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INTERVIEW: RABIA CHAUDRY
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT Rabia Chaudry
Rebecca Sanabria
In Rabia Chaudry’s new memoir, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat & Family (Algonquin, Nov. 8), the author delves into her lifelong struggles with weight and her relationship with food, intertwined with her heritage, family life, and relationships. Chaudry moved with her parents to the United States from Lahore, Pakistan, very shortly after the author was born. She recounts being overweight from a very young age, a subject of frequent conversation, ranging from concern to ridicule, among her relatives. Memories of food in rich, sumptuous detail dot her stories, from adolescence and college to her adulthood, and she ably describes the impact of food and dieting on all aspects of her life, including romance, self-worth, family, and more.
In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus said of the book (which includes recipes!): “Whether she’s describing a mad motorcycle mission to score Lahore street food with her overweight uncles, the acquisition of the ‘freshman 25’ with new friends at college, or sharing ice cream in bed with her sweet second husband, Chaudry eloquently portrays the role of food in love and friendship. At the same time, she doesn’t flinch from reporting the humiliations heaped on the overweight at every turn….The literary equivalent of chaat masala fries: heady, sour, and uniquely delicious.”
Attorney, author, and podcaster Chaudry is well known for her work on the case of Adnan Syed, who was recently exonerated after being wrongfully charged with murder in 1999, as Chaudry explored in her acclaimed 2016 book, Adnan’s Story. She answered our questions via email.
Who is the ideal reader for this book? Where are they reading it? The ideal reader for this book is someone who enjoys memoirs, is a foodie, loves immigrant stories, ranks My Big Fat Greek Wedding as one of their favorite movies, and/or has struggled with weight and body image issues in their life. They are reading it over a lazy weekend, on the beach or at a mountain retreat, or listening to the audiobook during a road trip!
How did writing this book impact your current relationship with food as well as the memories of food from your past? Writing this book was a literal mapping of my relationship with food over the near five decades of my life and helped me to connect so many dots between my eating patterns, self-esteem issues, intergenerational trauma, and understanding how and what and why I was eating at different points in my life. It explained so much to me, like assembling a puzzle and finally being able to see the entire picture.
What in-person events for the book are you looking forward to? Yes, I would love to do in-person events. I am excited for the book launch with Chelsea Clinton, [scheduled for Nov. 8 at the Judson Memorial Church in
New York]. I’m also excited for the numerous book festivals I’ll be speaking at!
What have been some of your favorite books of 2022? Better Than We Found It by Frederick and Porsche Joseph; Road of Bones by Christopher Golden; Kismet by Amina Akhtar; Go Back to Where You Came From by Wajahat Ali; and The Old Woman With the Knife by Gu Byeong-Mo.
Interview by Nina Palattella.
suffuse the narrative, and many readers will shed tears of their own. In one heart-wrenching section, the author describes the plight of a family friend who shared Brian’s condition: “She winds up in the care of one of her daughters, and she does not get to Dignitas, because that window probably closed two years earlier, and she will spend the rest of her life in a memory-care unit, and the best outcome I can hope for is that she dies soon. She does not die very soon and when we talk next, she is in the memorycare unit and she says, Something very strange is going on here, please come get me.” As Alzheimer’s becomes more prevalent, this shimmering love story and road map is must-read testimony.
You will never forget this book, and if you do, let’s hope someone close to you remembers.
THE LAST CAMPAIGN Sherman, Geronimo and the War for America
Brands, H.W. Doubleday (416 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 1, 2022 978-0-385-54728-4
A sweeping history of the Indian Wars and two iconic fighters. The Geronimo campaign has been so intensely studied for the last 150 years that it’s hard to imagine there’s much new information to discover. Noted historian Brands finds news, though, by placing the war against the Apaches in the larger context of the Indian Wars generally, from the mass hanging of Sioux rebels in 1862 to the Modoc Wars, Little Bighorn, the Red Cloud War, and more. A central figure in those campaigns was William Tecumseh Sherman, who, ironically, bore the name of an early champion of Native American resistance. Stationed in Florida during the time of the Indian removals from the East, he opined that “Florida…was of little value to us” and suggested that Native tribes should be moved there and not what he considered the more valuable lands of Oklahoma. Transferred to the West after heroic service in the Civil War, he told a militant White audience bent on annihilating neighboring tribes, “I don’t see how we can make a decent excuse for an Indian war.” Yet, when the occasion demanded, Sherman could be as ruthless as he was in Georgia, noting that the foremost goal of war was not extermination—a word he used sometimes inadvisedly—but instead economic disaster. Reflecting Sherman’s thinking, Gen. Philip Sheridan wrote, “reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in more than one great conflict.” The application of that technique brought mixed results, and Geronimo held out to the end. Brands is particularly good in placing all this in a political as well as military context, with Sherman wrestling with Indian Agency bureaucrats in Washington over whether they or the Army should oversee matters of war, peace, and, in the end, cultural extermination.
