Maximum Shelf author interview: Josh Hanagarne

Posted on April 12, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Following yesterday’s review of Josh Hanagarne’s new book, The World’s Strongest Librarian, here’s my interview with the man himself.

Josh Hanagarne: The World’s Strongest Librarian Writes

Josh Hanagarne is from Moab, Utah, and lives with his wife, Janette, and son, Max, in Salt Lake City, where he works at the beautiful main branch of the SLC Public Library. His memoir, The World’s Strongest Librarian, touches on the bizarrely various pieces of his life: his struggles with Tourette Syndrome; his journey to becoming a husband and a father; his love affair with books and libraries that would eventually lead to a career; an obsession with the gym that became a penchant for tearing phone books and full decks of cards; and a less-than-smooth lifelong relationship with the Mormon Church, where he still finds family and friends but less faith than he once held.

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Your book includes a lot of personal and painful history that belongs not only to you but to your wife and family as well. What was the process for sharing those personal details?

It was hard. During the first draft I didn’t think too much about how people were going to react. When I started going through on the second draft, I started showing things to Janette or to my mom and asking, is this accurate? Is this something you’re okay with having in here? Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. Whenever anybody was mildly uncomfortable with something, I just took it out–nothing of real consequence. I guess when you write a memoir, you choose which periods of your life you’re going to represent, and then you choose which episodes best represent those periods. If you’re a normal person, sometimes that means you’ll look good and sometimes it means you’ll look bad. So that wasn’t fun, but it was honest, I think, without being tedious and self-flagellating.

I’ve always used humor kind of in self-defense, because I knew if I could make people laugh I could make them focus on something other than my tics. I think this book is kind of sad, and I think a lot of humor is rooted in something sad. I believe Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain both talked towards the ends of their lives about having various forms of irony fatigue, because humor was mainly a self-defensive tool for them. I think in any book where you get to pick and choose what you put in, the sadder stuff’s going to get sadder, and the funny stuff’s probably going to get funnier.

You’ve included Dewey classification numbers under each chapter heading. Do you think this resonates with the general population, or mostly just librarians?

I don’t know. I think most people, even if they don’t get it, will probably be intrigued. Some people have pointed out that they don’t all work out exactly the way capital-“L” Librarians think they should, to which I will just say, the numbers do exactly what I want them to do. I think it’s eye-catching. I didn’t necessarily think of it as being gimmicky, because it really does tie in thematically with each chapter. What I really like about it is that you can kind of see what’s coming and yet sometimes not have any clue how one thing will lead to the next.

Tell us about the process of writing this book: When did you write? Were you still working at the library?

This is probably going to disappoint a lot of aspiring writers who put off writing until they have hours of free time every day, but I don’t think I ever sat down and wrote for more than 15 minutes at a time. I just can’t; the tics won’t let me. I wrote whenever I could. I’d guess I rarely wrote more than half an hour total in a day. I do write really fast. I found out that, at least now, I’m the sort of writer who has to make a gigantic mess and then clean it up, because if I start trying to anticipate all the editorial questions on the fly, I just freeze up and I don’t get anything done. So I wrote a lot more to get to this book than I probably could have, if I were another writer. I wrote the first draft totally on my own and then I sent it to my editor, and things had just been going so well that I kind of assumed, yeah, my first draft is surely anyone else’s fourth or fifth. Then my editor sent it back and said, you’ve got to get rid of 120 pages. We can’t even talk yet. Fix this. Which was a great lesson to learn, and not an easy one. But editing was really kind of fun, because Megan [Newman] is really the right editor for me. I think it took three total drafts between us, but about eight on my part. I learned that it takes a hideous amount of work to appear spontaneous. But it was a lot of fun. The shortest way to answer your question is: I wrote every day, I only wrote for a few minutes at a time, and I just kept going. A big part of it is being willing to show up.

Was the writing process cathartic for you?

If this book hadn’t come about, I think I’d probably still be going through the motions in church, trying not to make waves. The ideas I’ve gotten from church have everything to do with my relationship to my body, and the explanations I thought I owed for my life. In writing the book, I realized, I’m actually going to have to deal with this. So I got into the sticky situation of writing a book about how much I love my family and yet gently distancing myself from the church, knowing that that would be painful for my family. That was the biggest catharsis: realizing that I was going to have to deal with that shift in faith. Spending so much time thinking about that, and trying to word it correctly, is what taught me what I actually do think about it all.

Would you say that you had a message or even a cause to communicate with this book, related to Tourette’s, or libraries, or anything else?

