→ April 6, 2019
→ By

Stick to baseball, 4/6/19.

No ESPN+ content from me this week, although I have a draft blog post to file tonight that will cover what I saw at NHSI this week as well as potential first-rounder George Kirby of Elon. I did hold a Klawchat on Tuesday.

Meredith Wills helped me do some of the research that went into Smart Baseball, and, in addition to being an astrophysicist and general baseball expert (who realized that a change in the thickness of the baseball’s laces likely explains the current home run surge), she’s also a knitter and generally quite crafty. She’s disassembled many baseballs to look into their construction and is now selling crafts made from the leather on these baseballs, repurposing material that would otherwise go to landfills.

And now, the links, with a note. I didn’t get through all the longer reads I’d saved this week, so I may post a bonus roundup tomorrow or Monday. We’ll see how my weekend goes.

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→ December 15, 2017
→ By

The Body Keeps the Score.

I’ve been open about my own mental health issues, such as this piece I wrote on being anxious throughout my childhood, but am fortunate in one respect in that my childhood was also relatively free of trauma. I grew up in a loving family, didn’t lose any close family members until I was a teenager – both of my grandmothers lived to their 100th birthdays – and never had to deal with the effects of divorce or abuse, to pick just two possible traumas that affect kids. Events I might recall as “traumatic” pale in comparison to what others grew up with.

I’ve only come to learn about trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in the last handful of years, due to several close friends who suffer from it and how its effects can often include problems I’ve dealt with, including anxiety, panic, depression. Somewhere along the way I heard about Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal 2015 book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I have since learned is an incredibly influential and important book in the world of mental health professionals. Dr. van der Kolk has spent decades working with trauma victims and was one of the leading proponents of the hypothesis, later supported by fMRI and similar evidence, that trauma actually alters the brain in a physical sense rather than just a mental one, and that even minor events can still have traumatic effects on our brains, especially when they happen while we’re young.

Dr. van der Kolk spends the first part of The Body Keeps the Score discussing his own history in working with trauma victims and the difficulty he and other colleagues had in even gaining acceptance for the idea of the aftermath of trauma as a distinct medical disorder. PTSD was only recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a formal diagnosis in 1980, when it was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders‘s third edition (DSM-III), thanks to a surge in sufferers among soldiers who returned from fighting in Vietnam. Awareness of the condition dates back to ancient Greece, and is well-documented in medical and popular literature from the 1800s forward under terms like “shell shock” (whence our word “shell-shocked” derives), but people with PTSD prior to 1980 were treated as if they had a panoply of other, seemingly unrelated mental health disorders, which led to problems like overmedication and a lack of any progress back towards a normal life.

From there, the author discusses new evidence from the world of neuroscience to support his and others’ hypotheses that the brain of a trauma victim works differently than the brain of someone without PTSD. Different parts of the brain are activated in similar situations, although among trauma victims there can be varying responses, from panic to dissociation to shutdown. He also discusses the various ways we develop PTSD, often in excruciating details of childhood abuse or wartime atrocities, tying these underlying conditions to changes in methylation of genes that can even be passed on to offspring, a process known as “epigenetics,” that also explains how the brains of trauma victims end up operating on a different BIOS than those of others.

The prose here can feel a bit academic, perhaps the result of van der Kolk’s background but also that he’s a native Dutch speaker and writing in his second language. In part five, which constitutes nearly half of the book, the writing livens up as he delves into various methods of attacking trauma and retraining the brain not to panic, dissociate, or just peace out when the person is presented with a trigger. Some suggestions are obvious or well-known, like using yoga or EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but does help trauma victims), while others are novel and surprising, including participation in theater or similar role-playing activities, or using a computer program to try to ‘reprogram’ the brain not just in its fear response but all of the time. He includes EEG graphs that show patterns of attention in the brains of study participants where the trauma victims’ brain waves are less tightly connected and even diverge in the milliseconds after the subject was presented with information for the brain to process. Neurofeedback, which allows the user to regulate his/her own brain function with the help of software that displays EEG results, has shown promise for trauma victims and people with other mental health disorders to reestablish control over their brains’ betrayals. Dr. van der Kolk also goes into heart-rate variability training, self-leadership of the different parts of our personality (not quite dissociative identity disorder, but leaning that way), and the pros and cons of cognitive behavioral therapy or medication for PTSD sufferers.