An excellent, well-written study—like most of the author’s books, a welcome addition to the literature of westward expansion.
the rise and reign of the mammals
NAPOLEON The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821
Broers, Michael Pegasus (750 pp.) $39.95 | Aug. 30, 2022 978-1-63936-177-9
Broers continues his run of satisfying books on Napoleon. The relentless fascination with Napoleon and his empire continues to generate books, mostly biographies, and this is another fine entry by Broers, a professor of Western European history at Oxford. Controlling land that stretched from Rome to the Baltic, Napoleon had defeated continental rivals and established friendly relations with Russia, and his forces were having some success suppressing the gruesome Spanish rebellion. Fruitless efforts to cut off British trade finally made a painful impression when he placed Atlantic ports under military rule to suppress smuggling. “Napoleon always wanted war during this period of relative peace,” writes Broers, “just not the one he got in 1812.” His plan to invade Britain—this time with a proper navy—was derailed when Czar Alexander “opened Russian ports to neutral shipping in December 1810” and fended off bullying efforts to bring him into line. By summer 1811, Napoleon was determined to invade Russia. At this point, the text still has 500 pages to go, but few readers will complain as the author describes Napoleon’s preparations from a sullen French nation exasperated by massive taxes, mourning massive casualties, and oppressed by another round of brutally efficient conscription. The titanic army that trundled into Russia in June 1812 began shrinking long before meeting the enemy, led by a ruler Napoleon had consistently underestimated. Fans of War and Peace will learn that Tolstoy and Broers share a modest admiration for Alexander and a lower opinion of the emperor, although, having read all Napoleon’s correspondence, Broers’ opinion is more nuanced. After a gripping account of the Russian debacle, the author recounts Napoleon’s return to Paris. Returning without much of an army left, he wrung another fighting force from his exhausted nation and won several victories before he was forced to abdicate and retire to Elba, from which he returned to power, lost at Waterloo, and ended his life in humiliating exile.
An outstanding addition to the groaning bookshelves on one of the world’s most recognizable leaders.
of Dinosaurs.
THE RISE AND REIGN OF THE MAMMALS A New History From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us
Brusatte, Steve Mariner Books (528 pp.) $29.99 | June 7, 2022 978-0-06-295151-9
Another outstanding work of paleontology from the author of The Rise and Fall
Dinosaurs fascinate everyone, and Brusatte, professor of paleontology and adviser to the Jurassic World film franchise, has named more than 15 new species. However, mammals are his first love, and this delightful account will convert many readers. According to the popular belief, dinosaurs ruled the Earth until they were wiped out by a meteor strike 65 million years ago, whereupon mammals succeeded them. This is correct except that mammals not only succeeded dinosaurs; they existed alongside them back to their beginning. In fact, both share a common ancestor that appeared perhaps 325 million years ago. This small lizardlike creature evolved into two major lineages, one eventually becoming reptiles (including birds), the other mammals. Readers who remember high school biology know that mammals have warm blood, hair, and mammary glands that produce milk. Such true mammals did not appear for 100 million years, and these features do not fossilize well, but Brusatte excels in explaining how paleontologists figured matters out. Only mammals chew; most have complex teeth. Birds and reptiles swallow food whole; their teeth, when present, look alike. Mammals have three tiny bones in their ears, which allow them to hear better than other vertebrates, which have only one. Ancient mammals and pre-mammals were small. Their surviving bones were fragmentary and their teeth nearly microscopic, so early paleontologists sifted tons of dirt to detect minuscule fossils until the present century, when new sites, especially in China, have revealed spectacularly complete skeletons, often including hair, feathers, and embryos. Many readers consider humans the most interesting mammal, closely followed by extinct behemoths such as mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Brusatte, however, gives humans “about the same attention as horses and whales and elephants. After all, we are but one of many amazing feats of mammalian evolution.” Throughout, the author employs lucid prose and generous illustrations to describe the explosion of mammal species that followed the disappearance of dinosaurs.
