‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’

‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ by Beth Macy

Beth Macy’s characterization of life today in her Ohio birthplace “might feel familiar, like an update of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy,” said Alex Kotlowitz in The Atlantic. In fact, the vice president grew up an hour down the road. “But unlike Vance, who blamed much of his hometown’s misfortune on its residents,” Macy returned to Urbana, Ohio, an economically distressed city of 11,000, eager to listen to and learn from her former neighbors about why so many friends no longer talk to one another and why so many embrace the politics of Donald Trump. In Paper Girl, her new hybrid of memoir and social portrait, the Roanoke, Va.–based author of Dopesick and Factory Man “does what most opinion essays don’t even try to do: She gets out of her bubble.” And one of her most striking discoveries is how lonely many Americans are.

Our culture divide won’t be erased anytime soon, said Leigh Haber in The Washington Post. But “in offering us a chair at her kitchen table, Macy has injected a rare note of civility into the conversation.” Macy herself grew up poor; she was the daughter of the town drunk. After a newspaper route earned her pocket money, a Pell Grant enabled her to earn a college degree, and while she never cut all ties to Urbana, she was startled to discover upon her return that a place once proud to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad had shifted from Republican-­leaning to deep red, with QAnon lies metastasizing and Confederate flags flying. Macy traces the discontent back decades and calls on various experts to help fill in the big picture of job losses and failing public institutions. The result is a “searingly poignant” book that’s not afraid to call out liberals for being so blind to red-state pain.

“The conversations Macy has in this book—both with her family and others in MAGA world—are fascinating, but never entirely fruitful,” said Grace Byron in The New Yorker. She fares better when focused on her book’s true star: Silas, a young trans man working against the odds to move up in the world. Silas’ inclusion “could come across as a cynical ploy,” an easy way for Macy to highlight small-town intolerance. But Silas mostly illustrates how much more challenging life has become for Urbana’s ambitious young adults. Meanwhile, Macy blames Trump for the political polarization she sees, which feels too easy. Her “more compelling argument” is that America’s middle class is being crushed by the nation’s ultrarich. Since Trump’s 2016 election, many books have attempted to explain the nation’s deep divide. “Few do so as deftly as Macy’s.”

‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’ by Stefan Fatsis

“Are dictionaries going the way of dodos, pocket calculators, and civil discourse?” asked Chris Hewitt in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Sure, dictionaries are still printed. But the information they specialize in has largely moved online, and Stefan Fatsis’ lively new history of the once-ubiquitous reference books includes an insider account of the collapse of Merriam-Webster’s most recent bid to print an updated unabridged volume. While Word Freak, Fatsis’ previous book, proved gripping because it built to a Scrabble championship showdown, “Unabridged does not have that kind of narrative spine.” It’s instead the kind of book “enjoyed by dipping in and out of its discrete chapters,” whether Fatsis is focused on how social media is changing English or forecasting how AI may change how we view dictionaries.

The book “abounds with curious particulars,” said Henry Hitchings in The Wall Street Journal. Fatsis amusingly relates how Noah Webster strove to modernize English spelling when he created America’s first dictionary in 1806, only to be laughed at for suggestions such as “soop” and “spunge.” Insults were also flung at Merriam-­­Webster in 1961 when its unabridged Third New International edition included an entry for “ain’t.” That was the book primed for a revision when Fatsis landed work as a trainee lexicographer at Merriam-­Webster’s Springield, Mass., headquarters. While he’s often sardonic, his book is also “a stout defense of the craft of making dictionaries.”

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Fatsis’ best passages detail office life at Merriam-­Webster, said Dan Piepenbring in The New York Times. We’re there both for a retiree’s wistful send-off and a debate over a risqué definition of Dutch oven. At times, the book feels “like a Frederick Wiseman documentary about the last days of lexicography,” which I wanted more of. But Unabridged also provides “an excellent primer on Merriam-­Webster’s role in the culture wars, with thorough accounts of the dictionary’s approach to the N-word, the F-word, ‘Covid-19,’ and ‘woke.’” In the end, Merriam’s place in our national life comes across as privileged but tenuous. “We ask the dictionary to serve as both the authoritarian father and the laid-back uncle, but we bridle if it settles too comfortably into either role.”