Books: A wise life coach, a Houdini fable, and a girl’s own rebellion

In this round-up, we’ve added a category description to each title to give you a quick reference point. Some fall easily into established genres, others require a little more creative sign-posting. We hope this helps with your reading choices.

Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head - and How to Get It Out - Kara Loewentheil (Radar) Feminist Self-Help

Before Kara Loewentheil came to fame as the host of the hugely popular podcast UnF*uck Your Brain (more than 25 million downloads), her career was advancing on a more traditional trajectory. A Harvard Law School graduate, she clerked on the US Court of Appeals, was a reproductive rights litigator and ran a think tank at Columbia Law School. Well on her way to becoming a law professor, the then 30-year-old Loewentheil realised this wasn’t the version of success she wanted.

“Outside, my life looked great. But inside, I felt like I was being held hostage by a voice that was a cross between a middle school bully and a disapproving English governess”, Loewentheil writes. She learnt to quell that voice and, in the process, trained to be a life coach so she could help other women do the same. Her book, Take Back Your Brain, is described as a manual for every woman to break free of negative self-talk.

Critical of books that analyse the power structures that make women feel bad about themselves, but offer no advice on how to redress the situation, Loewentheil provides concrete examples. “Here’s literally what you can do,” she says. She also talks about a thought ladder, which helps you take small steps to change your thinking and improve your self-esteem.

If you want to check her out before you buy the book, take a listen to the podcast. One of the most recent episodes is entitled My Feminist Wedding. She’s funny, wise and warm-hearted.   

Houdini Unbound - Alan Attwood (Melbourne Books) Historical Fiction/Faction ?

Before there was Harry Houdini - master illusionist and escapologist who was the highest paid performer in American vaudeville at his time - there was Erik Weisz, born in Budapest, one of seven children of the impoverished Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz.

His literal ascent to fame began at the age of nine, after the family had moved to the US, when he debuted as a trapeze artist, calling himself ‘Ehrich, the Prince of the Air’. When he later became a magician, he took the name Houdini, and worked alongside his wife Bess, who had been part of the Coney Island song and dance act, the Floral Sisters.

Veteran Australian journalist Alan Attwood has taken the colourful legendary Houdini and created a novel which blends historical fact with fiction. But as the author himself says: “Harry Houdini’s success rested in blurring the line between reality and illusion. He was a storyteller whose favourite subject was himself.”

Houdini Unbound focuses on the brief period in 1910 when Houdin is performing in Melbourne. As well as his theatre obligations, he intends to claim the record of being first to fly in Australia, and has brought his own plane and mechanic on tour. While he is obsessed with his new “toy”, Bess is left to the ardent attentions of another famous guest at their Melbourne hotel.

Attwood writes: “Houdini believed that his achievements in his Voisin biplane, which he sold after some exhibition flights in Sydney (and then never flew again), would outlive his feats on stage. He was wrong. His name is synonymous with escapes, not flight.”

The Vaster Wilds - Lauren Groff (Hutchinson Heinemann) 17th Century Fable (Random?)

In early 1600s, America, a young servant girl has fled her post and “a certain wretched death” in an English pioneer settlement beset with smallpox. She runs into the forest, fearful of the cruel men she knows will be sent to find and punish her. We follow alongside her lonely breathless race for freedom, as she has to outrun human savagery and the violence of the wild world.

The Guardian’s review of Lauren Groff’s latest novel describes it as, “the Book of Job meets Bear Grylls - a 17th-century episode of TV survival show Alone”. And the girl - she has no name - certainly has to fend for herself, killing animals to eat (baby squirrels, grubs), keeping warm and dry, hidden and safe. But this is just the description of the mechanics of survival. 

The story has also been called a testament to individual struggle, a parable of human caretaking of the natural environment, a fable of pandemic times, and the story of America in miniature.

Those who enjoyed Groff’s last book, Matrix (reviewed here), which begins with a teenage girl sent to an abbey in 12th-century England, will enjoy her continued wanderings in a distant past.

In her acknowledgements, Groff writes: “This book is for my sister, Sarah True, who has spent decades pushing her body to the limits of human ability, and who, in the process, has made her soul radiant.”   

Melting Point - Rachel Cockerell (Wildfire) Historical Montage

“In these times, so progressive in most respects, we know ourselves to be surrounded by the old hatred.”

These words, sounding so of the moment, date back to 1897 and were spoken by Theodor Herzl at the first Zionist Congress in Basel. His aim, as we know, was to establish the Jewish homeland in Palestine. But just six years later, in the wake of the bloody Kishenev riots in Russia, he was anxious to give the poor masses in need of immediate help, “a closer territorial goal”.

Author Rachel Cockerell gives us a bystander’s view of the international attempts to find a safe Jewish way station en route to Zion, creating the sense of “being there” by adopting a radical approach: she doesn’t write a word! Instead, the narrative unfolds through a series of original eye-witness accounts including diaries, letters, articles and recordings. 

Here you’ll find reports from newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Manchester Guardian, and the words of the protagonists of the day, among them authors Stephan Zweig and Israel Zangwill, Herzl and Winston Churchill.

One of the players is Cockerell’s own great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, who was instrumental in the Galveston Movement which saw 10,000 Jews flee Europe before the outbreak of WWI for refuge in Texas.   

Rather than corralling her exhaustive research into a single-thread story, mediated by an author/narrator, Cockerell has fashioned a tale of, as she puts it, “historical eavesdropping”.

The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell - Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin) Reportage       

For five weeks in 2021, Lucia Osborne-Crowley set her alarm clock for 1.30am to ensure that she would be one of the first four reporters in the press line allowed access to the Ghislaine Maxwell trial on sex-trafficking of minors. Being in the courtroom for one of the most compelling trials of this century - not least because a member of the British royal family was caught up in the scandal - makes her uniquely placed to relate how the process transpired.

For Osborne-Crowley, an Australian trained lawyer and journalist, child sex abuse is personal. As a young successful gymnast, her trainer began grooming her from the age of nine. She has written about her sexual abuse and that of others in her previous book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, which won a Somerset Maugham Award.

Maxwell received a sentence of 20 years in prison for the role she played in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of four girls. But as Osborne-Crowley knows, this is not the end of the matter for the victims. She talks about “the long shadow” of abuse and its severe lifelong effects.      

“I am not here to tell you the story of Jeffrey Epstein, or even Ghislaine Maxwell. I am here to tell you the stories of these women . . . and about the real impact of sexual trauma on their lives.”

The Breakaway - Jennifer Weiner (Simon & Schuster) Chick-Lit

Abby Stern, the 34-year-old protagonist of The Breakaway, has had a difficult history with her body. As a child, her diet-conscious mother sent her off to weight loss camp against her wishes. And even now, her mother is constantly monitoring her food. 

But Abby has come to accept her plus-size and, recently reunited with Mark, her first boyfriend from fat camp (who has himself slimmed down), looks set to marry and live happily ever after.

Abby is happiest when she is riding her bicycle. From her first ride at the age of seven, “It felt like floating. It felt like flying. It felt like she was far away from everything that hurt her. . . She was free.”

When Abby finds herself stepping in to lead a fortnight-long bike trip from New York City to Niagara Falls, she discovers that Sebastian, a one-night stand from two years earlier, is in her tour group. Abby is determined to keep her distance, but theirs had been a great sexual encounter. . .   

Weiner is a journalist, television producer and New York Times best-selling author. Her novel, In Her Shoes, was made into a movie starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Colette and Shirley MacLaine. 

“I love riding my bike, and I loved writing this story about cycling, traveling, and girls and women finding their way in what feels like an increasingly hostile world,” she says of her story.