. To wit, the current issue features articles on honey fraud, tough-love crowdfunding for startups, and a new preservative-free challenger to the indestructible (in more ways than one) Lunchable.
Books & Essays
Bloomberg Businessweek
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Have Mother, Will Travel
By Claire and Mia Fontaine
Mother and daughter Claire and Mia Fontaine are battling gnawing life crises when they decide to shed their inertia and travel the world together. Claire, who purchased a moldy Florida money pit just in time for the real estate crash, has lost connection to her work and spirit; while Mia finds herself in an unsatisfying post-college loop of work, gym, parties, and reality TV.
Their journey is part perspiration, part relaxation. First, they embark on a whirlwind tour of places like Beijing, Nepal, and Macedonia. During this leg of the trip, the Fontaines elude the advances of pimps in squeaky leather pants and experience the somber majesty of public cremations. And, yes, their trip leads to squabbles due to time-honored travel challenges like blood-sugar crashes, differing spontaneity levels, and barbs such as, “You might consider that suffering in silence is a highly underrated skill.”
Following that segment, they treat themselves to three quintessentially relaxing months in Provence. They take to the lifestyle instantly, and spend the vast majority of their time hanging out in cafés and being entertained by wonderfully quirky French friends by day. By night, they obsessively watch costume dramas while inhaling homemade guacamole.
Both are inquisitive and inspiring travel guides, but this premise is secondary to the exploration of the mother-daughter bond and their own compelling story. Their first book, Come Back: A Mother and Daughter’s Journey Through Hell and Back, recounted Mia’s dramatic descent into addiction as a teen, Claire’s fight to save her, and their return to relative normalcy. Have Mother, Will Travel has them reworking their relationship as adults who have drifted apart.
The book alternates between their perspectives, a method that is initially distracting but ultimately rewarding. Claire’s style is both clinical and poetic. She writes particularly hauntingly of her estrangement from her own mother, a no-nonsense Holocaust survivor. Mia’s approach is breezy, conversational, and more circumspect. It’s clear that she is in the process of looking her quarter-life crisis squarely in the eyes and proceeding methodically, in part to avoid some of the regret currently gripping her mother. Together they make a terrifically introspective team, with a shared irreverence that adds levity to some rather heavy proceedings.
Far from being yet another tale of affluence gone emo, Have Mother, Will Travel is a beautiful, generous exploration of being both a mother and a daughter.
The Vanishers
By Heidi Julavits
The Vanishers started out strong: a renowned psychic’s relationship with her gifted understudy unravels into a jumble of interpersonal terror, suicide, disappearances, and online stalking. But the story gets weighed down by its meta self-interest, and devolves from a whodonit into a whocares.
Julavits, though, is an acerbic observer and an innovative, delightfully shocking writer. Her gifts lie in language and incisive characterization, and I’m hoping her next book focuses on those strengths.
This Generation
By Han Han
Han Han is a novelist, the world’s most read blogger, a professional race car driver, and the source of much controversy in his native China, where he is criticized for both his frankness and self-interested circumspection. This book offers a glimpse into China’s complex dynamics of unprecedented change, censorship, promise, hope, cynicism, and corruption by way of Han’s pithy, wry entries.
The Unwinding
By George Packer
This book traces the last thirty-five years of life in the United States through an eclectic mix of biographical and geographical profiles. Packer paints arresting, astute portraits of familiar figures like Colin Powell, Elizabeth Warren, Raymond Carver, Jay-Z, Robert Rubin, and Oprah, and then takes more in-depth inventory of anonymous American lives. These include a factory worker-turned-activist, an erstwhile company man who became a struggling entrepreneur, a formerly apolitical engineer who transformed into a Tea Party organizer, and the city of Tampa—which went from “America’s Next Great City” in 1985 to the epicenter of foreclosures in 2008.
Perhaps the most entertaining section covers the trajectory of Jeff Connaughton, a longtime Biden staffer who later cashed out as lobbyist, then wrote a damning exposé of the Capitol Hill-K Street-Wall Street alliance. (See also: “Biting the hand that feeds you.”) It’s an intriguing psychological study of an underling who initially hopes that proximity will equal power, settles for respect, gets neither, then gets greedy. And let’s just say that Biden is more Joe Pesci in Goodfellas than Crazy Uncle Joe here.
What could have been a diffuse, messy exercise is held together by Packer’s artistry and easy command of the material’s complexity. Plus, his writing is simply outstanding: simultaneously humane and dispassionate, diplomatic yet acerbic. This is excellent stuff.
The Fall of the House of Dixie
By Bruce Levine
This is social history at its finest. The Fall of the House of Dixie uses meticulous research and incisive quotes from a variety of sources--including soldiers, slaves, abolitionists, impoverished whites, and the Confederate aristocracy--to provide an astonishing autopsy of life in the nineteenth century South before and after the Civil War. Levine, a professor at the University of Illinois, presents complex ideas and loaded topics with remarkable clarity. He's a wonderful interviewee as well, as exemplified by his appearance on NPR's Fresh Air.