If you or someone close to you is a trauma victim of any sort, even if it seems like a ‘minor’ trauma, The Body Keeps a Score will be an illuminating read that could help alter the course of your/your intimate’s treatment. Even just the final section, where he points out why things like CBT aren’t effective (discussing the trauma over and over doesn’t actually change the way the brain responds to it or other triggers) and gives numerous suggestions for other remedies, would be useful. If you can get through some of the more technical language earlier in the book, though, the entire read is worthwhile, especially as van der Kolk explains his own journey of understanding through decades of working with veterans, children, and other trauma victims to get to this comprehensive theory of how best to treat these people – often people who were considered untreatable by previous generations of psychiatrists.

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→ July 16, 2016
→ By

Anomalisa.

Anomalisa is the best depiction of depression that I’ve come across in any medium of fiction, even though it’s, of all things, made with puppets and stop-motion animation. It uses one incredibly effective gimmick to show us the main character’s illness without resorting to lengthy explanations, and then is carried forward by the three voice actors’ performances in a story that is at times heartbreaking yet often deliberately silly. (It’s also available on iTunes.)

Michael Stone, voiced by David Thewlis (a.k.a., Remus Lupin), is a successful author and public speaker on the topic of customer service, and he’s just landed in Cincinnati to give a talk on the topic. He’s also battling what we learn is a very longstanding case of depression, which is shown to us via his senses: He sees all other people as having the same face, and all their voices as identical as well. Male, female, child, adult, whatever, they all look and sound alike to him. (All of these characters are voiced by character actor Tom Noonan, who just moderates his pitch slightly for age and gender, nothing more.) Many of the people he meets are comically annoying, from the cab driver who gets him to the hotel to the bellman who just won’t leave, followed by a disastrous reunion with the girlfriend he left without explanation ten years earlier.

Later that night, he hears a different voice for the first time in years, Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a very insecure woman who drove in from out of town with her friend just to hear Michael’s talk. Michael pursues her, discovering that she’s lonely in her own way, and … things move from there, but I wouldn’t say they “progress,” so much as they stumble, because Michael is still depressed and Lisa – whom he dubs “Anomalisa” when she refers to herself as a sort of anomaly – is not the cure.

I have been there, so to speak, not for the length of time that Michael has apparently been depressed but for long enough stretches to recognize what he’s enduring, and I’ve described it as a sort of fog. Colors seem less bright, everything is darker, edges are less crisp, and memories are always less clear. You don’t even necessarily know what’s wrong until you’re out of it and realize that your perception of the world and everyone in it was warped by your condition. I never suffered from the sort of modified Fregoli delusion that writer Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich) gives Michael, but it works perfectly as a metaphor for depression in general. Your brain perceives the world without its details, so everything becomes less interesting or able to hold your attention, and you become overwhelmed with a feeling of sameness. (I assume the name Anomalisa also alludes to anomie, a sociological term that can refer to the loss of direction or purpose an individual might feel due to a sense of alienation or disconnect from society. Michael also stays at the Hotel Fregoli for another bit of Kaufman wordplay.)

Anomalisa also avoids showing depression as a one-dimensional disorder. Michael is depressed, but he can still function. He got on the plane. He’s given these speeches before and even written a best-selling book. He has fans. He’s supposed to be quite good-looking (for a puppet). Depressed is not dead. You can be depressed, or anxious, or even bipolar, and still lead a functional life – just not a fulfilled one. And for whatever reason, Zoloft, a very widely prescribed anti-depressant, doesn’t appear to have helped Michael. His foggy status could be a combination of the depression and the side effect of SSRIs that they tend to take the edges off your emotions, for better or for worse; at one point he mentions being unable to cry, something I’ve experienced on escitalopram (Lexapro) as well.