A must for any list of the best popular science books of the year.
LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI An Epic American Adventure
Buck, Rinker Avid Reader Press (320 pp.) $32.50 | Aug. 9, 2022 978-1-5011-0637-8
An invigorating blend of history and journalism informs this journey down Old Man River.
Buck walks the walk, or perhaps rows the row: As with his previous book on the Oregon Trail, he follows the path of preceding generations in the hope of seeing something of what they saw. That’s not easy in the case of the Mississippi River, which, along with one of its principal tributaries, the Ohio, is “jointly managed by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers exclusively for the benefit of commercial barge traffic.” With those massive strings of barges, some as many as 25 containers long, clogging the river, traversing it by means of an oldfashioned wooden flatboat seems an invitation to disaster. Yet that’s just what Buck did, building his own craft in the manner of the 19th-century pioneers who saw in the river system a means of knitting far-flung territories into a nation. Building the boat was a challenge, and the author “would shortly learn that the flatboat was indeed an ideal school for acquiring a knowledge of human nature.” Buck populates his invigorating narrative with a memorable cast of characters, some people who traveled with him, some people he met along the way. The author was courtly to all of them, save a loudmouth Trumper who “considered it absolutely vital to explain to me that the ‘’nited states of ’merica’ was being ruined by ‘librals and buree-cats.’ ” Buck’s adventures alternate between nearly being swamped by massive commercial vessels and dealing with more mundane disasters; as he noted to his first mate, “Clusterfuck is our new normal.” Besides being a willing and intrepid traveler, Buck is also an able interpreter of history, and it’s clear that he’s devoured a library of Mississippiana. It all makes for an entertaining journey in the manner of William Least Heat-Moon, John McPhee, and other traveler-explainers.
For armchair-travel aficionados and frontier-history buffs, it doesn’t get much better.
BY HANDS NOW KNOWN Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners
Burnham, Margaret A. Norton (352 pp.) $30.00 | Sept. 27, 2022 978-0-393-86785-5
Searing indictment of the all-encompassing violence of Jim Crow and a persuasive case for long-overdue reparations.
The post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, writes Burnham, “blurred the lines between formal law and informal enforcement.” Every White citizen of a Jim Crow state was effectively deputized to enforce racially discriminatory laws and customs, even to the point of murdering a supposed offender, a common practice of the police as well. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, offers a vast roster of cases that highlight this formal/informal system of oppression. For example, bus drivers throughout the South had carte blanche to commit violence on any Black rider who dared insist on his or her dignity, while Black men were routinely lynched for responding the wrong way to a police officer—to say nothing of being in a White neighborhood without apparent reason. Most of the author’s illuminating and disturbing examples come from the mid-20th-century because abundant federal records exist (even if state and community records have been suppressed) and because living descendants of Jim Crow victims can often be found to corroborate official and civilian crimes against them. These include a Black man hanged for alleged sexual assault; a Black woman driven from her city to the friendlier climes of Detroit after a botched abortion procedure; a Black soldier killed for demanding equal treatment, one of countless Black service members who agitated for voting rights and equal employment even as they “continued to protest Jim Crow transportation and police brutality.” Burnham closes with a closely argued case for paying reparations to the descendants of victims. “Such a program is both practicable and politically feasible because the beneficiaries constitute a finite group,” she writes, adding, “Material reparation should be a part of a larger program of redress, including public educational initiatives and memory projects like memorial markers.”
An indispensable addition to the literature of social justice and civil rights.
ALSO A POET Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me
Calhoun, Ada Grove (272 pp.) $27.00 | June 14, 2022 978-0-8021-5978-6
Art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s daughter takes a shot at finishing her father’s derailed biography of Frank O’Hara and ends up writing a fascinating memoir.
Calhoun, author of the excellent St. Marks Is Dead, was looking for a childhood toy when she found the cassettes of her father’s interviews with O’Hara’s associates, recorded in preparation for writing an authorized biography in the late 1970s. Due to circumstances revealed gradually, support for the work was withdrawn by Maureen O’Hara, the poet’s sister and executor. Calhoun began blithely, certain she could resurrect the project, but what ensues turns out to be both somewhat less and very much more. As her husband, Neal, puts it in one of many adept
