Book reviews: 'Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age' and 'Mark Twain'

'Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age' by Amanda Hess

Amanda Hess is "exceptionally skilled at noticing things worth seeing," said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. In her new book, a hybrid of memoir and social critique, the New York Times critic at large recounts what it's like to experience pregnancy and childbirth in our wired age, and she paints an amusing but unsettling picture. Early in her journey to motherhood, she became so dependent on a menstrual-cycle tracking app that she informed the app she was pregnant even before she told her husband. From there, she was pulled into an online world of mom-fluencers, disturbing Reddit threads, and so many anxiety-inducing ads that she concluded that more brands knew she was expecting than actual people. As the stakes rise in the retelling, Hess handles every detail "with wit, discernment, and candor."

"Hess starts her story with the unexpected," said Hillary Kelly in The Atlantic. At her pregnancy's seven-month mark, doctors saw something they didn't like in the ultrasound, triggering a series of tests and worries leading to a diagnosis of Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, a growth disorder that will present risks to her child. But Hess treats even that rare aspect of her experience as a window on the promises that screen technologies dangle in front of every expecting mother but can't keep. Hess happens to be an expert on online culture, "yet she also smartly paints herself as just another willing victim of the internet." Like most of us, she turns to it for guidance and reassurance while knowing that each interaction can lead down hazardous paths or generate pitches for maternity body sprays, baby heart monitors, home births, and $2,000 smart cribs. In short, she "treats digital culture and the internet as it is: a character in our lives," said Kathryn Jezer-Morton in NYMag.com.

It's "part of how we make ourselves at home in the world." "Hess can sometimes seem cavalier about the harms of the digital world," said Joanna Scutts in The New Republic. But that's because she sees them as less grave than the physical dangers pregnant people face in a country where abortions are outlawed and reproductive care is limited in many states. Meanwhile, her experience with her son has made her more alert to the threat that advancing technology presents for unborn children who are deemed to have chronic health challenges. Mostly, though, what comes across in Hess' tale is that "there is ultimately no other way to parent than by sailing right off into it." In the end, said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker, Second Life reads as "foremost a mash note to Hess' firstborn son," because he proves to be "a complete and ongoing joy."

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'Mark Twain' by Ron Chernow

Mark Twain was skeptical that a biography could ever do more than capture surface impressions, said Mary Ann Gwinn in the Los Angeles Times. This one, however, "feels like the truth of one man's star-crossed life." At more than 1,000 pages, Ron Chernow's latest doorstop is "not a book for the casual reader," and the author "never quite gets to the core of the contradictions in Twain's conflicted soul." But after previously taking the measure of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Ulysses S. Grant, Chernow gives us Twain's complete life story, "in all its glory and sorrow." The creator of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer was a talent whose wit and best writing are valued to this day, but he was more discontented late in life than we generally acknowledge.

"Chernow has written a biography more about disappointment than success," said Gary Sernovitz in Bloomberg Businessweek. But for the first 362 pages, Twain is on the rise. Born Samuel Clemens in 1835, he grows up in Hannibal, Mo., becomes a riverboat pilot, flees conscription in the Confederate army, and heads west to Nevada and then San Francisco as he builds a newspaper career mixing truth and tall tales. By 34, his travel writing has yielded his most popular book and helped him win a coal heiress as his wife. By 50, he has written Huck Finn and is living in luxury in Hartford. But for the next 671 pages, it's almost all downhill. "Chernow, of course, has an obligation to cover the sadness at the end of Twain's life. It's the proportions that startle."

"If there's a constant in Twain's life," said Lauren Michele Jackson in The New Yorker, it's his obsession with making easy money. He wrote bad books alongside the great ones because he wanted to cash in on his brand, and he often needed the funds because he blew so much capital on foolish investments. Eventually, his wife and two of his daughters predeceased him, and even as he maintained an ebullient public persona, "his private writings grew full of grief, rage, and disillusionment." As Chernow tries to explain Twain's dark side, "apologies accumulate like packing peanuts." What he was in his final years and the moral hero we want him to be are "not so easily reconciled."