The film’s concluding sequence is somewhat jarring after the languorous pace of everything up to and including Michael’s encounter with Lisa, although it’s a logical series of events – it’s simply missing a few pieces, notably a last conversation between those two before Michael returns to Los Angeles, his miserable wife, and attention-starved son. Kaufman’s better at beginnings than endings; Being John Malkovich is a brilliant idea that crashes into the wall on the final lap, although I thought Eternal Sunshine ended well by returning to the beginning. Here, his script finishes with one final, beautiful flourish, a glimmer of hope in Lisa’s words and a visual trick you might miss if you’re not looking for it, that salvaged the slightly incongruous editing at the end.

If you’ve ever struggled to understand depression, perhaps because a friend or loved one has it, watch Anomalisa. All three voice actors are superb, especially Leigh, whose intonation reveals her character’s insecurity long before we understand her reasons for it. Kaufman’s script gives the disease an authentic, uncomfortable (quite so, at times) treatment for the serious, multi-dimensional story mental illness deserves. It’s a sad film, but never humorless, and left me wanting to see more.

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→ June 27, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 6/27/15.

My Insider pieces this week included a post on some Red Sox prospects, including Yoan Moncada; one on the Arizona/Atlanta trade involving Touki Toussaint; and a reaction to the release of the Futures Game rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the reissue of the modern classic Tigris & Euphrates, designer Reiner Knizia’s best game, now back in print with better graphics and clearer rules.

My good friend Molly Knight has a book coming out on the Dodgers, The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse, next month, and it’s so good I even gave the publisher a quote to use on the back.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • We’re getting so much closer to vaccine sanity, as California is set to end religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccinating school-age children. The science is clear and unequivocal, and making the wrong, anti-science decision can affect hundreds of others’ lives.
  • A young widow’s heartrending letter to her late husband, who committed suicide a month ago after a long battle with depression.
  • The Moringa oleifera tree may lead to an inexpensive process for purifying drinking water in developing countries.
  • On a Tokyo coffee roasting master still roasting at age 100.
  • A former president of the American Humanist Association writes in Psychology Today that anti-intellectualism is killing America. I’m not sure I agree with the premise, nor do I think such unreason as racial hatred is “anti-intellectualism” per se, but I still found it an interesting read.
  • Roxane Gay wrote in the New York Times that she can’t forgive Dylan Roof, and why should she? Forgiveness means releasing your anger. If we forget to be angry, why would anything ever change?
  • The first segment of Thursday’s episode of BBC Outlook, on Canada’s abused aboriginal children is harrowing listening, but also makes a superb case for “truth and reconciliation” commissions to address past historical wrongs.
  • Common sense from VOX.com: People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crimes. Yet we don’t hear calls for greater mental health treatment options when the former is true, only the latter.
  • A recent meta-study has found that the phenolic compounds found in olive oil may help prevent neurodegenerative diseases, although it would be nice to see empirical evidence (via clinical trials) to back this up. Still, olive oil is delicious and may be really good for you.
  • The guys behind Animal and Son of a Gun have opened a pizzeria in LA, and it sounds amazing, of course.
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→ November 30, 2011
→ By

Beginners.

Mike Mills’ 2011 film Beginners takes an event from his own life and turns it into the central plot point in a romantic drama about love, death, and depression. But it’s a much better and sweeter movie than that makes it sound.

As the film opens, we see the 38-year-old Oliver cleaning out a house, going through mementos and old papers, after which he explains (as narrator) that his father, Hal, has just died of cancer, four years after his mother died, which led Hal to reveal that he was gay and to embark on almost a second adolescence, finding new friends, a new love, and a happiness he’d never had during his four decades of marriage. That story, shown in retrospect, is cut in between shots of emotionally-stunted Oliver struggling to forge a new, and for him unusually happy, relationship with, Anna, a beautiful French actress who stumbles improbably into his life but is far from emotionally perfect herself. Oliver’s inability to be happy in love is only partially explained by what we learn about his family, but it’s too facile to say that he learns how to overcome that by watching his father – he learns how to start overcoming it, and to Mills’ credit, the film doesn’t make anything too easy on him or on us.