I’m not much of a crusader. But when I go speak to groups of people with disabilities, or their parents, or special educators, the reaction I get is so humbling and overwhelming. If people I speak to are actually getting out of this story what they tell me they are, I knew I really needed to do this book as well as I can. So that it can go be me in all the places I can’t be. There’s definitely no downside to spreading the word about Tourette’s. This story seems to inspire some people without me ever needing to claim I can inspire anyone. As far as libraries, obviously this whole book is my love letter to books and libraries. That’s not necessarily what I intended, but for me to write about myself honestly, that’s the only thing that could have happened.

What do you most want people to know about you that’s not in your book?

To entertain my son occasionally in the morning when I put my pants on, I will hold them up at about waist height and I will try to jump into my pants. So I jump all the way up in the air and tuck my knees in and if I do it right, my feet come through the pants and I’m dressed. And if it goes wrong it goes really badly wrong. And about one of every 10 times I can put my pants on this way. Once in a while. You know, one out of 10 might be optimistic.

This interview originally ran on April 9, 2013 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

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Maximum Shelf: The World’s Strongest Librarian by Josh Hanagarne

Posted on April 11, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

My editor recently asked me if I’d like to put together my first Maximum Shelf for them, and said she had just the book in mind for me: The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family, by Josh Hanagarne. (My father found this a hilarious expression of what my editor thinks of me. I’ll let you work that one out. I haven’t.) I was thrilled; and I loved the book. Because this would make for an extra long blog post, I’ve split the Max Shelf issue into two posts for you, so please enjoy my review today and my interview with the gracious & funny Josh tomorrow.

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Josh Hanagarne, blogger at The World’s Strongest Librarian, “might be the only person whose first three-hundred-pound bench press was accompanied by the Recorded Books production of Don Quixote.” This is just one of his remarkable singularities. A gentle giant who tears phone books for fun, at 6’7″ he tends to catch the eye at the Salt Lake City Public Library, even when his Tourette Syndrome is not acting up. His memoir explores these contradictions and oddities, and his remarkable journey from idyllic childhood to painfully jerky young adulthood to a contented family and work life.

Hanagarne had a happy childhood, beloved by his mother, an incorrigible prankster and devout Mormon, and his devoted, irreverent bear of a father. He grew up in libraries, a passionate bookworm disturbed only by the tics that began in first grade but would go undiagnosed until high school (although his father suspected Tourette’s from the beginning). By young adulthood, they were not only embarrassing but violent and debilitating. He would eventually suffer a hernia from the force of his involuntary shouting tics, and his larger movements resulted in injury to himself and chaos in his immediate surroundings. After high school he spent years trying numerous cures, in and out of college, working various jobs and struggling with depression. Lifting weights at the gym stilled the tics somewhat, and for a while he got regular Botox injections in his vocal cords to quiet the shouts and whoops. During that time he met and married a lovely Mormon folklorist named Janette. For the first eight months of marriage, he couldn’t speak to her above a whisper.

Although deeply in love, the atmosphere of Josh and Janette’s story early in their marriage remains clouded. For years they try to get pregnant. Janette suffers two miscarriages and they are harshly rejected by the Mormon Church as adoptive parents. Josh continues to tussle with Tourette’s. For a short time, he finds a position as assistant special educator quite satisfying, not least because his tics become unremarkable in a room full of special needs. But he soon leaves that job, because he seeks challenge: crucially, he aspires to overcome Tourette’s, to beat his tics into submission. Pondering what might present the greatest challenge to a man who can’t keep quiet, Josh is drawn to the quietest place he knows, a place that has always offered succor and delight. He gets a job as a clerk in the library and begins a master’s program in library science. And a key piece of marital bliss is finally achieved when Janette delivers a healthy baby boy named Max.

Josh continues to battle Tourette’s in the gym, discovers kettlebell lifting along the way, and makes a new friend in Adam Glass, a former Air Force tech sergeant and strongman: he bends wrenches and horseshoes and tears decks of cards and phone books. Josh’s story takes an inspiring turn as the twitchy librarian and the foul-mouthed strongman gradually develop a friendship; as Adam helps Josh build strength, together they also begin to understand and subdue the tics. He finds Adam a little strange, and the explanation for his social awkwardness is also what makes him the perfect mentor for overcoming Tourette’s: Adam is autistic.

