Best of the Week: Three Brave Books

The best books published this past week are three brave ones: a travel memoir, a novel about love and mental illness, and a spirited piece of family history, rare reads that take us to places as welcome as any in favorite old books yet different from those we’ve imagined before.

1. Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge by John Gimlette (Knopf, $28.95) is a memoir of three months’ travel through the swamps and jungles as well as the old towns and settlements of the three coastal South American countries Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. The aptly named Gimlette turns a fresh and detail-oriented eye on the sounds, smells, and human and animal ways of a place so rarely visited that to read of it seems like slipping a hundred or more years into the past, yet so lively and diverse, it seems like the unmapped landscape of the future– a last unexplored place. He notices the region’s plant life (verdant and challenging), animal life (from the world’s largest ants to the wild, great-jawed jaguars) and its human populace too (indigenous tribes as well as the cacophony of African, Dutch, French, Hmong and Irish descendants of runaways and adventurers, refugees and outlaws).

If you can’t remember where those three countries are, you are not alone in forgetting middle school geography. Here’s a map:

2. The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block (Random House, $25) is a fictionalized evocation of Block’s grandparents’ love story, of a 20th-century marriage (producer of four daughters) that was riven but also forged by a husband’s manic depression and by a wife’s decision, in the early 1960s, to commit her charismatic spouse to a mental institution. Starting with a plainspoken acknowledgment of the facts that inspired the novel, there is bold, true love in every sentence of this book. Though life threw a painful, socially unacceptable curve in the face of one couple’s hopes and dreams, their grandson made art of it. We’re printing the author’s photograph here because we can’t quite believe a man so young wrote so mature a thing.

3. In Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West (Scribner, $26), New Yorker writer Dorothy Wickenden tells the story of two corseted Smith College graduates who, in 1916, went west, from upstate New York to northern Colorado, to teach the raggedy-clothed children of homesteaders in a two-room schoolhouse. The two women worked for pay, traveled on the new railroad, danced with cowboys, and one of them fell in love. Wickenden draws on diaries, letters and memoirs: one of the two schoolteachers (also named Dorothy) was Wickenden’s grandmother.