Nearly all of the dialogue – I’d be hard-pressed to call it action – in Beginners comes from the three central characters, with a few added lines from Hal’s younger boyfriend Andy (Goran Visnjic) and from the dog Arthur (via subtitles, if you were confused). Christopher Plummer is earning some justified Oscar buzz for his performance as the moribund Hal, whose mood is anything but as he finds himself liberated after 40-plus closeted years in an unfulfilled marriage that was, for him, more of a business arrangement; while I’d love to see him win Best Supporting Actor for sentimental reasons, it may also be that he wins for sentimental reasons, as he turns 82 in two weeks and has received just one nomination, in 2009 for The Last Station. It could be the Academy’s last chance to so honor Captain Von Trapp in a sort of lifetime achievement award.

But Plummer is truly the supporting actor to the two leads, Ewan Macgregor as Oliver and Mélanie Laurent as Anna, whose relationship we watch in tiny movements from inception to breakup (if you can call it that) to resolution, a path that seems painfully real in how precise some of those movements are. They meet at a costume party – one of those costume parties you only see on TV or in films, because all of the costumes are impeccable – where Anna has laryngitis and communicates via a tiny notepad, which still makes her louder than the grieving Oliver, just two months past the death of his father. From there, the film jumps around in time between their romance, often sweet but tinged with melancholy reflected in dim apartments and fall weather, and Hal’s last few years of personal freedom, exploring (his word) another side of himself while Oliver attempts to hold together a foundational element of his past. Discovering that his parents’ marriage was a sham – to him, fully, but to his father, only partly so – only cements his belief that relationships won’t work out, so why give them a chance to do so when you know you’ll fail?

We also see scenes from Hal’s marriage to Oliver’s mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller) in flashbacks in which Hal never appears: It’s always Oliver and his mother, and it becomes clear that while Hal viewed their marriage as an arrangement, she didn’t, and her growing alienation from her husband only compounded whatever issues she brought into the marriage in the first place. (This receives some explanation toward the end of the film, a mild spoiler I won’t reveal.) Witnessing his own parents’ loveless marriage, understanding that it was loveless with no understanding of why, warps Oliver’s own view of love and plants the seeds of an inability to build a lasting relationships that, with Anna, is exacerbated by his suffocating grief.

Laurent, meanwhile, could say virtually nothing and steal scenes just by virtue of being adorable, but Anna is battling a depression of her own, living an itinerant and ultimately lonesome lifestyle that may also reflect a reaction to a broken relationship between her still-living parents. It’s a hard trick to look sad without becoming pathetic when an actress and her character are both cute; while it took some time for Laurent to make Anna’s underlying sadness come through (the film is, after all, more focused on Oliver’s grief), the script turns enough to allow Laurent to stretch out beyond the façade of Anna’s playfulness. Her reunion with Oliver at the film’s end would have felt forced if he was the only one struggling emotionally, one of several small twists in the film that made it more effective and less sentimental than a standard girl-fixes-guy romantic drama.

Mills’ script succeeds when it’s subtle but veers off course when he veers outside the relationships at the film’s core. The conversations between Oliver and Anna are soft, short, understated – sometimes too much so, as in the breakup conversation that neither my wife nor I fully understood – contributing to a tentative feeling that conveys Oliver’s own uncertainty at entering a relationship that might not fail (and perhaps Anna’s uncertainty over the same). What I could have done without was Oliver’s inexplicable job – he’s some sort of artist or sketcher who ignores a rock band client’s request for an album cover, instead producing a series of badly-drawn sketches about the history of sadness that is far more about him (and emphasizing just how sad he is) than about the client, whose needs we never actually hear about anyway. Mills wants us to know just how Sad everyone is, but the dialogue and the tiny interactions between Oliver and Anna already provide that, leaving his sketches (e.g., “First couple too in love to be sad”) feeling extraneous. It was a heavy-handed flourish in a film that didn’t need it; Beginners wins you over with the delicate scenes between Oliver and Anna the contrast with the unfettered last few years for Hal.

* I don’t understand how this moved ended up with a rating of “R.” There’s no violence at all, and very little foul language. There’s no on-screen sex or even nudity – just a few shots of Melanie Laurent’s bare back, and if that merits an “R” rating, I must be one of the New Libertines or something. It seems to me that the ratings board members must have been watching the movie and saying, “Wow, what a nice film, we should make it PG or PG-13 since it’s so inoffe…oh my God there are two men kissing! Rate it R! RATE! IT! R!”