The adult Josh Hanagarne who relates his story is content and stable, happily married, thrilled to be a father to four-year-old Max, and working full-time at the Salt Lake City Public Library. As he relates his stranger-than-fiction story, he intersperses present-day anecdotes from a workplace that he wryly notes is rife with strange and occasionally smelly patrons and events. He muses eloquently and powerfully about the role of libraries in society, and their future possibilities. Throughout his life and this book, Josh struggles with his Mormon faith, as he sets off on the expected mission and faces myriad challenges in school, work, marriage and parenthood. In telling a story about family, church and Tourette Syndrome, he always circles back to libraries and to books, in many charming literary references. And always central to Josh’s story is his love of family. From his loving parents and exceptionally close siblings through the clear delight Josh finds in marriage and fatherhood, he stresses the inestimable gift of a loving family.

Josh’s memoir is thoughtful, heartfelt, often hilarious– and unsparingly honest. He is not proud of every moment in his own past, but he shares nonetheless. The image of the man today who wrote this book and who works in a large branch of a public library in a large city is that of a serious yet funny, mature, loving family man, and this image is only partly at odds with the earlier, less secure young man we come to know in these pages. The younger Josh was unsure and unstable, and the author is more comfortable in his own skin. But both have tics, and stories to tell.

This review originally ran on April 9, 2013 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 9 minutes of calm.

Tomorrow: I interview The World’s Strongest Librarian.

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Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan

Posted on April 1, 2013 by pagesofjulia

The author of Stories and its followups, Stories II and Stories V!, shares a memoir of Appalachian boyhood filled with the requisite hardships but ultimately redemptive.

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Scott McClanahan centers Crapalachia on two characters of his West Virginia youth who rule over much of the narrative–his Grandma Ruby, an ornery, fantastical mother of 13 (or so) children who also photographed dead people, and his uncle Nathan, who had cerebral palsy and enjoyed listening to the radio preacher and having six-packs of beer poured down his feeding tube. We also meet his schoolboy friends, like Little Bill, an eventual roommate with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a destructive crush on a girl down the street.

Crapalachia is an unusual story told in an unusual fashion, peppered with second-person references, advice to the reader on how to live, how to remember and forget. The attentive reader will also appreciate McClanahan’s “Appendix and Notes” for its revelation of where he’s twisted the truth (as he remembers it) to suit the story he wanted to tell. Like many memoirists, McClanahan is concerned with the nature of memory, its credibility and value. He sometimes gets mired in the unpleasant, cringeworthy details of life, then pans out for grand, loving, hopeful statements. This is a gritty look at life–in Appalachia, yes, but also in a universal sense. Historical detail turns what looked to be a memoir of childhood into the subtitle’s promised “biography of a place.” In the end, despite various tragedies, this poetic, rambling series of remembrances is surprisingly optimistic.

This review originally ran in the March 26, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 gallstones.

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Ramblers: Loyola Chicago 1963: The Team that Changed the Color of College Basketball by Michael Lenehan

Posted on March 20, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A dynamic, emotional study of one college basketball team’s role in the civil rights movement.

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Michael Lenehan’s Ramblers chooses one college basketball team, and one season, to illustrate a sea change in the sport–and in the United States. The Loyola Chicago team of 1963 was not the first to send black and white players out on the court together, but Lenehan makes an excellent case for the significance of this particular team’s actions at a key moment in the national struggle for civil rights. He examines their competition over the course of the season, focusing on two teams in particular: Mississippi State, whose players had to sneak out of state due to a ban on playing teams with nonwhite members, and Cincinnati, which was also an integrated team, but one with an increasingly antiquated playing style.

Relying on primary sources and interviews to study a handful of individual players, coaches and administrators, Ramblers passionately evokes the beauty of a great game in a time of great change, and works as a metaphor for changes taking place across the nation as well. Lenehan handles the game with an ease and comfort that indicate his expertise, and Ramblers combines his passion for basketball with an intimately detailed history–including a deeply moving digression into the 1962 riots at Oxford, Miss. Lenehan eventually follows each of his subjects through to the present (or the ends of their lives), giving Ramblers a feeling of completeness. Throughout, he maintains a sense of fun appropriate to a book that’s ultimately about the antics of college kids.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the March 19, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 fast breaks.

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The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

Posted on March 8, 2013 by pagesofjulia

An evocative view of the Manhattan Project through the eyes of the women who worked and lived in the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tenn.

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Oak Ridge, Tennessee was born in the fall of 1942, but would remain unknown until August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Oak Ridge, or “Site X,” housed factories for the enrichment of uranium. The workers at those factories at their peak numbered some 75,000, living in a secret city and working on they knew not what.

