Review_NONFICTION
58 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 14, 2019
Review_NONFICTION
decision to leave journalism and pursue
stand-up (“I’m a Comedian”). Hilliard’s
battles with food may not be over, but age
has given her perspective: “I’m smart,
but I’ll never really grasp the concept of
calories.” The author’s self-love message
will resonate with readers who appreciate
narratives of personal and professional
fulfillment. (Jan.)Hunger: The Oldest Problem
Martín Caparrós, trans. from the Spanish by
Katherine Silver. Melville House, $29.99
(544p) ISBN 978-1-61219-804-0
Global hunger is the great moral issue
of our time, argues this vehement but
unfocused jeremiad. Argentine journalist
and novelist Caparrós (El Hambre) profiles
a woman in arid Niger who dreams of
owning a cow; a mother working in a
Bangladesh factory; scavengers picking
through garbage in Buenos Aires; home-
less Chicagoans at food pantries; and
Doctors Without Borders physicians
treating the ravages of malnutrition,
among others. His reportage is stark and
moving as people describe their struggles
to survive and, heartbreakingly, the
deaths of their children from starvation
and disease. Caparrós’s analysis of the
problem is less forceful, however. He
writes perceptively of poor people made
“disposable” by globalization, but his
discussions of food issues like GMOs and
commodity markets are confused and his
statistics sometimes untrustworthy. (Life
expectancy in Zambia is 63 years,
according to the World Bank, not 38
years, as he suggests.) His erratic critique
of international food policy denounces
“the barbarity of capitalism” and satirizes
Western callousness through imagined
“voices of the tribe” (“I’ve got enough
problems without going around thinking
about those poor bastards in Africa”), but
never musters a coherent agenda beyond
changing the “social model” in order to
end world hunger. Caparrós offers an
effective polemic on the horrors of hunger,
but little clear thinking on how to end it.
(Jan.)Old School Love: And Why It Works
Joseph and Justine Simmons, with Amy Ferris.
Dey Street, $26.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-
293972-2
Joseph Simmons (aka Rev Run fromand his theory of a universal grammar, is
one of the author’s idols, Benjamin Lee
Whorf, and his hypothesis that language
shapes our perception of reality, is one of
his whipping boys. Shariatmadari argues
at length that Whorf’s characterization of
Hopi as a kind of “mysterious code” was
both condescending and simply inaccu-
rate. Shariatmadari has a gift for making
obscure linguistic concepts plain, such as
the function of recursion in grammar,
which “means that there is no ‘longest’
sentence in a language—you can just keep
adding to it,” as illustrated by the nursery
rhyme “The House That Jack Built.”
Shariatmadari, however, does have a ten-
dency to belabor his points (as in his over-
long discussion of dialect vs. language).
Nevertheless, this is an engrossing intro-
duction to some basic problems in con-
temporary linguistics. (Jan.)F*ck Your Diet and Other Things
My Thighs Tell Me
Chloé Hilliard. Gallery, $27 (336p) ISBN 978-1-
982108-61-8
Journalist–turned–stand-up comic
Hilliard delivers a heartfelt, amusing
essay collection about her struggles with
her weight in an image-conscious culture.
Hilliard, who fluctuated “between fat and
thick from the age of twelve,” grew up
with the nick-
name “big.” In
“Starving Kids
in Africa,” she
writes about
getting overfed
by her food-
loving grand-
mother, and, in
“Let Them Eat
Ketchup,”
about later
being sent to school by her mother with
SlimFast for lunch. Throughout, she
analyzes the impact that government
policies have had on her “waistline, self-
esteem, and body image,” and repeatedly
calls out former president Ronald Reagan,
who, when she was a kid in 1981, slashed
budgets for public school lunches, which
she says increased unhealthy food offerings
and contributed to childhood obesity. She
shares a funny story about buying a
treadmill that put her in debt (“The
$1500 Mistake”) and gleefully recalls herBecoming a Man:
The Story of a Transition
P. Carl. Simon & Schuster, $26 (240p)
ISBN 978-1-9821-0509-9
In this deeply personal and moving
debut memoir, theater writer Carl shares
the story of his difficult yet triumphant
gender transition. After living as a queer
woman for most of his life, Carl transi-
tioned at age 51. His longtime wife,
Lynette, had a hard adjustment, one that
Carl struggled to understand—“I never
equated my transition, becoming me,
with leaving you,” Carl writes to Lynette.
“I felt I was appearing in the relationship
for the first time.” Carl’s raw, thoughtful
musings on the life he now lives—and
how powerless he was as a woman (as a
graduate student, Carl was nearly raped
by another student), yet how privileged
he suddenly is as a white man—are incisive
and intimate, ranging from empathy for
Christine Blasey Ford, accuser of
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh,
to a somewhat shameful satisfaction at
talking “shit [about his wife] with
another guy right before I walk in the
house and have to deal with whatever it is
we’re arguing about.” Carl’s honest,
timely musings illustrate the deep rumi-
nations that can arise about one’s
assigned gender at birth and the gender
one becomes. Carl’s thoughts about sexu-
ality and his compassionate feelings for
sexual assault survivors will captivate
readers from the first page to the last.
(Jan.)Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising
Truth About Language
David Shariatmadari. Norton, $27.95 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-324-00425-7
Guardian editor Shariatmadari’s mostly
accessible debut about modern linguistics
aims to debunk certain prevailing beliefs
about language. He begins by showing
the long history of an often-voiced
opinion—that English is now in a state of
unprecedented decline—citing a 14th-
century complaint that too much Danish
and French had entered the language.
Shariatmadari follows up by demon-
strating how commonly words change
meaning (such as the verb like) and
argues that language is “change.” Other
chapters take on etymology, pronuncia-
tion, and accent. While Noam Chomsky,