* Ewan Macgregor was just as charming as a shy phone-company tech in Little Voice, a 1998 vehicle for singer Jane Horrocks, who plays a painfully shy woman with a hidden talent for impersonating great singers. (Those of you with young daughters know her as the voice of Fairy Mary in the Tinker Bell movies. Yes, you do, stop lying.) Horrocks owns the movie when she sings, but it’s a virtuoso performance from Michael Caine, who won a Golden Globe for the film, as the unscrupulous talent agent who sees one last chance to make a killing.

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→ August 12, 2011
→ By

The Corrections.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections made the TIME list of the 100 greatest novels published since the magazine began for its use of dark humor in an unstinting portrayal of both the modern American family and of our unending winter of discontent. It is a well-constructed novel with smart prose, one that challenges the reader often without becoming an arduous read, but ultimately suffers from its depressing outlook and the presence of only one really compelling storyline.

The Lambert family is in the final stages of full collapse as its patriarch, Alfred, approaches the end of his life, and his wife Enid seeks to bring all three of her adult children home to St. Jude, Ohio, for one final Christmas together. Alfred suffers from Parkinson’s disease that is ravaging body and mind, yet lives in partial denial of the loss of some of his faculties while living in full denial of what appears to be a lifelong battle with clinical depression. Enid herself fights a depression of her own, but one more the result of her own losing battle with a sullen, domineering husband, who clipped her wings and may have driven away all three children once they could leave the nest. Eldest son Gary is superficially successful, married with three children and a lucrative day job in banking, but is himself depressed; he’s aware of it, unlike Alfred, but tries desperately to fight it without resorting to therapy or antidepressants (although the cause of his aversion to those solutions is unclear; it may be related to his paranoia about his wife and children conspiring against him). Middle child Chip is a failed academic, a tourist of Marxism, and eventually an aide to a Lithuanian con man. If you like a single one of these characters, each of whom (except perhaps Enid, a product of her times) is at least partly responsible for his own mess, you’re a more empathetic reader than I am.

The star of the book for me is the youngest Lambert child, Denise, a talented chef with a second talent for romantic entanglements that sabotage her life and eventually leave her jobless and, coincidentally, available to clean up family messes. I’d argue that she’s the most together of any family member, certainly the most self-aware and most willing to think about what causes her bouts of self-destructive behavior, and the job loss was a little bit forced into the plot anyway. (The absence of any mention of a sexual harassment lawsuit bothered me.) Each character gets his or her own extended section, and Denise’s was by far the most interesting, both from sheer narrative greed and from my ability to empathize with her character, because she has a level of emotional depth absent from other members of her family, and less of the propensity to extinguish her own flame. And the lead-in to that section, giving us the back story on the family that ends up employing Denise in the husband’s restaurant start-up, is the single best passage in the entire book, even thought it doesn’t feature any of the Lamberts. Incidentally, Franzen, to his great credit, shows pretty strong understanding of food and food trends of ten years ago in describing Denise’s culinary exploits, including her gustatory tour of Europe that leads to, of course, some significant emotional development, particularly when she sees acquaintances from St. Jude living a wealthy yet stale life in Austria.

The book is funny and crude, sometimes at the same time, but other times the crudeness is simply offputting and pointless. Franzen can spin a phrase and make words dance in many directions, and it’s a shame to see how often he makes them tango in the gutter when he excels at wry, incisive observations. The strongest prose got me through the book despite a rather bleak outlook on life. The emotions generated by the book’s brief concluding section were very real, and yet I still felt cheated, like this final “correction” to the Lambert family dysfunction came too late – after 550 pages of downers, chemical and psychological, I wanted some small glimmer of hope for the Lamberts left standing, some argument that life, corrected, still had meaning, and Franzen just left it hanging. But if his point was to display our happiness paradox, where greater prosperity in the U.S. hasn’t led to greater happiness or satisfaction or reduced rates of clinical depression, then that open-ended conclusion serves his greater purpose. It just wasn’t the book I wanted to read.

Next up: I’m about ¾ of the way through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Orange Prize-winning book Half of a Yellow Sun, a historical novel set during the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70.

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→ August 4, 2010
→ By

Legend of a Suicide.