Diverse young women traveled from around the country fill the jobs needed to help win a war. Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City is a unique glimpse into their strange experience of working on a project whose nature was kept from them. Most expected to leave Oak Ridge as soon as the war was won, but many stayed on for decades. Due to the fine supply of handsome young men in uniform, a number of Kiernan’s subjects would make families and homes there.

Based on interviews with their now-elderly subjects, the stories of Jane the statistician, Virginia the chemist, Kattie the janitor and many more are vivid and human in Kiernan’s telling. The focus of the book briefly zooms out for the dropping of the bomb, visiting Truman’s White House during the decision-making process, but then plunges back into Oak Ridge, where women who tested for leaks in pipes and kept tanks clean were rocked by the revelation of what they’d contributed to. Kiernan melds hard science and history with the moving stories of women caught in events bigger than themselves, whose experiences and whose work changed the world irrevocably. The result is a compelling and unusual new perspective on the Manhattan Project and World War II.

This review originally ran in the March 5, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

While I am always constrained by the limited space available for reviews in Shelf Awareness (you know I can get wordy!), this book was especially difficult to boil down, touching as it does on women’s issues, history, science, working conditions, civil rights, war and ethics… It could be compared to Soundings or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in its intersection of hard science with the creative, feeling portrayal of women’s lives. Additionally, Kiernan’s use of primary sources – interviews with survivors of the era – made me pause to think of my grandfather, a WWII veteran who’s over 90 years old now, whose memories will someday be lost to us. This is a fine book on an interesting subject and I just had to say a few more words to that effect.

Rating: 8 acronyms.

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Vera Gran: The Accused by Agata Tuszyńska, trans. by Charles Ruas

Posted on March 4, 2013 by pagesofjulia

The unanswered questions surrounding the life of a lounge singer in the ghettos of Warsaw, as seen through the gauze of memory.

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Vera Gran was a wildly popular Jewish lounge singer in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. In 2007, she died in an apartment in Paris–filthy, claustrophobic, paranoid and hateful. For decades, despite being found innocent by several tribunals, she had faced accusations of collaboration with the Gestapo.

Agata Tuszyńska was 19 when her mother, also a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, first told her she was Jewish. In her approach to a profoundly sad and traumatized old woman, Tuszyńska seeks the truth but realizes it cannot be pinned down. Vera Gran: The Accused is not a biography, but a shifting portrait of Gran, the Ghetto and survivors’ guilt; it is a contemplation of what we will do (and should do) to survive. Readers unfamiliar with Vera Gran may be more familiar with Wladyslaw Szpilman, the subject of Roman Polanski’s award-winning film The Pianist: Szpilman was Gran’s piano accompanist, but he cut her out of his memoir–later becoming one of her most vocal accusers. The nature of memory and memoir, the power of the stories we tell when those stories outlast memory of the events themselves, becomes a central theme in Tuszyńska’s book.

Charles Ruas’s translation from the French is subtly poetic and adds to the quiet tones of Tuszyńska’s musing as well as Gran’s anger. It is this atmosphere, along with the unknowable questions surrounding Gran, that makes Vera Gran: The Accused a remarkable and memorable contemplation.

This review originally ran in the March 1, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 changed stories.

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The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Montillo

Posted on February 20, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A spirited investigation of the bizarre times that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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On its surface, Roseanne Montillo’s The Lady and Her Monsters is an exploration of the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But Montillo clearly rejoices in meandering through the volatile times that gave life to Shelley’s gothic classic, and her multifaceted literary study expands to include discussions of anatomy and alchemy, suicides, ghoulish dissections of men not quite dead and the dramatic death of Percy Shelley at sea.

In the early 19th century, Europe grew increasingly fascinated with life, death and man’s ability to control nature. Grave robbers known as “resurrectionists” provided subjects for human dissections that were conducted both in medical schools and for the general public’s entertainment. Scientists and imposters experimented with the capacity of electricity to restore life. Into this environment, Mary Shelley was born to Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and William Godwin, a famous reformer of the day. Percy Bysshe Shelley was her lover and eventual husband; her sister was lover to Lord Byron. The foursome were traveling in Italy, telling the ghost stories with which Percy Shelley was obsessed, when–as Mary Shelley and legend have it–a human monster appeared to Mary in a waking dream. It was also in Italy that she may have first heard the surname Frankenstein, tied to the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as to Sir George (he who killed the dragon). In Montillo’s enthusiastic prose, such diverse and macabre subjects make for a lively survey, not only of Shelley’s masterpiece, but of an odd and colorful time in European history.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the February 8, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 5 volts.

