Review_NONFICTION
72 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JULY 29, 2019
stant ringing in the ears, describes in
detail his experience and also touches on
other conditions, such as benign parox-
ysmal positional vertigo, a balance
problem that occurs when the wrong hair
cells in the ear are stimulated, and oto-
sclerosis, which occurs when bones in the
middle ear fuse. As part of his research,
he is fitted for a pair of hearing aids and
visits Starkey Hearing Technologies in
Eden Prairie, Minn., to witness the device
in production. Owen also acquaints him-
self with advances such as cochlear
implants, which directly stimulate fibers
in the auditory nerves and thus create
new stimuli for the brain to process as
sound. Readers may object that topics
such as the stigma of deafness and the deaf
community receive less attention than
warranted. Otherwise, in exploring a
bodily mechanism “so remarkably small
and complex and hard to observe that sci-
entists still don’t completely understand
how all of its components work,” Owen
gives an account of human hearing equal
parts illuminating of and personally
invested in its subject. Agent: David
McCormick, McCormick & Williams. (Oct.)★ A Beginner’s Guide to Japan:
Observations and Provocations
Pico Iyer. Knopf, $24.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-
451-49395-8
Having lived in Japan for decades, the
widely traveled and erudite, Oxford-born
Iyer (The Art of Stillness) presents this
lovely pocket compendium of oddities
and insights of Japanese life. Save for a few
short essays, the book is comprised of
standalone, paragraph-long entries
grouped into loose thematic chapters,
such as “On the Streets,” “At the
Counter,” and “Behind Closed Doors.”
Iyer’s range is broad as he discusses the
signage upon disembarking Kyoto station
(“There are eleven arrows on the sign
above you.... They point left, right,
straight ahead and backwards. In the
middle is a question mark”) as well as
Japanese passion for baseball, in which
there is a surprising amount of violence
directed at baseball umpires (an American
umpire had to be carried off after being
hit “by a bicycle flung from a fan”). He
also engages in deeper ruminations such
as the role anime plays in Japanese life
(“anime is the natural expression of anthe trouble to which Orwell went, mostly
fruitlessly, to prevent the book’s political
misappropriation by both left and right.
Unfortunately, the breadth of 1984 ’s influ-
ence far exceeds this slender volume’s
capacity to capture, but Taylor has never-
theless crafted a gripping portrait of the
creation of an essential novel. (Oct.)The Relationship Economy:
Building Stronger Customer
Connections in the Digital Age
John R. DiJulius III. Greenleaf, $24.95 (248p)
ISBN 978-1-62634-644-4
An earnest, if curmudgeonly, guide to
building a customer-centric business
arrives from DiJulius, president of cus-
tomer service consulting firm DiJulius
Group. The ability to build an instant
connection with customers is critical, he
reminds readers, and yet most business
leaders are unprepared; the art of customer
connection is rarely taught formally. As
such, in order to build these relationships,
one must be sincere, good at listening,
empathetic, and “obsessively curious,” not
to mention genuinely fond of people.
DiJulius discusses how the business world
got to its current customer-unfriendly
state, and why so many employees lack
empathy; he directs business managers to
start with their workforce and figure out
how to give customers what they want:
“recognition and a personalized experi-
ence.” His description of the relationship
economy in action is clear and his advice
helpful, but readers may find the tone
unnecessarily judgmental; he bemoans a
society which is “relationship disadvan-
taged,” whose members are disinterested
in each other or in communicating, and in
which “trust is an endangered value.”
Readers sympathetic to or capable of
overlooking DiJulius’s crotchety worldview
will appreciate his well-informed per-
spective on delivering quality customer
service. (Oct.)Volume Control:
Hearing in a Deafening World
David Owen. Riverhead, $28 (304p) ISBN 978-
0-525-53422-8
Owen (Where the Water Goes), a New
Yorker staff writer, wrestles with the com-
plexities of the human ear in this informa-
tive extended essay on aural perception.
Owen, who suffers from tinnitus, a con-to public action has been unappreciated
by previous scholars, Mullen reveals the
early “impress of leftist political thought”
on Baldwin during his upbringing in
Depression-era Harlem, finding evidence
for the “prominence of queer sexuality in
young Baldwin’s life and writing” in early
notes outlining a more explicit version of
his 1953 debut novel, Go Tell It on the
Mountain. Mullen then attends to Baldwin’s
myriad political involvements and con-
cerns, stretching from the American setting
of the civil rights, Black Power, and anti–
Vietnam War movements, to the interna-
tional scene of his later “diasporic wander-
ings” in Europe and the Middle East. The
book then considers Baldwin’s “final acts”
and “queer legacies” during the 1980s as a
prescient opponent of Reagan conservatism
and an intellectual precursor to the
“flourishing of black feminism and queer
politics.” More an account of Baldwin’s
ideological evolution than of his life, this
study cannot compete with David
Leeming’s 1994 Baldwin biography for
breadth or depth, but readers aligned
with Baldwin’s political sympathies will
appreciate Mullen’s insights. (Oct.)On Nineteen Eighty-Four:
A Biography
D.J. Taylor. Abrams, $26 (208p) ISBN 978-1-
4197-3800-5
Taylor (Orwell: A Life) delivers a second
George Orwell “biography,” in this case
tracing the “life” of the author’s most
famous novel, 1984. In discussing the
book’s genesis, Taylor suggests that
Orwell’s public school experiences, as
related in his essay “Such, Such Were the
Joys,” gave him an early taste of repressive
regimes. Orwell himself pointed to the
1943 Tehran Conference—in which
Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met to
“carve up” the post-WWII world—as
providing initial inspiration for his dys-
topian future. Most compelling is Taylor’s
account of Orwell’s unusual (for him)
struggle to complete the novel, while
wracked by tuberculosis and holed up in a
remote village in the Inner Hebrides. Taylor
vividly evokes the image of a tubercular
Orwell hunched in bed, laboriously typing
out a fair copy of the manuscript for his
publisher, while the Atlantic rages outside
his window. Less thorough on the book’s
post-publication life, Taylor does convey