David Vann’s story collection Legend of a Suicide has won a slew of literary awards and plaudits, including the Grace Paley Prize and appearances on 25 “best books of the year” lists, as well as becoming a critical and commercial success in, of all places, France. It’s a highly autobiographical book built around the suicide of Vann’s father when the author was just 13.

Legend is built around a central, two-part novella, “Sukkwan Island,” with three very short stories before it and two after; those five stories tie together closely, but the novella shifts two major plot details in a way that prevents reading the set as a single, linear story that would probably qualify as a novel. The five stories are well-written and useful for setting the scene, but I found the shift in “Sukkwan Island” jarring not just for its shock value but because the three stories that preceded that one had set me up for a different path.

In the early short stories, Vann’s alter ego, Roy, watches his father’s demise into depression and bad life choices from something of a distance, but in the alternate reality of “Sukkwan Island,” Roy chooses to spend a year in Alaska with his father, living survivalist-style in the woods on a remote island, only to witness Jim’s downward spiral up close. (In real life, and in the two stories that end the book, Roy/David declined to go to Alaska, after which Jim killed himself.) Roy dies in Alaska, and Jim’s depression and anxiety after his son’s death take on more corporeal form as he tries to survive, to cover up what happened, and to escape responsibility. Even Roy’s death could be a metaphor for the death of Vann’s relationship with his father – sensing that his father was headed for an inevitable tragedy and fearing the darkness and mood changes of crippling depression, perhaps David pulled away from his dad, convincing him to decline the invitation to spend a (miserable) year in the wildnerness with an unstable parent. Jim’s eventual death in “Sukkwan Island” is simultaneously a form of revenge on his father and a form of forgiveness, a glimmer of understanding that despite the inherent selfishness of suicide*, someone in the grip of that type of depression isn’t fully in control of his actions.

*Yes, I’ve lost a close relative to suicide, as has my wife. I speak from some experience, although nothing comparable to Vann’s.

Jim’s descent, fueled by despair, grief, fear, and self-doubt, is gripping and difficult to read; by putting Jim in the position of a father whose son has died and who bears at least some responsibility, Vann gives the reader more reason to empathize with the character, perhaps even to pity him, and thus makes his late father more than just a personal mess who screwed up his life and then screwed up his son’s by killing himself.

In the concluding stories, Roy – very much alive – goes to Alaska and attempts to piece together a little of his father’s legacy, only to find that the world there has changed so much during his own emotional stasis:

Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

He remains emotionally paralyzed by his father’s suicide, and while that’s probably realistic, it doesn’t make for much of a story. I was looking for some kind of conclusion – not a happy ending, not even closure necessarily, but some sort of event to guide me out of the book. Roy goes to visit one of his father’s mistresses, only to find himself unable to ask her anything about his dad, a perfect vignette in a larger book but very unsatisfying as the basis for a short story.

Vann’s prose is easy and earnest, so much so that it’s uncomfortable at times to see through a window that clear, but a book about depression and suicide can’t be anything but brutally honest – if a novel or story on the subject doesn’t make the reader at least a little uncomfortable, it failed in its mission. If anything, Vann could have delved more deeply and continued any of the stories, or expanded “Sukkwan Island” into a longer novel, and found more material to mine in the complex, broken personality of his father and his own complex, even warped relationship with him, and the material would have remained compelling because he writes so well about these stark emotions. The first half of “Sukkwan” is the strongest material in Legend because that honesty is blended with the child’s view of his father breaking down, a mixture of confusion, fear, and stop-and-go sympathy from a boy in a position that would be difficult for an adult to handle. The second half of the story does suffer slightly from Roy’s absence.

If you don’t mind a bleak read, one where endings are few and never happy, but one that’s unsparing in its look at a fairly common mental illness that went untreated and ended in tragedy, Legend of a Suicide does an outstanding job of handling the subject. It’s uneven but introduces a talented writer who’s able to write about tough emotions, and I’m hopeful that in his upcoming novel, Caribou Island (due out in January), he’ll make the adjustments to tell a more complete story without compromising his emotional honesty.

Next up: Mary Murphy’s Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird. I received complimentary review copies of both that book and Legend from the publisher.

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