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The Rage by Gene Kerrigan

Posted on February 18, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A noir crime novel featuring the collision of a motley group of characters in modern Ireland.

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The Rage by Gene Kerrigan (The Midnight Choir) is a multifaceted, character-driven story of crime and remorse. Vincent Naylor, freshly out of prison, is back to planning a robbery with his old accomplices, most notably his beloved big brother, Noel. Bob Tidey is an experienced and jaded police detective, still devoted to doing good but with the growing feeling that his employers limit his best efforts. Maura Coady is a retired nun living with her guilt and regrets. When Maura witnesses something out the front window of her apartment that doesn’t look quite right, she calls Tidey to report it, setting in motion a string of events that run counter to the Naylor brothers’ movements toward the next big score. The reader watches each player’s trajectory on this collision course, but still won’t guess the big finish until it crashes into place.

The Rage will please readers of crime thrillers and literary fiction alike. The atmosphere effectively evokes contemporary Ireland, with all its discontent and economic frustration, and in this way brings to mind Tana French’s lyrical Dublin Murder Squad mystery series. Bob Tidey’s cynicism and gruff efforts at romance recall Michael Connelly’s hero Detective Harry Bosch. The intersecting story lines and crescendo of action create a cinematic effect. Kerrigan’s compelling characters carry this thriller breathlessly through to its climax, but it is the engaging dialogue, thoughtful and absorbing prose and social conscience that make The Rage memorable.

This review originally ran in the February 8, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 regrets.

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The Honored Society by Petra Reski

Posted on February 1, 2013 by pagesofjulia

An intriguing and sensational, but not sensationalist, study of the Italian Mafia through character sketches.

Petra Reski had covered the Mafia as an investigative journalist in Germany for years, to the minimal interest of her editors and readers, who considered it an Italian problem. Then, in 2007, six Calabrians were executed in the town of Duisburg, and suddenly the German public was interested in the Mafia.

In The Honored Society, Reski composes character studies of various players both within the Mafia and fighting against it, based on her reminiscences of meetings and interviews. In addition to mafiosi and police investigators, her subjects include public prosecutors, defense lawyers, priests, fellow journalists and Mafia wives and daughters. Accompanied by her cabbie, Salvo, and her photographer, Shobha (as well as Shobha’s mother, a famous anti-Mafia photographer in her own right), Reski travels the streets of Italy and recalls the personalities she’s known. Her sketches of these “bad guys” and their adversaries are intimate and contemplative, rooted in years of experience. Even while excoriating the actions and influence of the Mafia, she seems to feel respect, even affection, toward certain individuals, revealing a conflicted relationship much like the one she describes between the Italian public and its famous criminal organization.

Generally, Shaun Whiteside’s translation of Reski’s work (from the German original of 2008) reads as straightforward, simple prose; but a quiet poetry lurks in certain turns of phrase and carefully crafted images. The Honored Society is an unusually structured view into the strange and powerful world of the Italian Mafia.

This review originally ran in the January 15, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 expensive handbags.

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The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

Posted on January 23, 2013 by pagesofjulia

An ambitious but effective–and charming–exploration of the salutary lessons offered by traditional societies.

For many decades, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jared Diamond (Collapse; Guns, Germs and Steel) has split his time between his native United States and the traditional societies of New Guinea. In The World Until Yesterday, he compares traditional ways of life with “WEIRD” (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”) methods of problem-solving. Recognizing the daunting breadth of such a subject, he selects a few areas for examination, including dispute resolution, child-rearing, elder care, religion and the connection between lifestyle and non-communicable diseases like Type II diabetes. In each area, he compares traditional practices with modern ones, considering the evidence from angles both strictly scientific and personal.

Diamond supplements his extensive fieldwork with substantial research to draw credible conclusions and posit plausible theories. But he writes conversationally, using the first person liberally as he meanders across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, geography, statistics and evolutionary biology. This disarmingly personal tone is one of the greatest strengths of the book. Diamond also discusses preconceived notions that he and the reader may have, then moves on to new theoretical ground. While acknowledging aspects of traditional societies to which we do not wish to return–cyclical violence, infanticide, frequent starvation–he identifies certain strengths as well, like negligible rates of heart disease and restorative justice systems. “What can we learn from traditional societies?” Diamond asks in his subtitle; his plan to discover the wisdom and experimentation of more than 10,000 years of human society is well-executed.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the January 4, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 yams.

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