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Business Insider
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Bill Gates' summer reading list this year is all about memoirs
"Chasing Hope" by Nicholas Kristof Gates said he's been following the work of Nicholas Kristof since 1997, when the veteran journalist published an article about children in poor countries dying from diarrhea. It changed the course of his life and helped him shape the Gates Foundation, Gates wrote in his blog post. "In this terrific memoir, Nick writes about how he stays optimistic about the world despite everything he's seen," Gates wrote. "The world would be better off with more Nick Kristofs." "Chasing Hope" came out in 2024 — after Gates finished writing his own memoir. However, Gates said he felt he had to include it on the list. "Personal History" by Katharine Graham Gates said he met renowned newspaper publisher Katharine Graham in 1991 on the same day he met Warren Buffett. Kay, as Gates affectionately called her, is best known for presiding over her family's paper, The Washington Post, during Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. "I loved hearing Kay talk about her remarkable life: taking over the Post at a time when few women were in leadership positions like that, standing up to President Nixon to protect the paper's reporting on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, negotiating the end to a pressman's strike, and much more," Gates said. "Educated" by Tara Westover Tara Westover's "Educated" debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list after its 2018 release. The tale of her upbringing, which included an unconventional father who banned her family from going to hospitals or attending school, led Gates to leave a 5-star review on Goodreads the same year it came out. Westover taught herself math and self-studied for the ACT despite not setting foot in a classroom until she was 17. Today, she has a Ph.D. in history. "I thought I was pretty good at teaching myself — until I read Tara Westover's memoir 'Educated.' Her ability to learn on her own blows mine right out of the water," Gates said in his review. "Born a Crime" by Trevor Noah Comedian Trevor Noah released "Born a Crime," a memoir about his childhood in South Africa, in 2016. As a biracial boy growing up during apartheid, Noah was the product of an illegal interracial relationship and struggled to fit in. Gates said he related to the feeling of being an outsider. "I also grew up feeling like I didn't quite fit in at times, although Trevor has a much stronger claim to the phrase than I do," he wrote in his blog post. "Surrender" by Bono Gates shouted out the vulnerability in "Surrender" by musician Paul David Hewson, better known as U2 frontman Bono. The full title, "Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story," sums up the 40-chapter autobiography that has each chapter named after a U2 song. According to Gates, Bono opens up about his upbringing with parents who "basically ignored" his passion for singing, which only made him try harder to make it as a musician. "I went into this book knowing almost nothing about his anger at his father, the band's near-breakups, and his discovery that his cousin was actually his half-brother," Gates said.
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Geena Davis Can't Count How Many Times She's Reread Zola
In an email interview, she talked about the inspiration behind 'The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page,' and how 'The Accidental Tourist' changed her life. SCOTT HELLER What's the last great book you read? 'Horse,' by Geraldine Brooks, weaves the art world, the horse racing world and what it means to be human into a thrilling tapestry. What book have you recommended the most over the years? 'Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,' by Susan Faludi. As someone who's focused on creating equitable representation onscreen for women and girls, this book had a strong impact on me. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? Memoirs and biographies. I find stories about other people's real-life experiences and challenges so engrossing. They teach me a lot and broaden my perspective and understanding of the world. One recent favorite was 'Educated,' by Tara Westover. The story — and Tara's resilience — broke my heart. What kind of reader were you as a child? I read everything I could get my hands on, often under the covers with a flashlight. I used novels as a way to learn, to escape and to travel without leaving my little town in Massachusetts. I particularly loved 'The Cricket in Times Square,' by George Selden. The idea of a cricket giving concerts in New York City enchanted me. