Review_NONFICTION
WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 55In Wine Girl, Victoria James writes of becoming an award-
winning sommelier (reviewed on this page).Trees in Trouble:
Wildfires, Infestations, and
Climate Change Hit the West
Daniel Mathews. Counterpoint, $26 (256p)
ISBN 978-1-640091-35-1
Natural historian Matthews (Natural
History of the Pacific Northwest Mountains)
vividly relates the complex environmental
situation facing America’s western pine
forests in this fascinating account. He draws
in his audience from the opening line,
noting that in “western North America
there are living pine trees older than the
Egyptian pyramids,” thanks to several
millennia of fairly consistent temperatures.
In contrast, he sees the current era of
global warming bringing dramatic and
rapid changes, including the disappearance
of entire species of trees from these forests.
Mathews also illuminates other existential
threats facing the landscape, including
from devastating wildfires and insect
infestations. He is particularly good at
articulating why environmentalists should
“enthusiastically accept... low- to mod-
erate-severity fires” that thin out overgrown
forests and reduce the fuel available for
more serious blazes which humans have
more difficulty controlling, and from which
forests have difficulty recovering. Mathews
also analyzes the fascinating biological
measures and countermeasures developed
by certain trees and the beetles which feed
off of them, and explains how the decrease
in cold snaps caused by global warming
makes mountain pine beetle outbreaks
unstoppable. Eco-conscious readers, even
those unversed in this seemingly niche
subject, will be intrigued and enlightened
by Matthews’s thoughtful work. (Apr.)
Recollections of My
Nonexistence: A Memoir
Rebecca Solnit. Viking, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-
0-593-08333-8
Author and activist Solnit (Whose Story
Is This?) writes in this enlightening, non-
linear memoir of her life as a poor young
woman in 1980s San Francisco and her
development as a writer and feminist
thinker. As a teen, Solnit fled a volatile
home life to forge her path. She rented an
apartment in a black neighborhood (“I
was the first white person to live in the
building in seventeen years”) and acquired
a writing desk from a friend who was nearly
murdered by an ex (“Someone tried to
silence her. Then she gave me a platform
for my voice”). While in graduate school,
she worked at a museum—which informed
the writing of her first book, Secret
Exhibition—and struggled to be heard in a
world that favored male writers. In fluid,
vivid prose, she recalls the terror she
experienced while walking the streets
alone, not knowing if she’d be attacked or
raped, and considers how negative repre-
sentations of women in art affect creative
output (“How do you make art when the
art that’s all around you keeps telling you
to shut up and wash the dishes?”). Along
the way, she highlights her publishing
achievements, including the viral essay
“Men Explain Things to Me,” which
inspired the term mansplaining. This is a
thinking person’s book about writing,
female identity, and freedom by a powerful
and motivating voice for change. (Mar.)★ Wine Girl: The Obstacles,
Humiliations, and Triumphs of
America’s Youngest Sommelier
Victoria James. Ecco, $26.99 (336p)
ISBN 978-0-06-296167-9
In this gritty, eloquent memoir, James,who became the country’s
youngest sommelier at 21, talks
about overcoming sexual assault
and sexism as she built a career
in the restaurant business. The
book, which spans James’s life
from age seven to 28, opens
with an overview of her unstable
childhood, which included an
absent mother and alcoholic
father. James worked in greasy
diners as a teenager and pain-
fully describes being raped by
a customer after a shift. She
briefly turned to drugs after
the attack, then got clean and
moved to New York City,
where she landed a bartending
job at an Italian restaurant.
Her first sommelier job was at
Michelin-starred Aureole,
where she learned how to
make wine recommendations
and how to scan a customer’s
appearance to determine how
much money they might
spend. Often dismissed by customers
who disliked taking advice from a woman,
she relentlessly studied wine and won
awards, among them the prestigious Sud
de France Sommelier Challenge. James
grippingly discusses working at several
high-end restaurants and wading through
ugly swamps of unwanted advances and
crude comments before finding a happy
home at Michelin-starred Cote, where
she is the beverage director. This will
speak to wine geeks as well as those who
don’t know Burgundy from Budweiser.
(Mar.)Counterpoint:
A Memoir of Bach and Mourning
Philip Kennicott. Norton, $26.95 (224p)
ISBN 978-0-393-63536-2
In this uneven debut, Washington Post
and Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic
Kennicott recounts his efforts to learn to
play Johann Sebastian Bach’s renowned
Goldberg Variations to cope with his grief
following the death of his mother from
cancer. Kennicott is unabashedly honest,
stating he wanted to avoid the fate of his
mother, who was “unhappy and died that
way, unfulfilled and angry about what she
sensed was a wasted life.” This thoughtful
mission, nonlinearly told, helps him toNonfiction
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