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? My favorite book of all time is 'L'Assommoir,' by Émile Zola, and I adore Gervaise Macquart. She's such a strong character, and every time I read the book, I want her life to be different — I want her to have all the opportunities she's denied as a member of the Parisian underclass. And as far as antiheroes, while I wouldn't say her husband is my favorite antihero, I would say that he's the perfect foil for Gervaise's dreams. Zola is such a stunning writer. I can't tell you how many times I've read and reread his work. Do you have a favorite memoir by an actor? I don't, but I do have a favorite biography — 'Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor,' by Simon Callow. Charles Laughton is my absolute favorite actor. He was one of the true greats, and being able to gain insight into his life through this book meant a lot to me. What was the specific motivation to try your hand at a children's book? I've always loved drawing and writing, so it's been in my mind for a long time. Then, suddenly, the idea of a character knowing that they live in a book came to me. As a child, I always felt too tall, like I was taking up more than my share of space, and I tried to shrink myself to fit into the amount of space I imagined I should occupy. In writing 'The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page,' I wanted to reach out to kids who feel like I did back then — like they don't fit in — and reassure them that there is room for them in the world. I want them to realize that they should take up as much space as they need. Often new authors work with illustrators. Was it a must that you did the art for this book, too? I've always drawn and painted, and I saw my characters so clearly in my mind's eye that it seemed natural that I would draw them. And luckily for me, my publisher loved what I created. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? When Hugh Laurie and I played Stuart Little's parents in the movie 'Stuart Little,' Hugh decided to give me a copy of his hilarious book, 'The Gun Seller.' But since he knew I was once a foreign-exchange student in Sweden, Hugh gave me a Swedish copy! (The book was called 'Skottpengar' there.) The gift truly delighted me. I love Hugh's writing in any language. Of all the characters you've played across different media, which role felt to you the richest — the most novelistic? I've actually been in five movies based on books, but Muriel Pritchett from 'The Accidental Tourist' was definitely the most novelistic. Muriel, who first appeared in the beautiful book by Anne Tyler, is complicated and unique and felt so three-dimensional on the page. I remember reading this book aloud to Jeff Goldblum while we were shooting 'The Fly' together and he was getting his extensive makeup done. As I read, I started hating whoever was going to get to play the part of Muriel in the movie version — which it was clear there would be. But then it was me! And it completely changed my life.
The Guardian
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The trauma plot: how did culture get addicted to tragic backstories?
You only need to look at some of the biggest stories of the past decade to realise popular culture in the late 2010s had a love affair with trauma. Online, there was the personal essay boom that kept websites such as BuzzFeed, Jezebel and Australia's own Mamamia afloat. In publishing, memoirs that explored the full gamut of human suffering – everything from the pampered (Prince Harry's Spare) to the impoverished (Tara Westover's Educated) – broke sales records. And memoirs found their fictional counterpoint in novels such as Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and Miranda Cowley Heller's The Paper Palace. Even television and film were trauma-obsessed. Cue the detective who must face his own trauma before he can crack the case (True Detective, The Dry); and the advertising executive who could write perfect copy if only he could stop running from his past (Mad Men). Our craving for tales of suffering arguably reached a fever pitch with Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. The 2015 novel follows corporate lawyer Jude (named after the patron saint of lost causes) as he stumbles through a glamorous life in New York, haunted by the abundance of abuse he suffered as a child. A 2022 theatrical adaptation by Belgian theatre director Ivo Von Hove was so faithful, so bloody, that when I saw it at the Adelaide festival in 2023, a woman beside me exclaimed aloud in the intermission: 'Why?' Her cry resonated. Why were trauma narratives so popular? Was our appetite insatiable, or were we at a cultural tipping point? Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning It's not as if traumatic backstories were invented in TV writers' rooms in the past decade. Indeed, the idea that one's psyche can be shaped by early formative experiences – that a character can have an explanatory, humanising backstory – has been mainstream for more than a century. But there is a difference between threading trauma through a narrative and allowing trauma to become the whole story. It was the use of trauma as a ballast for plot, not just as a technique to illustrate character, that was so striking about culture over the past decade. Again and again, audiences were spoon-fed the same plot. We were introduced to a protagonist who exhibited neurotic, self-destructive behaviours. (What form those behaviours took depended on the genre. If it was comedy, we met Fleabag, who was as addicted to irony as sex. If it was climate fiction, heroines ran from society into the wilderness, such as in Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves.) Just as we began to wonder about why they were like this, flashbacks teased us with the promise of an answer: something really bad happened to them! But if you want to find out what it was, you must watch until the last episode, read until the final page. These kinds of stories satisfy us because they use good old-fashioned suspense. The flashbacks are bombs and we can't look away until they have detonated. But the trauma plot also satisfies on a psychological level. In real life, when someone tells the story of the worst thing that's ever happened to them, it can be the first step towards healing. Indeed, it's the whole point of talking therapy: that people might be able to find a narrative for their experiences, and thereby control and contain them. When those narratives are told to an audience – in a personal essay, or a memoir, or on a talkshow – the effect is powerful. It validates the speaker and empowers the audience to tell their own stories. The trauma plot is fiction's substitute for this healing high. In fiction, once the trauma is ventilated, the story reaches its natural resolution: the tension abates, the mystery surrounding the protagonist dissipates. The audience's relief mimics the feeling of witnessing or participating in real-life testimony: we have faced the worst, we are stronger and more resolute for having faced it. Of course, the trauma plot, like any narrative trope, was doomed to grow less potent over time. First, because it is now such a recognisable formula, it is too readily parodied. (In comedian Kate Berlant's award-winning solo show Kate, she teases the audience by referencing a childhood trauma, which she can't talk about … yet. The joke is that the 'trauma' turns out to be a minor thing.) Second, the trauma plot has lost its cultural currency because it obfuscates much of the nuances of living with trauma. One of Yanagihara's express aims in writing A Little Life was to challenge the notion that any suffering can be overcome: she wanted to write a character 'who never gets better'. And yet her textbook use of the trauma-plot undermines this goal. Jude's deepest, darkest secret – his most gruesome experience from a childhood of endless debasement – is illuminated in increasingly detailed flashbacks. When the last flashback is revealed, the feeling is one of overwhelming relief. For Jude, the memory of what happened might be something he never 'gets over'. But for the reader, it's the answer to all our questions, the resolution we've been waiting for. In life, talking about your trauma does not always neutralise it. But in the trauma plot, all is resolved the moment the trauma is revealed. A character's core wound becomes not just an extra detail in the rich tapestry of their psyche but the final clue that solves the mystery of who they are and why. The storytelling device designed to add depth ultimately has a flattening effect. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion But even as the trauma plot has grown stale, pop culture has not lost its psychoanalytic bent. Several of last year's critical and commercial films, from Wicked to Mufasa to The Apprentice, suggest that Hollywood has replaced the trauma plot with the Origin Story. We are no longer content to accept villains as mere agents of chaos. Now, there has to be a formative experience that can account for their later bad behaviour. Indeed, it seems the Origin Story is already going the way of the trauma plot: a device designed to complicate character and to demonstrate that no one is wholly good or evil, has been oversimplified: villainy always has a neat explanation. It begs the question, why do we keep looking to trauma as shorthand to better understand character, when it invariably proves such an unsatisfactory tool, one that flattens and obscures where we rely on it to clarify and complicate? The alternative – to excise trauma from storytelling – was chillingly dramatised in one of last year's best origin stories: The Apprentice. In the final scene, Sebastian Stan's Donald Trump ascends to full villainy the moment he looks a reporter in the eye and, in response to a question about his childhood, coldly replies, 'I don't like to think about that.' It requires humility to concede that character is malleable and to be vulnerable about the experiences that shape us. It is worth endlessly repeating the idea that we have all, to some extent, been shaped by our suffering. The challenge is to expand our vocabulary rather than dull it with cliche; to keep seeking new ways to tell stories about trauma instead of repeating those which came before. Diana Reid's new novel, Signs of Damage, is out now through Ultimo Press.
Yahoo
26-01-2025
- General
- Yahoo
This historic building will change as a popular corner of downtown Boise gets a makeover
It could be easy to miss the small cabin wedged between Capitol Boulevard, the downtown Boise Public Library, the Boise River Greenbelt and the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial. But that log building has had an outsized impact on Idaho's literary scene, attracting writers like Louise Erdrich, George Saunders and Michael Pollan. It has uplifted Idaho's own growing list of award-winning authors, such as east Idaho's Tara Westover, whose 2018 memoir 'Educated' spent two years on the New York Times Bestseller List. Boise's Anthony Doerr, whose books include Pulitzer Prize winner 'All the Light We Cannot See' and 2021's 'Cloud Cuckoo Land,' brought international attention to the City of Trees and he has given several talks and readings with The Cabin. Now, nearly 30 years since the organization moved into the building, originally known as the Log Cabin Literary Center, it is looking to renovate and expand its offerings. The change comes in a corner of downtown that has been a hub of activity recently. 'As Idaho's only literary arts nonprofit, we are working hard to help close the gap with Idaho's arts education standards,' according to the Cabin's website. 'Our greatest challenge when meeting this need is our lack of space to grow our programming as the community grows.' Staff and volunteers have made several upgrades since first leasing it from the city of Boise, said Kurt Zwolfer, executive director of The Cabin. These include adding a classroom and putting in ramps and an elevator. This would be the first major renovation in 15 to 20 years, he said. But while the 1940-built cabin is 'astoundingly large,' Zwolfer said by phone, the staff can only use about half of it. The renovation would open the entire basement and attic and would effectively double the amount of space the organization could use. The Cabin has had plans to expand for several years, but the COVID-19 pandemic put everything on hold, Zwolfer said. 'A lot of (nonprofits) had ambitions to change, to make renovations, to grow, but we really couldn't until we saw our way out of that crisis,' he said. Plans call for a new pen-and-paint studio, a writer's den, a meeting room, a reading loft and more office space for staff. Plans also call for renovating two existing basement classrooms and adding a third. First used by the U.S. Forest Service, every room on the first floor uses a different kind of lumber, Zwolfer said. These include rooms of yellow pine, white pine, red fir and red cedar. The renovations, he said, would protect and restore some of that original woodwork. 'That beautiful floor… is a Boise treasure,' he said. Plans also call for a new outdoor amphitheater that would allow The Cabin to better host some of its programs and events, Zwolfer said. The development includes renovating the lawn and parking lot into a circulatory space and sunken amphitheater, according to Garden City's Breckon LandDesign Inc., an engineering, planning and design firm. Zwolfer said the amphitheater would add to other venues The Cabin uses, the Gene Harris Band Shell in Julia Davis Park and the Egyptian Theater. The library, the Wassmuth Center or others could use the amphitheater for community events or fundraisers, he said. It could even act as a new venue for Treefort. The space would be built in the Cabin's small parking lot and named Henry's Storytelling Grove, after past board member Henry Reents, who died in January 2023. Reents was a prominent member of the community and husband of former state Sen. Sue Reents. The renovations and amphitheater are entirely self-funded, Zwolfer said. The organization is about $50,000 away from its goal of raising $2 million for the development — just enough, he said, to move to temporary offices and start construction. Zwolfer said he hoped that construction on the interior would wrap up this summer, and the outdoor aspects by the end of the year. The timeline depends on a long list of nearby developments as well. Zwolfer said they didn't intend for The Cabin's changes and multiple nearby upgrades all to come at the same time. The Wassmuth Center for Human Rights' new Philip E. Batt Education Building opened next to the Anne Frank Memorial in October. Construction has closed all but one lane on Capitol Boulevard for roadway improvements funded by the city's urban renewal agency. Plans call for improved sidewalks, bike lanes and planter boxes, Zwolfer said. The city and its urban renewal agency are also renovating and redesigning parts of the intersection of the Greenbelt, Anne Frank Memorial and 8th Street, which runs behind the library. Plans call for security cameras, more lighting and a 'distinctive' public space between the Wassmuth Center and the library. 'It'll really make the library campus… more inviting for citizens of Boise and visitors of Boise too,' he said. 'Something beautiful and community-oriented is being created in that area.' Idaho author was excited to buy first home after new book. Then the emergencies started Incomes are growing faster in Idaho than anywhere else in the U.S. Here's where, why Downtown Boise could get a new park soon. Will it come in time for giant Basque festival? Growing Boise area could add almost 200 homes in battle over density. What about traffic?
